Eh, you're right in this particular case, but you're not thinking broadly enough. There *is* a use for the "right" way, namely package managers, at least for those of us under Linux. I don't know if Flash is a "component" under these definitions, but I like being able to keep it synced with my distro's repositories the same way I update the rest of my software.
What nitpicking? You claimed one can fork BSD code and change the code's license. That's wrong.
It's effectively the same thing. You can release a "derivative work" that contains an extra newline at the end and release it under a different license. But the original will still be available, so nobody does that.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 'use tax' loophole, as long as enforcement of it followed some guidelines that ensured it wasn't being used to discriminate on the state of origin of the product (use tax can't be higher than regular sales tax, for example, see Associated Industries v. Lohman, 511 US 641).
But to answer your actual question, it's being debated because the States are looking for some public sympathy so they can persuade Congress to address the issue with legislation. To which Congress which has shown no interest whatsoever. So I say (sarcastically) "good luck with that".
There's two parties in any transaction: the seller and the buyer. Both use services of their own state. I suppose the most fair situation would be to split the bill down the middle and give each state its percentage of that half of the bill, with each party being responsible for his own jurisdiction's taxes.
Linux supports something called Extended File Attributes in most of its file-systems, going all the way back to ext2. Any program can write and read name/value pairs for a file via system calls in attr/attributes.h. These follow the file when its moved, copied, etc. There's still the downside that the information doesn't follow the file when you send the file by email, HTTP, or FAT USB key, so it's not a perfect solution. But it does follow file moves, copies, etc, and can be read by any program that wants to.
I think you confused my argument. I wasn't attempting to talk about the lauding of taking by force. I was merely demonstrating-by-example GGP's argument that ownership was a social construct, which wasn't made any more innate by scarcity. I was proving that, yes, societies did in fact treat ownership of at least one type of scarce resource differently from modern society. There are other examples (dictatorships, grants from the Crown, what have you). And there are even different types of ownership (people) if you want to get extreme about it.
I didn't mean to endorse any view on the recognition or rejection of IP, just that scarcity doesn't provide the defining element of guidance in constructing ownership rights in society. There are many arguments based in utility, shared cultural beliefs in the populace, etc, to consider.
Possession is, if you will, an inherent property of the universe.
Tell that to the native Americans.
Land ownership is a social construct. Yes, if you believe in ownership of tangibles, you will have to enforce a limit of one owner per item, to respect physical realities, but that doesn't mandate the concept of ownership in the first place.
I'm not saying that just because it isn't innate it isn't a sensible right. The USA is based on a society that buys into a certain set of premises, of which property ownership is one of them, and a useful one at that. But that doesn't mean it's the only sensible way to run a society.
At most, that company has a copyright over the CD version that they're creating.
Right. Which is what they're trying to protect.
If you want to do your own digitization of the laws and put them up online, you have every right. The content isn't a secret or protected in any way. But you can't just throw up a quick shell script to piggy-back off the contractors' work without being a derivative work and in violation of their copyright.
I don't see the problem. Work has value. Company wants to profit from it. News at 11.
The short answer is yes, and GP's "empty space" model never really holds any water, but the analogies all get fuzzy here. The real variable of merit is the "cross-section", which is a probability of a given interaction taking place in units of certain accelerator collision parameters.
At low energy, the cross-section for "elastic" (traditional photon exchange with the proton) scattering is very high, and inelastic (probing the quark substructure) is very low. At high energy, the elastic cross-section falls off sharply (you're "missing"), and inelastic remains near its small, but now comparatively bigger, number. When these inelastic collisions do occur, instead of hitting one of the three "constituent quarks", you have to apply a parton distribution function (the odds of interacting with a particular flavor of quark or gluon) to see what element of the "sea" you hit, and how much momentum it's carrying away from the proton. And then the rest will fly off to form color-neutral debris
Photons pop out of the vacuum all the time. A photon and an anti-photon (or do they call it a virtual photon)
Two virtual photons. A photon is its own anti-particle, and since conservation of energy is violated, it has to be off-shell, so virtual (and only exist for as much time as Heisenberg is willing to give it).
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term.
But they're not *equally* incorrect. They're as good as they are useful at modeling the world around us in their particular regimes.
We don't put Newton by the wayside just because we know about GR. And likewise if GR is ever expanded on or replaced, we still might use it to correct the time-slew of GPS satellites. It's about the best tool available for the job. And right now, the best tool for making decisions about the behavior of black holes and high-energy interactions based on the evidence available is telling us not to worry. What cause otherwise *is* there to worry? The fact that the word "black hole" happens to relate to a concept that scares people?
* Also what happens if two or more black holes are created that can then collide with each other?
* Can one black hole like particle influence the decay of another black hole particle?.
* Could 3 or 4 acting together grow exponentially more easily than one on its own?
* Also how would micro-black-hole particle groups behave in other collisions with other non-black holes like particles?
You have to understand that in asking these questions you're implicitly making analogies with the macroscopic world. You're asking for answers to questions that, at the scale and regime of the LHC, may be the equivalent of asking "what does blue sound like?"
Which implies using existing theories to calculate it. What I think the grand parent post is saying is that we don't know for sure our current theories are all correct. After all, if we knew it all 100% correctly, there wouldn't be any need to build the LHC.
This line of logic is ridiculous. We're building the LHC to explore many things, one of which is probing a few plausible alternate theories that predict black hole production at a measurable rate. But the assumption that that means we can't come up with logically-consistent explanations of how such a black-hole would behave is ridiculous. You can put some bounds on it, right? You can say that a black hole won't make bunnies leap out of the wall. Not because it *sounds* ridiculous, but because there's no mathematically and logically internally consistent theory under which such a thing could happen. You can keep moving this line until you start finding regimes of behavior that might be consistent with new theories allowed, compatible with previous observations but allowing new ones under these new conditions. And that's what theorists are doing!
Any claim of unexpected behavior without a plausible and mathematically self-consistent theory to back it up is baseless. Which isn't to say one doesn't exist (the whole absence of evidence thing), but until one does, there's just as much sense to prepare for the coming bunny invasion.
I hate to respond to this sort of thing because on paper you're right, but you're ignoring GP's point. You can be legally the rightest person in the world and that doesn't change the fact that the US does what the majority within it wants most of the time. In a rare handful of cases, you'll get the Supreme Court protecting a minority via Constitutional protections, but far more often they tend to side with the status quo, especially in cases like federal highways, etc, when they even manage to GET to the courts despite the fact that nobody has standing to sue because there's no single victim, just taxpayers at large (and the strict constructionalists). Hell, go read Gonzales vs. Raich and tell me the government is doing anything other than justifying its own existence. These days, crafting a narrowly applicable decision is considered a judicial merit, as opposed to telling people what the law actually says.
I apologize if I'm ranting and sound jaded, but the fact of the matter is the US government has power inasmuch as the people believe it does. Not because of guns or military, but just popular mindset, because to question it gets you branded as a Ron-Paul-loving weirdo or something. No movement to return the federal level to the restricted enumerated powers the Constitution originally granted it is ever going to get traction as long as people are happy.
I don't really know what the answer is. I do like your idea of divorcing health plans from employers. There's really no reason to get your health insurance through your job.
Taxes. If you know you're going to spend 10k or more per year on healthcare ANYWAY, it's appealing to an employer to offer to pay it directly and save the income taxes. The same reason you see corporate cars, day-care, etc. Except that this is a perk that's gotten particularly more pervasive to the point where it's expected and very difficult to do on your own.
And there's no real synergy or comparative advantage from having your employer do these things. I think the income tax system here is being a bad motivator. Maybe we should start taxing benefits (but then how do you tax in-house benefits like day-care? I don't see an easy solution).
I don't understand why people treat health-care uniquely like this. Very few demand the government provide housing for people who can't afford it, or that the government feed people who can't afford it. Yes we have programs that help in some ways, but there's rarely a "public option" in the sense of "don't worry about it, use this system, we spread the load over the tax-payers". What programs there are consist of financial assistance to indeed "find your own care".
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be nice for a government to do these things for people, to feed and house them and care for them when they're sick, it's just that it doesn't seem to be part of what a government's functions should be. At least in American culture. And I'm trying not to judge whether that's good or bad, just observing.
No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it.
That's not entirely true. US Copyright law carves out some "compulsory licensing" exceptions that copyright holders are obligated to accept particular amounts of payment on and cannot deny permission. Web radio, for example. Mechanical reproduction for another (cover bands, etc). Which I believe may have been the exception this guy was going for, by trying to ride the fine line of what constitutes a new recording of the work. Even the makers of Guitar Hero did this (albeit in a much more legal way, by actually playing and rerecording the songs), and resulted with what sounded to the amateur as identical to the originals.
So this guy's idea wasn't necessarily *crazy*, just too close to literal duplication for this judge's taste (seems even the legal system applies some common sense now and then).
There are those who suggest that homosexuality isn't a choice, but a strong genetic predisposition. If one can choose not to be homosexual, they are at core the same as everyone else, and then gay marriage laws aren't discriminating against people, but behavior. Granted the behavior discriminated on is a silly and unnecessary distinction when judging marriages (homosexual couples have demonstrated they can raise children, have stable households, contribute positively to society), but it's no longer a civil rights issue.
Is this a road we want to go down? Surely there must be some consideration for genetic predispositions.
Everyone and their brother has made the big points about older hardware and manufacturer support, but I'll also chime in that Linux has infinitely better hardware support for non-x86 architectures and the devices on them (since modern Windows has literally none).
There's a big world out there beyond the commodity desktop: servers, smartphones, integrated devices, etc. Many running Linux.
It is true that Linux has amazing hardware support. Much better than Windows. But a different set of hardware. Probably not the hardware you're interested in, if in this case it's a formerly working Windows desktop. But even sometimes in the overlapping cases Linux support *is* better (Intel hardware, namely). Your mileage will most certainly vary.
The only way to remove the setuid requirement from ping (apart from making your system thoroughly insecure) is to allow messages to be sent and received on raw sockets opened by non-root only if they're ICMP ECHO messages (I'm not aware of any other ICMP messages that it's useful for user code to send).
That's absolutely not the only way. You can make raw sockets accessible via a node in/dev, which you can assign to a group, control membership in, and setuid/setgid a NON-root user to "ping".
A *lot* of system resources are controlled in this manner (dri, sound, disks). I still don't think it's a sufficiently versatile security model (cf my comment on sandboxing), but it's a good place to start.
Setuid is certainly a trade-off, but it seems a little absurd that you need full root permissions to access just the special resources "ping" needs to function. If anything, vulnerabilities like these are calls for a more fine-grained capability-based security system, that only grants the expected privileges needed for a given process to function.
While I'm dreaming I'll also take sandboxing for user-executed processes. And a pony.
I choose the one that will install on the hardware I own. or the one that has the most pro user functions and anti carrier functions...
I.E. mp3 ringtones that are not locked out.
Backgrounds can be any file I choose to upload to it, same as themes. Give me a way to design and upload a look change without makign the carrier rich.
All features enabled and systems in place that keep the carrier from disabling features in the phone or forcing an update to my phone that is crippled.
Allows me to use a voip client at a wifi hotspot to circumvent airtime charges.
The Palm Pre is what you're looking for (though I don't think there's a voip app yet... just that Palm doesn't have the ability to lock one out when it comes around).
In all seriousness, I love the philosophy behind my Pre. It doesn't come with an install CD. There's no such thing as "Pre software". It works with internet services and data protocols you already have. Mail, chat, calendar, and contacts sync through Google. All uploads to the phone (ringtones, wallpapers) and downloads from it (photos) are done on a flat file-system on a USB mass storage device (standard USB micro cable, BTW, the same one that powers it). Music goes through iTunes, not some branded "Sprint Pre Jukebox" (yes, they should've used the less proprietary MTP, but you can upload as flat files if you like). Apps can be (and are) created by third parties and installed without Sprint/Palm's approval. Including a bluetooth tethering app.
Using common preexisting standards. Not creating its own protocols to lock you into their services. All features available and unlocked. Slashdotters should approve of this.
No offense, but if you accept that explanation, you're one of the suckers their PR people spew that line for. That's not why they are charging more. Prices are set based upon maximizing profitability, not based on "cost + some acceptable profit margin".
I agree with your post in entirety, but I'll take it a step farther and say "Who cares?" Different markets are different. Amazon doesn't owe you an explanation as to why it's "fair". You either take them up on their offer or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, you're right in this particular case, but you're not thinking broadly enough. There *is* a use for the "right" way, namely package managers, at least for those of us under Linux. I don't know if Flash is a "component" under these definitions, but I like being able to keep it synced with my distro's repositories the same way I update the rest of my software.
What nitpicking? You claimed one can fork BSD code and change the code's license. That's wrong.
It's effectively the same thing. You can release a "derivative work" that contains an extra newline at the end and release it under a different license. But the original will still be available, so nobody does that.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 'use tax' loophole, as long as enforcement of it followed some guidelines that ensured it wasn't being used to discriminate on the state of origin of the product (use tax can't be higher than regular sales tax, for example, see Associated Industries v. Lohman, 511 US 641).
But to answer your actual question, it's being debated because the States are looking for some public sympathy so they can persuade Congress to address the issue with legislation. To which Congress which has shown no interest whatsoever. So I say (sarcastically) "good luck with that".
There's two parties in any transaction: the seller and the buyer. Both use services of their own state. I suppose the most fair situation would be to split the bill down the middle and give each state its percentage of that half of the bill, with each party being responsible for his own jurisdiction's taxes.
Linux supports something called Extended File Attributes in most of its file-systems, going all the way back to ext2. Any program can write and read name/value pairs for a file via system calls in attr/attributes.h. These follow the file when its moved, copied, etc. There's still the downside that the information doesn't follow the file when you send the file by email, HTTP, or FAT USB key, so it's not a perfect solution. But it does follow file moves, copies, etc, and can be read by any program that wants to.
I think you confused my argument. I wasn't attempting to talk about the lauding of taking by force. I was merely demonstrating-by-example GGP's argument that ownership was a social construct, which wasn't made any more innate by scarcity. I was proving that, yes, societies did in fact treat ownership of at least one type of scarce resource differently from modern society. There are other examples (dictatorships, grants from the Crown, what have you). And there are even different types of ownership (people) if you want to get extreme about it.
I didn't mean to endorse any view on the recognition or rejection of IP, just that scarcity doesn't provide the defining element of guidance in constructing ownership rights in society. There are many arguments based in utility, shared cultural beliefs in the populace, etc, to consider.
Possession is, if you will, an inherent property of the universe.
Tell that to the native Americans.
Land ownership is a social construct. Yes, if you believe in ownership of tangibles, you will have to enforce a limit of one owner per item, to respect physical realities, but that doesn't mandate the concept of ownership in the first place.
I'm not saying that just because it isn't innate it isn't a sensible right. The USA is based on a society that buys into a certain set of premises, of which property ownership is one of them, and a useful one at that. But that doesn't mean it's the only sensible way to run a society.
At most, that company has a copyright over the CD version that they're creating.
Right. Which is what they're trying to protect.
If you want to do your own digitization of the laws and put them up online, you have every right. The content isn't a secret or protected in any way. But you can't just throw up a quick shell script to piggy-back off the contractors' work without being a derivative work and in violation of their copyright.
I don't see the problem. Work has value. Company wants to profit from it. News at 11.
The short answer is yes, and GP's "empty space" model never really holds any water, but the analogies all get fuzzy here. The real variable of merit is the "cross-section", which is a probability of a given interaction taking place in units of certain accelerator collision parameters.
At low energy, the cross-section for "elastic" (traditional photon exchange with the proton) scattering is very high, and inelastic (probing the quark substructure) is very low. At high energy, the elastic cross-section falls off sharply (you're "missing"), and inelastic remains near its small, but now comparatively bigger, number. When these inelastic collisions do occur, instead of hitting one of the three "constituent quarks", you have to apply a parton distribution function (the odds of interacting with a particular flavor of quark or gluon) to see what element of the "sea" you hit, and how much momentum it's carrying away from the proton. And then the rest will fly off to form color-neutral debris
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/nuclear/scatele.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parton_(particle_physics)
Cue the descriptivists....
Eh. Word usage changes over time.
I didn't expect that to work! Can AP31R0N cue blackjack and hookers next?
Photons pop out of the vacuum all the time. A photon and an anti-photon (or do they call it a virtual photon)
Two virtual photons. A photon is its own anti-particle, and since conservation of energy is violated, it has to be off-shell, so virtual (and only exist for as much time as Heisenberg is willing to give it).
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term.
But they're not *equally* incorrect. They're as good as they are useful at modeling the world around us in their particular regimes.
We don't put Newton by the wayside just because we know about GR. And likewise if GR is ever expanded on or replaced, we still might use it to correct the time-slew of GPS satellites. It's about the best tool available for the job. And right now, the best tool for making decisions about the behavior of black holes and high-energy interactions based on the evidence available is telling us not to worry. What cause otherwise *is* there to worry? The fact that the word "black hole" happens to relate to a concept that scares people?
* Also what happens if two or more black holes are created that can then collide with each other? * Can one black hole like particle influence the decay of another black hole particle?. * Could 3 or 4 acting together grow exponentially more easily than one on its own? * Also how would micro-black-hole particle groups behave in other collisions with other non-black holes like particles?
You have to understand that in asking these questions you're implicitly making analogies with the macroscopic world. You're asking for answers to questions that, at the scale and regime of the LHC, may be the equivalent of asking "what does blue sound like?"
Which implies using existing theories to calculate it. What I think the grand parent post is saying is that we don't know for sure our current theories are all correct. After all, if we knew it all 100% correctly, there wouldn't be any need to build the LHC.
This line of logic is ridiculous. We're building the LHC to explore many things, one of which is probing a few plausible alternate theories that predict black hole production at a measurable rate. But the assumption that that means we can't come up with logically-consistent explanations of how such a black-hole would behave is ridiculous. You can put some bounds on it, right? You can say that a black hole won't make bunnies leap out of the wall. Not because it *sounds* ridiculous, but because there's no mathematically and logically internally consistent theory under which such a thing could happen. You can keep moving this line until you start finding regimes of behavior that might be consistent with new theories allowed, compatible with previous observations but allowing new ones under these new conditions. And that's what theorists are doing!
Any claim of unexpected behavior without a plausible and mathematically self-consistent theory to back it up is baseless. Which isn't to say one doesn't exist (the whole absence of evidence thing), but until one does, there's just as much sense to prepare for the coming bunny invasion.
I hate to respond to this sort of thing because on paper you're right, but you're ignoring GP's point. You can be legally the rightest person in the world and that doesn't change the fact that the US does what the majority within it wants most of the time. In a rare handful of cases, you'll get the Supreme Court protecting a minority via Constitutional protections, but far more often they tend to side with the status quo, especially in cases like federal highways, etc, when they even manage to GET to the courts despite the fact that nobody has standing to sue because there's no single victim, just taxpayers at large (and the strict constructionalists). Hell, go read Gonzales vs. Raich and tell me the government is doing anything other than justifying its own existence. These days, crafting a narrowly applicable decision is considered a judicial merit, as opposed to telling people what the law actually says.
I apologize if I'm ranting and sound jaded, but the fact of the matter is the US government has power inasmuch as the people believe it does. Not because of guns or military, but just popular mindset, because to question it gets you branded as a Ron-Paul-loving weirdo or something. No movement to return the federal level to the restricted enumerated powers the Constitution originally granted it is ever going to get traction as long as people are happy.
I don't really know what the answer is. I do like your idea of divorcing health plans from employers. There's really no reason to get your health insurance through your job.
Taxes. If you know you're going to spend 10k or more per year on healthcare ANYWAY, it's appealing to an employer to offer to pay it directly and save the income taxes. The same reason you see corporate cars, day-care, etc. Except that this is a perk that's gotten particularly more pervasive to the point where it's expected and very difficult to do on your own.
And there's no real synergy or comparative advantage from having your employer do these things. I think the income tax system here is being a bad motivator. Maybe we should start taxing benefits (but then how do you tax in-house benefits like day-care? I don't see an easy solution).
I don't understand why people treat health-care uniquely like this. Very few demand the government provide housing for people who can't afford it, or that the government feed people who can't afford it. Yes we have programs that help in some ways, but there's rarely a "public option" in the sense of "don't worry about it, use this system, we spread the load over the tax-payers". What programs there are consist of financial assistance to indeed "find your own care".
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be nice for a government to do these things for people, to feed and house them and care for them when they're sick, it's just that it doesn't seem to be part of what a government's functions should be. At least in American culture. And I'm trying not to judge whether that's good or bad, just observing.
No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it.
That's not entirely true. US Copyright law carves out some "compulsory licensing" exceptions that copyright holders are obligated to accept particular amounts of payment on and cannot deny permission. Web radio, for example. Mechanical reproduction for another (cover bands, etc). Which I believe may have been the exception this guy was going for, by trying to ride the fine line of what constitutes a new recording of the work. Even the makers of Guitar Hero did this (albeit in a much more legal way, by actually playing and rerecording the songs), and resulted with what sounded to the amateur as identical to the originals.
So this guy's idea wasn't necessarily *crazy*, just too close to literal duplication for this judge's taste (seems even the legal system applies some common sense now and then).
There are those who suggest that homosexuality isn't a choice, but a strong genetic predisposition. If one can choose not to be homosexual, they are at core the same as everyone else, and then gay marriage laws aren't discriminating against people, but behavior. Granted the behavior discriminated on is a silly and unnecessary distinction when judging marriages (homosexual couples have demonstrated they can raise children, have stable households, contribute positively to society), but it's no longer a civil rights issue.
Is this a road we want to go down? Surely there must be some consideration for genetic predispositions.
Everyone and their brother has made the big points about older hardware and manufacturer support, but I'll also chime in that Linux has infinitely better hardware support for non-x86 architectures and the devices on them (since modern Windows has literally none).
There's a big world out there beyond the commodity desktop: servers, smartphones, integrated devices, etc. Many running Linux.
It is true that Linux has amazing hardware support. Much better than Windows. But a different set of hardware. Probably not the hardware you're interested in, if in this case it's a formerly working Windows desktop. But even sometimes in the overlapping cases Linux support *is* better (Intel hardware, namely). Your mileage will most certainly vary.
The only way to remove the setuid requirement from ping (apart from making your system thoroughly insecure) is to allow messages to be sent and received on raw sockets opened by non-root only if they're ICMP ECHO messages (I'm not aware of any other ICMP messages that it's useful for user code to send).
That's absolutely not the only way. You can make raw sockets accessible via a node in /dev, which you can assign to a group, control membership in, and setuid/setgid a NON-root user to "ping".
A *lot* of system resources are controlled in this manner (dri, sound, disks). I still don't think it's a sufficiently versatile security model (cf my comment on sandboxing), but it's a good place to start.
Setuid is certainly a trade-off, but it seems a little absurd that you need full root permissions to access just the special resources "ping" needs to function. If anything, vulnerabilities like these are calls for a more fine-grained capability-based security system, that only grants the expected privileges needed for a given process to function.
While I'm dreaming I'll also take sandboxing for user-executed processes. And a pony.
I choose the one that will install on the hardware I own. or the one that has the most pro user functions and anti carrier functions...
I.E. mp3 ringtones that are not locked out. Backgrounds can be any file I choose to upload to it, same as themes. Give me a way to design and upload a look change without makign the carrier rich.
All features enabled and systems in place that keep the carrier from disabling features in the phone or forcing an update to my phone that is crippled.
Allows me to use a voip client at a wifi hotspot to circumvent airtime charges.
The Palm Pre is what you're looking for (though I don't think there's a voip app yet... just that Palm doesn't have the ability to lock one out when it comes around).
In all seriousness, I love the philosophy behind my Pre. It doesn't come with an install CD. There's no such thing as "Pre software". It works with internet services and data protocols you already have. Mail, chat, calendar, and contacts sync through Google. All uploads to the phone (ringtones, wallpapers) and downloads from it (photos) are done on a flat file-system on a USB mass storage device (standard USB micro cable, BTW, the same one that powers it). Music goes through iTunes, not some branded "Sprint Pre Jukebox" (yes, they should've used the less proprietary MTP, but you can upload as flat files if you like). Apps can be (and are) created by third parties and installed without Sprint/Palm's approval. Including a bluetooth tethering app.
Using common preexisting standards. Not creating its own protocols to lock you into their services. All features available and unlocked. Slashdotters should approve of this.
No offense, but if you accept that explanation, you're one of the suckers their PR people spew that line for. That's not why they are charging more. Prices are set based upon maximizing profitability, not based on "cost + some acceptable profit margin".
I agree with your post in entirety, but I'll take it a step farther and say "Who cares?" Different markets are different. Amazon doesn't owe you an explanation as to why it's "fair". You either take them up on their offer or not.
Non-story.
Point taken, there are some cases more suited to verbs than others, but... "Proceed" is what you're looking for there.