The thing is, is that the RIAA is just about business. And therefore all they are interested in is making money.
That's the kind of greedy shortsightedness that gets businesses into this sort of mess. Businesses are, and should be, interested in making money. However, maximizing profits over the long haul is often a very different game over maximizing them Right Now.
In the RIAA's case, it's not that they want to produce the least music for the most profit, because if that were truly the case they would finding new ways to produce music and new ways to profit from it, instead of running around like headless chickens suing anyone with a pair of headphones.
I maintain that this is all part of a plan to get people used to obeying rules that don't make any sense and keeping people afraid so they'll be docile and do what they're told. Imagine combining the Milgram experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) with a multi-generational desensitization towards following orders you don't agree with. You know, start small, like forcing people to split their fluids up into 3 oz containers on airplanes. Eventually , I bet you could get people to do pretty much anything.
Let's say car B is 2m behind car A, traveling down the highway. If car A slows down by 5km/h, it takes only a second and a half for car B to catch up and rear-end car A. That is not a very long time to allow people to react. If, instead, car B was traveling 20m behind car A, then car B has 15 seconds to react to a 5km/h slowdown.
You are never going to get people to keep a constant speed. Even cruise control has it's limits. Even if no one ever touched their brakes on the highway, there would still exist this kind of traffic jam because people follow to closely. Not to mention the safety concerns. Let's say that something really drastic happens and the car A slows down by half its speed. You now have a 100km car B hitting a 50km car A unless car B can hit the brakes with about a tenth of a second's notice.
I put it to you that if everyone judiciously kept 10 times more space, traffic jams would vanish.
The reason the market will tolerate those kinds of disruptions is because that is all that is available. My options for internet are a-few-outages-of-a-few hours-each-year, or no internet service at all. The same for my cell phone.
The problem is that the barriers for entry, both political and financial, are quite high in those types of industries so competition is low. Why would any company break the bank trying to provide better service than the other 2 or 3 players in that region in that industry? It's not like people can leave them for a company who does provide better service. They simply don't exist. And when some upstart startup finally does get their foot in the door, they discover that all their potential customers are all tied up in year 1 of a 3 years perpetual contract.
Until people stop signing stupid contracts and until the government stops meddling to keep the big players happy, there will be no space for newcomers and the market will look exactly as it does right now.
How useful is terabit ethernet when the pipe to the outside world is effectively choked at a couple of Mbps?
Also, am I the only person in the world who hasn't got GigE at home? I mean, again, what's the point? I could see faster ethernet being useful for university campuses and businesses who can afford giant pipes to the internet, but really, can we please get reasonable consumer grade internet access and *then* worry about the terabit ethenet?
The beauty of the internet, though, is that there are so many people and resources connected, all the time, that even if Yahoo became solely a right-winged-whack-job propaganda machine, there would still be a million-billion-zillion other places to look for your information. If people can't be bothered to corroborate what they read in the "news" when they've got the entire world's worth of knowledge available then no amount of legislation will fix that.
If anything, legislation will make the problem worse, because any such law about truth in internetting will be all but impossible to enforce, but it will make the online news agencies seem just that much more credible to the gullible masses who believe that governments and corporations are out for their best interests.
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That's the kind of greedy shortsightedness that gets businesses into this sort of mess. Businesses are, and should be, interested in making money. However, maximizing profits over the long haul is often a very different game over maximizing them Right Now.
In the RIAA's case, it's not that they want to produce the least music for the most profit, because if that were truly the case they would finding new ways to produce music and new ways to profit from it, instead of running around like headless chickens suing anyone with a pair of headphones.
I sure hope this is the final nail in the coffin.
I maintain that this is all part of a plan to get people used to obeying rules that don't make any sense and keeping people afraid so they'll be docile and do what they're told. Imagine combining the Milgram experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) with a multi-generational desensitization towards following orders you don't agree with. You know, start small, like forcing people to split their fluids up into 3 oz containers on airplanes. Eventually , I bet you could get people to do pretty much anything.
Let's say car B is 2m behind car A, traveling down the highway. If car A slows down by 5km/h, it takes only a second and a half for car B to catch up and rear-end car A. That is not a very long time to allow people to react. If, instead, car B was traveling 20m behind car A, then car B has 15 seconds to react to a 5km/h slowdown.
You are never going to get people to keep a constant speed. Even cruise control has it's limits. Even if no one ever touched their brakes on the highway, there would still exist this kind of traffic jam because people follow to closely. Not to mention the safety concerns. Let's say that something really drastic happens and the car A slows down by half its speed. You now have a 100km car B hitting a 50km car A unless car B can hit the brakes with about a tenth of a second's notice.
I put it to you that if everyone judiciously kept 10 times more space, traffic jams would vanish.
The reason the market will tolerate those kinds of disruptions is because that is all that is available. My options for internet are a-few-outages-of-a-few hours-each-year, or no internet service at all. The same for my cell phone.
The problem is that the barriers for entry, both political and financial, are quite high in those types of industries so competition is low. Why would any company break the bank trying to provide better service than the other 2 or 3 players in that region in that industry? It's not like people can leave them for a company who does provide better service. They simply don't exist. And when some upstart startup finally does get their foot in the door, they discover that all their potential customers are all tied up in year 1 of a 3 years perpetual contract.
Until people stop signing stupid contracts and until the government stops meddling to keep the big players happy, there will be no space for newcomers and the market will look exactly as it does right now.
How useful is terabit ethernet when the pipe to the outside world is effectively choked at a couple of Mbps?
Also, am I the only person in the world who hasn't got GigE at home? I mean, again, what's the point? I could see faster ethernet being useful for university campuses and businesses who can afford giant pipes to the internet, but really, can we please get reasonable consumer grade internet access and *then* worry about the terabit ethenet?
The beauty of the internet, though, is that there are so many people and resources connected, all the time, that even if Yahoo became solely a right-winged-whack-job propaganda machine, there would still be a million-billion-zillion other places to look for your information. If people can't be bothered to corroborate what they read in the "news" when they've got the entire world's worth of knowledge available then no amount of legislation will fix that. If anything, legislation will make the problem worse, because any such law about truth in internetting will be all but impossible to enforce, but it will make the online news agencies seem just that much more credible to the gullible masses who believe that governments and corporations are out for their best interests.