While streaming may be a little troublesome, if you are using download and watch instead, 1mbit/600kbit is far superior to a 20GB cap which is what the cable industry seems to be aiming for.
Really, the cable industry have an internet setup that is failing and they know it. Their last mile networks can't handle scaling up.
Here's someone trying to compare, say, an illegally downloaded Madonna tune to, for example, the technology used to build a solid fuel booster
When it comes to difference between copying and stealing it is the same. They are very different in size though, but still not stealing.
. I might add that you've a remarkably uninformed and downright dangerous attitude regarding industrial and military secrets
Not really. I am fully aware that secrets is one of the best ways to control the world. I understand why the ones at the top likes to keep them. And the US being the top military bully in the world of course wants to remain there by keeping their secrets.
You're naivete is almost endearing, but I'm really glad you're not in charge of security at any important government facility.
I would be more afraid that you are in charge of one. Someone who don't understand the difference between copying and stealing really shouldn't be.
That "someone" was the citizens of the United States. We spent an incredible amount of money developing our space program and its military applications (the two are really inextricable.) We spent it so that we would have more on the ball than anyone else: if China (or anyone else) wants to be equal to us in that regard, let them spend their own money.
Oh yeah, do the same research someone else has done. What an excellent waste of money and resources. Any reasonably intelligent being would try to copy first. Of course, you are fully free to try to prevent the copying.
Of course, if you try to hard to prevent the copying, noone will be able to access it and future advances may be stalled.
There should be long prison terms involved here
Sure, can't disagree with that. It is in the US best interest to have long prison terms for copying your precious secrets.
Mark my words, the day will come when you will care.
Why would I regret that the biggest bully in the world becomes less able to use its power to bully others.
See, when it comes to information about hard-won military technology and strategic assets, copying does equal stealing..
No it doesn't. It is copying. Oh, it is heavy duty copying allright, but it is copying. If it was stealing the US would have just lost all its ability to build space shuttles. If that had happened you would really be in a position to be upset.
And what it actually is, is an espionage issue. Which neither falls under copyright nor stealing.
Honestly, what are you smoking? You need to educate yourself on the history of warfare, and more importantly what is required to maintain peace. Giving your enemies everything you've learned about how to defend yourself is just bloody stupid! It's also a good way to get you and yours killed, or enslaved.
Maintaining peace? I thought we were talking about the US here. One of the most aggressive countries in the second part of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st.
And I never said it was good for the US. But then again, I couldn't care less about the superiority of a war mongering country like the US. You seem to manage to kill yourself off pretty good without anyone else interfering.
What those "copies" do represent is billions, if not trillions, of hard-earned U.S. dollars, money that was spent to maintain military superiority over our enemies, not mere parity. Face it, all through the ages the societies least likely to suffer armed attack have been the ones that carried the biggest stick
Which is a very good reason to copy the US military secrets. Right now the US have the biggest stick, and by getting your hand on it, you are less likely to get invaded by the US as you can actually fight back.
Just be happy that the stick wasn't stolen but just copied.
. Consequently, we don't want the Chinese to be merely equal to us... we want t
And in the same line of thoughts. Why does everyone keep repeating the word stealing. All the chinese did was copy the information. It isn't like the US no longer have the information. China just aquired a copy so they didn't have to waste resources recreating the same information that had already been created by someone.
Copying doesn't equal stealing (although copying certain information such as credit card numbers can be used for stealing and other crimes).
Funny. Nowhere in my post did I advocate piracy. I simply corrected you when you claimed that IP is a free market success, which it isn't. Anyway, I am not going to debate with you anymore after this. If you can't see the different between stealing and copying something you are simply not worthy of debating with.
And, just so you know. You do not own any intellectual property even if you created it. Atmost the goverment gives you certain rights to restrict distribution during a limited timespan.
"I love the way someone like you would put high value on a piece of furniture, because its made by carpenters, but zero value on the fruits of a knowledge"
Not value, price. I value air highly, but I wouldn't pay for it since it is easily availible. That is a cause of supply & demand. If the supply is high and cheap (as in air) the price goes down even if the value is high. Very basic economics, and yet most people don't seem to grasp the difference between value and price.
The free market is a bitch if you let it run free. A great tool for efficency, but without restrictions it can cause problems everywhere, from externalties to recouping research/IP creation costs.
Arguing for reasonable restrictions is far more likely to gain you sympathy. That of course means that you have to be reasonable. As more and more people think that todays restrictions are unreasonable and noone seems to be willing to offer reasonable restrictions, the situation will get worse before it gets better.
"Then people come along and develop a way to get the goods without paying. Suddenly "oooh the market was all wrong and the Cds were always too pricey!!!!""
And that is the corner stone of the free market. Someone came up with an idea to do something (distribution) more efficently, reducing the cost for consumers.
It isn't stealing, no more than me copying a chair from an IKEA catalog is stealing from IKEA. Taking an idea and implementing it more efficently is what drives society forward.
Sure, you can advocate that the free market is bad idea for IP, since it fails to account for the fact that the first item of a type costs a lot to produce, while the remaining items are cheap as dirt. That atleast is a valid argument. But when you try to claim superiority based on the free market, I have to call it what it is, bullshit.
I'll probably make another try with Linux after one of the big distributions supports installation and running of windows programs by just clicking on an exe file. I am not saying that I expect every program to function correctly, but I do atleast except the integration of Wine and Mono into the desktop.
I don't care that much about the desktop itself. As long as it doesn't try to get in my way, nor suck away my resources and doesn't require me to use the command console to setup/run things I could care very little about which desktop I use.
The key point of the operating system is to provide the infrastructure nescessary to run applications as smoothly as possible.
Which is why I don't call myself an atheist nowadays, and instead prefer to use the word adogmatist. It is more all inclusive of my philosophy and it is much harder to find negative things to say about it.
* Wireless extremly high bandwidth long range communication unit. * Replicator, with lots of item blueprints (including all other items on my wishlist) downloadable via the communication unit * Energy device to power the replicator.
Those are the three main ones. Add this one as a bonus:
* Automatic doctor unit that can fix any injuries. Bonus if it can extend life.
Cable companies are definitly going to use caps that seems punitive. Why? The reason is simple. The problem isn't buying backbone bandwidth. That kind of bandwidth is cheap enough that it hardly is worth charging for. Atleast not with small change units like 40GB/month.
The real problem is that they are so close to hitting their limit. They can't scale their last mile networks any longer without replacing large parts of it. That is why they are going to use punitive caps to prevent user from using enough bandwidth that they have to actually upgrade their network.
Ah, damn I am getting tired of trolls calling copying stealing. I guess it is time to adopt it just as we did with being called pirates even though we aren't sailing.
I am thief and pirate and proud of it. I will steal to my hearts desire and see nothing wrong with it as long as the original owner gets to keep a copy of what I steal. When you call me a thief I will proudly say thank you and then I will steal your words and call my fellow pirate a thief.
"I actually fear for the future of the country because so many people do not know right from wrong any more."
I just stole the sentence above, but I just wanted to say that I agree with it. You are definitly a good example of how many people don't know right from wrong, often confusing the concept with legal and illegal.
Backbone traffic is cheap. Extremly cheap. 40GB/month is small change, unless it is during primetime. Just keeping track and billing it would cost as much as the traffic itself. And the 5% users are probably mostly those that fileshare, which incidently can be and is done just as easily during off hours.
The real cost is the last mile. Or to be more specific, ISPs have created last mile networks that they aren't able to scale without replacing huge parts of them. Since they want to avoid having to do these replacements, they are going with the simple solution. Cap everyone and charge huge prices if you go over the cap. This works good since they have close to monopoly in most places.
Only when it comes to religious issues. The brain is very good at compartmentalisation. And this doesn't only apply to religion. A person can be smart and rational on many issues, but if you trigger the wrong emotions or subjects, they will turn irrational. Also, there are several types of irrationality.
Dogmatic irrationality - Religion, Ideologism Emotional irrationality - Think of the children, Fear of death Shock irrationality - Happens after: Terrorist acts, Natural catastrophies, Losing someone you love
Of those, dogmatism is the absolutly worst. Responsible for most of the violence and destruction throughout histroy. The other types of irrationality are more a target of being exploited by the first one. Someone who fears death, may be exploited by religion leaders that preach eternal life. Someone who is shocked by a terrorist act, might not react when idelogical laws are pushed through immediatly after.
"For people who don't engage in peer to peer file sharing, 24mbit and 5GB/month is definitely the better deal."
If you don't even use 5GB/month, you definitly won't notice the difference between 8mbit/s and 24mbit/s. I have had both, and can say that you probably won't notice the difference even if you use 100GB/month.
"- Using an FTP client
- Using a P2P/torrent application"
But couldn't those application be seem as abuse of monopoly power towards those in the market of programming those applications. Really, bundling a web browser with an operating system doesn't look as such a dumb idea, considering that web browsing is one of the things that most computer users do.
There is one place where I would consider it abuse of monopoly power, and that is if they prevent/make it difficult for OEM manufacturers to include other browsers with the system. And it wouldn't really surprise me if that were the case.
"No. I'm saying that if everyone could easily get a copy of the lord of the rings DVD for free, the perceived value of that particular DVD would be almost nothing. This applies to any digital goods/something that can easily be copied over the Internet."
You conveniently ignored my physical world examples. Using your definition of "percieved value" as value, air would have a value of zero. Which is completly incorrect.
And digging up gold would make it less valuable, which isn't true. Actually, it is slightly true. As one of the selling points of gold is its rarity, digging it up will actually decrease its value. A better example would be iron that has a price because of its usefulness, and not because of its rarity.
The value of an item simply doesn't change just because you get more of an item, unless the rarity of the item is the selling point. (money, collector items). Your "perceived value" does however as it isn't the real value. It sound more like the demand price curve than anything else.
You are basically saying that movies like "Lord of the Rings" or "The Godfather" are worthless since they have been copied so many times.
And for a more physical example. If we dig up more gold from the ground, we get less wealthy since the price of gold decreases due to supply&demand. Even worse, if we come up with a more efficent way to extract gold from the ground, we will become even less wealthy.
When you are talking about value, what you are actually referring to is price (an easy mistake to make). Price is a mix of cost of production, supply & demand and various other things such as monopoly rights and goverment regulations.
Value (which is the basis of wealth) is about the perception of those who consume the service/goods.
People won't value a movie less just because it has been copied many times. They may however not be willing to pay as much if it is easy accessible. The best example to demonstrate this is air. Air is very valuable as you would die without it. It does however have a price of zero, since it is easily accessible anywhere. (clean air is another matter though)
While copying doesn't decrease the value of the work itself, it can decrease the value of other works. If you have the ability to get copies of a 1000 masterpiece songs, the value of each song will go down slightly, simply because you won't have time to enjoy them all. Fortunally, this decrease in value is far less than the increase in value of having all that music availible to you. Also, the decrease in value is mostly limited to the songs you like the least. The favorite songs keep their value even if you get access to other songs.
As for counterfeiting. That is a matter of fraud. The value of a dollar is the trust that every person puts into it. By counterfeiting you dilute that trust. Note also, that price and value are very close to each other when it comes to money since money doesn't have any usefulness beyond paying for things.
The reason software companies try to prevent piracy is simple. It is profitable to have a monopoly on distribution. I never claimed otherwise.
Except that Mininova isn't a tracker. It is an indexing/directory site. And if you are using Mininova, you have most likely used the pirate bay tracker lots of times.
While backbones don't have unlimted bandwidth, they practically have unlimited data transfer per month in a consumer perspective. Atleast compared to the so data transfer caps that people are talking about.
40GB? On the backbone, that can be less than a dollar if you are moving it evenly over the day. Sure, ISPs have to deal with primetime, but transfer caps aren't for that unless they are time specific. But even then it is probably better to just shape traffic at those times.
The biggest parties (usually two) in any goverment are mostly equally corrupt. Losing votes to their opposite big party doesn't scare them that much. They are simply two sides of the same coin. If they lose in one election, they will simply adjust their stances a little to gain back the voters they lost. It is just ordinary politics.
The real solution is to vote for third parties.. What really scares mainstream politicians is losing votes to someone who isn't well known, because that means that people are beginning to notice that the mainstream parties are two sides of the same coin and rejecting that coin.
Of course, before every election you will hear how you should vote for one of the big candidates, because other votes don't matter. In actuality it is the opposite. Votes for big candidates don't matter since they are all votes for the same coin. They simply reinforce the opinions that the current politicians in power have.
There are of course times when voting for the lesser of two evils has its purpose, but it is far less often than most people would think. To avoid this completly it would of course be better to have a system where you could rank your candidates, but try getting that into the law.
Copyright law was created as replacement for the monopoly that distributors had on printing and distributing information. Distributors, not wanting to lose their monopoly completly, managed to negotiate a law where they got the monopoly on a single work.
Protecting the rights of artists was the original excuse that distributors had for implementing the law, and it may even have been a good excuse in its time. It even made itself into the US constitution in a slightly edited form. Although to the US forefathers credit, they did actually only give the congress a right to limit distribution, and not a responsibility.
Why is copyright law bad? One reason, is that leads to privacy invasion since you have to monitor all communication of private citizens to make sure that they aren't sending copyright information. The swedish pirate party is focusing quite strongly on this particular issue since it has few good counter arguments and is pretty obvious.
There are also economical issues regarding inefficencym as copyright is a limitation on the free market of distribution. The difference in cost between making a song availible to one million or a hundred million people is minimal, yet with a copyright system the cost difference remains large.
There are other issues also, such as new business models that copyright laws prevent.
Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the pirate party did a presentation at google about some of what I said above, that was filmed. It is availible at the link below
Every single thing you mentioned except for the highly trained labor had to do with the machine. Since, the post you responded to said "Vet labs can do MRIs for less then $200.", I fail to see why the machine cost for scanning a human would be that much higher.
As for personnel cost, sure it is expensive, but $1000 for 30 minutes? I could of course be missing something, but that is how it looks to a casual observer.
I am assuming that you mean download+upload60GB, which is 30GB up and 30GB down. And yes that is litte to me. In the last two years I have not been under 60GB any single month. Of course I am paying more, $50 for my connection.
I don't have a real cap, but I think my traffic gets deprioritized slightly if I download/upload too much in too short a time. The biggest amount of traffic I have had in a month is 350GB, but median looks to be around 200GB (pretty evenly divided between up and down). My usage hasn't increase though. HD video may change that a little though, as it is getting more popular.
Of course I live in Sweden, and here I am not really that special. Of course I am a heavy user, but If you want to talk about really heavy bandwidth users here, you have to look at those who fully use their 10mbit links.
A few years I may have cost my ISP a little money, but today I probably don't. I am probably not that profitable either, but they would rather have me than let their already constructed infrastructure go to waste. In the meantime they make their profit on all those who only check their email and look things up on wikipedia.
Bulk bandwidth is becoming cheaper and cheaper in most places. The big problem is the last mile, but in Sweden by allowing anyone access to the telephone lines for adsl/vdsl at set prices, those costs have been reduced quite a lot. Of course fiber is also added when building new houses and when digging in the ground, but getting that to the whole population will take alot of time.
Yes I am aware that I probably used mbit slightly incorrectly. The meaning of both was a transfer rate of 1 mbit per second, so 1 mpbs is the correct term. While data usage and bandwidth aren't the same, they are closely linked. If I use a 1mbps link, that means I can transfer 324GB per month at 100% usage.
As this whole discussion seems to be about heavy consumer downloader/uploaders who usally don't care if their traffic occurs during non peak hours, it is safe to say that their usage pattern makes for a pretty efficent usage of the lines. Therefore, it is correct to say that data usage costs are cheap for those kinds of users.
Of course, at peak hours, it is a different matter. But data usage caps that is talked about isn't the solution. Even if you remove/cap every single big user, the problem will still exist to the same degree. It is the casual users that all use the internet during the same time of day and expect to have their share of the bandwidth that are the biggest cause of network slowdowns.
And even then, with mpbs prices at the level that they are (and sinking), it should be possible to minimize slowdowns since the backbone cost for allocating 512kbps to a user at peaktime is less than $5. And even at peak time, not every user is on at the exact same time.
The main reason for all the talk about data usage caps and the internet collapsing is that coorporations are looking for a new profit vector.
Slashdot Mirror
While streaming may be a little troublesome, if you are using download and watch instead, 1mbit/600kbit is far superior to a 20GB cap which is what the cable industry seems to be aiming for.
Really, the cable industry have an internet setup that is failing and they know it. Their last mile networks can't handle scaling up.
Here's someone trying to compare, say, an illegally downloaded Madonna tune to, for example, the technology used to build a solid fuel booster
When it comes to difference between copying and stealing it is the same. They are very different in size though, but still not stealing.
. I might add that you've a remarkably uninformed and downright dangerous attitude regarding industrial and military secrets
Not really. I am fully aware that secrets is one of the best ways to control the world. I understand why the ones at the top likes to keep them. And the US being the top military bully in the world of course wants to remain there by keeping their secrets.
You're naivete is almost endearing, but I'm really glad you're not in charge of security at any important government facility.
I would be more afraid that you are in charge of one. Someone who don't understand the difference between copying and stealing really shouldn't be.
That "someone" was the citizens of the United States. We spent an incredible amount of money developing our space program and its military applications (the two are really inextricable.) We spent it so that we would have more on the ball than anyone else: if China (or anyone else) wants to be equal to us in that regard, let them spend their own money.
Oh yeah, do the same research someone else has done. What an excellent waste of money and resources. Any reasonably intelligent being would try to copy first. Of course, you are fully free to try to prevent the copying. Of course, if you try to hard to prevent the copying, noone will be able to access it and future advances may be stalled.
There should be long prison terms involved here
Sure, can't disagree with that. It is in the US best interest to have long prison terms for copying your precious secrets.
Mark my words, the day will come when you will care.
Why would I regret that the biggest bully in the world becomes less able to use its power to bully others.
See, when it comes to information about hard-won military technology and strategic assets, copying does equal stealing ..
No it doesn't. It is copying. Oh, it is heavy duty copying allright, but it is copying. If it was stealing the US would have just lost all its ability to build space shuttles. If that had happened you would really be in a position to be upset. And what it actually is, is an espionage issue. Which neither falls under copyright nor stealing.
Honestly, what are you smoking? You need to educate yourself on the history of warfare, and more importantly what is required to maintain peace. Giving your enemies everything you've learned about how to defend yourself is just bloody stupid! It's also a good way to get you and yours killed, or enslaved.
Maintaining peace? I thought we were talking about the US here. One of the most aggressive countries in the second part of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st. And I never said it was good for the US. But then again, I couldn't care less about the superiority of a war mongering country like the US. You seem to manage to kill yourself off pretty good without anyone else interfering.
What those "copies" do represent is billions, if not trillions, of hard-earned U.S. dollars, money that was spent to maintain military superiority over our enemies, not mere parity. Face it, all through the ages the societies least likely to suffer armed attack have been the ones that carried the biggest stick
Which is a very good reason to copy the US military secrets. Right now the US have the biggest stick, and by getting your hand on it, you are less likely to get invaded by the US as you can actually fight back. Just be happy that the stick wasn't stolen but just copied.
. Consequently, we don't want the Chinese to be merely equal to us ... we want t
And in the same line of thoughts. Why does everyone keep repeating the word stealing. All the chinese did was copy the information. It isn't like the US no longer have the information. China just aquired a copy so they didn't have to waste resources recreating the same information that had already been created by someone.
Copying doesn't equal stealing (although copying certain information such as credit card numbers can be used for stealing and other crimes).
"wow what bullshit."
Funny. Nowhere in my post did I advocate piracy. I simply corrected you when you claimed that IP is a free market success, which it isn't. Anyway, I am not going to debate with you anymore after this. If you can't see the different between stealing and copying something you are simply not worthy of debating with.
And, just so you know. You do not own any intellectual property even if you created it. Atmost the goverment gives you certain rights to restrict distribution during a limited timespan.
"I love the way someone like you would put high value on a piece of furniture, because its made by carpenters, but zero value on the fruits of a knowledge"
Not value, price. I value air highly, but I wouldn't pay for it since it is easily availible. That is a cause of supply & demand. If the supply is high and cheap (as in air) the price goes down even if the value is high. Very basic economics, and yet most people don't seem to grasp the difference between value and price.
The free market is a bitch if you let it run free. A great tool for efficency, but without restrictions it can cause problems everywhere, from externalties to recouping research/IP creation costs.
Arguing for reasonable restrictions is far more likely to gain you sympathy. That of course means that you have to be reasonable. As more and more people think that todays restrictions are unreasonable and noone seems to be willing to offer reasonable restrictions, the situation will get worse before it gets better.
"Then people come along and develop a way to get the goods without paying.
Suddenly "oooh the market was all wrong and the Cds were always too pricey!!!!""
And that is the corner stone of the free market. Someone came up with an idea to do something (distribution) more efficently, reducing the cost for consumers.
It isn't stealing, no more than me copying a chair from an IKEA catalog is stealing from IKEA. Taking an idea and implementing it more efficently is what drives society forward.
Sure, you can advocate that the free market is bad idea for IP, since it fails to account for the fact that the first item of a type costs a lot to produce, while the remaining items are cheap as dirt. That atleast is a valid argument. But when you try to claim superiority based on the free market, I have to call it what it is, bullshit.
A clause like that should be illegal in any sane justice system. Not that I am claiming that the US justice system is sane.
I agree.
I'll probably make another try with Linux after one of the big distributions supports installation and running of windows programs by just clicking on an exe file. I am not saying that I expect every program to function correctly, but I do atleast except the integration of Wine and Mono into the desktop.
I don't care that much about the desktop itself. As long as it doesn't try to get in my way, nor suck away my resources and doesn't require me to use the command console to setup/run things I could care very little about which desktop I use.
The key point of the operating system is to provide the infrastructure nescessary to run applications as smoothly as possible.
Which is why I don't call myself an atheist nowadays, and instead prefer to use the word adogmatist. It is more all inclusive of my philosophy and it is much harder to find negative things to say about it.
My wish list:
* Wireless extremly high bandwidth long range communication unit.
* Replicator, with lots of item blueprints (including all other items on my wishlist) downloadable via the communication unit
* Energy device to power the replicator.
Those are the three main ones. Add this one as a bonus:
* Automatic doctor unit that can fix any injuries. Bonus if it can extend life.
Cable companies are definitly going to use caps that seems punitive. Why? The reason is simple. The problem isn't buying backbone bandwidth. That kind of bandwidth is cheap enough that it hardly is worth charging for. Atleast not with small change units like 40GB/month.
The real problem is that they are so close to hitting their limit. They can't scale their last mile networks any longer without replacing large parts of it. That is why they are going to use punitive caps to prevent user from using enough bandwidth that they have to actually upgrade their network.
Ah, damn I am getting tired of trolls calling copying stealing. I guess it is time to adopt it just as we did with being called pirates even though we aren't sailing.
I am thief and pirate and proud of it. I will steal to my hearts desire and see nothing wrong with it as long as the original owner gets to keep a copy of what I steal. When you call me a thief I will proudly say thank you and then I will steal your words and call my fellow pirate a thief.
"I actually fear for the future of the country because so many people do not know right from wrong any more."
I just stole the sentence above, but I just wanted to say that I agree with it. You are definitly a good example of how many people don't know right from wrong, often confusing the concept with legal and illegal.
Wrong.
Backbone traffic is cheap. Extremly cheap. 40GB/month is small change, unless it is during primetime. Just keeping track and billing it would cost as much as the traffic itself. And the 5% users are probably mostly those that fileshare, which incidently can be and is done just as easily during off hours.
The real cost is the last mile. Or to be more specific, ISPs have created last mile networks that they aren't able to scale without replacing huge parts of them. Since they want to avoid having to do these replacements, they are going with the simple solution. Cap everyone and charge huge prices if you go over the cap. This works good since they have close to monopoly in most places.
"Are religious people stupid and irrational?"
Only when it comes to religious issues. The brain is very good at compartmentalisation. And this doesn't only apply to religion. A person can be smart and rational on many issues, but if you trigger the wrong emotions or subjects, they will turn irrational. Also, there are several types of irrationality.
Dogmatic irrationality - Religion, Ideologism
Emotional irrationality - Think of the children, Fear of death
Shock irrationality - Happens after: Terrorist acts, Natural catastrophies, Losing someone you love
Of those, dogmatism is the absolutly worst. Responsible for most of the violence and destruction throughout histroy. The other types of irrationality are more a target of being exploited by the first one. Someone who fears death, may be exploited by religion leaders that preach eternal life. Someone who is shocked by a terrorist act, might not react when idelogical laws are pushed through immediatly after.
"For people who don't engage in peer to peer file sharing, 24mbit and 5GB/month is definitely the better deal."
If you don't even use 5GB/month, you definitly won't notice the difference between 8mbit/s and 24mbit/s. I have had both, and can say that you probably won't notice the difference even if you use 100GB/month.
"- Using an FTP client
- Using a P2P/torrent application"
But couldn't those application be seem as abuse of monopoly power towards those in the market of programming those applications. Really, bundling a web browser with an operating system doesn't look as such a dumb idea, considering that web browsing is one of the things that most computer users do.
There is one place where I would consider it abuse of monopoly power, and that is if they prevent/make it difficult for OEM manufacturers to include other browsers with the system. And it wouldn't really surprise me if that were the case.
"No. I'm saying that if everyone could easily get a copy of the lord of the rings DVD for free, the perceived value of that particular DVD would be almost nothing. This applies to any digital goods/something that can easily be copied over the Internet."
You conveniently ignored my physical world examples. Using your definition of "percieved value" as value, air would have a value of zero. Which is completly incorrect.
And digging up gold would make it less valuable, which isn't true. Actually, it is slightly true. As one of the selling points of gold is its rarity, digging it up will actually decrease its value. A better example would be iron that has a price because of its usefulness, and not because of its rarity.
The value of an item simply doesn't change just because you get more of an item, unless the rarity of the item is the selling point. (money, collector items). Your "perceived value" does however as it isn't the real value. It sound more like the demand price curve than anything else.
That is some bad economics.
You are basically saying that movies like "Lord of the Rings" or "The Godfather" are worthless since they have been copied so many times.
And for a more physical example. If we dig up more gold from the ground, we get less wealthy since the price of gold decreases due to supply&demand. Even worse, if we come up with a more efficent way to extract gold from the ground, we will become even less wealthy.
When you are talking about value, what you are actually referring to is price (an easy mistake to make). Price is a mix of cost of production, supply & demand and various other things such as monopoly rights and goverment regulations.
Value (which is the basis of wealth) is about the perception of those who consume the service/goods.
People won't value a movie less just because it has been copied many times. They may however not be willing to pay as much if it is easy accessible. The best example to demonstrate this is air. Air is very valuable as you would die without it. It does however have a price of zero, since it is easily accessible anywhere. (clean air is another matter though)
While copying doesn't decrease the value of the work itself, it can decrease the value of other works. If you have the ability to get copies of a 1000 masterpiece songs, the value of each song will go down slightly, simply because you won't have time to enjoy them all. Fortunally, this decrease in value is far less than the increase in value of having all that music availible to you. Also, the decrease in value is mostly limited to the songs you like the least. The favorite songs keep their value even if you get access to other songs.
As for counterfeiting. That is a matter of fraud. The value of a dollar is the trust that every person puts into it. By counterfeiting you dilute that trust. Note also, that price and value are very close to each other when it comes to money since money doesn't have any usefulness beyond paying for things.
The reason software companies try to prevent piracy is simple. It is profitable to have a monopoly on distribution. I never claimed otherwise.
Copying however is extremly productive. That is the real differencce between copying and stealing. Copying creates wealth, while stealing doesn't.
Except that Mininova isn't a tracker. It is an indexing/directory site. And if you are using Mininova, you have most likely used the pirate bay tracker lots of times.
While backbones don't have unlimted bandwidth, they practically have unlimited data transfer per month in a consumer perspective. Atleast compared to the so data transfer caps that people are talking about.
40GB? On the backbone, that can be less than a dollar if you are moving it evenly over the day. Sure, ISPs have to deal with primetime, but transfer caps aren't for that unless they are time specific. But even then it is probably better to just shape traffic at those times.
The biggest parties (usually two) in any goverment are mostly equally corrupt. Losing votes to their opposite big party doesn't scare them that much. They are simply two sides of the same coin. If they lose in one election, they will simply adjust their stances a little to gain back the voters they lost. It is just ordinary politics.
The real solution is to vote for third parties.. What really scares mainstream politicians is losing votes to someone who isn't well known, because that means that people are beginning to notice that the mainstream parties are two sides of the same coin and rejecting that coin.
Of course, before every election you will hear how you should vote for one of the big candidates, because other votes don't matter. In actuality it is the opposite. Votes for big candidates don't matter since they are all votes for the same coin. They simply reinforce the opinions that the current politicians in power have.
There are of course times when voting for the lesser of two evils has its purpose, but it is far less often than most people would think. To avoid this completly it would of course be better to have a system where you could rank your candidates, but try getting that into the law.
Copyright law was created as replacement for the monopoly that distributors had on printing and distributing information. Distributors, not wanting to lose their monopoly completly, managed to negotiate a law where they got the monopoly on a single work.
Protecting the rights of artists was the original excuse that distributors had for implementing the law, and it may even have been a good excuse in its time. It even made itself into the US constitution in a slightly edited form. Although to the US forefathers credit, they did actually only give the congress a right to limit distribution, and not a responsibility.
Why is copyright law bad? One reason, is that leads to privacy invasion since you have to monitor all communication of private citizens to make sure that they aren't sending copyright information. The swedish pirate party is focusing quite strongly on this particular issue since it has few good counter arguments and is pretty obvious.
There are also economical issues regarding inefficencym as copyright is a limitation on the free market of distribution. The difference in cost between making a song availible to one million or a hundred million people is minimal, yet with a copyright system the cost difference remains large.
There are other issues also, such as new business models that copyright laws prevent.
Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the pirate party did a presentation at google about some of what I said above, that was filmed. It is availible at the link below
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2541736281918823479
Every single thing you mentioned except for the highly trained labor had to do with the machine. Since, the post you responded to said "Vet labs can do MRIs for less then $200.", I fail to see why the machine cost for scanning a human would be that much higher.
As for personnel cost, sure it is expensive, but $1000 for 30 minutes? I could of course be missing something, but that is how it looks to a casual observer.
I am assuming that you mean download+upload60GB, which is 30GB up and 30GB down. And yes that is litte to me. In the last two years I have not been under 60GB any single month. Of course I am paying more, $50 for my connection.
I don't have a real cap, but I think my traffic gets deprioritized slightly if I download/upload too much in too short a time. The biggest amount of traffic I have had in a month is 350GB, but median looks to be around 200GB (pretty evenly divided between up and down). My usage hasn't increase though. HD video may change that a little though, as it is getting more popular.
Of course I live in Sweden, and here I am not really that special. Of course I am a heavy user, but If you want to talk about really heavy bandwidth users here, you have to look at those who fully use their 10mbit links.
A few years I may have cost my ISP a little money, but today I probably don't. I am probably not that profitable either, but they would rather have me than let their already constructed infrastructure go to waste. In the meantime they make their profit on all those who only check their email and look things up on wikipedia.
Bulk bandwidth is becoming cheaper and cheaper in most places. The big problem is the last mile, but in Sweden by allowing anyone access to the telephone lines for adsl/vdsl at set prices, those costs have been reduced quite a lot. Of course fiber is also added when building new houses and when digging in the ground, but getting that to the whole population will take alot of time.
Yes I am aware that I probably used mbit slightly incorrectly. The meaning of both was a transfer rate of 1 mbit per second, so 1 mpbs is the correct term. While data usage and bandwidth aren't the same, they are closely linked. If I use a 1mbps link, that means I can transfer 324GB per month at 100% usage.
As this whole discussion seems to be about heavy consumer downloader/uploaders who usally don't care if their traffic occurs during non peak hours, it is safe to say that their usage pattern makes for a pretty efficent usage of the lines. Therefore, it is correct to say that data usage costs are cheap for those kinds of users.
Of course, at peak hours, it is a different matter. But data usage caps that is talked about isn't the solution. Even if you remove/cap every single big user, the problem will still exist to the same degree. It is the casual users that all use the internet during the same time of day and expect to have their share of the bandwidth that are the biggest cause of network slowdowns.
And even then, with mpbs prices at the level that they are (and sinking), it should be possible to minimize slowdowns since the backbone cost for allocating 512kbps to a user at peaktime is less than $5. And even at peak time, not every user is on at the exact same time.
The main reason for all the talk about data usage caps and the internet collapsing is that coorporations are looking for a new profit vector.