I agree. I wouldn't say I'm eager to give up the ability to sell my games when I'm done with them, but if your prices come down to make up for that loss of value, then we can probably reach a deal.
As a bit of an aside, the fact that game publishers/developers argue against selling used games has always seemed silly to me. I'm willing to bet that the majority of money that people get from selling old games gets put towards buying new games. The person who couldn't sell their old game wouldn't have as much money to spend on new stuff. And it's not like everyone who buys used games today would just shrug their shoulders and go buy a full-price copy instead.
I agree, but when you're dealing with those sorts of countries, then the original issue of F-22's vs F-35's isn't all that relevant, because the navy/air force has plenty of older planes that are more than adequate against such a foe.
It's a weird situation. If the USA were to go to war with a country that had a real ability to defend itself (or attack the US), I'm not sure that aircraft carriers would be that useful. They seem awfully vulnerable to missile attack. You can try to razzle-dazzle people with all your carrier group defense systems, but for a reasonably well equipped enemy, launching a few dozen anti-ship missiles all at once and overwhelming any missile defense systems is certainly feasible. And even if those anti-ship missiles cost a million bucks a piece, it seems like a pretty good trade-off for sinking an aircraft carrier and taking all its aircraft out of service.
Basically, I think that aircraft carriers are pretty much obsolete with missile technology being where it is today. They are huge, slow moving, and very valuable targets. Missiles are small, very fast, and dirt cheap compared to the amount of damage that they can do to a ship.
I think there's still plenty of room for land-based planes, although your point about the F-22 not being multi-role is a good one.
This is a giant multi-national project with funding from multiple governments. I'm sure there was plenty of politics and bureaucrats involved, not just a bunch of over-ambitious engineers trying to build the most complicated things they could dream up.
Meh, if the government for whatever reason decided to build thousands of state of the art studios and provided a professionally done recording for free to anyone who wanted one, 99% of it would still be forgotten, because making good music is hard.
The state of the art of anything is always going to be expensive, but just because you could spend $10,000 on an umbrella doesn't mean that a $15 umbrella is worthless. But anyways, maybe I shouldn't have said "building a recording studio" and instead said "gaining access to a recording studio". I know a few local bands that have produced their own CD's for just a few grand, and have done alright for themselves. They have facilities available to them that are a bit nicer than a basement setup. I'm sure it's not the perfect recording studio, and someone who knows what they're doing could find plenty of ways to potentially improve things, but that doesn't mean that it's worthless and that the end result is automatically crap.
Fair enough, but you're still talking about a completely different business model, and so the people who have jobs that rely on the old one are still going to make up reasons why it wouldn't work.
And at the end of the day, whether that college kid that can't download music spends $10/month on a CD or $10/month on a subscription, that's still a far cry from the $40,000 that the RIAA claims they've lost in sales. So they would probably use pretty much the same argument to try and preserve the status-quo.
There's still money to be made in music, in fact the lowered costs of production/storage/distribution could mean that there's a better market available than ever before, its just that the money is going to different people than before.
Somebody who won't pay for the music is not a potential customer. That's really the giant disconnect in this whole issue. College kids who've downloaded 40,000 songs off of the internet wouldn't have paid for those 40,000 songs if the music wasn't available online. But the naive belief/dishonest claim that every downloaded song is lost sale is what the RIAA has used to justify all this DRM nonsense to themselves, consumers, government, their investors, etc.
It doesn't come down to anything as broad as libertarian views on society. All of the music industry turmoil can be summed up with just a few basic points:
The record labels as a business model provided three things that most musicians couldn't feasibly do on their own. A proper recording studio, distribution, and decent advertising. Modern hardware and software has drastically lowered the costs to build a recording studio. The internet allows for almost free digital distribution, and physical distribution is become less important every day. The internet has also made advertising much more accessible. What this all means is that record labels are becoming irrelevant, technology is allowing us to cut out the middle man position that they fill. DRM is just a symptom of the huge hissy fit that the music execs are throwing as they've slowly started to understand that they're going to have to find new jobs.
The general idea is that the government should play by the same rules that it imposes on its people. If the military doesn't want me taking pictures of their top-secret aircraft, then they shouldn't fly it over my house. And generally they don't, they have big restricted areas out west that they use in order to avoid this problem. But on the other hand, there has been plenty of publicity surrounding instances where people have gotten hassled by the authorities for taking pictures of stuff that's standing out in plain sight. Generally it's not illegal to be taking pictures of this stuff, but many times that doesn't stop police or security guards from overstepping their bounds and trying to make people stop or make them delete their photos.
Wikileaks is just another piece of the puzzle. It's not a replacement for all public disclosure laws, and it's not a replacement for journalism. You're complaining that it has its own agendas and bias, which is undoubtedly true, but so does every other possible outlet for this sort of information.
You can never create a source that's guaranteed to be free of that bias, so the proper system has lots of separate sources, which hopefully "averages out" all the bias and provides some sort of truth. To claim that the solution is to just have one way of releasing information and make it perfect is to ignore how the world really works. You need to have so many sources that it becomes untenable for any one agenda to manipulate them all.
If you're unhappy with the fact that wikileaks doesn't give you much of a say, then go ahead and start your own website. Wikileaks provides a pretty decent template for how that might be done.
Because even with that restriction, the iphone is still a zillion times more useful than my old phone.
Sure, I can only choose from Apple-authorized apps, but seeing as there's tens of thousands of those apps, chances are I can find at least one app (or more likely a few to choose from) for pretty much anything I want to do. For most practical purposes, it really doesn't make a difference to me, seeing as I don't really care from any philosophical or ideological angle.
And if I ever have the need, jail-breaking my phone will always be an option.
Anyone afraid that buttons are going to disappear is just getting upset for no good reason. There's bazillions of hours invested into buttons, programming buttons, and designing game interfaces around buttons. Everyone isn't going to just up and abandon all of that investment and knowledge just because something new has appeared.
You'll just have to live with the fact that your beloved button based games might have to sit next to some motion control games on the store shelves. But that's not really something worth whining about.
I wonder if here in the US, if the government would actually be able to convince the military to turn its tanks and other war machines against the people. While the armed forces certainly have their own culture, would the average soldier fight against a mass uprising of the people in order to defend whoever happens to be president at the time? Would they consider their duty to their commanders greater than their duty to the people?
I think an important part of military enforced dictatorships has to be an economic situation where being a part of that military generally leads to a better life than one could expect as a civilian. In that situation, it's more about securing one's own status and income, and securing the position of the government is just a necessary side effect of that.
There's been a lot of this sort of attitude towards Nintendo and the Wii coming from the tradition gaming culture for a few years now. Rather than just accept the fact that Nintendo has decided to target a broader marker that doesn't exactly overlap with the "hardcore" gamers, some people have decided to be offended by it, and have been complaining almost non-stop.
The fact that we're still consistently seeing articles from various gaming outlets about whether or not casual gaming is killing real gaming is almost laughable at this point.
That's a pretty valid question, but look at it from the point of view of an investor that's got giant piles of money just sitting around. Sure, chances are 99.9999% that these guys are chasing a dead-end, but if against all odds they've actually figured something out, there's going to be bazillions of dollars and fame and publicity as a reward, and you can potentially be a part of that for an amount of money that's rather minor to you.
For the vast majority of people, basically throwing away a couple million dollars on such a long-shot certainly seems foolish. But there are people in this world for which a few million dollars isn't that big of a deal, so it might be worth the risk.
It might be more accurate to say that these different genres don't work yet. Developers need time to figure out how to make it play well. Madden '09 has refined controls on the 360 because it has a controller full of buttons, and people have been making football games for button controllers for decades. They started with controllers with just a couple buttons, and over the years have refined it to the complex system that they've got today. If they were to try and port that to a tiny touchscreen, why would you expect it to be anything other than a disaster?
What they would need to do is start basically from scratch, and rethink the entire control scheme. Practicality would likely dictate that getting it all right the first time around is unlikely, so they'd have to settle for a game much less complicated than what we see on home consoles (not to mention the iphone's lesser hardware specs). Whether or not a significantly less complicated football game would be accepted by the marketplace is another matter.
There's nothing inherent about the idea of sports games that makes them unsuitable for a touchscreen. Thirty years ago there were sports "simulating" board games. And the same goes for most other genres. A direct port of a game, or even the genre itself with touchscreen controls pasted on won't be successful in all cases, but a careful rethinking of how it could work is not a worthless exercise.
Actually getting a building built is way more complicated than either of those two statements. Any complicated building most likely has a good sized team of people working on it. Besides just deciding what the building is going to look like, the architect(s) on the project need to coordinate all of the engineers and consultants (mechanical, structural, landscape, etc.), deal with lots of code/government issues, keep the project within a workable budget, and then make sure the contractor actually builds what was designed.
Sadly, the way the construction business often works (in the US at least), the relationship between the the contractor and the architect/client is often adversarial, because there are lots of clients who want their building to be built basically for free, and lots of contractors looking trying to squeeze every dollar out of the client.
But on occasion I've worked on projects where the contractor is involved from the beginning and generally acting in good faith, and there's a real partnership at work. Those projects are usually much more fun.
I don't remember what my point was. Make sure your kid never decides to be an architect.
In general, I'd think that any enemy with the sophistication and resources to hack our UAV's and then send them back against us would also have the sophistication and resources to just make their own UAV's. In fact, making your own would probably be a good bit easier than capturing, reprogramming, and controlling the enemy's drones.
Considering that Nintendo has been consistently outselling everyone else by big margins, maybe the ratings aren't that valid? You can't really make a good argument that the Wii is just a fad at this point, you can't realistically argue that it's just cruising on hype. People are still buying lots of their stuff, and they're buying it because it's fun to them.
It's been said before, but Nintendo has expanded the realm of people that they're targeting as customers. Those people are often different from the types of people that spend their time rating video games. Different people have different ideas about what is fun. "Traditional gamers" might not enjoy the games, but it's less about there not being good games, and more about there just being different games. It's just that the people doing the ratings are the traditional gamers. The games aren't necessarily made to impress them, so their ratings are negatively skewed. Not to mention that there's still "hardcore" gamers out there who seem to be offended that Nintendo would rather target some of their efforts towards the casual crowd rather than the 6 hours/day type gamer.
I agree, the knee-jerk reaction where everybody hears the word "sequel" and immediately jumps to "half-assed money grab" isn't necessarily fair, especially to an organization like Pixar which did really well on their previous sequel.
They've created some characters and worlds that have lots of potential, and it'd be a shame to limit the exploration of all of that to only 90 minutes or so just because that's the useful length of a movie. Like you said, there needs to be a real story there, but with the amount of creative people that Pixar has, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to come up with some quality stuff. In fact, I'd imagine that for each of their previous movies, there were tons of good ideas or story arcs that didn't make it into film, not because it wasn't a good idea, but because they only had so much time to fill.
Now if disney starts farming out pixar characters offshore for quick straight-to-DVD release, then you should start worrying about them.
If your biggest problem is that your latest product upgrade isn't as exciting as the initial launch of said product, well that's not such a bad place to be.
Apple has consistently released new iPods for years, but not every one was a giant step over the last. And people complained that the change wasn't that exciting. But they kept selling truckloads of the little things, and they'll probably keep selling iPhones as well.
I don't know what sort of huge innovations you were expecting. Apple has spent a lot of effort in creating the iPhone as a platform, served by the app store. They're not going to release something so incredibly different that it fractures that platform "eco-system". They're going to be very careful about releasing hardware that will result in apps that aren't backwards compatible with the phones already out there.
The costs end up on the consumer either way. If you tax the corporations, then they raise the price of their goods, consumers pay more. If you don't tax the corporations, then the government will directly tax the people even more to make up for the income that they aren't getting from corporate taxes.
We pay either way. The government requires money to meet its many obligations, and it's going to collect that money through taxes of one sort or the other.
The corporation that I'm buying from is reliant on the highways and bridges that it has to truck its products across, and those highways and bridges need to get paid for. Either I pay the company which than pays the government, or I pay the government directly. If the company is paying, it factors that cost into its prices, and then as a consumer, I can see those extra costs and make a more informed purchasing decision. And a well designed corporate tax system would have the added benefit of compelling companies to use those public resources more efficiently, which would lower their tax burden, and then lower their prices.
You're right, but you're missing the piece that a lot of people don't see. Creating good software is hard. Cramming a new piece of hardware into a piece of plastic is the easy part. Designing an interface that makes that piece of hardware more useful can be a lot harder.
That's the only reason why a computer company was able to walk right into the phone market, and on their first try create something that all those old phone manufacturers are now rushing to catch up to. I'm willing to bet that Apple's employees overall spent way more time getting the software right than they did deciding what hardware to put into the iPhone.
And then the app store is a whole other beast. Apple had a lot of experience from the iTMS, they had a ton of infrastructure in place, and they even already had end-user software in place to tie it all together. Most of their competitors have to build similar systems from scratch. They've got a good example to follow now, but they've still got plenty to figure out.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I wouldn't say I'm eager to give up the ability to sell my games when I'm done with them, but if your prices come down to make up for that loss of value, then we can probably reach a deal.
As a bit of an aside, the fact that game publishers/developers argue against selling used games has always seemed silly to me. I'm willing to bet that the majority of money that people get from selling old games gets put towards buying new games. The person who couldn't sell their old game wouldn't have as much money to spend on new stuff. And it's not like everyone who buys used games today would just shrug their shoulders and go buy a full-price copy instead.
I agree, but when you're dealing with those sorts of countries, then the original issue of F-22's vs F-35's isn't all that relevant, because the navy/air force has plenty of older planes that are more than adequate against such a foe.
It's a weird situation. If the USA were to go to war with a country that had a real ability to defend itself (or attack the US), I'm not sure that aircraft carriers would be that useful. They seem awfully vulnerable to missile attack. You can try to razzle-dazzle people with all your carrier group defense systems, but for a reasonably well equipped enemy, launching a few dozen anti-ship missiles all at once and overwhelming any missile defense systems is certainly feasible. And even if those anti-ship missiles cost a million bucks a piece, it seems like a pretty good trade-off for sinking an aircraft carrier and taking all its aircraft out of service.
Basically, I think that aircraft carriers are pretty much obsolete with missile technology being where it is today. They are huge, slow moving, and very valuable targets. Missiles are small, very fast, and dirt cheap compared to the amount of damage that they can do to a ship.
I think there's still plenty of room for land-based planes, although your point about the F-22 not being multi-role is a good one.
This is a giant multi-national project with funding from multiple governments. I'm sure there was plenty of politics and bureaucrats involved, not just a bunch of over-ambitious engineers trying to build the most complicated things they could dream up.
Meh, if the government for whatever reason decided to build thousands of state of the art studios and provided a professionally done recording for free to anyone who wanted one, 99% of it would still be forgotten, because making good music is hard.
The state of the art of anything is always going to be expensive, but just because you could spend $10,000 on an umbrella doesn't mean that a $15 umbrella is worthless. But anyways, maybe I shouldn't have said "building a recording studio" and instead said "gaining access to a recording studio". I know a few local bands that have produced their own CD's for just a few grand, and have done alright for themselves. They have facilities available to them that are a bit nicer than a basement setup. I'm sure it's not the perfect recording studio, and someone who knows what they're doing could find plenty of ways to potentially improve things, but that doesn't mean that it's worthless and that the end result is automatically crap.
Fair enough, but you're still talking about a completely different business model, and so the people who have jobs that rely on the old one are still going to make up reasons why it wouldn't work.
And at the end of the day, whether that college kid that can't download music spends $10/month on a CD or $10/month on a subscription, that's still a far cry from the $40,000 that the RIAA claims they've lost in sales. So they would probably use pretty much the same argument to try and preserve the status-quo.
There's still money to be made in music, in fact the lowered costs of production/storage/distribution could mean that there's a better market available than ever before, its just that the money is going to different people than before.
Somebody who won't pay for the music is not a potential customer. That's really the giant disconnect in this whole issue. College kids who've downloaded 40,000 songs off of the internet wouldn't have paid for those 40,000 songs if the music wasn't available online. But the naive belief/dishonest claim that every downloaded song is lost sale is what the RIAA has used to justify all this DRM nonsense to themselves, consumers, government, their investors, etc.
It doesn't come down to anything as broad as libertarian views on society. All of the music industry turmoil can be summed up with just a few basic points:
The record labels as a business model provided three things that most musicians couldn't feasibly do on their own. A proper recording studio, distribution, and decent advertising. Modern hardware and software has drastically lowered the costs to build a recording studio. The internet allows for almost free digital distribution, and physical distribution is become less important every day. The internet has also made advertising much more accessible. What this all means is that record labels are becoming irrelevant, technology is allowing us to cut out the middle man position that they fill. DRM is just a symptom of the huge hissy fit that the music execs are throwing as they've slowly started to understand that they're going to have to find new jobs.
The general idea is that the government should play by the same rules that it imposes on its people. If the military doesn't want me taking pictures of their top-secret aircraft, then they shouldn't fly it over my house. And generally they don't, they have big restricted areas out west that they use in order to avoid this problem. But on the other hand, there has been plenty of publicity surrounding instances where people have gotten hassled by the authorities for taking pictures of stuff that's standing out in plain sight. Generally it's not illegal to be taking pictures of this stuff, but many times that doesn't stop police or security guards from overstepping their bounds and trying to make people stop or make them delete their photos.
Wikileaks is just another piece of the puzzle. It's not a replacement for all public disclosure laws, and it's not a replacement for journalism. You're complaining that it has its own agendas and bias, which is undoubtedly true, but so does every other possible outlet for this sort of information.
You can never create a source that's guaranteed to be free of that bias, so the proper system has lots of separate sources, which hopefully "averages out" all the bias and provides some sort of truth. To claim that the solution is to just have one way of releasing information and make it perfect is to ignore how the world really works. You need to have so many sources that it becomes untenable for any one agenda to manipulate them all.
If you're unhappy with the fact that wikileaks doesn't give you much of a say, then go ahead and start your own website. Wikileaks provides a pretty decent template for how that might be done.
Because even with that restriction, the iphone is still a zillion times more useful than my old phone.
Sure, I can only choose from Apple-authorized apps, but seeing as there's tens of thousands of those apps, chances are I can find at least one app (or more likely a few to choose from) for pretty much anything I want to do. For most practical purposes, it really doesn't make a difference to me, seeing as I don't really care from any philosophical or ideological angle.
And if I ever have the need, jail-breaking my phone will always be an option.
Also carry a clipboard. Nobody will question a guy taking notes on a clipboard.
Anyone afraid that buttons are going to disappear is just getting upset for no good reason. There's bazillions of hours invested into buttons, programming buttons, and designing game interfaces around buttons. Everyone isn't going to just up and abandon all of that investment and knowledge just because something new has appeared.
You'll just have to live with the fact that your beloved button based games might have to sit next to some motion control games on the store shelves. But that's not really something worth whining about.
I'm not a programmer, but in my field we've got the same basic issue, which can be boiled down to something like this:
In a given project, for every hour of fun/interesting/challenging work, there's ten hours(at least) of tedious/drone work that needs to be completed.
It's not an issue specific to programming, or computers, or even technology. It's just a fact of life that will never change.
I wonder if here in the US, if the government would actually be able to convince the military to turn its tanks and other war machines against the people. While the armed forces certainly have their own culture, would the average soldier fight against a mass uprising of the people in order to defend whoever happens to be president at the time? Would they consider their duty to their commanders greater than their duty to the people?
I think an important part of military enforced dictatorships has to be an economic situation where being a part of that military generally leads to a better life than one could expect as a civilian. In that situation, it's more about securing one's own status and income, and securing the position of the government is just a necessary side effect of that.
There's been a lot of this sort of attitude towards Nintendo and the Wii coming from the tradition gaming culture for a few years now. Rather than just accept the fact that Nintendo has decided to target a broader marker that doesn't exactly overlap with the "hardcore" gamers, some people have decided to be offended by it, and have been complaining almost non-stop.
The fact that we're still consistently seeing articles from various gaming outlets about whether or not casual gaming is killing real gaming is almost laughable at this point.
That's a pretty valid question, but look at it from the point of view of an investor that's got giant piles of money just sitting around. Sure, chances are 99.9999% that these guys are chasing a dead-end, but if against all odds they've actually figured something out, there's going to be bazillions of dollars and fame and publicity as a reward, and you can potentially be a part of that for an amount of money that's rather minor to you.
For the vast majority of people, basically throwing away a couple million dollars on such a long-shot certainly seems foolish. But there are people in this world for which a few million dollars isn't that big of a deal, so it might be worth the risk.
It might be more accurate to say that these different genres don't work yet. Developers need time to figure out how to make it play well. Madden '09 has refined controls on the 360 because it has a controller full of buttons, and people have been making football games for button controllers for decades. They started with controllers with just a couple buttons, and over the years have refined it to the complex system that they've got today. If they were to try and port that to a tiny touchscreen, why would you expect it to be anything other than a disaster?
What they would need to do is start basically from scratch, and rethink the entire control scheme. Practicality would likely dictate that getting it all right the first time around is unlikely, so they'd have to settle for a game much less complicated than what we see on home consoles (not to mention the iphone's lesser hardware specs). Whether or not a significantly less complicated football game would be accepted by the marketplace is another matter.
There's nothing inherent about the idea of sports games that makes them unsuitable for a touchscreen. Thirty years ago there were sports "simulating" board games. And the same goes for most other genres. A direct port of a game, or even the genre itself with touchscreen controls pasted on won't be successful in all cases, but a careful rethinking of how it could work is not a worthless exercise.
Actually getting a building built is way more complicated than either of those two statements. Any complicated building most likely has a good sized team of people working on it. Besides just deciding what the building is going to look like, the architect(s) on the project need to coordinate all of the engineers and consultants (mechanical, structural, landscape, etc.), deal with lots of code/government issues, keep the project within a workable budget, and then make sure the contractor actually builds what was designed.
Sadly, the way the construction business often works (in the US at least), the relationship between the the contractor and the architect/client is often adversarial, because there are lots of clients who want their building to be built basically for free, and lots of contractors looking trying to squeeze every dollar out of the client.
But on occasion I've worked on projects where the contractor is involved from the beginning and generally acting in good faith, and there's a real partnership at work. Those projects are usually much more fun.
I don't remember what my point was. Make sure your kid never decides to be an architect.
We have the technology. The time is now. Science can wait no longer. Children are our future. American can, should, must, and will blow up the moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdT2HqoV198
In general, I'd think that any enemy with the sophistication and resources to hack our UAV's and then send them back against us would also have the sophistication and resources to just make their own UAV's. In fact, making your own would probably be a good bit easier than capturing, reprogramming, and controlling the enemy's drones.
Considering that Nintendo has been consistently outselling everyone else by big margins, maybe the ratings aren't that valid? You can't really make a good argument that the Wii is just a fad at this point, you can't realistically argue that it's just cruising on hype. People are still buying lots of their stuff, and they're buying it because it's fun to them.
It's been said before, but Nintendo has expanded the realm of people that they're targeting as customers. Those people are often different from the types of people that spend their time rating video games. Different people have different ideas about what is fun. "Traditional gamers" might not enjoy the games, but it's less about there not being good games, and more about there just being different games. It's just that the people doing the ratings are the traditional gamers. The games aren't necessarily made to impress them, so their ratings are negatively skewed. Not to mention that there's still "hardcore" gamers out there who seem to be offended that Nintendo would rather target some of their efforts towards the casual crowd rather than the 6 hours/day type gamer.
I agree, the knee-jerk reaction where everybody hears the word "sequel" and immediately jumps to "half-assed money grab" isn't necessarily fair, especially to an organization like Pixar which did really well on their previous sequel.
They've created some characters and worlds that have lots of potential, and it'd be a shame to limit the exploration of all of that to only 90 minutes or so just because that's the useful length of a movie. Like you said, there needs to be a real story there, but with the amount of creative people that Pixar has, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to come up with some quality stuff. In fact, I'd imagine that for each of their previous movies, there were tons of good ideas or story arcs that didn't make it into film, not because it wasn't a good idea, but because they only had so much time to fill.
Now if disney starts farming out pixar characters offshore for quick straight-to-DVD release, then you should start worrying about them.
If your biggest problem is that your latest product upgrade isn't as exciting as the initial launch of said product, well that's not such a bad place to be.
Apple has consistently released new iPods for years, but not every one was a giant step over the last. And people complained that the change wasn't that exciting. But they kept selling truckloads of the little things, and they'll probably keep selling iPhones as well.
I don't know what sort of huge innovations you were expecting. Apple has spent a lot of effort in creating the iPhone as a platform, served by the app store. They're not going to release something so incredibly different that it fractures that platform "eco-system". They're going to be very careful about releasing hardware that will result in apps that aren't backwards compatible with the phones already out there.
The costs end up on the consumer either way. If you tax the corporations, then they raise the price of their goods, consumers pay more. If you don't tax the corporations, then the government will directly tax the people even more to make up for the income that they aren't getting from corporate taxes.
We pay either way. The government requires money to meet its many obligations, and it's going to collect that money through taxes of one sort or the other.
The corporation that I'm buying from is reliant on the highways and bridges that it has to truck its products across, and those highways and bridges need to get paid for. Either I pay the company which than pays the government, or I pay the government directly. If the company is paying, it factors that cost into its prices, and then as a consumer, I can see those extra costs and make a more informed purchasing decision. And a well designed corporate tax system would have the added benefit of compelling companies to use those public resources more efficiently, which would lower their tax burden, and then lower their prices.
You're right, but you're missing the piece that a lot of people don't see. Creating good software is hard. Cramming a new piece of hardware into a piece of plastic is the easy part. Designing an interface that makes that piece of hardware more useful can be a lot harder.
That's the only reason why a computer company was able to walk right into the phone market, and on their first try create something that all those old phone manufacturers are now rushing to catch up to. I'm willing to bet that Apple's employees overall spent way more time getting the software right than they did deciding what hardware to put into the iPhone.
And then the app store is a whole other beast. Apple had a lot of experience from the iTMS, they had a ton of infrastructure in place, and they even already had end-user software in place to tie it all together. Most of their competitors have to build similar systems from scratch. They've got a good example to follow now, but they've still got plenty to figure out.