Maybe the stagnation of growth means the industry (finally) reaches it's saturation point, where it becomes fully mature, has captured nearly 100% of the market, and just doesn't have room to grow? Like what happened to Microsoft about a decade ago? Still selling a lot - but just no room to sell even more, and for the market being saturated, actually starting to lose sales as soon as competition arises.
Going to the movies should be compared to visiting concerts or theatre. It is the experience. Personally I prefer concerts over movies, and either over the recording (or radio resp. TV broadcast).
Recorded music may be compared to DVD. You buy a copy, play it at your leisure at home or on the go, but it misses the crowd, the band on stage or the large screen, etc. It's not the same.
Any numbers by the way on pop concert visits? Not just the big guys but also local club ticket sales. Could be interesting as well.
Maybe it's time for the studios to do something about those costs. Movie budgets are ridiculous these days.
Hong Kong also still makes movies. Not as many as in the 70s, but still they make movies. And they are often very popular here. I don't have exact numbers but I estimate a Hong Kong movie budget at 1-5% of a Hollywood production's budget. And they are not even worse that the shit Hollywood spews out these days.
The big difference: Hong Kong movies do without all those special effects and computer graphics. It's still the story that counts, while most Hollywood productions nowadays are just spectacles, carried fully by the special effects with the story just being an excuse for more special effects, like in American porn movies where the story is just an excuse to pass the censors.
If YOU lose your own key, then that's your own fault. Forgetting to take your keys and closing the door behind you, that's simply your own silliness. And no news.
Here it is a third-party vendor (Microsoft in this case) that basically changes the locks to your files. As if the developer of the apartment building where you live suddenly changes the locks of all the flats. Locking out everyone who locked their doors. Even if they did not lose their own keys.
Home and work area yes, not exact address. Train station and bus route, maybe not even bus stop (I don't know how detailed the buses keep their records of where you board).
Mobile phone companies can know that much more accurate; GSM can triangulate (my phone can tell me where I am!) but afaik not height. So they can not tell which floor I am.
Interesting note indeed. Interesting to see how COMPANIES deal with that. We all know how employees deal with that already: private time is taken over by work time. Business calls in the cinema, answering e-mails on the blackberry during dinner. Now if private life enters the company... oh wait... private life... what private life?
Why do you think it's OK to be on some kind of government watch list? Now that is truly scary. I don't like that idea, at all. And by the way I'm not that coy about my identity on-line either. I am who I am, I am not revealing my address, tel number, ID card, etc. to any site not directly needing it.
You can probably stay somewhat anonymous. As in: they know what you do, but not that it's YOU that's doing just that.
It's like my Octopus card used for public transport. The Octopus company knows exactly for what rides that card is used - where and when I get on or off the train, where and when I board a bus, the boats I take, the occasional newspaper or other purchase I make with it. And they keep those records for seven years.
However what they do not know is that it's me. There is no name linked to the card. I bought it with cash, always update it with cash, basically leaving no trace that it is me.
The same I'm sure you can do with Google's services. Create an account, use fake information (or very limited real information, not enough to track it to you, if you have a general name like "john doe" you're set), and Google may know everything about that account, but can not link it to the real you.
To me that's more than enough for Google (or Octopus) to know. For Google's ads I actually don't mind them, and have clicked on them quite often, especially when searching for some commercial product or service. E.g. I want to buy a hard disk, then I'd click on ads offering hard disks. If Google personalises that to my account to show sellers local to me and not e.g. USA based sellers, then that would make me happy. And the advertiser as well as a USA seller of such a generic product will not make a sale to me, I rather buy something from a local store. Some personalisation to my preferences is quite OK, linking it to physical me is less so. There is no reason for that imho. Especially not for a foreign company based in a country that starts to scare me more and more when it comes to basic privacy and human rights. If ever I try to cross the US border I don't want to be questioned about Google searches that I did, for example!
When I read this my first thought was that this is yet another sign that the difference between smartphones, netbooks, and even laptops and desktops is fading. The form factor is what remains mainly, as we can pack more and more computing power in smaller and smaller packages.
We can do things now on smartphones that 10, 15 years ago were just getting possible on an average desktop PC. And the gap is narrowing quickly. OS vendors (and VMWare is pretty much in that market) these days are of course looking at the smartphone as the next platform.
I just use the hot-corner for that. Move mouse to right top corner and I see all my windows. In a way it becomes like a gesture that way. No need to have a mouse with so many buttons, and then trying to remember which button to use when.
The cost of setting up a network is huge, even in a small country like NL. Finding spots for your aerials, for your equipment, etc.
Common regulation is that established players must rent out network capacity to new entrants at a fixed rate (often determined by the government), like commonly done with fixed-line networks as well. And other infrastructure such as railroads.
That's the only way for a relative small player to enter such a market.
It's well known that limited diets reduce reproductive metabolism in favor of survival. After all, what good is reproduction if you don't live to do it.
While that may be true, I think it is more of a case of: what good is reproduction (which requires a lot of resources from the mother before birth) when there is not enough food to go around even without extra mouths to feed. Better save the expense of pregnancy for times when there is better chance for the baby to actually have enough to eat.
-- Or Bernie Madoff, who stole BILLIONS of dollars - wiping out whole families, I suppose he should just get a slap on the wrist eh?
No, he should be forced to work until he dies, paying as much as can possibly be paid back to the people he swindled. This works better than us paying 40+K a year to keep him in prison.
OK... let him work... now let's see, what is he good at? Ah yes, working with money, and speculation. So let's put him at work at a bank. Preferably Wall Street. The guy has the experience and certainly the qualities - he has proven that already. There at least if he does his best he can get enough in bonuses to at least put a dent in those losses.
Those women could also choose to just walk away from those abusive husbands/boyfriends, and report them to police. Saves a lot of violence both ways. But for some reason most of them tend to say. Why that is I truly don't know nor understand.
Except that possession is a measure of demand. As long as there is demand, there is supply. So demand for pornographic images results in supply, also if this is about illegal types of porn. Or other images. So while yes they should try and track down the creators, mere possession is not necessarily innocent.
Accidental download of such images, and having them deleted leaving only traces on the hard disk that should not be punishable beyond maybe a stern warning. Like in this case.
Possession of readily accessible images indicates demand.
Having paid for said content definitely would be grounds for punishment, as this (in contrast to say smoking pot grown in your own back yard) is not a victimless crime.
About 15-20 years ago that was the situation in The Netherlands as well. Heavy subsidies on phones.
Very soon however some resellers were giving cash back: most of the subscriptions were sold through independent retailers, who basically got a commission on selling a plan, and then used that commission to subsidise phones. So if you were to renew your plan, then you could keep your phone and get the money cash back.
Now the situation has changed drastically, as I don't live there any more I don't have the details but there are a few dozen networks (maybe 5-6 physical networks and the rest are virtual networks, using other's physical network), subscription rates are down, and sim-only is a standard option. This must be the result of government intervention to open up the market. Prices are far lower than 8 years ago at least, and mobile Internet is also pretty cheap. And as a result I guess there will be more and more trade in handsets as well.
Maybe also in the US and Canada it's time for the government to step in and open up the market. I know it's considered evil by many here but it's an example of where proper government intervention can promote competition and jump-start a market even.
Question, in your world why would we pay for the T1 lines? Why would anyone?
I think the real answer here is, or should be: "we need the reliability". Now I have no idea how reliable that 6 Mbps DSL is (at USD 100 per month it should be pretty good), and how much downtime costs you.
And you get a C-block of IP space just for a library? You really have that many servers that you want to connect to a direct IP address? I'd expect that you want to connect most if not everything through a single firewall, blocking all direct incoming connections. Unless you specifically allow those.
Paying to receive calls is not unique. In Hong Kong at least the same (rest of Asia not sure, never bothered to figure it out). But then you can get 800 minutes monthly air time (making/receiving local calls) for less than USD 4.50 all in. Well excluding the phone itself of course, but you can get a decent phone second hand for like USD 20 if you don't mind a three-year-old model.
Not being able to buy SIM without phone and the other way around, and worse: IMEI whitelisting, now that is evil, anti-competitive and blocking innovation. Totally "un-American" I'd say.
What I don't understand, but that is maybe uniquely American:
Why can you guys not just start importing the latest phones from Asia or Europe. At least in Hong Kong phones are by default sold unlocked (not jailbroken, though there are plenty of shops that will provide such a service for free with the purchase of your phone or for a small fee). You can just pop in a SIM card and it works.
This should also work in the US with a SIM card from a US network. No need to buy the phones that are locked by your network provider.
Unless the networks have something in place that an unknown phone is blocked as well (that would be horrible and arguably anti-competitive behaviour), I don't see why you could not do so. Get yourself a SIM card with say a decent number of airtime minutes and a sufficient data plan, get a nice open-source phone, and start hacking. Open a business that imports and sells such phones - a webshop is cheap to set up. What's the problem? Why is no-one doing just that?
Put them in a shipping container and send them over to China. Old printers have value here for dismantling and recycling. They contain quite some valuable stuff: metals, plastics, PCBs. It just has to be separated.
All have their pros and cons; I think for my use both could be a good solution.
Two years ago I bought an OfficeJet Pro L7580 (printer/fax/scanner/copier all in one) at about USD 300. Print quality is very good, can print double sided even (I do use that sometimes, mainly to save a bit on paper). I have printed about 5000 pages by now, just over ten per working day average. Average cost, including ink and paper, I just calculated to be about USD 0.083 per page. And I am just halfway my third black cartridge, while most what I print is just black text.
About 70% of that cost is the printer purchase price and the rest is ink and paper - so it's hard for a laser to beat this cost per page, considering a laser costs still more than double just for the printer. This means I really have to print a lot more to save costs. Especially if you are looking for a laser printer with the same multi-functionality. I need a fax, sometimes for more than one sheet and then the sheet feeder is a must. Same for scanning and copying, usually just one page, sometimes more. This I do often enough to want to have a machine in house, but not often enough to warrant dedicated devices. I copy/fax less than once a day. HP claims that the cost of prints on this printer is actually cheaper than on laserjets.
So there is a lot to say for inkjets: and cost is one. For the price difference of inkjet/laserjet you can still buy quite some cartridges for your inkjet. If you use it so infrequent that you have problems with heads drying out, you'd better use a commercial print shop in the first place. If you use it daily but small volumes, an inkjet is simply cheaper than a laserjet (go for the better inkjets, not the bottom-line models). Only if you have to print really a lot lasers become cheaper.
Just looking at the history of the entry on Slashdot in WP: each edit has either IP address or user name listed already.
Then for people who need privacy (whistleblowers): most of them have no place on WP which is for summarising publicly available information, which is why WP always asks for citations. Those people should go to WikiLeaks, that is set up for exactly that purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the stagnation of growth means the industry (finally) reaches it's saturation point, where it becomes fully mature, has captured nearly 100% of the market, and just doesn't have room to grow? Like what happened to Microsoft about a decade ago? Still selling a lot - but just no room to sell even more, and for the market being saturated, actually starting to lose sales as soon as competition arises.
Going to the movies should be compared to visiting concerts or theatre. It is the experience. Personally I prefer concerts over movies, and either over the recording (or radio resp. TV broadcast).
Recorded music may be compared to DVD. You buy a copy, play it at your leisure at home or on the go, but it misses the crowd, the band on stage or the large screen, etc. It's not the same.
Any numbers by the way on pop concert visits? Not just the big guys but also local club ticket sales. Could be interesting as well.
Maybe it's time for the studios to do something about those costs. Movie budgets are ridiculous these days.
Hong Kong also still makes movies. Not as many as in the 70s, but still they make movies. And they are often very popular here. I don't have exact numbers but I estimate a Hong Kong movie budget at 1-5% of a Hollywood production's budget. And they are not even worse that the shit Hollywood spews out these days.
The big difference: Hong Kong movies do without all those special effects and computer graphics. It's still the story that counts, while most Hollywood productions nowadays are just spectacles, carried fully by the special effects with the story just being an excuse for more special effects, like in American porn movies where the story is just an excuse to pass the censors.
If YOU lose your own key, then that's your own fault. Forgetting to take your keys and closing the door behind you, that's simply your own silliness. And no news.
Here it is a third-party vendor (Microsoft in this case) that basically changes the locks to your files. As if the developer of the apartment building where you live suddenly changes the locks of all the flats. Locking out everyone who locked their doors. Even if they did not lose their own keys.
And that is bad. Very bad.
Depends what you want to do.
Word processing, or DTP. It seems you want to do the second.
Home and work area yes, not exact address. Train station and bus route, maybe not even bus stop (I don't know how detailed the buses keep their records of where you board).
Mobile phone companies can know that much more accurate; GSM can triangulate (my phone can tell me where I am!) but afaik not height. So they can not tell which floor I am.
Interesting note indeed. Interesting to see how COMPANIES deal with that. We all know how employees deal with that already: private time is taken over by work time. Business calls in the cinema, answering e-mails on the blackberry during dinner. Now if private life enters the company... oh wait... private life... what private life?
Why do you think it's OK to be on some kind of government watch list? Now that is truly scary. I don't like that idea, at all. And by the way I'm not that coy about my identity on-line either. I am who I am, I am not revealing my address, tel number, ID card, etc. to any site not directly needing it.
You can probably stay somewhat anonymous. As in: they know what you do, but not that it's YOU that's doing just that.
It's like my Octopus card used for public transport. The Octopus company knows exactly for what rides that card is used - where and when I get on or off the train, where and when I board a bus, the boats I take, the occasional newspaper or other purchase I make with it. And they keep those records for seven years.
However what they do not know is that it's me. There is no name linked to the card. I bought it with cash, always update it with cash, basically leaving no trace that it is me.
The same I'm sure you can do with Google's services. Create an account, use fake information (or very limited real information, not enough to track it to you, if you have a general name like "john doe" you're set), and Google may know everything about that account, but can not link it to the real you.
To me that's more than enough for Google (or Octopus) to know. For Google's ads I actually don't mind them, and have clicked on them quite often, especially when searching for some commercial product or service. E.g. I want to buy a hard disk, then I'd click on ads offering hard disks. If Google personalises that to my account to show sellers local to me and not e.g. USA based sellers, then that would make me happy. And the advertiser as well as a USA seller of such a generic product will not make a sale to me, I rather buy something from a local store. Some personalisation to my preferences is quite OK, linking it to physical me is less so. There is no reason for that imho. Especially not for a foreign company based in a country that starts to scare me more and more when it comes to basic privacy and human rights. If ever I try to cross the US border I don't want to be questioned about Google searches that I did, for example!
When I read this my first thought was that this is yet another sign that the difference between smartphones, netbooks, and even laptops and desktops is fading. The form factor is what remains mainly, as we can pack more and more computing power in smaller and smaller packages.
We can do things now on smartphones that 10, 15 years ago were just getting possible on an average desktop PC. And the gap is narrowing quickly. OS vendors (and VMWare is pretty much in that market) these days are of course looking at the smartphone as the next platform.
I just use the hot-corner for that. Move mouse to right top corner and I see all my windows. In a way it becomes like a gesture that way. No need to have a mouse with so many buttons, and then trying to remember which button to use when.
Letting him wash the dishes in some backstreet restaurant (e.g. McDonalds) is not going to pay off any reasonable amount of his debts. Ever.
The cost of setting up a network is huge, even in a small country like NL. Finding spots for your aerials, for your equipment, etc.
Common regulation is that established players must rent out network capacity to new entrants at a fixed rate (often determined by the government), like commonly done with fixed-line networks as well. And other infrastructure such as railroads. That's the only way for a relative small player to enter such a market.
It's well known that limited diets reduce reproductive metabolism in favor of survival. After all, what good is reproduction if you don't live to do it.
While that may be true, I think it is more of a case of: what good is reproduction (which requires a lot of resources from the mother before birth) when there is not enough food to go around even without extra mouths to feed. Better save the expense of pregnancy for times when there is better chance for the baby to actually have enough to eat.
-- Or Bernie Madoff, who stole BILLIONS of dollars - wiping out whole families, I suppose he should just get a slap on the wrist eh?
No, he should be forced to work until he dies, paying as much as can possibly be paid back to the people he swindled. This works better than us paying 40+K a year to keep him in prison.
OK... let him work... now let's see, what is he good at? Ah yes, working with money, and speculation. So let's put him at work at a bank. Preferably Wall Street. The guy has the experience and certainly the qualities - he has proven that already. There at least if he does his best he can get enough in bonuses to at least put a dent in those losses.
Those women could also choose to just walk away from those abusive husbands/boyfriends, and report them to police. Saves a lot of violence both ways. But for some reason most of them tend to say. Why that is I truly don't know nor understand.
Except that possession is a measure of demand. As long as there is demand, there is supply. So demand for pornographic images results in supply, also if this is about illegal types of porn. Or other images. So while yes they should try and track down the creators, mere possession is not necessarily innocent.
Accidental download of such images, and having them deleted leaving only traces on the hard disk that should not be punishable beyond maybe a stern warning. Like in this case.
Possession of readily accessible images indicates demand.
Having paid for said content definitely would be grounds for punishment, as this (in contrast to say smoking pot grown in your own back yard) is not a victimless crime.
About 15-20 years ago that was the situation in The Netherlands as well. Heavy subsidies on phones.
Very soon however some resellers were giving cash back: most of the subscriptions were sold through independent retailers, who basically got a commission on selling a plan, and then used that commission to subsidise phones. So if you were to renew your plan, then you could keep your phone and get the money cash back.
Now the situation has changed drastically, as I don't live there any more I don't have the details but there are a few dozen networks (maybe 5-6 physical networks and the rest are virtual networks, using other's physical network), subscription rates are down, and sim-only is a standard option. This must be the result of government intervention to open up the market. Prices are far lower than 8 years ago at least, and mobile Internet is also pretty cheap. And as a result I guess there will be more and more trade in handsets as well.
Maybe also in the US and Canada it's time for the government to step in and open up the market. I know it's considered evil by many here but it's an example of where proper government intervention can promote competition and jump-start a market even.
Question, in your world why would we pay for the T1 lines? Why would anyone?
I think the real answer here is, or should be: "we need the reliability". Now I have no idea how reliable that 6 Mbps DSL is (at USD 100 per month it should be pretty good), and how much downtime costs you.
And you get a C-block of IP space just for a library? You really have that many servers that you want to connect to a direct IP address? I'd expect that you want to connect most if not everything through a single firewall, blocking all direct incoming connections. Unless you specifically allow those.
Paying to receive calls is not unique. In Hong Kong at least the same (rest of Asia not sure, never bothered to figure it out). But then you can get 800 minutes monthly air time (making/receiving local calls) for less than USD 4.50 all in. Well excluding the phone itself of course, but you can get a decent phone second hand for like USD 20 if you don't mind a three-year-old model.
Not being able to buy SIM without phone and the other way around, and worse: IMEI whitelisting, now that is evil, anti-competitive and blocking innovation. Totally "un-American" I'd say.
What I don't understand, but that is maybe uniquely American:
Why can you guys not just start importing the latest phones from Asia or Europe. At least in Hong Kong phones are by default sold unlocked (not jailbroken, though there are plenty of shops that will provide such a service for free with the purchase of your phone or for a small fee). You can just pop in a SIM card and it works.
This should also work in the US with a SIM card from a US network. No need to buy the phones that are locked by your network provider.
Unless the networks have something in place that an unknown phone is blocked as well (that would be horrible and arguably anti-competitive behaviour), I don't see why you could not do so. Get yourself a SIM card with say a decent number of airtime minutes and a sufficient data plan, get a nice open-source phone, and start hacking. Open a business that imports and sells such phones - a webshop is cheap to set up. What's the problem? Why is no-one doing just that?
If those "sophisticated microfluidic devices" are really that expensive they do not belong in the cartridge in the first place.
Put them in a shipping container and send them over to China. Old printers have value here for dismantling and recycling. They contain quite some valuable stuff: metals, plastics, PCBs. It just has to be separated.
All have their pros and cons; I think for my use both could be a good solution.
Two years ago I bought an OfficeJet Pro L7580 (printer/fax/scanner/copier all in one) at about USD 300. Print quality is very good, can print double sided even (I do use that sometimes, mainly to save a bit on paper). I have printed about 5000 pages by now, just over ten per working day average. Average cost, including ink and paper, I just calculated to be about USD 0.083 per page. And I am just halfway my third black cartridge, while most what I print is just black text.
About 70% of that cost is the printer purchase price and the rest is ink and paper - so it's hard for a laser to beat this cost per page, considering a laser costs still more than double just for the printer. This means I really have to print a lot more to save costs. Especially if you are looking for a laser printer with the same multi-functionality. I need a fax, sometimes for more than one sheet and then the sheet feeder is a must. Same for scanning and copying, usually just one page, sometimes more. This I do often enough to want to have a machine in house, but not often enough to warrant dedicated devices. I copy/fax less than once a day. HP claims that the cost of prints on this printer is actually cheaper than on laserjets.
So there is a lot to say for inkjets: and cost is one. For the price difference of inkjet/laserjet you can still buy quite some cartridges for your inkjet. If you use it so infrequent that you have problems with heads drying out, you'd better use a commercial print shop in the first place. If you use it daily but small volumes, an inkjet is simply cheaper than a laserjet (go for the better inkjets, not the bottom-line models). Only if you have to print really a lot lasers become cheaper.
Just looking at the history of the entry on Slashdot in WP: each edit has either IP address or user name listed already.
Then for people who need privacy (whistleblowers): most of them have no place on WP which is for summarising publicly available information, which is why WP always asks for citations. Those people should go to WikiLeaks, that is set up for exactly that purpose.