but as long as I get the price I wanted, I'm still happy (just maybe not as happy as I could have been had I been in the middleman's position).
And therein lies the rub.
I (the seller) want to sell stuff at 99 "or higher". He (the buyer) want to buy stuff at 100 "or lower".
From there, you have two outcomes:
- We meet, agree to split the difference however we want (half each and we deal at 99.5? buyer wants more and we deal at 99.2?) - The middleman gets in, pockets the 1 difference
In situation 1, the buyer and seller are happy at finding a better trade. In situation 2, the middleman is happy at "correcting" a market imbalance. Unless you are a middleman, you will prefer much being in situation 1. Which is why everybody outside Wall Street... hates the middlemen.
No, they both offer value. The difference is in value offered.
The buy-low/sell-high strategy broker takes a risk. At the instant he buys, he is not sure if he will be selling later. However, by buying at that moment, he gives cash to the seller, cash that would not have been available then. The seller benefits: he gets cash now, not later. And, in return for the risk of maybe not finding the right buyer later, the broker takes his cut - which is the reward for added value: the increased liquidity (seller got his money earlier and could use it).
The HFT brokers don't take risks. The way they operate is that they already know there's a low seller and high buyer - it's just that they didn't had the time to make the trade yet. He buys low from the seller and sells high to the buyer immediately, within milliseconds. And therein lies the quantitative difference: the buyers and seller are already on the market and are on the way to meet each other, when the huckster intercepts each and make him an offer right there.
In essence, the guy above is right: the liquidity has been improved - the seller got his money earlier. All of 5 milli seconds earlier. And, in exchange for this wondrous risk (read: 0, since the "HFT bandits" already knows a buyer) and service (5 millisecond more of money in your pocket! Wonders!), he gets a tiny bit of profit.
Actually, the danger isn't that planes will fall out of the sky or somesuch because they've encountered some ash. The problem comes from the glass/ash mixture having a rather big effect on engines and airframes' wear-and-tear. Flying thru the ash plume probably causes 10 or more times the normal wear on engines. However, the maintenance schedules are rather inflexible on planes.
Net result? The flights won't be dangerous now. They'll be in a couple weeks/months, when you have 90% of your airplane fleet that has engine problems early, the civil aviation inspectors can't inspect them all, and the average european company becomes no more reliable than the lowliest north-african charter plane company.
Sure, they could replace all those engines earlier. If they can find some outside of the counterfeit market at reasonable prices, that is.
(short: Resuming flights before we can figure out the length of the emergency is short-term good, long-term bad)
I believe that the server will accept a small amount of drift in order to keep things in sync.
The server for these things resynchs stuff when you enter the code, or when you activate it. That's why you have to enter your code twice in a row when you activate it: it checks which code you entered (to see how much intervals you're ahead or behind), then the second code makes sure it's not a coincidence, and your internal clock is really X*45s ahead.
The Blizzard fob uses 45s clock intervals. Their maker can't use 1mn clock intervals: that's patented by RSA (yup, RSA patented the fob-code-change-every-60s method. An oversight, I presume, I'd have patented every R seconds, where R is a member of the set of real numbers).
The strength isn't in the fob/app, it's in the data in the fob. To emulate such a fob, you need two things: it's internal clock and it's internal serial number (which is not the serial number printed on it - Blizzard's server has a database that matches the printed number with the real internal seed).
Both of them can be reverse engineered from the fob they come from. But if you have the actual fob at hand, why would you need to break it to steal its code, when it would be easier to simply use it (we're talking about game).
So, the security model boils down to this: to hack a blizzard account, you need to steal a physical object. That will limit the hacking to a close circle around the player (its family, close friends), allowing Blizzard to say "you can police this yourself".
Of course, the authenticator in phones are far more vulnerable. You might be able to sneak in a trojan that gets those two pieces of data (clock & seed) and send them back to you. No need to steal physical stuff.
Yes. Curiously, until june this year, a corporate entity, condemned for fraud, could be subject, depending on the judge, to additional optional penalties. The legal code stated "penalties as stated from paragraph 1 to 9 in article soandso". In june, a "law cleanup" bill went into effect. Among those things rewritten, penalties for corporate entities were unchanged... except for fraud. For fraud, a corporate entity could only be subject to penalties from paragraph TWO to 9.
Paragraph 1 was "dissolution of the corporate entity". Yup, a bill, introduced a month just before the lawsuit was due to be examined, removed specifically any possibility of dissolving a legal organisation that engaged in fraud. Nothing else, just what the Scientology was accused of.
Now, of course, it's being fixed. Alas, the law can't apply retroactively if it leads to harsher penalties, so...
So there could potentially be huge caverns on the moon? enough to make a difference in the amount of gravity?
Alas no. The moon gravity anomalies have been mostly mapped (because that's "relatively" easy). They're named Mascons, or Mass Concentrations, i.e. areas of greater density, instead of hollows.
Nitpicking: Internet access is not a fundamental right. If it was, the goverment would have a mandate to ensure that each and every person has internet access. What it recognizes is that interference with internet access is an interference with free speech, which is slightly different.
Prior cases are used as guidelines in how to interpret a law on borderline/ambiguous cases. Jurisprudence is only that. A judge can perfectly well ignore completely a prior case and make a different decision, as long as its decisions fit within the law, as written from legislative bodies.
That's why there's a completely separate system to decide on laws (the Conseil Constitutionnel) and cases (Conseil d'Etat, for any administrative cases, Cour de Cassation, for civil and penal cases).
how does one ensure that the creators (and their owners) make enough to offset the cost of making the first copy?
First, don't talk about copy. Content business will have to stop being about copies to survive in a world of ubiquitous cheap copying. Aside, that's the thoughie: right now, everybody in the content industry has its cart hitched on the per-copy model.
Each author gets paid by the (sold) copy. However, if you look at the copyright legislation, you'll see that's not a feature. There's nothing in law that dictates that an author must be paid by the copy. It's just that they (the authors) are used to that model. Heck, they even have evolved complex models to account for the correct number of copies for their payments - and if you dare miscount, why, they'll sue you. But there's no base law that requires authors to be paid so, it's just that it's "how it's been always done".
Do I have a solution? No. If I did, I would probably have started a content business of the 21st century. Someone will figure out a good model. Meanwhile, everybody tries to animate the zombie of the old model so they can get some useful work out of it. Will it cause a lot of people to lose their jobs? Probably - that's how every major technical progress did: previous business dies, new business with lower overhead rises instead. You get more jobs when you invent something that no one consumed before, but that's not the case here.
Some countries are readying themselves for the new models. I read someone speaking about China and the music business there. He said that artists based their living on performances, tours, private concerts, whatever. No one expected much money to come from recordings - every recording is going to be duplicated and distributed at close to zero cost, so they don't try to compete with the zero-cost non-professional duplication; they just make money otherwise. Your music recordings are treated as advertising. And that's they country we're trying to strangle with ACTA and the like, and force to move out from the 21st century business era back to the 19th century one under the various threats of commercial sanctions "if you don't copy our obsolete and unviable US models".
The french presidential majority, you mean. Don't mistake the french with their politicians, or we could all think you're clones of G.W. Bush:)
The major problem of the 3-strike law is that it's a read-guard action that does essentially nothing (at worst) and completely ignores economic forces (at best).
30 years ago, in 1979, if I wanted to get a permanent copy of some content - say, a novel -, I would have to purchase a bunch of paper, some inks, find the appropriate tools (thank god, Xerox already existed), spend a couple hours preparing stuff, and would end with my copy of the novel. At the same time, a professional content copier - which I would call, say, a printer - would purchase paper at a discount compared to me, inks the same, have the tools ready for use, spend 1/1000th of the time I did per copy. Requiring the services of a professional content duplicator to make my copy of some content made economical sense.
Today, making a copy of some content involves about a milliwatt or so of electricity, a tool I already have, and 5s of my index or middle finger to do copy/paste. Using a professional content duplicator to make a copy of some content is an economically non-viable proposition, no matter how you turn around things. You cannot justify charging 15$ to make a DVD copy of a movie when I can make the same copy, at the same quality level, for one cent. And when I purchase your DVD, from my point of view, I am paying somebody 15$ for making a copy for me. That's good, if your DVD is a luxury item. But for a common economy good? Not working.
The profession of content duplicator is dead. Or dying. Like any profession that is no longer economically justified, it will go, like the hordes of people who slaved at hand looms to make cloths when Mr. Jacquart came with his automatic looms. They yelled, they ranted, they ran into the streets (hmmm, how many popular showings of movie industry people have we seen in the streets so far?). And in the end, they went, for no one would pay triple or worse prices for the same product.
The entire content industry is running in circles because, for good or worse, they all have hitched their cart to the profession of content duplicator. We still need people to create content (we call them artists). We still need businesses to find "good" content creators from the masses and advertise this content (we call them editors). We still need businesses to take the raw content, polish it, make sure it's well done (we call them producers). We even need business to deliver that content to us (we used to call them retail chains). What we no longer need is content duplicators. However, the whole content industry has decided (well, evolved) around the content duplicator. Why else are artists paid by the copy, if not because they use the content duplicator as the driver of their revenue. Everyone else in the industry does. Steve Jobs knew it when he was asked if he favored Blu-ray or HD-DVD: he said it didn't matter, because the idea of making expensive copies of content was already dying.
With that profession dying, they need to find out new methods of doing those services, and get paid. One segment of the content industry has already found it: the distributors. The guys who are delivering the content to the consumers are already there; they're called ISPs, and they charge people for the delivery of content - any content - and they're happy. They don't care if the content is subcription-based TV, iTunes songs, web pages, or BitTorrent P2P streams. They have found out the new business model of content delivery, and they're ready for the 21st century. The rest of the content profession still hasn't figured out, or, in the case of the old delivery channels will be dead. As usual when business models change, most of the old business go titsup and new business appear instead - only rarely will an existing business figure out it needs changing, figure out how it will change, and do it.
And when they have figured out how to live without the content duplicators, then HADOPI will become like all those laws that require you to keep your riding crop in hand when crossing another vehicle: something that's completely irrelevant.
The consequences will be simple, and depends on how fast the Telecom pack legislation passes in Europe
1) The Conseil Constitutionnel gets mandated to have a look at the law, and the Telecom pack is already there. It will throw the HADOEPI law back to the parliament as incompatible with the EU legislation, and hence invalid. And it's all much ado about nothing.
2) The telecom pack gets delayed, and the law proceeds without major challenge (the selfsame Conseil might also invalidate the law as being incompatible with key elements of the french constitution itself, go to step 1). The telecom goes in force, and France gets X years to put his legislation back into conformance (i.e. geld the HADOEPI's extra-judicial powers) or face punitive damages.
3) The Telecom pack gets brute forced AGAINST the wishes of the european parliament, which will simply demonstrate to all europeans that EU isn't a democratic institution, and needs bigger reforms than the last treaty, and the french presidential lobby is happy, and can wield a big ban stick to cover their abnormal business model based on luxury-levels professional content duplication (in an era where anyone can duplicate any content for less than an euro cent, paying any service to create a copy of a content for you is an economic aberration)
Exactly. By all measures, LOTRO is a succesful game. You do not need to be a "WoW Killer" to be a succesful game, nor even to have millions of subscribers. If you are growing (and if you didn't invest so much you do need in fact 10 times your potential subscriber bases to recoup your costs), then you are successful.
The failure of the most recents MMO isn't that they didn't reach WoW numbers. It's that they failed out of the door.
And the lesson, as painful as it is, starts to enter the producers' brains: You live and die by your launch. You botch your launch, you die.
It's a bit more than that. With sovereignty, you lose a large chunk of your internal economy and logistics. A lot of that will not have to be re-acquired, it will have to be rebuilt, from the ground up.
The reason BoB was able to hold on its central Delve systems was that sovereign systems are easy to defend. You have cynos, you have jumpbridges, you have reserves of capitals and super-capitals ready to reinforce. And it helped that Delve was a very rich sector, making it a perfect logistics base.
Those advantages are gone. They have to be rebuilt - and most ennemy corps will not stand idle while BoB regroup. Look at the influence map: BoB has started to reassert sovereignty in pieces, but there's already huge chunks of territory carved. Getting them back... is going to take months. Or a year. Or two.
Each of the States has an Electoral College, or "Grand Electors". Each State, independently, decides which of the candidates it supports. Currently, all states do so by having their people vote in a popular election, but that's not, strictly speaking, an obligation from the Constitution.
Once a State has decided on the candidate, its Electoral College votes, unanimously, for that candidate at the "real election", which is a formality today, as all States' Electoral College size is known, as is their ballot. But still.
Let's take a State, say, Florida. It has 25 in its Electoral College. The election comes, and ends with 50.1% for Bush, and 49.9% for Gore, at last recount. That means that every single of those 25 votes will go for Bush. 25 for Bush, 0 for Gore.
Repeat for every single state. That's the Presidential Election.
The resulting problem is that it magnifies small discrepancies. One vote in the Electoral College that designates candidate A from a 51% win is exactly the same vote from one that designated candidate A with 70% margin. Not everyone's vote is weighted the same in the final decision. I think that, theoretically, you could have over 60% of the popular vote, and still fail (which requires you to lose by a margin of 1 vote in a number of key states, and win by 100% in the rest, so that's still largely theoretical. A good computer can crunch you the exact difference).
And yes, that's pretty indicative of a broken system. All tentatives to reform it have failed so far.
I remember something about Halo originally being designed for the PC then msft bought it and had it ported to console,...
Don't let any rabid Apple Fan hear you. Halo was originally a full OpenGL Mac game. Fans still remember the Jobs keynote "Great games are coming back to the Mac", with Jason Jones showing a cinematic with "all this is rendered real time, in OpenGL"... Bungee was a Mac-only outfit, until Microsoft, sniffing out a potential flagship game for its new XBOX system, bought them out in 2000, sank the whole Mac/OpenGL part, and... the rest is history.
what does SL offer beyond a traditional IRC-style chat? Wouldn't a chatroom on the show's website offer an easier way to communicate?
Ambiance. Just as there are people who find mutt or an xterm-based IRC client perfectly adequate, yet the vast majority prefers a GUI font-end. As anyone can tell you, the packaging does make a difference to the product.
To be honest, they have introduced a credit system. Whenever you leave a bike on an uphill depot, you get credited of 15 unmetered minutes for this rental, or any further one. This works only for year-long subscribers, not daily tickets.
The mini-trucks are gas powered, and "eco friendly". Supposedly.
No. Corporations are by their very definition intelligence without emotion. People have emotions, but those people don't apply emotions when working for corporations. They do apply their intelligence, though.
I think Jerry Yang at Yahoo might disagree with you about emotional reactions. Notably when Microsoft is involved.
I think they are the ones that need to be "educated".
In many ways. The article notes that "because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.", "they (drm/simlock/subsidisies) were necessary components of the current mobile industry", and "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here".
The conclusion: Instead of the industry evolving, the programmers (namely, the Open Source crowd) need to go back to the old outdated model.
When you recognise yourself that your business model is flawed and doesn't work, the LAST thing you want is to attempt to perpetuate it. You can hold on it by brute force for a while, but you'll lose your short-term gains in the long term.
Of course, very few companies really think long term. The tyranny of publically owned companies and their stock.
I am surprised that no one made a reference to Cosm (I have the Hardcover instead of this one, thanks), from esteemed physicist G. Benford, for a science-fictional treatment of that very topic (universe creation).
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. Figuring out the answer to that "security question", like "what is your mother's maiden name" suddendly became much, much easier.
And therein lies the rub.
I (the seller) want to sell stuff at 99 "or higher". He (the buyer) want to buy stuff at 100 "or lower".
From there, you have two outcomes:
- We meet, agree to split the difference however we want (half each and we deal at 99.5? buyer wants more and we deal at 99.2?)
- The middleman gets in, pockets the 1 difference
In situation 1, the buyer and seller are happy at finding a better trade. In situation 2, the middleman is happy at "correcting" a market imbalance. Unless you are a middleman, you will prefer much being in situation 1. Which is why everybody outside Wall Street... hates the middlemen.
No, they both offer value. The difference is in value offered.
The buy-low/sell-high strategy broker takes a risk. At the instant he buys, he is not sure if he will be selling later. However, by buying at that moment, he gives cash to the seller, cash that would not have been available then. The seller benefits: he gets cash now, not later. And, in return for the risk of maybe not finding the right buyer later, the broker takes his cut - which is the reward for added value: the increased liquidity (seller got his money earlier and could use it).
The HFT brokers don't take risks. The way they operate is that they already know there's a low seller and high buyer - it's just that they didn't had the time to make the trade yet. He buys low from the seller and sells high to the buyer immediately, within milliseconds. And therein lies the quantitative difference: the buyers and seller are already on the market and are on the way to meet each other, when the huckster intercepts each and make him an offer right there.
In essence, the guy above is right: the liquidity has been improved - the seller got his money earlier. All of 5 milli seconds earlier. And, in exchange for this wondrous risk (read: 0, since the "HFT bandits" already knows a buyer) and service (5 millisecond more of money in your pocket! Wonders!), he gets a tiny bit of profit.
Tell that to Mt. Tambora.
(ok, he had some help)
Actually, the danger isn't that planes will fall out of the sky or somesuch because they've encountered some ash. The problem comes from the glass/ash mixture having a rather big effect on engines and airframes' wear-and-tear. Flying thru the ash plume probably causes 10 or more times the normal wear on engines. However, the maintenance schedules are rather inflexible on planes.
Net result? The flights won't be dangerous now. They'll be in a couple weeks/months, when you have 90% of your airplane fleet that has engine problems early, the civil aviation inspectors can't inspect them all, and the average european company becomes no more reliable than the lowliest north-african charter plane company.
Sure, they could replace all those engines earlier. If they can find some outside of the counterfeit market at reasonable prices, that is.
(short: Resuming flights before we can figure out the length of the emergency is short-term good, long-term bad)
The server for these things resynchs stuff when you enter the code, or when you activate it. That's why you have to enter your code twice in a row when you activate it: it checks which code you entered (to see how much intervals you're ahead or behind), then the second code makes sure it's not a coincidence, and your internal clock is really X*45s ahead.
The Blizzard fob uses 45s clock intervals. Their maker can't use 1mn clock intervals: that's patented by RSA (yup, RSA patented the fob-code-change-every-60s method. An oversight, I presume, I'd have patented every R seconds, where R is a member of the set of real numbers).
The strength isn't in the fob/app, it's in the data in the fob. To emulate such a fob, you need two things: it's internal clock and it's internal serial number (which is not the serial number printed on it - Blizzard's server has a database that matches the printed number with the real internal seed).
Both of them can be reverse engineered from the fob they come from. But if you have the actual fob at hand, why would you need to break it to steal its code, when it would be easier to simply use it (we're talking about game).
So, the security model boils down to this: to hack a blizzard account, you need to steal a physical object. That will limit the hacking to a close circle around the player (its family, close friends), allowing Blizzard to say "you can police this yourself".
Of course, the authenticator in phones are far more vulnerable. You might be able to sneak in a trojan that gets those two pieces of data (clock & seed) and send them back to you. No need to steal physical stuff.
Yes. Curiously, until june this year, a corporate entity, condemned for fraud, could be subject, depending on the judge, to additional optional penalties. The legal code stated "penalties as stated from paragraph 1 to 9 in article soandso". In june, a "law cleanup" bill went into effect. Among those things rewritten, penalties for corporate entities were unchanged... except for fraud. For fraud, a corporate entity could only be subject to penalties from paragraph TWO to 9.
Paragraph 1 was "dissolution of the corporate entity". Yup, a bill, introduced a month just before the lawsuit was due to be examined, removed specifically any possibility of dissolving a legal organisation that engaged in fraud. Nothing else, just what the Scientology was accused of.
Now, of course, it's being fixed. Alas, the law can't apply retroactively if it leads to harsher penalties, so...
Alas no. The moon gravity anomalies have been mostly mapped (because that's "relatively" easy). They're named Mascons, or Mass Concentrations, i.e. areas of greater density, instead of hollows.
See the video where this advanced tactic is discussed ("Grandfather paradox" section).
At last a (former) man who knows his classics.
Nitpicking: Internet access is not a fundamental right. If it was, the goverment would have a mandate to ensure that each and every person has internet access. What it recognizes is that interference with internet access is an interference with free speech, which is slightly different.
Prior cases are used as guidelines in how to interpret a law on borderline/ambiguous cases. Jurisprudence is only that. A judge can perfectly well ignore completely a prior case and make a different decision, as long as its decisions fit within the law, as written from legislative bodies.
That's why there's a completely separate system to decide on laws (the Conseil Constitutionnel) and cases (Conseil d'Etat, for any administrative cases, Cour de Cassation, for civil and penal cases).
First, don't talk about copy. Content business will have to stop being about copies to survive in a world of ubiquitous cheap copying. Aside, that's the thoughie: right now, everybody in the content industry has its cart hitched on the per-copy model.
Each author gets paid by the (sold) copy. However, if you look at the copyright legislation, you'll see that's not a feature. There's nothing in law that dictates that an author must be paid by the copy. It's just that they (the authors) are used to that model. Heck, they even have evolved complex models to account for the correct number of copies for their payments - and if you dare miscount, why, they'll sue you. But there's no base law that requires authors to be paid so, it's just that it's "how it's been always done".
Do I have a solution? No. If I did, I would probably have started a content business of the 21st century. Someone will figure out a good model. Meanwhile, everybody tries to animate the zombie of the old model so they can get some useful work out of it. Will it cause a lot of people to lose their jobs? Probably - that's how every major technical progress did: previous business dies, new business with lower overhead rises instead. You get more jobs when you invent something that no one consumed before, but that's not the case here.
Some countries are readying themselves for the new models. I read someone speaking about China and the music business there. He said that artists based their living on performances, tours, private concerts, whatever. No one expected much money to come from recordings - every recording is going to be duplicated and distributed at close to zero cost, so they don't try to compete with the zero-cost non-professional duplication; they just make money otherwise. Your music recordings are treated as advertising. And that's they country we're trying to strangle with ACTA and the like, and force to move out from the 21st century business era back to the 19th century one under the various threats of commercial sanctions "if you don't copy our obsolete and unviable US models".
The french presidential majority, you mean. Don't mistake the french with their politicians, or we could all think you're clones of G.W. Bush :)
The major problem of the 3-strike law is that it's a read-guard action that does essentially nothing (at worst) and completely ignores economic forces (at best).
30 years ago, in 1979, if I wanted to get a permanent copy of some content - say, a novel -, I would have to purchase a bunch of paper, some inks, find the appropriate tools (thank god, Xerox already existed), spend a couple hours preparing stuff, and would end with my copy of the novel. At the same time, a professional content copier - which I would call, say, a printer - would purchase paper at a discount compared to me, inks the same, have the tools ready for use, spend 1/1000th of the time I did per copy. Requiring the services of a professional content duplicator to make my copy of some content made economical sense.
Today, making a copy of some content involves about a milliwatt or so of electricity, a tool I already have, and 5s of my index or middle finger to do copy/paste. Using a professional content duplicator to make a copy of some content is an economically non-viable proposition, no matter how you turn around things. You cannot justify charging 15$ to make a DVD copy of a movie when I can make the same copy, at the same quality level, for one cent. And when I purchase your DVD, from my point of view, I am paying somebody 15$ for making a copy for me. That's good, if your DVD is a luxury item. But for a common economy good? Not working.
The profession of content duplicator is dead. Or dying. Like any profession that is no longer economically justified, it will go, like the hordes of people who slaved at hand looms to make cloths when Mr. Jacquart came with his automatic looms. They yelled, they ranted, they ran into the streets (hmmm, how many popular showings of movie industry people have we seen in the streets so far?). And in the end, they went, for no one would pay triple or worse prices for the same product.
The entire content industry is running in circles because, for good or worse, they all have hitched their cart to the profession of content duplicator. We still need people to create content (we call them artists). We still need businesses to find "good" content creators from the masses and advertise this content (we call them editors). We still need businesses to take the raw content, polish it, make sure it's well done (we call them producers). We even need business to deliver that content to us (we used to call them retail chains). What we no longer need is content duplicators. However, the whole content industry has decided (well, evolved) around the content duplicator. Why else are artists paid by the copy, if not because they use the content duplicator as the driver of their revenue. Everyone else in the industry does. Steve Jobs knew it when he was asked if he favored Blu-ray or HD-DVD: he said it didn't matter, because the idea of making expensive copies of content was already dying.
With that profession dying, they need to find out new methods of doing those services, and get paid. One segment of the content industry has already found it: the distributors. The guys who are delivering the content to the consumers are already there; they're called ISPs, and they charge people for the delivery of content - any content - and they're happy. They don't care if the content is subcription-based TV, iTunes songs, web pages, or BitTorrent P2P streams. They have found out the new business model of content delivery, and they're ready for the 21st century. The rest of the content profession still hasn't figured out, or, in the case of the old delivery channels will be dead. As usual when business models change, most of the old business go titsup and new business appear instead - only rarely will an existing business figure out it needs changing, figure out how it will change, and do it.
And when they have figured out how to live without the content duplicators, then HADOPI will become like all those laws that require you to keep your riding crop in hand when crossing another vehicle: something that's completely irrelevant.
The consequences will be simple, and depends on how fast the Telecom pack legislation passes in Europe
1) The Conseil Constitutionnel gets mandated to have a look at the law, and the Telecom pack is already there. It will throw the HADOEPI law back to the parliament as incompatible with the EU legislation, and hence invalid. And it's all much ado about nothing.
2) The telecom pack gets delayed, and the law proceeds without major challenge (the selfsame Conseil might also invalidate the law as being incompatible with key elements of the french constitution itself, go to step 1). The telecom goes in force, and France gets X years to put his legislation back into conformance (i.e. geld the HADOEPI's extra-judicial powers) or face punitive damages.
3) The Telecom pack gets brute forced AGAINST the wishes of the european parliament, which will simply demonstrate to all europeans that EU isn't a democratic institution, and needs bigger reforms than the last treaty, and the french presidential lobby is happy, and can wield a big ban stick to cover their abnormal business model based on luxury-levels professional content duplication (in an era where anyone can duplicate any content for less than an euro cent, paying any service to create a copy of a content for you is an economic aberration)
Exactly. By all measures, LOTRO is a succesful game. You do not need to be a "WoW Killer" to be a succesful game, nor even to have millions of subscribers. If you are growing (and if you didn't invest so much you do need in fact 10 times your potential subscriber bases to recoup your costs), then you are successful.
The failure of the most recents MMO isn't that they didn't reach WoW numbers. It's that they failed out of the door.
And the lesson, as painful as it is, starts to enter the producers' brains: You live and die by your launch. You botch your launch, you die.
It's a bit more than that. With sovereignty, you lose a large chunk of your internal economy and logistics. A lot of that will not have to be re-acquired, it will have to be rebuilt, from the ground up.
The reason BoB was able to hold on its central Delve systems was that sovereign systems are easy to defend. You have cynos, you have jumpbridges, you have reserves of capitals and super-capitals ready to reinforce. And it helped that Delve was a very rich sector, making it a perfect logistics base.
Those advantages are gone. They have to be rebuilt - and most ennemy corps will not stand idle while BoB regroup. Look at the influence map: BoB has started to reassert sovereignty in pieces, but there's already huge chunks of territory carved. Getting them back... is going to take months. Or a year. Or two.
Simple summary:
Each of the States has an Electoral College, or "Grand Electors". Each State, independently, decides which of the candidates it supports. Currently, all states do so by having their people vote in a popular election, but that's not, strictly speaking, an obligation from the Constitution.
Once a State has decided on the candidate, its Electoral College votes, unanimously, for that candidate at the "real election", which is a formality today, as all States' Electoral College size is known, as is their ballot. But still.
Let's take a State, say, Florida. It has 25 in its Electoral College. The election comes, and ends with 50.1% for Bush, and 49.9% for Gore, at last recount. That means that every single of those 25 votes will go for Bush. 25 for Bush, 0 for Gore.
Repeat for every single state. That's the Presidential Election.
The resulting problem is that it magnifies small discrepancies. One vote in the Electoral College that designates candidate A from a 51% win is exactly the same vote from one that designated candidate A with 70% margin. Not everyone's vote is weighted the same in the final decision. I think that, theoretically, you could have over 60% of the popular vote, and still fail (which requires you to lose by a margin of 1 vote in a number of key states, and win by 100% in the rest, so that's still largely theoretical. A good computer can crunch you the exact difference).
And yes, that's pretty indicative of a broken system. All tentatives to reform it have failed so far.
Don't let any rabid Apple Fan hear you. Halo was originally a full OpenGL Mac game. Fans still remember the Jobs keynote "Great games are coming back to the Mac", with Jason Jones showing a cinematic with "all this is rendered real time, in OpenGL"... Bungee was a Mac-only outfit, until Microsoft, sniffing out a potential flagship game for its new XBOX system, bought them out in 2000, sank the whole Mac/OpenGL part, and... the rest is history.
Ambiance. Just as there are people who find mutt or an xterm-based IRC client perfectly adequate, yet the vast majority prefers a GUI font-end. As anyone can tell you, the packaging does make a difference to the product.
To be honest, they have introduced a credit system. Whenever you leave a bike on an uphill depot, you get credited of 15 unmetered minutes for this rental, or any further one. This works only for year-long subscribers, not daily tickets.
The mini-trucks are gas powered, and "eco friendly". Supposedly.
I think Jerry Yang at Yahoo might disagree with you about emotional reactions. Notably when Microsoft is involved.
In many ways. The article notes that "because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.", "they (drm/simlock/subsidisies) were necessary components of the current mobile industry", and "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here".
The conclusion: Instead of the industry evolving, the programmers (namely, the Open Source crowd) need to go back to the old outdated model.
When you recognise yourself that your business model is flawed and doesn't work, the LAST thing you want is to attempt to perpetuate it. You can hold on it by brute force for a while, but you'll lose your short-term gains in the long term.
Of course, very few companies really think long term. The tyranny of publically owned companies and their stock.
I am surprised that no one made a reference to Cosm (I have the Hardcover instead of this one, thanks), from esteemed physicist G. Benford, for a science-fictional treatment of that very topic (universe creation).