People have limited leisure time and they want to use it to see the very best, or at least, the most popular so they can discuss it with peers and strangers. They want to see the biggest (or latest big) stars, the top directors and screenwriters, the slickest cinematography, special effects, set design, etc. This is the "winner take all" syndrome that some pundits have written about.
And yet most TV shows these days are "reality TV" crap with amateur talent. And even non-reality shows are mostly actors and actresses that nobody has heard of. I'm not sure I buy that argument. Besides, the quality of most TV and movies these days is abysmal. It isn't exactly hard to do better. All you have to do is not suck. The major studios care more about cinematography than they do about plot, character development, or any of the other aspects of a good story. As long as the so-called "top" screenwriters keep churning out the same tired, old crap over and over, there will be significant room for improvement.
Every few years an independent professional sports league comes along to provide a low price, "fan-friendly" alternative to the "greedy" major sports leagues. After all, there are lots of talented young athletes who recently starred in college ball who would love a shot at the pros. IIRC the last one that succeeded was in the 1970s (the American Basketball Association, which eventually merged with the NBA). The others have all failed, because after an initial burst of fan enthusiasm, fans discovered that they couldn't care less about the careers of marginal talent (marginal in the sense that they weren't chosen for a roster in the big leagues - not that they didn't have serious playing skills).
And yet, some of the most watched games on TV are college sports. Those other leagues didn't fail because of lack of name recognition. They failed because A. they didn't provide the same level of entertainment, B. they underpriced their offerings (leading people to assume that they must be crap), or C. the college leagues already filled that niche. Or maybe all of the above.
So no, I don't think the competitive threat of crowdsourced movies is something that keep studio execs awake late at night.
If it doesn't, it should. TV viewership is steadily declining, while YouTube viewership is steadily increasing. YouTube gets over three billion video views per day worldwide. That's up from three billion per month just a little over two years ago. That alone pretty strongly refutes your view.
Where would the "jackass in his home" obtain the music with which to set the scene? Say a character is listening to a song on his boombox; how would that get licensed for use in the film? There are rumors on the Internets that over half the budget of the film Clerks was spent on music clearance.
There's a lot of buyout music out there from various music libraries, and there are probably lots of local bands that would be thrilled to license something for a hundred bucks if you want something all your own.
Other than that the makers of the major video game consoles are more willing to allow "one of those sweatshops" to publish a game than to allow a home-based family business to publish a game.
Console gaming probably won't be that important in the long term. The future is in mobile gaming, and those platforms are pretty much wide open to anyone.
Battlestar Galactica is a SFX-laden show. You'll notice I said non-SFX show. You know, like sitcoms, romantic comedies, and so on. Yes, the production values can suck if you don't know what you're doing, but it's not that hard a skill to learn. (This is coming from somebody who majored in communications as an undergrad.)
You can't combat piracy. Externalities are a cost of doing business. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding him/herself.
There's exactly one way to maximize profit, and that is to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for at a price that they are willing to pay. The pirates were never your customers and never will be, and the sooner the companies accept that and focus on the real problems (massively overpricing everything when first released, delivering products that can't easily be moved between devices because of the restrictive/broken DRM, and the declining quality of entertainment products in general), they'll have better profits. That's not what SOPA/PIPA and similar legislation are about, however. They're about eliminating legitimate lower-cost competition.
What scares the industry most is that these days, any jackass in his home could make a movie of comparable quality to most of the non-SFX Hollywood films. Moderately high-end HD cams cost a couple of grand or three—well within the price range of most people if they are willing to save up for a bit. You can buy halogen lights at Home Depot for fifty bucks, then rebuild the reflectors yourself and build your own barn doors for just about nothing. And there are millions of people out there who can act, not just a few dozen in Hollyweird, so there's no shortage of available talent.
In effect, this means that commercial movies are too expensive by about a factor of a thousand. But instead of finding ways to take advantage of new technologies to cut their production and distribution costs, they are instead focusing on destroying new means of distribution to prevent competition. You see, YouTube is in a great position to deliver paid content from independent producers to consumers. The studios know this, and they know that if the Internet turns into anything approaching a free market, they're basically out of business. For this reason, they do everything within their power to kill such sites—not because they can be used to pirate Hollywood movies, but because they can be used to sell non-Hollywood movies without having to spend millions of dollars in infrastructure. That ability of the general public to do what the major studios do is the greatest threat to their power.
Game studios are similar. There's no reason why people who want to write games should go work for one of those sweatshops, working unholy hours for terrible pay. You can go off on your own and work with a handful of people and write a great game, sell it, and make a fair amount of money. If everyone did this, the sweatshop game studios of the world would collapse, and the Internet makes that not only possible, but downright easy. They know this, and it terrifies them. So they do what they can to create liability for any ISP that might dare to distribute software, thus discouraging the practice.
And so on. It's not about piracy. It's about control. They want to control the entire content production industry, and our Congresspeople are almost all too fucking stupid to realize that these laws only serve to turn the big studios into a state-protected oligopoly and thwart small businesses' attempts to compete. And this is why we don't have jobs in this country.
The first button should say, "Write Your Congressperson". The *second* button should say "Continue to site". Here's what the ad campaign should look like:
Facebook: grey background with all media (video clips, photos, etc.) and most of the posts replaced with the words "This content is not available due to copyright claim."
Google: all image search results, Google Video/YouTube results, and a random scattering of normal search results should be replaced with the words "This content is not available due to copyright claim."
And on all pages, a pop-over dialog box in the middle of the screen says, "If SOPA passes, this is what this website will look like. [Write my congresspeople] [Okay, I get it; just show me the content]".
And it should use cookies so that each person sees it only once per day.
But most of the rich are good with money, and you're not going to trick them out of it. Not with taxes or surcharges or estate taxes...
Nonsense. You can tax the rich very easily. You just have to start by removing the need for every politician to be rich. As long as the politicians protect their own, you won't ever be able to tax the rich usefully. If there weren't so much money in politics, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Once you have political bodies that are going for fairness instead of giving favors to the people who paid to get them elected, you can create a system of taxation in which there are damn near zero tax deductions. Allow a deduction for charitable donations. Allow a deduction for taxes paid at the state or local level. Tax all income at 40%, regardless of how that money was made—wages, tips, capital gains, whatever. You might also want to provide an exemption or lower tax rate for the first $30k of income, give or take. And then boom. You now have a tax system in which no one can avoid the tax.
While you're at it, tax corporate distributions to and U.S. stock market gains by anyone who doesn't pay U.S. income tax, then eliminate all corporate income taxes. Set those taxes so that you make up for those people's portion of each corporation's income (on average), and make up the rest of the corporate income tax reduction by taxing the capital gains of U.S. investors at the same 40% as ordinary income.
So you see, it's not hard at all to tax the rich fairly. What's hard is getting honest politicians in office who are wiling to make it happen. As the old joke went, a guy was walking through a cemetery and stumbled across a grave marker that read, "Here lies John Smith, a politician and an honest man." Upon reading it, the guy said, "Wow. Three people in one grave."
We are headed now for a situation where over 50% of all Federal expenditures go to entitlements; now along comes ObamaCare piling more financial obligations on there. ObamaCare could be, not just a straw, but a boulder dropped on the camel's back.
That's a bit disingenuous, don't you think? If the U.S. economy collapses, it's because of excessive federal debt. The problem with your statement is that those entitlement programs you criticize are very nearly cash-flow-neutral, and Social Security is actually cash-flow-positive. In other words, ignoring the temporary payroll tax cuts that are currently in place, most years, Social Security doles out less money than they take in from taxes specifically earmarked for that program. Social Security actually loans money to the federal government, which means that without Social Security, our government would be in even worse shape than it is.
As for Medicare, I think it operates at a loss, but its total expenditures are barely twice Social Security's excess, so even if fully half of Medicare's costs were above and beyond the Medicare payroll tax, the combination of Medicare and Social Security would still be break-even as far as the federal budget is concerned.
In other words, in any honest description of the federal budget, entitlements make up approximately zero percent of the total budget, not half. This means that cutting the entitlement programs won't do a damn thing for reducing the national debt because it isn't actually contributing to it; those entitlements don't come out of the general budget in the first place. Merely talking about entitlement reform in the context of the federal budget means that you're either misinformed or are deliberately distorting reality to push a political agenda. Either way, it's complete bullshit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fully in favor of having an honest discussion about the insane growth of Medicare expenses and how to slow that growth. We need to drive the cost of healthcare back down to what it should be, and I'm convinced that the only way to do so is to remove the profit motive from healthcare entirely. Unfortunately, that terrifies both political parties—the Republicans because non-profit healthcare would impact companies that donate heavily to their campaigns, the Democrats because protecting the people from the high cost of healthcare and health insurance is one of their strongest cards to play against the Republicans.
While we're at it, we should have honest discussions about whether providing healthcare and minimal monetary support for the poor and elderly is a good thing or whether we should just throw them out in the streets to die. Sadly, no Republican actually has the guts to admit that this is what their party is really after; instead, they couch their argument in terms of the federal budget to keep people from noticing how many of them are borderline sociopaths. Sorry to be so blunt, but rather than try to fix the problems with these programs, they instead use fear of possible future increases in cost as an excuse to dismantle services that provide critical healthcare and financial support to people in need. There's no other word for that other than sociopathic.
I'm not saying the Democrats are great, either, mind you. I could rant for hours about overtaxation of corporations that immediately pass all of those taxes on to the poor because they can. We need less corporate taxation and more individual taxation (and particularly higher capital gains taxes), but neither party wants that because it would make it too easy for the public to see just how much they're paying in taxes. As long as those taxes are hidden in the cost of the products people buy, the people won't notice how much they're getting shafted from both sides.
Because you have people like a friend of mine who'll give plenty of lip service about how both parties are screwing us over - yadda yadda yadda, but come election day, she votes Republican - the incumbent - instead of a third party candidate because she can't stand the thought of a Democrat winning. I do point out to her that in Georgia, USA, Democrats have a very hard time getting elected and voting third party isn't "throwing her vote away."
The problem is that in most parts of the country, we don't have even have a real second party to choose, much less an acceptable third. The opposing major party never fields any competent challengers, and the third parties are almost invariably even farther out than that.
I was all set to vote against Feinstein because she completely ignored my letters and those of countless other Silicon Valley folks who expressed our opinions on a number of laws similar to SOPA in past years. I even voted (as a registered independent) in the Republican primary to try to get somebody electable to unseat her.
What happened? The non-independent Republicans in California picked the one candidate on the ticket who I could never even consider electing—Carly Fiorina, a deposed former leader of HP who is so clueless about technology and business that she nearly bankrupted one of the largest tech companies in the Silicon Valley. She is quite possibly the only candidate on the entire Republican ticket who I could confidently say would have even less clue about laws like SOPA than Feinstein.
And this is why nothing ever changes. Instead of being intelligent voters who vote during the primaries for the candidate who is the closest to center, members of both parties choose the candidate that most closely resembles their highly partisan beliefs, thus ensuring that no members of the other party can possibly even consider crossing party lines to vote for their chosen candidate. Combine this with gerrymandering, and you have an electoral system that all but guarantees that no seats ever change hands.
Want to change things? Vote for the most centrist candidate you can choose—the least ideological candidate you can possibly choose—in the hopes that maybe that candidate will be palatable enough to voters in the opposing party to get elected. This is provably the only feasible way to ever actually get anyone sane to "vote for the other guy".
As for voting for a third party, that only makes sense if the third party stands a chance. The right way to handle third parties (in the absence of a more sensible voting scheme) is this: whenever anyone polls you, tell them you are planning to vote for the third-party candidate that is most closely tied with your position. This ensures that the polls track likely real-world election results as closely as possible. Then, on election day, if that candidate is polling strongly, vote for that third-party candidate. Otherwise, vote for whichever major-party candidate is closer.
That said, Feinstein's support for SOPA/PIPA pushed me over the edge. I don't care if Adolph f**king Hitler runs as the Republican, I'm not voting for her again. I'll tolerate even the most batshit crazy Palin/Bachmann wannabe for one term just to get her out. Enough is enough. Feinstein and Boxer have to go.
Massively overestimated, almost certainly. It's not at all uncommon to download a torrent from three or four sites before you find one with enough seeders to finish in your lifetime. Conservatively, I suspect their estimates are high by at least a factor of two if that was their methodology.
First, dimming fluorescents is a pain in the backside. The usual techniques people use for doing so cause the bulb to just stop producing light below a certain threshold. Such circuits don't work very well if you're actually trying to use the bulbs for mood lighting.
Second, if you don't damp your inductors correctly, the things whine like you wouldn't believe. I tried a "dimmable" LED bulb in my touch lamp for all of three seconds before I went back to an incandescent. It was loud enough to cause physical pain.
I'm not sure how universal either of these problems are.
No, not really. It wasn't until fairly late in the 20th century that DC-DC converters and switched-mode power supplies became usably efficient. Prior to that, AC was the only realistic way to bump power up to high enough voltages to do long-distance power transmission without *huge* resistive losses. So yes, if we were designing the power grid today, DC might be practical, but a hundred years ago, it wasn't, at least not scalably.
As best I can tell, that's how LED Christmas light sets are wired. They have a whole bunch of LEDs wired in series, each running on unrectified AC. You can easily see the flicker when the limbs blow around in the breeze.
Spoken like someone who has never lived in the Middle East. They're blowing things up with regularity. Just not in the U.S.
Also, it's not really relevant. There's no evidence that DRM actually increases sales if any cheaper alternatives exist (or any non-DRM alternatives, regardless of cost). If someone cannot pirate the game they want to play, they are likely to pirate something else rather than buy the game.
All the pseudo-studies that ask people if they would have bought some product if they could not pirate it are completely missing the point. Most people don't generally pirate things that they can afford. Thus, we can safely assume that they would have bought only some subset, X, but would not have bought or used a much larger subset, Y. By trying all of the titles in X U Y instead of just X, the pirates provide free word-of-mouth advertising based on the larger set of titles, leading to sales of Y that would not otherwise happen. This counteracts many of the lost sales for X.
Further, those studies completely ignore network effects. The term "network effects" refers to the perceived value of a service increasing as more users join that service. For example, when there were only three people on the Internet, it wasn't that interesting. Now that almost everybody is on it, you're looked at as a luddite if you don't have an email address. Network effects affect some products more than others, but they are a major factor in sales of multiplayer games and creative software.
With creative software, network effects come into play when people start mailing files around; at this point, most people who buy Microsoft Word buy it because of network effects. They know they're going to get lots of files in that format, so it is to their advantage to use that format. Further, they know that if they create files in that format, most people will be able to read them. I remember a statistic that showed that most copies of Word in China were pirated. Given that most U.S. products are manufactured in China, if China had not pirated MS Word, there are a large number of companies in the U.S. that would be unable to use Word files to communicate with their partner companies in China, and thus there are a lot of copies of Word that would not have been sold to companies in the U.S.
The same effect occurs with multiplayer games. The enjoyment that people get from a multiplayer game depends to a significant degree on how many people are playing. Sure, if the servers are overloaded, this can be a negative, but on the average, having more players is a net positive.
Also, many people buy games because their friends are on there. If one of those people buys a game and makes a copy for three friends, that's one sale. If that one person is deciding whether to buy that multiplayer game and can't copy it for those three friends, that may well result in zero sales.
For this reason, every study that has looked at actual numbers instead of doing bogus surveys has consistently shown that piracy increases sales on the whole. Most people don't pirate what they can afford, so the downside of piracy is bounded. Because of the network effects plus the free word-of-mouth advertising, the upside of piracy is basically unbounded. Therefore, the notion that DRM could improve sales is unfathomable.
So yes, it's just like the porn scanners. It's a lot of extra expense that makes life miserable for everyone, but provably does not improve things in the slightest and in many respects makes things worse, instigated as a knee-jerk reaction by a bunch of overpaid higher-ups who didn't really think things through.
Sure, they're just going to find other ways to grab profits. The point was to ensure that they couldn't disproportionately place that burden on the backs of the people who could least afford it. As long as the regulations achieve that, then yes, I think they're useful.
As for credit cards being a free market, the reality of the matter is that it can't be. Most companies take credit cards from VISA and Mastercard. Some companies take credit cards from American Express or Discover. Beyond that, your odds start to fall to near zero fairly rapidly. This means that if you want to be a credit card company, you have to play in those companies' sandboxes.
As long as we do not have open, Internet-based standards for credit cards so that any company can opt into providing a credit card without signing on with one of those four companies, there can be no free market. Nearly all of the "competition" is just superficial competition for the right to be the front-facing identity for an oligopoly.
I'm willing to blame our educational system for not giving these people the tools to evaluate financial risks. If there were specific circumstances where the policies weren't spelled out in the customer agreements, I agree that should be fixed.
Most of the agreements I've gotten pretty much say that they can raise the rates at any time for any reason, up to some ludicrous amount. Most rational people, however, assume that because the company has treated them reasonably in the past, they will continue to do so. Sure, those folks arguably should have read the maximum rate, and thought to themselves, "If they crank my rate up to 27% interest, can I still afford this?", but the reality is that most people don't, and you can't reasonably expect them to do so.
Don't get me wrong; the credit card fix wasn't ideal. They should have passed a federal usury law limiting annual percentage rates to prime + 10%. That would not only prevent pretty much all of the abuse, but also would have the effect of killing all the payday loan scams that banks and check cashing centers perpetrate—schemes that prey upon the desperate who often have no real alternatives if they don't want the power company to turn off their electricity.
Suddenly, my family member and my friend both experienced huge rate increases on their existing debt. (Almost everyone's rates went up to pay for the revenue the credit card companies were no longer making off of the irresponsible delinquents.) Because of that, they went from situations where they were responsibly paying back their debt every month to situations where they couldn't sustain the payments. One was lucky enough to have a family member who could bail her out; the other almost went bankrupt.
What you're failing to mention is that the reason they cranked those folks' rate up is that the government gave them notice that it was their last opportunity to do so before new regs would make it harder to do exactly that. Some folks got screwed in the short term. That sucks. But in the long run, a lot more people will be saved from getting screwed over because of those rules.
More significantly, you're blaming the regulations for what the credit card companies did all on their own. Nobody held a gun to their heads and said that they had to raise their rates. They've been making record profits, and would still have made solid earnings without doing so. And they didn't even do it in a rational way; they tripled my rate to near usurious levels, and I have excellent credit and pay off all of my cards at the end of the month each month. Many credit card companies used those regulations as an excuse for why they had to arbitrarily crank nearly everyone's rate as high as the law would allow, and you bought their bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
The fact of the matter is this: companies lie. They didn't have to do it. They did it because they could. And because they don't actually care about anyone other than themselves. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the vast majority of corporations are run by sociopaths, who do whatever they think they can get away with, to the maximum extent allowable by law. As long as that is the case, it is absolutely necessary to have laws that ensure that the worst they can do is still within the realm of what is acceptable in a functioning society. Want to stop the draconian laws that make life miserable for businesses? Buy stock in a company that acts like a bunch of evil assholes, then vote all of your shares against the entire board. If enough people did this, companies would be forced to act like decent human beings. Short of that, the law is the last refuge of civility.
I got that from the stories about the sale that said that printer licensing was one of the conditions.
I very much doubt the current crop of web-enabled printers run anything remotely resembling CP/M. They have built-in Wi-Fi hardware, Ethernet, and full-color, full-motion playback of help videos. That's way, way, way past anything you could do easily in many RTOSes, much less something as primitive as CP/M.
If they aren't running WebOS, it is inevitable to assume that they will. They'd have to be idiots to license somebody else's OS when they have their own OS with in-house programming teams that they can leverage.
Blaming the pirates for DRM is like blaming terrorists for the porn scanners at the airport. The terrorists didn't take put those scanners in the airports; our own government did. The pirates didn't add DRM to our multimedia content and apps; the manufacturers did....
We are each responsible for our own actions. People pirating movies does not excuse the industry's reaction to it any more than foreign terrorists crashing some planes into buildings on September 11th excuses unlawful searches, unlawful wiretapping, unlawful detention, etc. It takes two to tango. It is far better to deny the other side battle than to pursue a course that leads to totalitarianism.
They wanted to show that they tried every option, but they didn't actually want to sell Palm.
It's not that. I'd imagine that all of HP's touchscreen-based printers run WebOS under the hood. If so, then HP is so dependent on WebOS that they can't afford to sell it without requiring the buyer to license it back to HP. This makes any sale problematic from both ends of the deal.
Yes. This fee screws the people who can least afford it. People who pay their bill online or by phone on a one-off basis are usually the people who are struggling to pay that bill at all. By charging those folks an extra fee, Verizon basically said, "Screw the poor." To which I say, "Screw Verizon."
Sure, those folks pose a higher risk of non-payment. That doesn't mean Verizon has the right to discriminate against them, and it certainly doesn't mean Verizon is justified in charging them extra fees that increase the risk of non-payment. They're basically starting to act like credit card companies, and need to be dealt with in the same way that we dealt with them—with harsh federal regulations that punish such behavior. It's really the only way to deal with companies that are so big that they feel unthreatened by competition.
And yet I can't think of anyone else other than government agencies that do this. Accepting electronic transfers is simply part of the cost of doing business in the modern age, and companies that refuse to accept that will get left behind.
The only reason the power companies and government agencies can get away with it is that no competition is possible. And even they may succumb to public pressure before too much longer.
Book covers aren't generally even considered commercial use under U.S. law, much less a minor scene in a movie. As I understand it, U.S. law defines "commercial use" pretty narrowly. If it isn't a commercial or an advertisement, it doesn't count, and even then, it doesn't always count.
More to the point—and I realize this explanation is a bit imprecise, but it's in the ballpark—if you aren't specifically using the mark to describe your product in an ad, it doesn't count, and even if you are using the mark to describe your product, as long as you are using the mark descriptively (compare to [competing product]), you probably aren't infringing.
Generally speaking, you have to work pretty hard to infringe a trademark in the U.S. It's not something that happens accidentally. Unless WB has gone into the counterfeit handbag market, I think they're probably safe.
First, the word you're looking for is geostationary. Not all geosynchronous orbits are geostationary.
Second GPS cannot be done with geostationary orbits. You have to have a minimum of three non-collinear points to triangulate a location on the surface of the Earth, and geostationary orbits are effectively collinear for all practical purposes. As such, geostationary orbits would only get you longitude (position along that orbital line), not latitude.
They don't really register them. It's just domain tasting, and they can only do it for five days. Of course, with some bad luck, somebody else might come along and do the same thing for another five days, and so on. YMMV.
Sure, product placement is advertising, but the movie as a whole isn't advertising; only the portion of it that constitutes a paid product placement is advertising. Unless someone paid WB to advertise Louis Vuitton products, the incidental use of that name in a movie is clearly not a use in commerce.
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And yet most TV shows these days are "reality TV" crap with amateur talent. And even non-reality shows are mostly actors and actresses that nobody has heard of. I'm not sure I buy that argument. Besides, the quality of most TV and movies these days is abysmal. It isn't exactly hard to do better. All you have to do is not suck. The major studios care more about cinematography than they do about plot, character development, or any of the other aspects of a good story. As long as the so-called "top" screenwriters keep churning out the same tired, old crap over and over, there will be significant room for improvement.
And yet, some of the most watched games on TV are college sports. Those other leagues didn't fail because of lack of name recognition. They failed because A. they didn't provide the same level of entertainment, B. they underpriced their offerings (leading people to assume that they must be crap), or C. the college leagues already filled that niche. Or maybe all of the above.
If it doesn't, it should. TV viewership is steadily declining, while YouTube viewership is steadily increasing. YouTube gets over three billion video views per day worldwide. That's up from three billion per month just a little over two years ago. That alone pretty strongly refutes your view.
There's a lot of buyout music out there from various music libraries, and there are probably lots of local bands that would be thrilled to license something for a hundred bucks if you want something all your own.
Console gaming probably won't be that important in the long term. The future is in mobile gaming, and those platforms are pretty much wide open to anyone.
Battlestar Galactica is a SFX-laden show. You'll notice I said non-SFX show. You know, like sitcoms, romantic comedies, and so on. Yes, the production values can suck if you don't know what you're doing, but it's not that hard a skill to learn. (This is coming from somebody who majored in communications as an undergrad.)
You can't combat piracy. Externalities are a cost of doing business. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding him/herself.
There's exactly one way to maximize profit, and that is to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for at a price that they are willing to pay. The pirates were never your customers and never will be, and the sooner the companies accept that and focus on the real problems (massively overpricing everything when first released, delivering products that can't easily be moved between devices because of the restrictive/broken DRM, and the declining quality of entertainment products in general), they'll have better profits. That's not what SOPA/PIPA and similar legislation are about, however. They're about eliminating legitimate lower-cost competition.
What scares the industry most is that these days, any jackass in his home could make a movie of comparable quality to most of the non-SFX Hollywood films. Moderately high-end HD cams cost a couple of grand or three—well within the price range of most people if they are willing to save up for a bit. You can buy halogen lights at Home Depot for fifty bucks, then rebuild the reflectors yourself and build your own barn doors for just about nothing. And there are millions of people out there who can act, not just a few dozen in Hollyweird, so there's no shortage of available talent.
In effect, this means that commercial movies are too expensive by about a factor of a thousand. But instead of finding ways to take advantage of new technologies to cut their production and distribution costs, they are instead focusing on destroying new means of distribution to prevent competition. You see, YouTube is in a great position to deliver paid content from independent producers to consumers. The studios know this, and they know that if the Internet turns into anything approaching a free market, they're basically out of business. For this reason, they do everything within their power to kill such sites—not because they can be used to pirate Hollywood movies, but because they can be used to sell non-Hollywood movies without having to spend millions of dollars in infrastructure. That ability of the general public to do what the major studios do is the greatest threat to their power.
Game studios are similar. There's no reason why people who want to write games should go work for one of those sweatshops, working unholy hours for terrible pay. You can go off on your own and work with a handful of people and write a great game, sell it, and make a fair amount of money. If everyone did this, the sweatshop game studios of the world would collapse, and the Internet makes that not only possible, but downright easy. They know this, and it terrifies them. So they do what they can to create liability for any ISP that might dare to distribute software, thus discouraging the practice.
And so on. It's not about piracy. It's about control. They want to control the entire content production industry, and our Congresspeople are almost all too fucking stupid to realize that these laws only serve to turn the big studios into a state-protected oligopoly and thwart small businesses' attempts to compete. And this is why we don't have jobs in this country.
The first button should say, "Write Your Congressperson". The *second* button should say "Continue to site". Here's what the ad campaign should look like:
Facebook: grey background with all media (video clips, photos, etc.) and most of the posts replaced with the words "This content is not available due to copyright claim."
Google: all image search results, Google Video/YouTube results, and a random scattering of normal search results should be replaced with the words "This content is not available due to copyright claim."
And on all pages, a pop-over dialog box in the middle of the screen says, "If SOPA passes, this is what this website will look like. [Write my congresspeople] [Okay, I get it; just show me the content]".
And it should use cookies so that each person sees it only once per day.
Nonsense. You can tax the rich very easily. You just have to start by removing the need for every politician to be rich. As long as the politicians protect their own, you won't ever be able to tax the rich usefully. If there weren't so much money in politics, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Once you have political bodies that are going for fairness instead of giving favors to the people who paid to get them elected, you can create a system of taxation in which there are damn near zero tax deductions. Allow a deduction for charitable donations. Allow a deduction for taxes paid at the state or local level. Tax all income at 40%, regardless of how that money was made—wages, tips, capital gains, whatever. You might also want to provide an exemption or lower tax rate for the first $30k of income, give or take. And then boom. You now have a tax system in which no one can avoid the tax.
While you're at it, tax corporate distributions to and U.S. stock market gains by anyone who doesn't pay U.S. income tax, then eliminate all corporate income taxes. Set those taxes so that you make up for those people's portion of each corporation's income (on average), and make up the rest of the corporate income tax reduction by taxing the capital gains of U.S. investors at the same 40% as ordinary income.
So you see, it's not hard at all to tax the rich fairly. What's hard is getting honest politicians in office who are wiling to make it happen. As the old joke went, a guy was walking through a cemetery and stumbled across a grave marker that read, "Here lies John Smith, a politician and an honest man." Upon reading it, the guy said, "Wow. Three people in one grave."
That's a bit disingenuous, don't you think? If the U.S. economy collapses, it's because of excessive federal debt. The problem with your statement is that those entitlement programs you criticize are very nearly cash-flow-neutral, and Social Security is actually cash-flow-positive. In other words, ignoring the temporary payroll tax cuts that are currently in place, most years, Social Security doles out less money than they take in from taxes specifically earmarked for that program. Social Security actually loans money to the federal government, which means that without Social Security, our government would be in even worse shape than it is.
As for Medicare, I think it operates at a loss, but its total expenditures are barely twice Social Security's excess, so even if fully half of Medicare's costs were above and beyond the Medicare payroll tax, the combination of Medicare and Social Security would still be break-even as far as the federal budget is concerned.
In other words, in any honest description of the federal budget, entitlements make up approximately zero percent of the total budget, not half. This means that cutting the entitlement programs won't do a damn thing for reducing the national debt because it isn't actually contributing to it; those entitlements don't come out of the general budget in the first place. Merely talking about entitlement reform in the context of the federal budget means that you're either misinformed or are deliberately distorting reality to push a political agenda. Either way, it's complete bullshit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fully in favor of having an honest discussion about the insane growth of Medicare expenses and how to slow that growth. We need to drive the cost of healthcare back down to what it should be, and I'm convinced that the only way to do so is to remove the profit motive from healthcare entirely. Unfortunately, that terrifies both political parties—the Republicans because non-profit healthcare would impact companies that donate heavily to their campaigns, the Democrats because protecting the people from the high cost of healthcare and health insurance is one of their strongest cards to play against the Republicans.
While we're at it, we should have honest discussions about whether providing healthcare and minimal monetary support for the poor and elderly is a good thing or whether we should just throw them out in the streets to die. Sadly, no Republican actually has the guts to admit that this is what their party is really after; instead, they couch their argument in terms of the federal budget to keep people from noticing how many of them are borderline sociopaths. Sorry to be so blunt, but rather than try to fix the problems with these programs, they instead use fear of possible future increases in cost as an excuse to dismantle services that provide critical healthcare and financial support to people in need. There's no other word for that other than sociopathic.
I'm not saying the Democrats are great, either, mind you. I could rant for hours about overtaxation of corporations that immediately pass all of those taxes on to the poor because they can. We need less corporate taxation and more individual taxation (and particularly higher capital gains taxes), but neither party wants that because it would make it too easy for the public to see just how much they're paying in taxes. As long as those taxes are hidden in the cost of the products people buy, the people won't notice how much they're getting shafted from both sides.
The problem is that in most parts of the country, we don't have even have a real second party to choose, much less an acceptable third. The opposing major party never fields any competent challengers, and the third parties are almost invariably even farther out than that.
I was all set to vote against Feinstein because she completely ignored my letters and those of countless other Silicon Valley folks who expressed our opinions on a number of laws similar to SOPA in past years. I even voted (as a registered independent) in the Republican primary to try to get somebody electable to unseat her.
What happened? The non-independent Republicans in California picked the one candidate on the ticket who I could never even consider electing—Carly Fiorina, a deposed former leader of HP who is so clueless about technology and business that she nearly bankrupted one of the largest tech companies in the Silicon Valley. She is quite possibly the only candidate on the entire Republican ticket who I could confidently say would have even less clue about laws like SOPA than Feinstein.
And this is why nothing ever changes. Instead of being intelligent voters who vote during the primaries for the candidate who is the closest to center, members of both parties choose the candidate that most closely resembles their highly partisan beliefs, thus ensuring that no members of the other party can possibly even consider crossing party lines to vote for their chosen candidate. Combine this with gerrymandering, and you have an electoral system that all but guarantees that no seats ever change hands.
Want to change things? Vote for the most centrist candidate you can choose—the least ideological candidate you can possibly choose—in the hopes that maybe that candidate will be palatable enough to voters in the opposing party to get elected. This is provably the only feasible way to ever actually get anyone sane to "vote for the other guy".
As for voting for a third party, that only makes sense if the third party stands a chance. The right way to handle third parties (in the absence of a more sensible voting scheme) is this: whenever anyone polls you, tell them you are planning to vote for the third-party candidate that is most closely tied with your position. This ensures that the polls track likely real-world election results as closely as possible. Then, on election day, if that candidate is polling strongly, vote for that third-party candidate. Otherwise, vote for whichever major-party candidate is closer.
That said, Feinstein's support for SOPA/PIPA pushed me over the edge. I don't care if Adolph f**king Hitler runs as the Republican, I'm not voting for her again. I'll tolerate even the most batshit crazy Palin/Bachmann wannabe for one term just to get her out. Enough is enough. Feinstein and Boxer have to go.
Massively overestimated, almost certainly. It's not at all uncommon to download a torrent from three or four sites before you find one with enough seeders to finish in your lifetime. Conservatively, I suspect their estimates are high by at least a factor of two if that was their methodology.
The problems with dimmable CFLs are twofold.
First, dimming fluorescents is a pain in the backside. The usual techniques people use for doing so cause the bulb to just stop producing light below a certain threshold. Such circuits don't work very well if you're actually trying to use the bulbs for mood lighting.
Second, if you don't damp your inductors correctly, the things whine like you wouldn't believe. I tried a "dimmable" LED bulb in my touch lamp for all of three seconds before I went back to an incandescent. It was loud enough to cause physical pain.
I'm not sure how universal either of these problems are.
No, not really. It wasn't until fairly late in the 20th century that DC-DC converters and switched-mode power supplies became usably efficient. Prior to that, AC was the only realistic way to bump power up to high enough voltages to do long-distance power transmission without *huge* resistive losses. So yes, if we were designing the power grid today, DC might be practical, but a hundred years ago, it wasn't, at least not scalably.
As best I can tell, that's how LED Christmas light sets are wired. They have a whole bunch of LEDs wired in series, each running on unrectified AC. You can easily see the flicker when the limbs blow around in the breeze.
FTFY.
Spoken like someone who has never lived in the Middle East. They're blowing things up with regularity. Just not in the U.S.
Also, it's not really relevant. There's no evidence that DRM actually increases sales if any cheaper alternatives exist (or any non-DRM alternatives, regardless of cost). If someone cannot pirate the game they want to play, they are likely to pirate something else rather than buy the game.
All the pseudo-studies that ask people if they would have bought some product if they could not pirate it are completely missing the point. Most people don't generally pirate things that they can afford. Thus, we can safely assume that they would have bought only some subset, X, but would not have bought or used a much larger subset, Y. By trying all of the titles in X U Y instead of just X, the pirates provide free word-of-mouth advertising based on the larger set of titles, leading to sales of Y that would not otherwise happen. This counteracts many of the lost sales for X.
Further, those studies completely ignore network effects. The term "network effects" refers to the perceived value of a service increasing as more users join that service. For example, when there were only three people on the Internet, it wasn't that interesting. Now that almost everybody is on it, you're looked at as a luddite if you don't have an email address. Network effects affect some products more than others, but they are a major factor in sales of multiplayer games and creative software.
With creative software, network effects come into play when people start mailing files around; at this point, most people who buy Microsoft Word buy it because of network effects. They know they're going to get lots of files in that format, so it is to their advantage to use that format. Further, they know that if they create files in that format, most people will be able to read them. I remember a statistic that showed that most copies of Word in China were pirated. Given that most U.S. products are manufactured in China, if China had not pirated MS Word, there are a large number of companies in the U.S. that would be unable to use Word files to communicate with their partner companies in China, and thus there are a lot of copies of Word that would not have been sold to companies in the U.S.
The same effect occurs with multiplayer games. The enjoyment that people get from a multiplayer game depends to a significant degree on how many people are playing. Sure, if the servers are overloaded, this can be a negative, but on the average, having more players is a net positive.
Also, many people buy games because their friends are on there. If one of those people buys a game and makes a copy for three friends, that's one sale. If that one person is deciding whether to buy that multiplayer game and can't copy it for those three friends, that may well result in zero sales.
For this reason, every study that has looked at actual numbers instead of doing bogus surveys has consistently shown that piracy increases sales on the whole. Most people don't pirate what they can afford, so the downside of piracy is bounded. Because of the network effects plus the free word-of-mouth advertising, the upside of piracy is basically unbounded. Therefore, the notion that DRM could improve sales is unfathomable.
So yes, it's just like the porn scanners. It's a lot of extra expense that makes life miserable for everyone, but provably does not improve things in the slightest and in many respects makes things worse, instigated as a knee-jerk reaction by a bunch of overpaid higher-ups who didn't really think things through.
Sure, they're just going to find other ways to grab profits. The point was to ensure that they couldn't disproportionately place that burden on the backs of the people who could least afford it. As long as the regulations achieve that, then yes, I think they're useful.
As for credit cards being a free market, the reality of the matter is that it can't be. Most companies take credit cards from VISA and Mastercard. Some companies take credit cards from American Express or Discover. Beyond that, your odds start to fall to near zero fairly rapidly. This means that if you want to be a credit card company, you have to play in those companies' sandboxes.
As long as we do not have open, Internet-based standards for credit cards so that any company can opt into providing a credit card without signing on with one of those four companies, there can be no free market. Nearly all of the "competition" is just superficial competition for the right to be the front-facing identity for an oligopoly.
Most of the agreements I've gotten pretty much say that they can raise the rates at any time for any reason, up to some ludicrous amount. Most rational people, however, assume that because the company has treated them reasonably in the past, they will continue to do so. Sure, those folks arguably should have read the maximum rate, and thought to themselves, "If they crank my rate up to 27% interest, can I still afford this?", but the reality is that most people don't, and you can't reasonably expect them to do so.
Don't get me wrong; the credit card fix wasn't ideal. They should have passed a federal usury law limiting annual percentage rates to prime + 10%. That would not only prevent pretty much all of the abuse, but also would have the effect of killing all the payday loan scams that banks and check cashing centers perpetrate—schemes that prey upon the desperate who often have no real alternatives if they don't want the power company to turn off their electricity.
What you're failing to mention is that the reason they cranked those folks' rate up is that the government gave them notice that it was their last opportunity to do so before new regs would make it harder to do exactly that. Some folks got screwed in the short term. That sucks. But in the long run, a lot more people will be saved from getting screwed over because of those rules.
More significantly, you're blaming the regulations for what the credit card companies did all on their own. Nobody held a gun to their heads and said that they had to raise their rates. They've been making record profits, and would still have made solid earnings without doing so. And they didn't even do it in a rational way; they tripled my rate to near usurious levels, and I have excellent credit and pay off all of my cards at the end of the month each month. Many credit card companies used those regulations as an excuse for why they had to arbitrarily crank nearly everyone's rate as high as the law would allow, and you bought their bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
The fact of the matter is this: companies lie. They didn't have to do it. They did it because they could. And because they don't actually care about anyone other than themselves. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the vast majority of corporations are run by sociopaths, who do whatever they think they can get away with, to the maximum extent allowable by law. As long as that is the case, it is absolutely necessary to have laws that ensure that the worst they can do is still within the realm of what is acceptable in a functioning society. Want to stop the draconian laws that make life miserable for businesses? Buy stock in a company that acts like a bunch of evil assholes, then vote all of your shares against the entire board. If enough people did this, companies would be forced to act like decent human beings. Short of that, the law is the last refuge of civility.
I got that from the stories about the sale that said that printer licensing was one of the conditions.
I very much doubt the current crop of web-enabled printers run anything remotely resembling CP/M. They have built-in Wi-Fi hardware, Ethernet, and full-color, full-motion playback of help videos. That's way, way, way past anything you could do easily in many RTOSes, much less something as primitive as CP/M.
If they aren't running WebOS, it is inevitable to assume that they will. They'd have to be idiots to license somebody else's OS when they have their own OS with in-house programming teams that they can leverage.
Blaming the pirates for DRM is like blaming terrorists for the porn scanners at the airport. The terrorists didn't take put those scanners in the airports; our own government did. The pirates didn't add DRM to our multimedia content and apps; the manufacturers did....
We are each responsible for our own actions. People pirating movies does not excuse the industry's reaction to it any more than foreign terrorists crashing some planes into buildings on September 11th excuses unlawful searches, unlawful wiretapping, unlawful detention, etc. It takes two to tango. It is far better to deny the other side battle than to pursue a course that leads to totalitarianism.
It's not that. I'd imagine that all of HP's touchscreen-based printers run WebOS under the hood. If so, then HP is so dependent on WebOS that they can't afford to sell it without requiring the buyer to license it back to HP. This makes any sale problematic from both ends of the deal.
Yes. This fee screws the people who can least afford it. People who pay their bill online or by phone on a one-off basis are usually the people who are struggling to pay that bill at all. By charging those folks an extra fee, Verizon basically said, "Screw the poor." To which I say, "Screw Verizon."
Sure, those folks pose a higher risk of non-payment. That doesn't mean Verizon has the right to discriminate against them, and it certainly doesn't mean Verizon is justified in charging them extra fees that increase the risk of non-payment. They're basically starting to act like credit card companies, and need to be dealt with in the same way that we dealt with them—with harsh federal regulations that punish such behavior. It's really the only way to deal with companies that are so big that they feel unthreatened by competition.
And yet I can't think of anyone else other than government agencies that do this. Accepting electronic transfers is simply part of the cost of doing business in the modern age, and companies that refuse to accept that will get left behind.
The only reason the power companies and government agencies can get away with it is that no competition is possible. And even they may succumb to public pressure before too much longer.
Book covers aren't generally even considered commercial use under U.S. law, much less a minor scene in a movie. As I understand it, U.S. law defines "commercial use" pretty narrowly. If it isn't a commercial or an advertisement, it doesn't count, and even then, it doesn't always count.
More to the point—and I realize this explanation is a bit imprecise, but it's in the ballpark—if you aren't specifically using the mark to describe your product in an ad, it doesn't count, and even if you are using the mark to describe your product, as long as you are using the mark descriptively (compare to [competing product]), you probably aren't infringing.
Generally speaking, you have to work pretty hard to infringe a trademark in the U.S. It's not something that happens accidentally. Unless WB has gone into the counterfeit handbag market, I think they're probably safe.
First, the word you're looking for is geostationary. Not all geosynchronous orbits are geostationary.
Second GPS cannot be done with geostationary orbits. You have to have a minimum of three non-collinear points to triangulate a location on the surface of the Earth, and geostationary orbits are effectively collinear for all practical purposes. As such, geostationary orbits would only get you longitude (position along that orbital line), not latitude.
They don't really register them. It's just domain tasting, and they can only do it for five days. Of course, with some bad luck, somebody else might come along and do the same thing for another five days, and so on. YMMV.
Sure, product placement is advertising, but the movie as a whole isn't advertising; only the portion of it that constitutes a paid product placement is advertising. Unless someone paid WB to advertise Louis Vuitton products, the incidental use of that name in a movie is clearly not a use in commerce.