That's an interesting and unusual spin, but I think you're assuming far, far more infrastructure capability and availability of raw capital than India is likely to have available anywhere in the foreseeable future.
If the offshoring providers are already doing the work for Fortune 500 corporations, they have the infrastructure capability by definition. How much data traffic would be added to what's coming out of India if the C-level people running these companies were based in India? Probably not much unless all of them are serious pr0n addicts.
As for raw capital, I assume that the offshore companies are making a very substantial profit from the Fortune 500 companies paying them. I don't know what their markups on labor costs are (and suspect that this information is as publically unavailable as everyone concerned can manage) but I assume they are charging all the traffic will bear.
The other pointer to there being substantial capital floating around India is the Indian space and nuclear weapons programs.
In fact, part of the problem with the claims that the offshoring trend will somehow uplift a downtrodden India is precisely that in India, it only benefits a tiny sliver of the population.
I never made those claims. In fact, they aren't especially relevant, except in the context that since money is not being diverted by either government or the private sector in substantial quantities to attack poverty, this means that capital availability for projects like turning Indian outsourcers into Fortune 500 companies isn't going to be all that substantially affected by taxation. Perhaps it's that paying bribes is cheaper than paying taxes.
I don't have the serious kind of high-end math needs some of you do, so I don't own a copy of Mathematica. I'm not in school, so I don't need a programmable/graphic calculator for exams.
If I need a single simple calculation, I simply use a calculator program. The Windoze scientific calculator is perfectly adequate for most of my needs.
If it's more than that or something I'm likely to do again, I open up Excel. (presumably, I'll open something else when I finally go full-time or most of the time on Linux.)
While the implications of this treaty are truly frightening, the amazing thing about it is that it originated in Europe.
From the available information, the bad ideas in it came straight from the DOJ representatives who sat in on the conferences at which the treaty was drafted. Did a published article on this for 8wire back in 2001. Unfortunately, 8wire is out of business. From the SecurityFocus article, it appears that everything that was wrong with it back then still is.
Judging by all the anti-American trolls here on Slashdot, you would think that such legislation was only possible in a land corrupted by people like Jack Valenti and John Ashcroft.
By and large, the bad ideas that the EU government is rushing to adopt are MADE IN USA. The DMCA clones (see EU Copyright Directive) that the EU has mandated for adoption by EU nations are a good example. The only purpose is to protect the Hollywood content cartel.
This only makes sense if both parents each make more than $100/hour.
Just about anybody who's been using Winblows boxes from DOS through W98 or so should legitimately qualify for at least the $100 that proofs of purchases aren't required for.
Second would be reality. To claim your settlement money you must produce your "Product Key number or Product ID number". Mind you these are your keys/ids from February 18, 1995 thru December 15, 2001. I don't know about you but those keys are long gone for me.
WRONG
From the claim form instructions: In this Part, you may make claims for up to five eligible Microsoft products you purchased between
February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 without providing any additional proof of purchase. The
total value of the claims listed in this part of the Claim Form cannot exceed $100. Voucher values for
each eligible product are listed above and in Part C of the Claim Form. If your claim exceeds either
five products or a $100 total voucher value, you may claim those additional products in Part D.
But I did have some of mine (no, I didn't have the PIDs for MS-DOS or Windows 3.1... they weren't using them back then, IIRC), so I got $129.
If you're a member of the class hosed by MS, i.e. any resident of CA who bought MS crap between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001, what are you waiting for? http://www.microsoftcalsettlement.com/
I'm waiting for my $129 rebate, which will be spent on anything but MS software. I'm a bit frustrated that the deadline keeps getting pushed back in the hopes of rewarding the clueless.
If YOU are a current or former MS customer in CA who wants MS to pay for a chunk of your next computer upgrade, go to http://www.microsoftcalsettlement.com/
You do NOT need proofs of purchase for everything,
In this Part, you may make claims for up to five eligible Microsoft products you purchased between
February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 without providing any additional proof of purchase. The
total value of the claims listed in this part of the Claim Form cannot exceed $100. Voucher values for
each eligible product are listed above and in Part C of the Claim Form. If your claim exceeds either
five products or a $100 total voucher value, you may claim those additional products in Part D.
Luckily, I had the license keys for my later purchases.
There have already been several stories about Indians who are concerned with their gradually increasing compensation. By their own estimate, in only a few years they'll be expensive enough that they're no longer appealing and Big Business will shift it's gaze to the next low-rent country on the list. Their bubble will be smaller and shorter-lived than ours ever was.
Only if they're stupid, and I don't believe thay are.
In the outsourcing of core business processes, the US corporate sector has in effect transferred it's knowledge of how to operate major corporations, how to provide customer service for US customers, how to build products and services for US customers and get them to America. And they paid for upgrading infrastructures to make these processes possible.
What's to stop Indian outsourcers from pulling the plug on their offshoring customers before these customers have cheaper replacements in place and going into business for themselves selling to the same US end users, only changing the mailbox to which checks need to be sent?
What else do they need? A US marketing company (localized expertise is needed in marketing) and there are many which will be happy to do the job.
Courts and contracts? Remember the comments about IP law and Indian drug companies copying US drugs with US corporations having no effective recourse? Indians have the "home turf" advantage against US corporations, the judges are likely as not to be related to the people running the companies US corporations will be suing, and while Indian politicians are just as likely to be 0wn3d as US politicians, their owners are likely to be exactly the people US corporations are demanding actions against.
IMHO, best case is that the Indian corporations are required to return copies of the IP to the US corporations. Hopefully, as tons of hard copy. This won't help much, as the US corporations won't have a labor force or machinery or equipment to do anything with it.
This makes the assumption that the US corporations are going to be in any position to sue. What happens to stock prices of any corporation the media announces "Unfriendly Indian Takeover" about? That company will be in Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 within days.
I see a large part of the Fortune 500 in effect, relocating to India, leaving US stockholders holding the bag in a transfer of wealth that will make the S&L debacle of the 90s look benign, because this transfer of wealth will be overseas.
Don't be concerned for the current generation of CEOs. They will have cashed out and if this turns the US to shit as a place to live, there are other countries. Perhaps they'll be able to repeat the cycle there.
Ever played catch? If the ability to handle higher math wasn't hardwired into you somewhere, how would you be able to play it? How would you know how to calculate a trajectory well enough to have your hand in exactly the right place? How would you know how to move the muscles required to throw to give you the trajectory you intended to make the ball move through?
If you don't think simply getting up and moving around doesn't require complex math, I suggest checking out the number-crunching power that the computers in any robot capable of walking unassisted use.
How to turn that low-level kinesthetic stuff into the ability to handle this consciously at a symbolic level?
Even people stupid enough to buy from spammers generally aren't stupid enough to send money through the mail. They send checks or money orders.
Companies that hire spammers may pay cash. If they do, the spammer takes the money to his bank. (unless he plans to evade taxes, in which case he's got a resourceful, tenacious, and powerful enemy called the IRS) If he's promised immunity from prosecution, there will probably be a bank withdrawal by the spam customer matching the spammer's deposit and if the company is of any reasonable size, a "paper" trail to match what the spammer got paid.
There are plenty of law enforcement officers and forensic accountants who know how to make this work.
Back in the 1960s, kids who were into science and technology were playing with chemistry sets and erector sets and electronics learning kits. That's when I grew up.
Today, the same kind of kids are learning how to deal with computers, learning to program, and their universe can be largely defined as "things that can be done on a computer", including learning simulations for things that can't be done on a computer. For them, the world IS the network and things that don't happen there are somehow unreal.
This has been happening for long enough that we've got grownups who can't see the value of a space program because it happens in the physical world, not cyberspace.
Cyberspace is important, but it, too, is based on physical artifacts. These artifacts are manufactured and their raw materials have to come from somewhere. How many people can look at a PC and figure out where it physically came from, down to the mines from where the steel in the cases came from?
IMHO, we need more educated people who understand how to deal in a technological way with physical things.
There is no way to build electronic things that work without dealing with physical objects and their mechanical properties.
Anything that encourages kids to get involved with electronics will provide the kind of education you appear to favor.
One other thing. Looked under the hood of a modern automobile? Physical, mechanical, electronic controls, and software. It's the perfect example of the combination of mechanical and electronic devices you're going to see in most "mechanical" devices these days. If you want kids to learn mechanical design, these kids have to learn electronics anyway.
A low-quality camcorder rip is more than likely going to be exactly that, shit. Perhaps they should give shit away so that end users will distribute their promos on their own bandwidth dime.
So far, nobody's demonstrated actual losses based on P2P distributions of MPAA content. If no demonstration has been made, what reason is there that taxpayers should pay for enforcement over and above what we already pay for anti-piracy enforcement? Or paying for keeping people in jail?
You seem to have some peculiar idea that getting a poor-quality camcorder rip via P2P is a reason for not buying the actual DVD. There's a bit of a quality difference here. Using a low-quality rip to preview a movie you like is simply going to persuade you to buy it when it hits the stores. If you can't tell the difference, your problem isn't with slashdotters, it's medical.
MPAA's real problem with this is that if a movie is going to be popular, just as P2P tracks drive record sales (see also Big Champagne), P2P video will drive sales via Internet word of mouth. If a movie is going to be a dud, Net word of mouth kills it faster, more than one movie has been DOA because the intended audience already knew better than to waste their money. This is not my problem and it isn't yours unless you personally own stock in a Hollywood entertainment cartel member. If you think we should pay for this out of altruism, write a check to the MPAA yourself and leave us out of this. Personally, I think that if MPAA members make a shit movie, they should be allowed to eat the costs. That's capitalism. You got a problem with it?
Perhaps they should put heavily compressed early versions of the movie on P2P networks themselves on purpose before committing big bucks to nationwide media promo campaigns.
You don't find nightvision goggles scanning you and your date in a movie audience intrusive? Do you think that camcorders are the only thing they're going to see? Perhaps you should spend less time here and spend it instead with some mysterious creatures called women and find out why that sort of thing matters.
And why all the sudden is there an equation to the War on Drugs? It's completely irrelevant. Does that mean that Slashdot editors also believe drugs should be legalized?
Well, if they're reasonably intelligent and clued, they probably do. If you don't, that's more of a grim (or funny) comment on you than anything else.
As for your not being able to spot the analogy, let's see, millions of people engaging in an activity that does no harm to society and having to fear going to jail to practice it. Sounds like something that can apply equally well either to DRUGWARS or *AA organization-style copyright enforcement.
The mod points tell me that 3 of the other moderators have been asleep at the switch again. I decided to post instead of giving your post a proper "Flamebait" negative point.
No one knows exactly how much more would be collected by enforcing the broader definition of the tax. The rate varies statewide, ranging from 9.17 percent to 18.07 percent depending on local option assessments.
Does this include the network or all the computers connected to it?
If the second... businesses will be looking for places to move right after they get their tax bills, this is worse than MS tax and one doesn't even get a bug-ridden OS to show for it. The ones that will stay will be those who primarily serve local customers, and they're going to have to increase cost to the customers immediately to cover the tax.
Sure it's a failure, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a good alternative. You can't say for sure that things would be better if we legalized drugs. Perhaps *bad* is an improvement over *worse*.
Actually, I can. The Netherlands recently celebrated their 30th anniversary of decriminalizing marijuana and tolerating other drugs.
They get safe streets (I've been there) and reduced spending on law enforcement and prisons.
The Netherlands hasn't slid into the ocean. Not even once. Remember that a good part of the nation is below sea level and if the population is too stoned to keep the pumps and dikes working, the place actually will slide beneath the waves.
What have we gotten out of DRUGWARS? Nothing any sane, patriotic citizen would want, just a bunch of DRUGWAR profiteers (prison contractors, cushy jobs at "antidrug" organizations that produce nothing useful, and the biggest ones being the major drug traffickers whose business model is based on insane markups on what would otherwise be commodity products.
What are we going to get out a Federal war on copying?
Why are we expected to spend a comparable amount to the gross revenues of an industry just to protect a plainly unsustainable business model?
Why should I take a girlfriend to a movie theater where somebody with night vision goggles is watching us? Of course, if you're pro-DRUGWARS and pro-*AA companies, you probably don't have any personal concern with that because your girlfriend is inflatable.
You forgot
1) Eudora for Linux (promised by Customer Service Real Soon Now)
2) easy peripheral installation of ANY recent peripheral (if it requires a kernel recompile, Joe Sixpack will be nuking his Linux install and getting Windoze)
3) easy software installation (no more dependency hell)
You're making the assumption that labor cost is a significant portion of the price of a manufactured product. What's the "labor cost" per unit of a W2003 in a retail box?
Back when I was involved in electronics manufacturing design and cost analysis about 10 years ago, the rule of thumb I was using was "under 10% on a high-volume product assuming good design and manufacturing practices" and that the way to improve this is via better use of automated manufacturing processes from which one also gets higher product quality and lower rates of warranty repairs. These manufacturing processes are best supervised by trained / skilled / expensive workers, because if one person is supervising the construction of 1000 units per hour, either he does so competently or he's a net loss to the company whether he's paid 5 cents an hour or $500/hour.
The rules don't seem to have changed since then, other than lower cost and better manufacturing technology. The "cheap labor" fad is what's changed the situation.
I am prepared to take what you have to say seriously when you are talking about video compression.
The primary purpose of outsourcing is not to maximize shareholder value, it's to provide a reason for profits or stock prices to go up enough to trigger the next set of stock options that the American CEO and a few other C-level people are eligible to receive.
Whether the profits are real or simply based on misunderstanding of labor cost components (hint: in a decently designed product, labor cost is the least important component) or fraud really doesn't matter.
The investment analyst community, practically none of whom have management or production experience or other areas of expertise needed to evaluate what's really going on with a company likes outsourcing. They're also the same people who told us that "the long boom" had superceded economic cycles and that dot.coms would lead us into a glorious economic future. They are also still the group who influence stock prices most. So they're going to give "buy" recommendations to companies that outsource... run the numbers? Get serious, they wouldn't know what numbers to run even if they had interests other than pumping stock to investors who know no better.
By the time any damage to the corporation's assets or cash flow that outsourcing enough of their core processes to allow the creation of new foriegn competitors can happen, the current generation of CEOs will have cashed out and retired, leaving future CEOs and any investors who didn't know when it was time to bail holding an empty bag.
I expect most of the Fortune 500 to be Indian by 2020. The ex-outsourcing companies won't have much of a choice, their options will be to let the US put them out of business by moving to cheaper countries or to decide that since American CEOs no longer add value to a product and a customer base they no longer have day-to-day contact with, there is no reason why they should content themselves with taking profit based on labor costs when they can take all the profit.
If there's on class of people that is still heavily discriminated against, it's the rich.
Default assumption: you've been bamboozled by a generation of corporate media / right-wing propaganda. You have no idea about "discrimination against the rich" because your only chance at joining the rich yourself evaporated when the dot.com boom went off and the paper options you "earned" with your overpriced html "coding" gig went down with the ship.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that you have the slighest clue as to what you're talking about.
Hint: if there was serious discrimination against the rich, why are so many people trying to join the "mistreated" class?
Hint: Find a First World nation with a national-level tax rate lower than that in the USA.
They're an industry lobbying / PR organization. The difference between it and ordinary trade associations is that it's better funded than most and in my opinion, it represents a bunch of companies comparable to SCO.
Odd, they are telling us the record industry is the group that's been ripping them off. Why should we believe you instead? What is your association with the music industry, should you happen to have one?
I decided not to bother with a point-by-point refutation when you repeated the *AA companies favorite lie. Given the repeated exposure of this lie, anyone who repeats it now is either too clueless to be worth discussing anything with or too interested in grabbing regular checks from *AA organization or label PR firms to care about it.
You should look to your. . . associates in the industry for an explanation as to why they are ripping artists off.
Note: if you are not on their payroll, you are an idiot. You're doing their work for them free of charge. Your getting modded as "Insightful" suggests that people should be required to take IQ tests before being allowed mod points.
If you don't like reading facts and informed speculation about M$hit and the *AA organizations and member companies, click here.
So we spend that money on rotting schools, dilapidated hospitals, and people without access to ANY form of healthcare.
So we have fixed schools, the finest hospitals, and universal health care when the oil runs out. The numbers I've seen say we're 1-2 generations away from that. Will anybody care at that point?
I've addressed the point you think you're making at length here
Catch a clue, there's a reason why progressives have the reputation for being clueless about technology, and you're adding to it.
Slashdot Mirror
His company would have a better reputation if it provided Thailand sex tours for serious pedo perverts.
That's an interesting and unusual spin, but I think you're assuming far, far more infrastructure capability and availability of raw capital than India is likely to have available anywhere in the foreseeable future.
If the offshoring providers are already doing the work for Fortune 500 corporations, they have the infrastructure capability by definition. How much data traffic would be added to what's coming out of India if the C-level people running these companies were based in India? Probably not much unless all of them are serious pr0n addicts.
As for raw capital, I assume that the offshore companies are making a very substantial profit from the Fortune 500 companies paying them. I don't know what their markups on labor costs are (and suspect that this information is as publically unavailable as everyone concerned can manage) but I assume they are charging all the traffic will bear.
The other pointer to there being substantial capital floating around India is the Indian space and nuclear weapons programs.
In fact, part of the problem with the claims that the offshoring trend will somehow uplift a downtrodden India is precisely that in India, it only benefits a tiny sliver of the population.
I never made those claims. In fact, they aren't especially relevant, except in the context that since money is not being diverted by either government or the private sector in substantial quantities to attack poverty, this means that capital availability for projects like turning Indian outsourcers into Fortune 500 companies isn't going to be all that substantially affected by taxation. Perhaps it's that paying bribes is cheaper than paying taxes.
If I need a single simple calculation, I simply use a calculator program. The Windoze scientific calculator is perfectly adequate for most of my needs.
If it's more than that or something I'm likely to do again, I open up Excel. (presumably, I'll open something else when I finally go full-time or most of the time on Linux.)
From the available information, the bad ideas in it came straight from the DOJ representatives who sat in on the conferences at which the treaty was drafted. Did a published article on this for 8wire back in 2001. Unfortunately, 8wire is out of business. From the SecurityFocus article, it appears that everything that was wrong with it back then still is.
Judging by all the anti-American trolls here on Slashdot, you would think that such legislation was only possible in a land corrupted by people like Jack Valenti and John Ashcroft.
By and large, the bad ideas that the EU government is rushing to adopt are MADE IN USA. The DMCA clones (see EU Copyright Directive) that the EU has mandated for adoption by EU nations are a good example. The only purpose is to protect the Hollywood content cartel.
Doesn't it make you proud to be an American?
The critics apparently never got around to filling out the forms themselves. They're less hassle than any MS product I've used has been.
Just about anybody who's been using Winblows boxes from DOS through W98 or so should legitimately qualify for at least the $100 that proofs of purchases aren't required for.
WRONG
From the claim form instructions:
In this Part, you may make claims for up to five eligible Microsoft products you purchased between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 without providing any additional proof of purchase. The total value of the claims listed in this part of the Claim Form cannot exceed $100. Voucher values for each eligible product are listed above and in Part C of the Claim Form. If your claim exceeds either five products or a $100 total voucher value, you may claim those additional products in Part D.
But I did have some of mine (no, I didn't have the PIDs for MS-DOS or Windows 3.1... they weren't using them back then, IIRC), so I got $129.
If you're a member of the class hosed by MS, i.e. any resident of CA who bought MS crap between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001, what are you waiting for? http://www.microsoftcalsettlement.com/
If YOU are a current or former MS customer in CA who wants MS to pay for a chunk of your next computer upgrade, go to http://www.microsoftcalsettlement.com/
You do NOT need proofs of purchase for everything,
In this Part, you may make claims for up to five eligible Microsoft products you purchased between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 without providing any additional proof of purchase. The total value of the claims listed in this part of the Claim Form cannot exceed $100. Voucher values for each eligible product are listed above and in Part C of the Claim Form. If your claim exceeds either five products or a $100 total voucher value, you may claim those additional products in Part D.
Luckily, I had the license keys for my later purchases.
Only if they're stupid, and I don't believe thay are.
In the outsourcing of core business processes, the US corporate sector has in effect transferred it's knowledge of how to operate major corporations, how to provide customer service for US customers, how to build products and services for US customers and get them to America. And they paid for upgrading infrastructures to make these processes possible.
What's to stop Indian outsourcers from pulling the plug on their offshoring customers before these customers have cheaper replacements in place and going into business for themselves selling to the same US end users, only changing the mailbox to which checks need to be sent?
What else do they need? A US marketing company (localized expertise is needed in marketing) and there are many which will be happy to do the job.
Courts and contracts? Remember the comments about IP law and Indian drug companies copying US drugs with US corporations having no effective recourse? Indians have the "home turf" advantage against US corporations, the judges are likely as not to be related to the people running the companies US corporations will be suing, and while Indian politicians are just as likely to be 0wn3d as US politicians, their owners are likely to be exactly the people US corporations are demanding actions against.
IMHO, best case is that the Indian corporations are required to return copies of the IP to the US corporations. Hopefully, as tons of hard copy. This won't help much, as the US corporations won't have a labor force or machinery or equipment to do anything with it.
This makes the assumption that the US corporations are going to be in any position to sue. What happens to stock prices of any corporation the media announces "Unfriendly Indian Takeover" about? That company will be in Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 within days.
I see a large part of the Fortune 500 in effect, relocating to India, leaving US stockholders holding the bag in a transfer of wealth that will make the S&L debacle of the 90s look benign, because this transfer of wealth will be overseas.
Don't be concerned for the current generation of CEOs. They will have cashed out and if this turns the US to shit as a place to live, there are other countries. Perhaps they'll be able to repeat the cycle there.
It would be a hell of a lot stranger and funnier if there were no results.
If you don't think simply getting up and moving around doesn't require complex math, I suggest checking out the number-crunching power that the computers in any robot capable of walking unassisted use.
How to turn that low-level kinesthetic stuff into the ability to handle this consciously at a symbolic level?
Interesting question.
Even people stupid enough to buy from spammers generally aren't stupid enough to send money through the mail. They send checks or money orders.
Companies that hire spammers may pay cash. If they do, the spammer takes the money to his bank. (unless he plans to evade taxes, in which case he's got a resourceful, tenacious, and powerful enemy called the IRS) If he's promised immunity from prosecution, there will probably be a bank withdrawal by the spam customer matching the spammer's deposit and if the company is of any reasonable size, a "paper" trail to match what the spammer got paid.
There are plenty of law enforcement officers and forensic accountants who know how to make this work.
See subject line.
Today, the same kind of kids are learning how to deal with computers, learning to program, and their universe can be largely defined as "things that can be done on a computer", including learning simulations for things that can't be done on a computer. For them, the world IS the network and things that don't happen there are somehow unreal.
This has been happening for long enough that we've got grownups who can't see the value of a space program because it happens in the physical world, not cyberspace.
Cyberspace is important, but it, too, is based on physical artifacts. These artifacts are manufactured and their raw materials have to come from somewhere. How many people can look at a PC and figure out where it physically came from, down to the mines from where the steel in the cases came from?
IMHO, we need more educated people who understand how to deal in a technological way with physical things.
There is no way to build electronic things that work without dealing with physical objects and their mechanical properties.
Anything that encourages kids to get involved with electronics will provide the kind of education you appear to favor.
One other thing. Looked under the hood of a modern automobile? Physical, mechanical, electronic controls, and software. It's the perfect example of the combination of mechanical and electronic devices you're going to see in most "mechanical" devices these days. If you want kids to learn mechanical design, these kids have to learn electronics anyway.
A low-quality camcorder rip is more than likely going to be exactly that, shit. Perhaps they should give shit away so that end users will distribute their promos on their own bandwidth dime.
So far, nobody's demonstrated actual losses based on P2P distributions of MPAA content. If no demonstration has been made, what reason is there that taxpayers should pay for enforcement over and above what we already pay for anti-piracy enforcement? Or paying for keeping people in jail?
You seem to have some peculiar idea that getting a poor-quality camcorder rip via P2P is a reason for not buying the actual DVD. There's a bit of a quality difference here. Using a low-quality rip to preview a movie you like is simply going to persuade you to buy it when it hits the stores. If you can't tell the difference, your problem isn't with slashdotters, it's medical.
MPAA's real problem with this is that if a movie is going to be popular, just as P2P tracks drive record sales (see also Big Champagne), P2P video will drive sales via Internet word of mouth. If a movie is going to be a dud, Net word of mouth kills it faster, more than one movie has been DOA because the intended audience already knew better than to waste their money. This is not my problem and it isn't yours unless you personally own stock in a Hollywood entertainment cartel member. If you think we should pay for this out of altruism, write a check to the MPAA yourself and leave us out of this. Personally, I think that if MPAA members make a shit movie, they should be allowed to eat the costs. That's capitalism. You got a problem with it?
Perhaps they should put heavily compressed early versions of the movie on P2P networks themselves on purpose before committing big bucks to nationwide media promo campaigns.
You don't find nightvision goggles scanning you and your date in a movie audience intrusive? Do you think that camcorders are the only thing they're going to see? Perhaps you should spend less time here and spend it instead with some mysterious creatures called women and find out why that sort of thing matters.
And why all the sudden is there an equation to the War on Drugs? It's completely irrelevant. Does that mean that Slashdot editors also believe drugs should be legalized?
Well, if they're reasonably intelligent and clued, they probably do. If you don't, that's more of a grim (or funny) comment on you than anything else.
As for your not being able to spot the analogy, let's see, millions of people engaging in an activity that does no harm to society and having to fear going to jail to practice it. Sounds like something that can apply equally well either to DRUGWARS or *AA organization-style copyright enforcement.
The mod points tell me that 3 of the other moderators have been asleep at the switch again. I decided to post instead of giving your post a proper "Flamebait" negative point.
Does this include the network or all the computers connected to it?
If the second... businesses will be looking for places to move right after they get their tax bills, this is worse than MS tax and one doesn't even get a bug-ridden OS to show for it. The ones that will stay will be those who primarily serve local customers, and they're going to have to increase cost to the customers immediately to cover the tax.
Anybody seen the proposed enforcement rules?
Actually, I can. The Netherlands recently celebrated their 30th anniversary of decriminalizing marijuana and tolerating other drugs.
They get safe streets (I've been there) and reduced spending on law enforcement and prisons.
The Netherlands hasn't slid into the ocean. Not even once. Remember that a good part of the nation is below sea level and if the population is too stoned to keep the pumps and dikes working, the place actually will slide beneath the waves.
What have we gotten out of DRUGWARS? Nothing any sane, patriotic citizen would want, just a bunch of DRUGWAR profiteers (prison contractors, cushy jobs at "antidrug" organizations that produce nothing useful, and the biggest ones being the major drug traffickers whose business model is based on insane markups on what would otherwise be commodity products.
What are we going to get out a Federal war on copying?
Why are we expected to spend a comparable amount to the gross revenues of an industry just to protect a plainly unsustainable business model?
Why should I take a girlfriend to a movie theater where somebody with night vision goggles is watching us? Of course, if you're pro-DRUGWARS and pro-*AA companies, you probably don't have any personal concern with that because your girlfriend is inflatable.
Which of these do you get if you run Linux over Windows?
None of the above, of course.
If one simply needs a Open Source Office, that's what OpenOffice.org is for and there is a Windows version.
If there were a killer app for the general population that only ran on Linux and can't be ported, this might make sense. Name one.
This may be touted as a technical miracle, and it might be. But change the world? Looks more to me like a solution in search of a problem.
You forgot 1) Eudora for Linux (promised by Customer Service Real Soon Now) 2) easy peripheral installation of ANY recent peripheral (if it requires a kernel recompile, Joe Sixpack will be nuking his Linux install and getting Windoze) 3) easy software installation (no more dependency hell)
Back when I was involved in electronics manufacturing design and cost analysis about 10 years ago, the rule of thumb I was using was "under 10% on a high-volume product assuming good design and manufacturing practices" and that the way to improve this is via better use of automated manufacturing processes from which one also gets higher product quality and lower rates of warranty repairs. These manufacturing processes are best supervised by trained / skilled / expensive workers, because if one person is supervising the construction of 1000 units per hour, either he does so competently or he's a net loss to the company whether he's paid 5 cents an hour or $500/hour.
The rules don't seem to have changed since then, other than lower cost and better manufacturing technology. The "cheap labor" fad is what's changed the situation.
I am prepared to take what you have to say seriously when you are talking about video compression.
Whether the profits are real or simply based on misunderstanding of labor cost components (hint: in a decently designed product, labor cost is the least important component) or fraud really doesn't matter.
The investment analyst community, practically none of whom have management or production experience or other areas of expertise needed to evaluate what's really going on with a company likes outsourcing. They're also the same people who told us that "the long boom" had superceded economic cycles and that dot.coms would lead us into a glorious economic future. They are also still the group who influence stock prices most. So they're going to give "buy" recommendations to companies that outsource... run the numbers? Get serious, they wouldn't know what numbers to run even if they had interests other than pumping stock to investors who know no better.
By the time any damage to the corporation's assets or cash flow that outsourcing enough of their core processes to allow the creation of new foriegn competitors can happen, the current generation of CEOs will have cashed out and retired, leaving future CEOs and any investors who didn't know when it was time to bail holding an empty bag.
I expect most of the Fortune 500 to be Indian by 2020. The ex-outsourcing companies won't have much of a choice, their options will be to let the US put them out of business by moving to cheaper countries or to decide that since American CEOs no longer add value to a product and a customer base they no longer have day-to-day contact with, there is no reason why they should content themselves with taking profit based on labor costs when they can take all the profit.
Default assumption: you've been bamboozled by a generation of corporate media / right-wing propaganda. You have no idea about "discrimination against the rich" because your only chance at joining the rich yourself evaporated when the dot.com boom went off and the paper options you "earned" with your overpriced html "coding" gig went down with the ship.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that you have the slighest clue as to what you're talking about.
Hint: if there was serious discrimination against the rich, why are so many people trying to join the "mistreated" class?
Hint: Find a First World nation with a national-level tax rate lower than that in the USA.
They're an industry lobbying / PR organization. The difference between it and ordinary trade associations is that it's better funded than most and in my opinion, it represents a bunch of companies comparable to SCO.
Artists like Courtney Love and Janis Ian?
Odd, they are telling us the record industry is the group that's been ripping them off. Why should we believe you instead? What is your association with the music industry, should you happen to have one?
I decided not to bother with a point-by-point refutation when you repeated the *AA companies favorite lie. Given the repeated exposure of this lie, anyone who repeats it now is either too clueless to be worth discussing anything with or too interested in grabbing regular checks from *AA organization or label PR firms to care about it.
You should look to your. . . associates in the industry for an explanation as to why they are ripping artists off.
Note: if you are not on their payroll, you are an idiot. You're doing their work for them free of charge. Your getting modded as "Insightful" suggests that people should be required to take IQ tests before being allowed mod points.
If you don't like reading facts and informed speculation about M$hit and the *AA organizations and member companies, click here.
So we have fixed schools, the finest hospitals, and universal health care when the oil runs out. The numbers I've seen say we're 1-2 generations away from that. Will anybody care at that point?
I've addressed the point you think you're making at length here
Catch a clue, there's a reason why progressives have the reputation for being clueless about technology, and you're adding to it.