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Much like a drug dealer, they think there are plenty of people that will pay outrageous prices to remain luddites. Even those that will switch to broadband will probably want AOL to hold their hand.

AOL wants to keep all the customers they have. If they could do that at the new price, that would be the ultimate victory for them. However, when you raise prices, you will lose some who sit right at the Cost Benifit margin. However, if you lose 1% of your customer base and get the rest to pay 33% more, you are obviously making much more money.

Case and point, AOL is not trying to get rid of customers, simply maximize profit (well, actually ROI, but close enough). They may lose customers in the process, but that is just a annoying side effect.

And I never said AOL was a bunch of alter boys.

This tactic is not new, and its not weird that you can choose your price. If you have taken a basic Economics 101 course, you have learned about "price discrimination" and ideally "perfect price discrimination".

Businesses decide what price to charge by looking at the supply and demand curve. The demand curve shows you that there are people who will demand really high prices and those who will demand really low prices for the same product. The equilibrium price is the price where the company makes the most money by balancing the number of people willing to buy at a price that maximizes profit.

However many companies realize that there are still people on the high end of the demand curve that will still pay higher than the equilibrium price. So companies tried to differentiate a sales channel or product in a way that the customer feels they are getting a product worthy of the higher price, even if the same thing is available for less.

Easy examples: - High-octane gas - Business travelers pay much higher airfare - Designer clothing brands that have a high-end label and a lower-end label that are simply sold in different stores

Generally the higher-end priced items have marginally better quality that is not proportionate with the increase in price. The issue is that the consumer is still willing to pay the price.

If I can sell you a cup of lemonade for $1000.00 and you are willing to buy it for that price, then there is no wrongdoing, even if I tell you that its made from a specially crafted blend of rind and pulp. The 25c cup of lemonade doesn't get any fancy marketing, but I still make money there too (see volume).

Perfect Price Discrimination means that I can sell to EVERY person on the demand curve at the price they are willing to pay. (obviously only the price that is above my cost).

So this isn't news, its standard business practice. It can be sometimes be a monopoly tactic, but only if it can be proven that you are trying to hurt a competitor. (ie: lowering your price to drive someone else out of business)

Here is a link to an article discussing price discrimination.

-David

>The general public in the US is so amazingly ignorant, they probably never even bother thinking that we could run out of oil, much less that we will, and that is is only a matter of time before we do (if no action is taken, which is looking rather likely as always).

Ignorance is only a factor for those willing to forget basic economics 101 from elementary school. It dictates a simple principle that is as follows:

We will never "run out" of anything. It will simply become unaffordable for almost everyone.

Why?

Supply and Demand.

What *could* happen, is that oil becomes a strictly controlled substance, similar to cocaine, and simply becomes unavailable for sale so that various militaries can use it to power ever increasingly hungry aircraft, and possibly use trading oil to force other countries into various positions. Again, we still haven't run out.

Basically, oil could (has?) become the new gold.

>"just so some pinko environmentalist wackos can stop using oil".

Oddly enough, about the *ONLY* likely scenario (not the only one, but things like the earth exploding, I don't believe in) that could cause us to run out of oil *IS* communism, which, by its very nature, ignores the effects of supply and demand on prices, and rather presses the effects more viscerally on to the proletariat.

>And half of them probably would say "Poppycock; there's no way we could run out of fuel. God wouldn't let that happen to us!" It sounds like an anti-religion troll, but I seem to recall actually hearing rubbish like that from the far-right...

Religion ain't got nothin' to do with it. I'm sure any PhD in economics from a recognized university could explain why we won't run out of oil even better than I have.

No politician deserves credit for tax cuts unless they can cut spending or raise revenues by enough to pay for them.

For more background on this, research the crowding out effect. The deficit is newly borrowed money. the crowding out effect predicts that borrowing money to enact fiscal policies crowds out other investment, and thereby reduces economic activity.

Nonsense, economically, the cost of an additional windows copy is virtually zero. As this is the case for all software, the ability to offer 90% discounts doesn't qualify as dumping but as price discrimination.
Microsoft is - what is called - a natural monoploy, a side effect of the software business.

First off, I can't see why overclocking seems to work Intel's panties into such a froth.

Because it allows people who are willing to pay for a higher speed processor to buy a lower speed one. Read this article about price discrimination. I think you'll see why Intel doesn't want you to overclock.

Overclocking a processor is no different then 'hot rodding' a car!

The difference is that 'hot rodding' a car is not cost effective for most consumers to do. Trust me, if a lot of people stopped buying 6 cylinder cars and merely upgraded their 4 cylinder engines by buying generic parts car companies would get their panties into a froth too.

From what I've read, a lot of people seem to like the idea of color coded emails. Well, pine does this. In fact I have my client setup for a variety of different rules.

Simple, yet featureful. Pine rules!

We have the indexer running on a cron job twice a week during the middle of the night. It does kinda screw up webalizer results, but you can work around that.

Theres also one called glimpse, but my experience with that a few years ago showed it to not be as useful as htdig. things might have changed, though, and YMMV.