> "Why is it that the folks defending copyright always pull out the "But then creators will take their balls and go home!" card? That's such a repugnant, faithless argument. Numerous examples exist of people creating in spite of the system--and even making a living doing the same!"
Your logic is faulty - just because some people will continue to create in spite of the system does not mean all can continue to. Yes, indie game developers can continue to make games, but what about larger undertakings? You can't spend millions of dollars and employ large teams to devote themselves fully to creating a game like, say, Diablo 3, without some way to support those deveopers, artists, etc. A world with only indie games is less rich than a world with both indie and commercial games.
> "Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way."
I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.
If the market evolves to not sustain AAA games, thems the breaks.
I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.
So, to a point, they are effectively living off "donations" until they ship 1.0, right? Preorders are effectively donations to continue development.
afaik, pre-orders give you access to the "beta" version which is still very playable and will also give you access to the finished version when it is done.
All you get for free is an older version where you cannot do multiplayer or save your game. Basically a demo.
Yes, of course individuals or small groups will still create art in their free time.
You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied.
It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?
1. Games and movies still makes lots of money
2. Streaming technologies will render the need for physically storing games, movies or anything more and more obsolete.
3. Just wait til the movie houses start using 3d models in stead.
You see the problem is that you have to think about this in a much larger perpective to realize that things will even themselves out.
With regards to cost of copyright. Then yes when it makes people criminals to the extent it do today and fines them with amounts it do then it is way way way to high.
I'm not sure game streaming would be any better, it may require less copyright but then what happens when the company decides it is no longer economically feasible to stream the game that you like to play?
I'm not sure how 3d models would make a difference in movies? Many movies are already basically 3d renders.
That's not true at all, I have a large collection of games dating from around 1990 to present on my shelves. Assuming I can find the disks (most of them are in the wrong boxes) I can re-install any of them and play right now (ok I might have to install dosbox for some of them not to mention find a floppy drive).
That's only true currently for games that are only playable via a single central online service (e.g WoW etc) and that's sort of dictated by the game format itself.
What I mean is a world where all games are video streamed to you even if they are single player only.
Your point as I understand it is that you would find it preferable for content creators not to distribute at all rather than distribute with copyright?
So Google says 'we will play the game just like everyone else' and not report to you organic search terms coming from SSL (even though we have access to the data), but we also have a product (webmaster tools) that we can show you who is searching for what to get to your site, albeit slightly more obfuscated? It certainly sounds like a win for end users, not really sure it helps webmasters trying to see inbound search terms though. It sounds like it makes people have to put a little more value on the stats that Google provides via webmaster tools.
If referrers from HTTPS pages were sent to HTTP pages by browsers anyone sniffing the connection would know the URL the user visited. For a search engine, this would make SSL pretty useless as the main thing worth encrypting is search queries and people usually end up clicking links to non-SSL pages.
I presume they're working around it for ads and (telling webmasters the user is coming from Google) by sending the user through a HTTP page before they reach the result (like DuckDuckGo does, but for the opposite reason).
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the industry.
One of the reasons Google's advertising programs are so successful is that they are measurable. A site can compute return on investment and know that for every $X spent on Google ad clicks they are generating $Y in sales.
I'd love to hear some figures on that, because the ones I've seen from various (large) online retailers were abysmal. Setting up adwords campaigns for these retailers was a fun diversion, in some cases also a good excuse to huff and puff about the future of online marketing, but not at all a significant source of revenue. It was done mostly "to keep an online presence", probably out of fear that if they didn't buy those adwords someone else would.
The retailers I'm talking about may not be representative, however: they already had a strong market presence and strong brand recognition before they went online. Maybe there are businesses that have started from scratch online that did see significant revenue from adwords, but I doubt it.
The more niche you are, the more effective Adwords will be. High volume/low margin rarely makes sense on Adwords, because you'll face death by a thousand cuts by people who can target better, make bigger margins, bid higher and get better QS.
For businesses that can best exploit Adwords targeting, it can be breathtakingly effective. I've dealt with specialist contractors who saw 25000% ROI on their Adwords spend. Search terms like "loan consolidation" and "car insurance" cost tens of dollars per click and are absolutely worth that much.
I feel roughly the same about chess players as I feel about drunk drivers. That is, humanity clearly benefits from people willing to go out and drive while completely shitfaced, at least in the sense that when people are altruistic enough to kill themselves while driving drunk, the rest of us benefit by being able to look at their deaths statistically to create best-practices for the rest of us.[1]
In all seriousness though, if chess is your art then so be it, I certainly won't be the one to judge. On a personal level I think there are better mediums for self-expression. But clearly humanity as a whole gets stronger from diversity and randomness, and who knows what benefits us in the long run. And I agree with pessimizer that chess is ultimately more like math or music than cocaine or whatever.
Not the other poster, but I wouldn't be. In my semi-baseless opinion, chess playing pleasure is more like the pleasure you get from reading or doing math. Video game pleasure is more like television or cocaine.
What about the pleasure you get from playing a video game version of Chess? It just doesn't make sense to lump media as varied as video games, books and television into broad categories of pleasure. The content matters more than the medium.
He must not have noticed, but in the new UI you can minimize the "Mini Calendar" on the left side.
For someone with such a packed calendar the mini calendar is useless, and with it minimized you can view even more calendars than you could in the old UI.
And even if you do accept them, it should be much more convenient and less awkward.
That's what I'm looking forward to. I still want to keep up with my family but they don't care about machine learning and don't need to know everything that I'm doing with my friends. Circles sounds great for all of that.
I sense some confusion here. Those parameters are also used by Google Analytics which the author is using on that very page.
The utm parameters allow a site to track campaign information and replace much more annoying techniques like setting up unique landing pages or redirects. There's no relationship between these parameters, which have been around for nearly 10 years, and URL shorteners.
I had this exact experience about four years ago. Spent way too long dealing with their buggy code, wrote our own in a few weeks and everything was much easier from then on.
Your logic is faulty - just because some people will continue to create in spite of the system does not mean all can continue to. Yes, indie game developers can continue to make games, but what about larger undertakings? You can't spend millions of dollars and employ large teams to devote themselves fully to creating a game like, say, Diablo 3, without some way to support those deveopers, artists, etc. A world with only indie games is less rich than a world with both indie and commercial games.
> "Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way."
I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.