This is a country where far too many people believe that the President's new health care plan truly calls for "euthanasia panels" for older and/or handicapped folks. My point in mentioning that is that shills for this protectionist racket get up and tell the American People, "OMG!!! We can't share our technologies with the Chinese! It'll be bad! Trust us!" This scares the bejeebers out of John Q. Public, and if it scares him, you'd better believe that is scares his "elected" representative who is trying to keep their cushy job in Fantasy Land (Washington D.C., for those of you with an un-updated map.).
There are a LOT of issues right now facing the Republic, and the tragic reality is that most of the people are too ignorant of the issues because we trust these folks. I mean after all, you have the people who brought us Windows Vista and the folks who brought us the prime time lineup for NBC involved, so what could possibly go wrong here?
Funny that you'd say that. I remember waaaaaay back in the halcyon days of yore... Maybe 1992 or so... Someone did, in fact, trademark the word "Water" for use in gaming. I can't recall the company (note: it wasn't TSR, I at least remember that much), but I do remember that another company had released a supplement for their game that had the word "water" in the title. To avoid an infringement suit, they had a disclaimer on the front that indicated that they were not affiliated with the company who, apparently, owned the rights to an unproduced game entitled, "Water."
Apparently, this was SOP for this particular company.
They basically come out and say, "Yeah, video games will rot your brain, make your testicles shrink, get you hooked on 'the marijuana,' give you bad breath, make you kill your parents and your dog... But everything in moderation!"
This is like telling you that cyanide is bad, but then saying that a couple of drops will satisfy that almond craving that you're having.
Another case of academia with an agenda, trying to cater (or engineer) their results to appease the "but what about the children" set.
ALL of you are a bunch of Xenu-loving scum! Hail L. Ron!
Sorry, but any "religion" that is based on an admitted con artist and crappy writer... A religion that preaches as dogma that an evil alien warlord banished disloyal servants to a backwater planet that he then nuked into oblivion... And THEN blames the spirits of those exiled dissidents for all the ills of modern society... shouldn't be allowed to exist. Most religion is a little hokey when you get down to the meat of the matter, but this is a whole 'nother thing.
Take a page from the Germans and ban the bastards outright.
But if Fox "owned" the rights, then how is it that nobody @ WB noticed this before they made the movie? It seems like somebody royally screwed the pooch, if Fox has a legitimate claim. Of course, this is going to open the proverbial flood gates, and any ass hat at a film studio that's ever even heard of a comic book will now go looking to option everything that had even half-way decent sales.
Ya know, I'm tired of people taking the "oh, those poor bastard" viewpoints on things like this. Are the companies doing something fishy? Of course they are, that's a given! It's a fact... a certainty... even a definition that a business is an organization that is in the business of making money. Did these people think that Company X was sending them free software out of a sense of corporate citizenship? The 'Buddy Corporation,' if you will? Really? These 'poor bastards' thought that?
When in doubt, READ THE FUCKING CONTRACT. That's what it's there for. If you are old and (I would hope) smart enough to sign your name, then you're smart enough to read, process and understand what you're signing. If not, then, as Jake said, you kinda deserve what happens to you.
It's shit like this... People blindly signing away on little pieces of paper... that have caused first the housing crisis (no verifiable income? Not a citizen? No credit? Shitty credit? Hey, YOU TOO can own a $250k home with nothing down!), and now the looming credit crisis. Nobody bothers to read the contracts that they're entering into, and nobody notices until they start receiving the phone calls throughout the day hounding them for the money that they owe.
Hello? Is this thing on? (tap tap tap) CORPORATE AMERICA IS COUNTING ON YOUR IGNORANCE. CORPORATE AMERICA IS OUT TO GET YOU, AND THEY KNOW THAT YOU DON'T READ THE FINE PRINT.
They covered their asses by putting it in the contract, knowing full right well that Joe D. American is too lazy/stupid/gullible to read it. AND they know that if Joe D. American (or his wife Jane D. American or their friend LaQuandrashel D. American; part of being equal is owning up to your own shortcomings and mistakes!) actually took the time to READ the terms and conditions, then few people would sign.
Take responsibility for your own actions, quit crying and expecting the Gummint to come to your rescue. Hell, they outsourced writing the laws to the corporations!
I'm with you on this one. The only way that I can even consider this being true is if it was a SAT phone that they used in case their lowest-bidder radio took a dook on them, which... Hey, it never happens at a good time.
But IF this is the case, to have the dude's family as either a pre-programmed number OR the last call dialed?
But I remember the strict prohibitions on having any kind of cell phone while we were on the other side of the berm. OPSEC, and all that stuff. Not bloody likely. Plus, even with that phat combat pay, aren't SAT phones still kinda pricey?
Either way, this story stinks.
Oh, and since I'm thinking about it... #8? Assuming that you're not a troll, you're a total fucknut. IF you got offended by this story, then likely you're a wannabe and/or a weekend warrior who would love to go full-monty and join up but are too afraid of getting hurt. Put the shiny red helmet back on, pound your head against the wall, and stay off the Internet.
Due to this article, I went to Amazon and tried to find something from Target through Amazon (since Target has a physical presence here in Texas) to add to my cart. After a few minutes, I found a window treatment that I figured would suffice for this purpose. A few clicks later, it was in my basket, and lo! Estimated tax was added to the purchase.
I clicked the "why am I being charged tax?" link, and I found this:
Your Order: Tax and Seller Information
Your order contains one or more items from an Amazon.com partner and may be subject to local sales tax, depending on the state to which the item is being shipped.
and this:
Please note: The sales tax indicated on the checkout form is an estimate. The sales tax ultimately charged to your credit card will be calculated when your credit card charge is authorized and will reflect applicable state and local taxes.
So, taxes are being charged on purchases made through Amazon where the 3rd party retailer also has a presence in the locality from which the purchase is originating. I have to believe that if this is the case in Houston, then it should be the same in Manhattan.
So, yeah, this is pretty much a money grab, plain and simple. New York is attempting to charge taxes without Amazon having local representation (i.e. an "Amazon" store in Times Square), which, if memory serves, was part of what caused a little fracas up in that part of the country in, oh, around the early and mid 1770s.
The fact remains that, if a woman so desired, she could sell her eggs... and indeed her whole damn uterus! to another person or couple if she desired. However, selling the vagina? No, that's where we draw the line.
It's easy, and, let's face it, LAZY as hell to brand me as a... What was it... "perverted {man]," by saying that prostitution should be legal. But I think that prostitution, provided that it's by the woman's (or man's) free will, should be a matter of choice.
This, I feel, also should apply to abortion. Your body is, or should be, about the only thing that you can truly own in the free and clear. Free will, rather than someone else's narrow interpretation of archaic and quaint religious dogma, should be the law.
Tracy, if you're that damn prudish about it, go buy yourself a chastity belt and shut the hell up. Don't pretend that your views represent the rest of the population, or that yours has any more validity than mine does.
Craigslist hosts a section for "Erotic Services." Isn't that just a euphemism for dirty deeds done dirt... well, kinda expensive, but... That ain't how the song goes.
This could, I'm sure, but argued that it's "intended" for things like the cambabes that want to charge you $5 a minute to watch them do whatever it is that you want for them to do. But c'mon, does anyone really believe that this is what that's for? Seriously?
To be honest, I don't care if a woman (or a man, for that matter) wishes to sell their bodies for whatever purposes so long as the acts are not illegal-in-the-hey-how-old-is-she-seven?-eight? arena, and as long as these people are being as safe as they possibly can be and aren't spreading/contracting social diseases. I don't care, and I don't believe that the government should, either.
But to say that Craigslist doesn't know what's going on with their own site? That they don't know what an ad talks about when the listing says "full service?" Hint: she's not gonna put gas in your car and check the oil level.
I think that downloadable content will suffer from one basic thing, and that is that people like to own stuff. There's that feeling that you get from opening the cellophane wrapper, taking out the disc, and watching the movie for the first time in your living room. People around my age (33) and older really like that feeling.
However, the reality is that I have a whole closet FULL of CDs and DVDs that... Well, they really only take up space right now. I have most of my CDs "backed up" on my hard drive, so I theoretically don't really even need them now. I'd do the same for my DVDs too, if it wasn't for the fact that it would take more time than I feel like investing in the project.
That said, I think that a lot of the younger folks out there are starting to look at CDs and DVDs in much the same way that my generation look at 8 Tracks and LPs... This is to say as quaint relics of a bygone era. There is no real attachment to CDs, at least not in the same way. Who the hell wants to go buy physical media that's just going to take up space once it winds up on their iPod? I don't, and that feeling is only going to get stronger as time goes by.
Given ample bandwidth and selection, streaming video and/or downloadable content is going to kill the DVD and CD. You'll one day be able to pick up someone's collection at a garage sale for pennies on the dollar like you used to be able to do for LPs.
All of this chatter about contracts and early termination fees are... meaningless. If you're not happy with your service, then it's your God-given right to call your company's customer service line and vent your righteous frustration out to the person on the other end of the line.
THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR.
Complain often enough, and you've completely blown the profit margin that they typically would have made off of you. At that point, you are a liability to the company, and they'll politely ask you to take your business elsewhere. And since they're asking YOU to leave, it costs nothing, and you should be able to port your number with you should you desire to do such a thing.
They're counting on you not complaining. If you don't complain, then nobody is holding them to task for the lousy coverage, poor call quality, and technologies that lags behind most of the industrialized world. Not happy? Call those bastards and LET THEM KNOW.
Your statement about how artists can't be supported by music that costs less than a dollar a song is intellectually lazy. A well-paid musician will see less than a dollar for the ENTIRE CD if it is sold at a retail outlet. The rest of the money goes to the record labels, the retailer, the distributors, the unions, the studios, the RIAA and the various and sundry other leeches that make up the current music distribution model. THIS is why the RIAA fights; they're trying to perpetuate a model that enriches THEM, all under the guise of standing up for the people who actually MAKE the music. The reality is that the recording industry has the goose (or geese) that lays the golden eggs. They're able to get by with feeding said the musical geese a handful of grain.
Meanwhile, the RIAA sells the eggs and buys themselves private jets and, probably, specially trained wombats that will be used to sniff out illegally downloaded songs.
Also, if you're going to turn the music marketplace into a commodity-driven market, then you can't (and shouldn't even try) to level the market place by having a "one price fits all" model. Commodity markets are driven by supply and demand, with a price that fluctuates in response to the demand. So, yeah, there would be some artists that would be able to command a whopping $0.001 a song because nobody wants to listen to them. Conversely, other artists could, in theory, command a larger sum.
However, there is one glaring hole in all of this, and that is to consider the impact of scarcity in valuation of any given product. Diamonds are expensive because they're hard to get, and they're available only in a few geological areas. How would you address this one? Make it to where only the first 500 people are able to purchase a given song? At that point, you're practically begging folks to start pirating the music.
Piracy exists for a variety of reasons. Some people engage because yeah, they just don't want to pay for music. Some people engage because they don't feel that the prevailing pricing model is not conducive to their economic situation.
The solution is to cut out the middle men and create a model that actually supports the musicians/artists rather than one that treats them like a collection of trained monkeys.
By the way, what the hell does "songs are not about technology" supposed to mean?
"Subprime" is just a nice way of saying "shitty," no matter what the context happens to be. You've got bad credit because you weren't able to control yourself? Hey, it's not BAD credit, it's just "subprime," so you can still feel good about yourself while you're paying 14.99% interest on your home loan.
By this logic, Bush isn't a bad President; he's just subprime.
I'd write more, but I'm too tired to get pissed off enough.
You know, I hadn't even touched on the whole DRM-thing. I find it incredibly shitty that the MPAA was able to strong-arm Microsoft into implementing the HDCP requirement for Hi-Def programming. Then there's the whole thing with the cut that Universal Music is getting from each Zune that's sold... I resent the fact that there is this assumption of guilt on the part of the MPAA/RIAA that people who own digital media devices are "stealing music." I don't care that it's only $1. It's giving them the inch; guess what they'll take next?
Actually, the largest problem with coding games for the Mac in the past was that it was a different underlying programming for the PowerPC. Now with Cider though, developers are able to relatively easily port games to run on Mac OSX running on an Intel processor. EA announced at the WWDC that a few of their latest games that will be available on the Mac in the next few months.
Of course, I argue your point that M$ is the best OS on the market, but that's a given. I will, however, concede that it is the best SUPPORTED OS on the market. This is largely a function of marketplace dominance, and it's something of an error to correlate market share with quality. It's not always the fastest (or best) horse that wins the race.
Wow, man. Such hostility! I guess that it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling to read what I'd written earlier and try to psychoanalyze me AND attempt to asses some sort of ... shortcoming... in my technical abilities.
I HAVE used Vista. Just for fair disclosure, I've used every version of Windows from 3.0 on up, both personally and professionally. And I've only rarely not been able to figure something out without some assistance. I've run the dog shit out of Windows more than once, and I've not been satisfied. Again, it's not dominant because it's a great platform. It's legacy, nothing more and nothing less.
But seriously, I'm happy to see that my post earlier managed to distract you from your Solitaire and Minesweeper marathons long enough for you to post. I'm sure that your two index fingers were so tired afterwards that you weren't even able to click on the stack of cards to get the next single card to flip over. (Red seven on the black eight, by the way!)
Maybe your AOL-using Grandmother could show you how to use a Macintosh long enough for you to get a clue. I'm sure that your retarded brother would also be able to help you with your anger issues, because, you know, retarded people tend to be generally happy, right?
People keep bringing the "Porn chooses the victor" argument, but I don't see that as being as valid as it was back in the days of VHS vs. Betamax for one simple reason...
And you may have heard of it...
The Internet.
Back in the day, if you wanted to watch a hard-core skin flick, it meant pulling out your best "Aqualung" outfit and trudging down to the local "dirty movie" joint. Then, the Porn industry went with the VHS format, which meant that now people were able to watch porn in the privacy of their own homes.
But now? The Internet pipes in gigabyte after gigabyte of... whatever you want. Transsexual midget beastiality? No problem. Twincest lesbians? Yeah, we've got that. All in the privacy of your own computer. You don't even have to leave your desk chair anymore.
So yeah, while the adult movie industry's endorsement of HD-DVD is an important battle, it's not going to decide the war in the long run for either format.
It's going to boil down more to who can do the most for the computer user, which camp will bring the first player for under $200 that's not a stripped-down turd, and who has the best selection of "mainstream" movies.
This is a country where far too many people believe that the President's new health care plan truly calls for "euthanasia panels" for older and/or handicapped folks. My point in mentioning that is that shills for this protectionist racket get up and tell the American People, "OMG!!! We can't share our technologies with the Chinese! It'll be bad! Trust us!" This scares the bejeebers out of John Q. Public, and if it scares him, you'd better believe that is scares his "elected" representative who is trying to keep their cushy job in Fantasy Land (Washington D.C., for those of you with an un-updated map.).
There are a LOT of issues right now facing the Republic, and the tragic reality is that most of the people are too ignorant of the issues because we trust these folks. I mean after all, you have the people who brought us Windows Vista and the folks who brought us the prime time lineup for NBC involved, so what could possibly go wrong here?
Water as a Trademark...
Funny that you'd say that. I remember waaaaaay back in the halcyon days of yore... Maybe 1992 or so... Someone did, in fact, trademark the word "Water" for use in gaming. I can't recall the company (note: it wasn't TSR, I at least remember that much), but I do remember that another company had released a supplement for their game that had the word "water" in the title. To avoid an infringement suit, they had a disclaimer on the front that indicated that they were not affiliated with the company who, apparently, owned the rights to an unproduced game entitled, "Water."
Apparently, this was SOP for this particular company.
Danger! Terror! Watch out! Eh, whatever...
Nice.
They basically come out and say, "Yeah, video games will rot your brain, make your testicles shrink, get you hooked on 'the marijuana,' give you bad breath, make you kill your parents and your dog... But everything in moderation!"
This is like telling you that cyanide is bad, but then saying that a couple of drops will satisfy that almond craving that you're having.
Another case of academia with an agenda, trying to cater (or engineer) their results to appease the "but what about the children" set.
All of you...
ALL of you are a bunch of Xenu-loving scum! Hail L. Ron!
Sorry, but any "religion" that is based on an admitted con artist and crappy writer... A religion that preaches as dogma that an evil alien warlord banished disloyal servants to a backwater planet that he then nuked into oblivion... And THEN blames the spirits of those exiled dissidents for all the ills of modern society... shouldn't be allowed to exist. Most religion is a little hokey when you get down to the meat of the matter, but this is a whole 'nother thing.
Take a page from the Germans and ban the bastards outright.
But...
So, yeah, this is basically horseshit.
But if Fox "owned" the rights, then how is it that nobody @ WB noticed this before they made the movie? It seems like somebody royally screwed the pooch, if Fox has a legitimate claim. Of course, this is going to open the proverbial flood gates, and any ass hat at a film studio that's ever even heard of a comic book will now go looking to option everything that had even half-way decent sales.
Yay! Nobody wins but the studios!
Re: First question is the only one necessary
RTFA.
It was his Yahoo account. Not his corpmail account.
Re: What?!
Ya know, I'm tired of people taking the "oh, those poor bastard" viewpoints on things like this. Are the companies doing something fishy? Of course they are, that's a given! It's a fact... a certainty... even a definition that a business is an organization that is in the business of making money. Did these people think that Company X was sending them free software out of a sense of corporate citizenship? The 'Buddy Corporation,' if you will? Really? These 'poor bastards' thought that?
When in doubt, READ THE FUCKING CONTRACT. That's what it's there for. If you are old and (I would hope) smart enough to sign your name, then you're smart enough to read, process and understand what you're signing. If not, then, as Jake said, you kinda deserve what happens to you.
It's shit like this... People blindly signing away on little pieces of paper... that have caused first the housing crisis (no verifiable income? Not a citizen? No credit? Shitty credit? Hey, YOU TOO can own a $250k home with nothing down!), and now the looming credit crisis. Nobody bothers to read the contracts that they're entering into, and nobody notices until they start receiving the phone calls throughout the day hounding them for the money that they owe.
Hello? Is this thing on? (tap tap tap) CORPORATE AMERICA IS COUNTING ON YOUR IGNORANCE. CORPORATE AMERICA IS OUT TO GET YOU, AND THEY KNOW THAT YOU DON'T READ THE FINE PRINT.
They covered their asses by putting it in the contract, knowing full right well that Joe D. American is too lazy/stupid/gullible to read it. AND they know that if Joe D. American (or his wife Jane D. American or their friend LaQuandrashel D. American; part of being equal is owning up to your own shortcomings and mistakes!) actually took the time to READ the terms and conditions, then few people would sign.
Take responsibility for your own actions, quit crying and expecting the Gummint to come to your rescue. Hell, they outsourced writing the laws to the corporations!
Re: Another military guy....
I'm with you on this one. The only way that I can even consider this being true is if it was a SAT phone that they used in case their lowest-bidder radio took a dook on them, which... Hey, it never happens at a good time.
But IF this is the case, to have the dude's family as either a pre-programmed number OR the last call dialed?
But I remember the strict prohibitions on having any kind of cell phone while we were on the other side of the berm. OPSEC, and all that stuff. Not bloody likely. Plus, even with that phat combat pay, aren't SAT phones still kinda pricey?
Either way, this story stinks.
Oh, and since I'm thinking about it... #8? Assuming that you're not a troll, you're a total fucknut. IF you got offended by this story, then likely you're a wannabe and/or a weekend warrior who would love to go full-monty and join up but are too afraid of getting hurt. Put the shiny red helmet back on, pound your head against the wall, and stay off the Internet.
Re: Didn't everyone think it was a dumbass idea at the time?
What did you drink to come up with this nonsensical post?
Taxes and Amazon...
Due to this article, I went to Amazon and tried to find something from Target through Amazon (since Target has a physical presence here in Texas) to add to my cart. After a few minutes, I found a window treatment that I figured would suffice for this purpose. A few clicks later, it was in my basket, and lo! Estimated tax was added to the purchase.
I clicked the "why am I being charged tax?" link, and I found this:
Your Order: Tax and Seller Information
Your order contains one or more items from an Amazon.com partner and may be subject to local sales tax, depending on the state to which the item is being shipped.
and this:
Please note: The sales tax indicated on the checkout form is an estimate. The sales tax ultimately charged to your credit card will be calculated when your credit card charge is authorized and will reflect applicable state and local taxes.
So, taxes are being charged on purchases made through Amazon where the 3rd party retailer also has a presence in the locality from which the purchase is originating. I have to believe that if this is the case in Houston, then it should be the same in Manhattan.
So, yeah, this is pretty much a money grab, plain and simple. New York is attempting to charge taxes without Amazon having local representation (i.e. an "Amazon" store in Times Square), which, if memory serves, was part of what caused a little fracas up in that part of the country in, oh, around the early and mid 1770s.
Re: Craigslist and prositution
Thanks for your narrow-band view on the matter.
The fact remains that, if a woman so desired, she could sell her eggs... and indeed her whole damn uterus! to another person or couple if she desired. However, selling the vagina? No, that's where we draw the line.
It's easy, and, let's face it, LAZY as hell to brand me as a... What was it... "perverted {man]," by saying that prostitution should be legal. But I think that prostitution, provided that it's by the woman's (or man's) free will, should be a matter of choice.
This, I feel, also should apply to abortion. Your body is, or should be, about the only thing that you can truly own in the free and clear. Free will, rather than someone else's narrow interpretation of archaic and quaint religious dogma, should be the law.
Tracy, if you're that damn prudish about it, go buy yourself a chastity belt and shut the hell up. Don't pretend that your views represent the rest of the population, or that yours has any more validity than mine does.
Yeah, but...
Craigslist hosts a section for "Erotic Services." Isn't that just a euphemism for dirty deeds done dirt... well, kinda expensive, but... That ain't how the song goes.
This could, I'm sure, but argued that it's "intended" for things like the cambabes that want to charge you $5 a minute to watch them do whatever it is that you want for them to do. But c'mon, does anyone really believe that this is what that's for? Seriously?
To be honest, I don't care if a woman (or a man, for that matter) wishes to sell their bodies for whatever purposes so long as the acts are not illegal-in-the-hey-how-old-is-she-seven?-eight? arena, and as long as these people are being as safe as they possibly can be and aren't spreading/contracting social diseases. I don't care, and I don't believe that the government should, either.
But to say that Craigslist doesn't know what's going on with their own site? That they don't know what an ad talks about when the listing says "full service?" Hint: she's not gonna put gas in your car and check the oil level.
Re:
I think that downloadable content will suffer from one basic thing, and that is that people like to own stuff. There's that feeling that you get from opening the cellophane wrapper, taking out the disc, and watching the movie for the first time in your living room. People around my age (33) and older really like that feeling.
However, the reality is that I have a whole closet FULL of CDs and DVDs that... Well, they really only take up space right now. I have most of my CDs "backed up" on my hard drive, so I theoretically don't really even need them now. I'd do the same for my DVDs too, if it wasn't for the fact that it would take more time than I feel like investing in the project.
That said, I think that a lot of the younger folks out there are starting to look at CDs and DVDs in much the same way that my generation look at 8 Tracks and LPs... This is to say as quaint relics of a bygone era. There is no real attachment to CDs, at least not in the same way. Who the hell wants to go buy physical media that's just going to take up space once it winds up on their iPod? I don't, and that feeling is only going to get stronger as time goes by.
Given ample bandwidth and selection, streaming video and/or downloadable content is going to kill the DVD and CD. You'll one day be able to pick up someone's collection at a garage sale for pennies on the dollar like you used to be able to do for LPs.
Re: SPRINT
All of this chatter about contracts and early termination fees are... meaningless. If you're not happy with your service, then it's your God-given right to call your company's customer service line and vent your righteous frustration out to the person on the other end of the line.
THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR.
Complain often enough, and you've completely blown the profit margin that they typically would have made off of you. At that point, you are a liability to the company, and they'll politely ask you to take your business elsewhere. And since they're asking YOU to leave, it costs nothing, and you should be able to port your number with you should you desire to do such a thing.
They're counting on you not complaining. If you don't complain, then nobody is holding them to task for the lousy coverage, poor call quality, and technologies that lags behind most of the industrialized world. Not happy? Call those bastards and LET THEM KNOW.
Intellectually Lazy...
Your statement about how artists can't be supported by music that costs less than a dollar a song is intellectually lazy. A well-paid musician will see less than a dollar for the ENTIRE CD if it is sold at a retail outlet. The rest of the money goes to the record labels, the retailer, the distributors, the unions, the studios, the RIAA and the various and sundry other leeches that make up the current music distribution model. THIS is why the RIAA fights; they're trying to perpetuate a model that enriches THEM, all under the guise of standing up for the people who actually MAKE the music. The reality is that the recording industry has the goose (or geese) that lays the golden eggs. They're able to get by with feeding said the musical geese a handful of grain.
Meanwhile, the RIAA sells the eggs and buys themselves private jets and, probably, specially trained wombats that will be used to sniff out illegally downloaded songs.
Also, if you're going to turn the music marketplace into a commodity-driven market, then you can't (and shouldn't even try) to level the market place by having a "one price fits all" model. Commodity markets are driven by supply and demand, with a price that fluctuates in response to the demand. So, yeah, there would be some artists that would be able to command a whopping $0.001 a song because nobody wants to listen to them. Conversely, other artists could, in theory, command a larger sum.
However, there is one glaring hole in all of this, and that is to consider the impact of scarcity in valuation of any given product. Diamonds are expensive because they're hard to get, and they're available only in a few geological areas. How would you address this one? Make it to where only the first 500 people are able to purchase a given song? At that point, you're practically begging folks to start pirating the music.
Piracy exists for a variety of reasons. Some people engage because yeah, they just don't want to pay for music. Some people engage because they don't feel that the prevailing pricing model is not conducive to their economic situation.
The solution is to cut out the middle men and create a model that actually supports the musicians/artists rather than one that treats them like a collection of trained monkeys.
By the way, what the hell does "songs are not about technology" supposed to mean?
Weasel Words...
"Subprime" is just a nice way of saying "shitty," no matter what the context happens to be. You've got bad credit because you weren't able to control yourself? Hey, it's not BAD credit, it's just "subprime," so you can still feel good about yourself while you're paying 14.99% interest on your home loan.
By this logic, Bush isn't a bad President; he's just subprime.
I'd write more, but I'm too tired to get pissed off enough.
Re: Bleh on Vista
You know, I hadn't even touched on the whole DRM-thing. I find it incredibly shitty that the MPAA was able to strong-arm Microsoft into implementing the HDCP requirement for Hi-Def programming. Then there's the whole thing with the cut that Universal Music is getting from each Zune that's sold... I resent the fact that there is this assumption of guilt on the part of the MPAA/RIAA that people who own digital media devices are "stealing music." I don't care that it's only $1. It's giving them the inch; guess what they'll take next?
Re: Vista... lets look at a timeline
Actually, the largest problem with coding games for the Mac in the past was that it was a different underlying programming for the PowerPC. Now with Cider though, developers are able to relatively easily port games to run on Mac OSX running on an Intel processor. EA announced at the WWDC that a few of their latest games that will be available on the Mac in the next few months.
Of course, I argue your point that M$ is the best OS on the market, but that's a given. I will, however, concede that it is the best SUPPORTED OS on the market. This is largely a function of marketplace dominance, and it's something of an error to correlate market share with quality. It's not always the fastest (or best) horse that wins the race.
Re: Re: Surprised?
Jake, Jake, JAKE...
Wow, man. Such hostility! I guess that it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling to read what I'd written earlier and try to psychoanalyze me AND attempt to asses some sort of ... shortcoming... in my technical abilities.
I HAVE used Vista. Just for fair disclosure, I've used every version of Windows from 3.0 on up, both personally and professionally. And I've only rarely not been able to figure something out without some assistance. I've run the dog shit out of Windows more than once, and I've not been satisfied. Again, it's not dominant because it's a great platform. It's legacy, nothing more and nothing less.
But seriously, I'm happy to see that my post earlier managed to distract you from your Solitaire and Minesweeper marathons long enough for you to post. I'm sure that your two index fingers were so tired afterwards that you weren't even able to click on the stack of cards to get the next single card to flip over. (Red seven on the black eight, by the way!)
Maybe your AOL-using Grandmother could show you how to use a Macintosh long enough for you to get a clue. I'm sure that your retarded brother would also be able to help you with your anger issues, because, you know, retarded people tend to be generally happy, right?
Re: Beta vs VHS
People keep bringing the "Porn chooses the victor" argument, but I don't see that as being as valid as it was back in the days of VHS vs. Betamax for one simple reason...
And you may have heard of it...
The Internet.
Back in the day, if you wanted to watch a hard-core skin flick, it meant pulling out your best "Aqualung" outfit and trudging down to the local "dirty movie" joint. Then, the Porn industry went with the VHS format, which meant that now people were able to watch porn in the privacy of their own homes.
But now? The Internet pipes in gigabyte after gigabyte of... whatever you want. Transsexual midget beastiality? No problem. Twincest lesbians? Yeah, we've got that. All in the privacy of your own computer. You don't even have to leave your desk chair anymore.
So yeah, while the adult movie industry's endorsement of HD-DVD is an important battle, it's not going to decide the war in the long run for either format.
It's going to boil down more to who can do the most for the computer user, which camp will bring the first player for under $200 that's not a stripped-down turd, and who has the best selection of "mainstream" movies.