> Who opens a business and says "Jee, I think I'll > write some open standards and let everyone else > have an equal slice of the pie." ???
But is the purpose of a business to make money, or to make as much money as possible? Or to make a profit? What about other forms of profit than money?
Ask your local Accounting Hacker about the account called "Goodwill".
Besides, especially with some of the things I've been seeing lately about Microsoft getting into the e-money business, I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to need to review my copy of "Sixteen Tons", so I know what to say to the Company Storekeeper when he decides I need to pay more because I have more money.
I've heard the arguments to "charge as much as the traffic will bear", but what happens when the coming employment collapse really kicks in? When you only have jobs for 100 million people out of 10 billion, what do you do with the rest of the people? Kill them off, and you only have jobs for 500,000 - 1 million people... So do you kill off THOSE excess? (recursing until you're back to an Adam and Eve situation, sitting the Garden of Eden eating the Fruit of the Replicator... Reducio Ad Absurdum!)
The other problem, unless they've come out with something pretty new lately, is that the connection over a powerline ends at the transformer outside of the house, so setting up a house-to-house network is not an option (which would, I believe, be the real killer app for this in suburbia, where millions of kiddies are planning the destruction of their school WAIT! I meant playing Quake/Doom over the phone wasting perfectly good ports on the ISPs modem bank.
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> Who opens a business and says "Jee, I think I'll
> write some open standards and let everyone else
> have an equal slice of the pie." ???
But is the purpose of a business to make money, or to make as much money as possible? Or to make a profit? What about other forms of profit than money?
Ask your local Accounting Hacker about the account called "Goodwill".
Besides, especially with some of the things I've been seeing lately about Microsoft getting into the e-money business, I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to need to review my copy of "Sixteen Tons", so I know what to say to the Company Storekeeper when he decides I need to pay more because I have more money.
I've heard the arguments to "charge as much as the traffic will bear", but what happens when the coming employment collapse really kicks in? When you only have jobs for 100 million people out of 10 billion, what do you do with the rest of the people? Kill them off, and you only have jobs for 500,000 - 1 million people... So do you kill off THOSE excess? (recursing until you're back to an Adam and Eve situation, sitting the Garden of Eden eating the Fruit of the Replicator... Reducio Ad Absurdum!)
The other problem, unless they've come out with something pretty new lately, is that the connection over a powerline ends at the transformer outside of the house, so setting up a house-to-house network is not an option (which would, I believe, be the real killer app for this in suburbia, where millions of kiddies are planning the destruction of their school WAIT! I meant playing Quake/Doom over the phone wasting perfectly good ports on the ISPs modem bank.