I can only speak for my experiences in California, but that's just not true so long as the store had some on hand when the item was advertised. If it wasn't advertised, then there is no bait and switch. No advertisement means no bait.
Your idea of a rain check is also silly depending on the quantity demanded. If a chain of stores with one distribution center places its order for an item six months in advance, then 500 people come to one store demanding rain checks, what is the company supposed to do if it only ordered 400 for all of its stores? If the item is clothing, factories often produce limited runs and then move on to the next season with different clothes. If the item is electronic, it may get discontinued, or be in high demand from many retailers. End result is that a single company or store is unable to procure additional units.
The Zalman VF700 has "Silent and Normal fan speed settings. The Silent plug uses 5V power and spins the fan at 1,350 RPM, while the Normal setting uses 12V power and cranks the fan up to 2,650 RPM." (TechReport.com)
Why do you need to undervolt the fan further? Are you so cramped for space that you can't put your computer on the floor where 1,350 RPM should be silent?
Who said anything about companies not being allowed to make profits? That would communist and un-American! As long as the Return On Investment is higher than the perceived Risk, companies will invest in alternative energies and new R&D. Meaning if oil companies are only making 15% profits on a new venture instead of 25% because of government intervention, but the Risk threshold is 10%, the companies will continue to invest in that venture.
I haven't told you nearly enough for you to picture my ideal world.
What is amusing though is that public water and power companies can and do deliver their services cheaper than private companies that skim profits off for their overpaid executives. Also, the cost of health care paperwork is something like 10 or 15% in the USA because of all the different insurance providers and forms required. A nationalized health care system could definitely do things more cheaply. You Canadian health care could solve the scary problem of multi-year waits for surgeries if you and your government resolved to spend more money on more doctors, nurses, and hospitals.
One thing I'm unclear on, what would be the downside of allowing Canadians to have private health care insurance, provided they still paid money into the national system they've elected not to use. Sure the taxpayer is being charged twice, but if they're willing to pay, they'll get private, speedy care, while not using up resources in the national system.
Most people don't buy their TVs online. Best Buy's site is absolutely not representative of their stores.
Okay then, I haven't been in one lately, nor a Circuit City, but their website also has 720p TVs.
VoIP isn't about the bandwidth, it's extremely latency-sensitive, and nearly maxing out your connection will drastically increase latency, even with your router doing advanced QoS/Throttling. You've apparently never had to deal with it.
Not with my router, but with per-computer software for my household network. So long as I throttle back the bittorrent client enough to leave a little breathing room, webpages and voice chat come through just fine.
I hadn't even thought of the idea that the Netflix-Tivo could be set to download during the middle of the night, or while everyone is away at work or school. For non-urgent movies that is of course.
I know how much bandwidth costs, what I don't know is how much movie licensing costs. Find those numbers, and I we can get much more specific.
Isn't movielink.com owned by one or more studios? Whatever licensing fees are involved could be pretty straightforward. It's going to work differently from the way DVDs are sold to Blockbuster for $150, instead it's a per download fee forever. So I'm guessing about one dollar since the studio will still be getting money for it even five years from now.
I read a few of your other posts. You seem more interested in stirring up hornets' nests than having meaningful debate. You let your ideology make you emotional and so you jump to conclusions without reading posts carefully enough to consider complicated points. You make it sound like you consider issues in black and white, ignoring the shades of gray that exist in the real world. Sure you were careful enough to say "excessive government interference", because if you'd left that word out you'd truly be a libertarian with no grasp of reality. Yet you're unwilling to consider how much government interference is needed? I make a post concerning that and you start typing before reading and thinking enough. Bra-vo.
"You shouldn't have brought up other carbon containing material" Coal as the main source, well as other things possible in the future, WHAT on earth is wrong with that statement???
In the field of alternative energies, turning carbon containing material into oil means rendering corn into ethanol, switchgrass into ethanol, turkey ofal into oil, or other biomass being cooked under head and pressure to produce oil. Now yes ethanol is not oil, but they're both fuels. Since you should know this, you should know what other people will think you're talking about. In your head you meant coal into oil, and perhaps Canadian oil sands into oil, and Rocky Mountain oil shales into oil. What you actually said also included biomass-into-oil, which is a NEW technology still being refined (pardon the pun).
As for your main concept that coal-into-oil will limit what the market will bear for what oil companies can charge for what they pump out out of the ground, on that we agree. Now lets get back to my main point that the oil companies are making record profits and margins, raising prices for any excuse they can use no matter how trivial, then taking more time than they should to slowly lower prices back down. The coal-into-oil companies want massive profits and margins too, so no doubt they'll take advantage of the thirsty world market and keep their prices high as well. We started debating that over here. I thought we finished it too since you haven't replied to my last post in that thread.
One nitpick: I assume you meant to say "I couldn't care less." You'll might go farther in this world and be taken more seriously if you learn the difference between "I could care less", and "I couldn't care less."
I get 7.5 hours as the theoretical minimum. Obviously there is a lot of overhead and other real-world conditions which will make that significantly longer.
Math-wise I don't remember how I goofed up and got 6. If it's a full 25GB then theoretically that's 9.5 hours. As for the overhead, how so? When I get a really popular bittorrent downloading, it can max out my connection for most of the time it's going. Very little of that ends up being overhead.
Additionally, since the majority of HDTVs only have pixels to actually display 720p,
I can't believe that's possibly true. EVERYTHING sold in stores now, and for the past several years, is 1080. The only exceptions I can think of may be the old Plasma screens, and they're not incredibly popular.
Then under "Shop By Price", I clicked on "$3000 and Up" and it turns out that the first three TVs listed turn out to be:
Mitsubishi - 62" Widescreen Digital-Cable-Ready Rear-Projection LCD HDTV w/HDMI Inputs - Silver/Black - $2,299 - 1280 x 720 Sony BRAVIA 40" Widescreen Digital-Cable-Ready LCD HDTV with HDMI Input - $3,299 - 1366 x 768 Pioneer - 61" HD-Ready PureVision Plasma Monitor - SALE: $8,549.99 - 1365 x 768 !!!
Finally we come down the list to Mitsubishi 62" Widescreen Digital-Cable-Ready DLP Rear-Projection HDTV w/HDMI Inputs - Silver/Black Model: WD-62627 - $2,799 - 1920 x 1080
Took long enough, eh?
Believe it! Consumers are STILL being talked into buying NEW 1366x768 HDTVs!
Streaming audio? VoIP calls? The user has this high-speed internet connection for a reason... And every bit of bandwidth you take away from the download, increases the download time noticably.
Streaming audio is usually 128kbps at most. On a 6Mbps, that's a whopping 2.1% of the connection! Looks like someone downloading a movie while streaming music is gonna have need to kill an extra 9 minutes before they watch. Maybe they could eat an extra bowl of bran and spend 9 minutes more in the bathroom.
As for VoIP, that takes up much much less than 128. We're talking about transmitting voice, not music, for crying out loud.
($3.50) surely wouldn't be a net loss, but I don't think that would give them the profit margin to compete with conventional services. And that's not mentioning this high-end Tivo you're going to have to purchase up-front. DRM usually kills services that attempt this kind of thing.
For the cost of sending 25GB over the net, you don't have any numbers do you? Just a guess that the cost is more than $2 but less than $3.50?
Meanwhile a 300GB drive is down to $100 retail. Plenty of people are buying Tivos, so why won't this work again? Netflix is profittable and their margins are slim-to-none. With movies over IP people get the convenience of delivery in less than 24 hours, and no more envelopes to mail back or go missing/stolen. In a few years the cost of the hardware will decrease, while more people will have 6Mbps broadband or even higher. The hardware and service could go live today and be profittable even from just the early adopters, who evangelize it for free.
Glad that you agree with me that they can't set ANY price they want, that was what you suggested with the water analogy.
Nice try. Your grandparent post was at 3:28am. My post that mentioned water wasn't until 4:24am. I don't know how you read into the future posts, but you could make a lot of money if you work on that skill, even if you neglect your reading comprehension.
...turn coal or any other carbon containing material into oil.
You shouldn't have brought up other carbon containing material since your point is only correct about coal. I was addressing your error about turning non-coal biomass into oil. Seriously, work on your reading comprehension and critical thinking.
It depends on the water scenario. Suppose there are 10 rich people and 100 poor/middle class people in need of water. If the 10 rich people can continally pay me $1000 per bottle, I'd make more money from them than if I sold everyone water for $10/bottle. $1100 vs. $10,000.
That is basically what the pharmaceutical companies do when they charge $50,000 for a course of cancer treatments. Most people in the world die because they can't pay.
As for oil, those companies are worth so many many billions of dollars that they can buy up all the alternative energy companies that aren't tightly, privately held. That hasn't happened just yet, because a few oil companies are working on building their own plants. They'll buy out the competition when they become a realistic threat.
The simple fact is the demand curve for oil is more inelastic than elastic, meaning the oil companies could raise prices another dollar per gallon, and because the world infrastructure is built around oil-power, people and companies will have to pay the higher price. It will take a decade before alternative energies (including pebble-bed nuclear) can scale up to meet the needs of the US, let alone world-wide.
This pricing scheme won't work. Why would I pay equivalent prices to standard rental and have to wait hours or days, when I could get the DVD at the local rental shop and be watching it tonight? And at that price all the DVD ownership vs. renting relationships stay the same. Why rent a DVD I already know I like for $4 when I could buy it for $10 at Walmart and come out ahead in the long run?
Because you don't have to wait more than half a day, and in a few years you won't have to wait at all. Because you're a lazy SOB who doesn't want to go down to the video rental store just to find out they're out of the movie you wanted. Because you don't want to go back two days later to return the movie.
And you pay $4 because you know you probably aren't going to watch the movie again because there are hundreds or thousands of other good movies just waiting to be seen. Especially if it's a movie that got mixed reviews and you're wary about paying $10 for something you might not like after all.
it is fairly old technology to turn coal or any other carbon containing material into oil.
Gee, then why are the plants to turn turkey feathers and guts into oil just a year old or still being planned or built? Along with rendering other biomass types? Old has nothing to do with it. The technology wasn't mature, the ideal temperatures, pressures, and cooking times for creating the oil were unknown.
Biodiesel would be cheaper than oil at that point, so your argument that they have no potential competition and can set any price they want is false and shows your lack of background information on the resource base.
I never said they could set any price they want. Try and show me where I did. Now as you imply, biodiesel presently has higher production costs, so it only becomes economically viable to produce when oil is selling for XX dollars a barrel. You've just agreed with my statement where I said:
When alternatives become economically viable, they don't lower the price of gasoline, they only help keep it from going up. It takes R&D breakthroughs to lower the production costs of the alternative energy sources to lower gas prices.
Sounds like that buzzer meant you're the one who is wrong. Work on your reading comprehension and critical thinking for the sake of everyone else in this world.
So is collusion and oligarchy okay too? How about monopolies? The the Company can charge even more. If people are dying of thirst and I'm the only one with water, can I charge whatever I want? I am not directly likening oil to water, they are separate scenarios.
You, like Impy, also missed my point. There is a difference between someone being a fuckhead because it's legal, and whether it's ethical and fair to be a fuckhead.
First off, the pipes won't be big enough for HDTV in reasonable download time for well-over a decade. Just calculate how many days it would take to download a 50GB movie on your connection.
In my comment above yours, I did the math for 20GB, although HD-DVDs coming in between about 22-25GB. Unless my math is wrong, a 6Mbps Comcast cable connection could download a movie in about 6 hours, which means about 4 hours of waiting if it's a 2 hour-long film. That's 10 hours of waiting over my 3Mbps AT&T DSL.
Additionally, since the majority of HDTVs only have pixels to actually display 720p, the file size for those users can be only 11-12GB, meaning just one hour of buffering/waiting for the 6Mbps connection.
The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.
But how much bandwidth does the average user use while surfing? Next to nothing. The box downloading the movie just needs to find out the maximum available bandwidth and then scale back a bit so there's 128kbps available, or if it plays nice, have it adjust as needed. Even if the average user has P2P-using children, that could be limited to 50kBps.
Then just like Netflix has users select movies they want to watch soon, this box should come with a 300 or 500GB hard drive that downloads movies before the users get around to watching them.
Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.
So how much is the market rate for large customers for 12GB or 24GB? I agree that $2 isn't going to happen. My video rental store charges $3.50. How about that?
Then please define uneven. When I watched The Bourne Supremacy and Inside Man in a 4 year-old AMC multiplex in Emeryville, I saw what appeared to be blur as action unfolded or the camera panned over the sets. I couldn't make out as much detail as I wanted to because the picture was blured.
As for film resolution, if it's scanned at 4K, and then an interpositive and internegative have to be made, the generational loss would imply what ends up on a screen is significantly less than 4K. Personally, I saw SW Episode 3 back-to-back first in film, then digital, and there was enough detail blurred from the film shaking (jittering?) that I'd call the detail a tie. In fact because the digital image wasn't shaking I noticed the pixels sometimes, which is of course the strong argument for 4K. I think 2K on a medium screen instead of the multiplex's largest would look quite excellent.
Blurry pans and fast action don't bother you as much as the alternative? What about those who say the eventual projection in a multiplex is only equivalent to about 2K anyway?
And I really thought 2K was going to be 2048x1536, not 2048x1080. That's rather annoying. JVC's D-ILA chip is 2048x1536 and used by Kodak. Now I'm torn over which I'd prefer.
My understanding is that the standard calls for true 48fps at 2K, which I'd rather see happen than 4K at 24fps. I've heard from others that by the time a movie gets shown in a multiplex, it's a multi-generation print with likely only 1K of resolution making it to the screen. My back-to-back viewing of Star Wars Episode 3 of the film then the digital projection seemed to bear this out. In fact I think the projector used might have only been capable of 1080 or 1280 lines, not the 1536 used in 2K projection (2048x1536).
The film projection seemed like it might have still had more detail to it, but because of the judder, it was hard to be sure. The judder-free digital projection was wonderfully clear and crisp. So much so that the lack of resolution became all too apparent in some slow, dragging shots of the film. So I'll take actual 2K the detail will be satisfactory, more than compensated by the beautiful fluidity of 48fps.
True, but fast-action shots/pans are still common in dramas, comedies, and horror too. Even musicals would benefit in the dancing, not that there's many, if any of them anymore being made in the USA.
As for myself, I'm bothered by the low frame rate even on my small TV or monitor.
You're just an idiot if you're pretty sure you're only going to watch a movie once or twice and then buy it for keeps instead of renting it for $3.50.
As for HD-movies on demand, I'm sure the bandwidth is coming, but to stream a 20GB film in just two hours as it's being watched will saturate a 24Mbps connection. My DSL is presently 3Mbps, and I think Comcast cable is 6Mbps. If people don't mind waiting 4 hours (out of 6) for the Comcast connection to load the movie, or 10 hours (out of 12) for 3Mbps, then present tech will work. Alternatively people will select movies they're interested in and those will download days in advance. This is workable tech since a 500GB hard drive can hold 25 HD-movies at any one time. But if the users want one that hasn't pre-loaded, they'll have to wait.
Now one final idea that I think is important is that most HDTVs only have 720 lines, or maybe 768, not 1080. Since that is half the pixels of 1080p, that means there ought to be a 10GB, 720p version to download in half the time. Meaning that people who now have 6Mbps only need to wait a single hour before watching the still-downloading movie.
So in conclusion, I like this idea. In fact it ought to be made available as soon as possible, because it will just grow as people pressure their DSL and Cable companies to fatten their pipes.
Last I'd heard, CRTs had the best color, contrast, and often brightness compared to the other technologies. So a very high quality CRT ought to beat the DLP HDTV for $1300. Also, weren't CRTs for a while the only consumer sets capable of true 1920x1080 output? In fact, for $1300, is that DLP HDTV going to do that, or just 1365x768 or 1280x720?
At any rate, you missed my point. How highly am I supposed to think of an oil executive who amassed a billion-dollar fortune and then gives most of it away? He got it by bleeding others at the pump.
Oil profits and profit margins are at all-time highs. The volatility of gasoline prices is rediculous. They spike up sooner than they should after an event and then take overly long to come down. Except they don't come down as far as they should either.
When alternatives become economically viable, they don't lower the price of gasoline, they only help keep it from going up. It takes R&D breakthroughs to lower the production costs of the alternative energy sources to lower gas prices. I'm expecting those will be forthcoming, but meanwhile the country has been hurting from price increases that have happened too quickly. If gas went up a dollar over five years that would be manageable, but one or two years is too quickly for people to adjust.
And it's sad that you don't mention how little drilling in ANWAR will lower the price of a gallon of gas. Less than $0.25 I believe. It's also sad that extraordinarilly profittable oil companies are still getting billions in federal subsidies for what they could easily pay for themselves.
Also, define "unnoticeable." Like from space looking down so you could see several thousand square miles?
Walmart is still the cheapest place to buy just about everything. They can charge whatever they want. You are free to shop somewhere else and employees are free to work somewhere else.
Thank you Captain Obvious Capitalist (COC). Oh, and the whole point of the study is that Walmart can leave prices where they are, that is, not charge consumers any extra, but pay workers more just by accepting the same profit margin the company had in 1997. The question is whether Walmart should pay its workers more out of ethics and fairness to them and the communities surrounding their stores.
Even if the Walton family members decide in a decade to give most of their fortunes away, they will still have accumulated them by sucking money out of every community where there's a store. The result is shuttered storefronts, net lost jobs, and the Walmart workers usually being paid so little they suck money from State assistance programs.
As for Microsoft, I agree with you there that its prices are reasonable. That's why I brought up the oil and pharmaceutical companies.
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Crap, right, got it. My mistake.
I can only speak for my experiences in California, but that's just not true so long as the store had some on hand when the item was advertised. If it wasn't advertised, then there is no bait and switch. No advertisement means no bait.
Your idea of a rain check is also silly depending on the quantity demanded. If a chain of stores with one distribution center places its order for an item six months in advance, then 500 people come to one store demanding rain checks, what is the company supposed to do if it only ordered 400 for all of its stores? If the item is clothing, factories often produce limited runs and then move on to the next season with different clothes. If the item is electronic, it may get discontinued, or be in high demand from many retailers. End result is that a single company or store is unable to procure additional units.
The Zalman VF700 has "Silent and Normal fan speed settings. The Silent plug uses 5V power and spins the fan at 1,350 RPM, while the Normal setting uses 12V power and cranks the fan up to 2,650 RPM." (TechReport.com)
Why do you need to undervolt the fan further? Are you so cramped for space that you can't put your computer on the floor where 1,350 RPM should be silent?
Who said anything about companies not being allowed to make profits? That would communist and un-American! As long as the Return On Investment is higher than the perceived Risk, companies will invest in alternative energies and new R&D. Meaning if oil companies are only making 15% profits on a new venture instead of 25% because of government intervention, but the Risk threshold is 10%, the companies will continue to invest in that venture.
I haven't told you nearly enough for you to picture my ideal world.
What is amusing though is that public water and power companies can and do deliver their services cheaper than private companies that skim profits off for their overpaid executives. Also, the cost of health care paperwork is something like 10 or 15% in the USA because of all the different insurance providers and forms required. A nationalized health care system could definitely do things more cheaply. You Canadian health care could solve the scary problem of multi-year waits for surgeries if you and your government resolved to spend more money on more doctors, nurses, and hospitals.
One thing I'm unclear on, what would be the downside of allowing Canadians to have private health care insurance, provided they still paid money into the national system they've elected not to use. Sure the taxpayer is being charged twice, but if they're willing to pay, they'll get private, speedy care, while not using up resources in the national system.
Then just get the phrase right the first time. Should I not laugh when some kids wants Napoleon-flavored ice cream?
Most people don't buy their TVs online. Best Buy's site is absolutely not representative of their stores.
Okay then, I haven't been in one lately, nor a Circuit City, but their website also has 720p TVs.
VoIP isn't about the bandwidth, it's extremely latency-sensitive, and nearly maxing out your connection will drastically increase latency, even with your router doing advanced QoS/Throttling. You've apparently never had to deal with it.
Not with my router, but with per-computer software for my household network. So long as I throttle back the bittorrent client enough to leave a little breathing room, webpages and voice chat come through just fine.
I hadn't even thought of the idea that the Netflix-Tivo could be set to download during the middle of the night, or while everyone is away at work or school. For non-urgent movies that is of course.
I know how much bandwidth costs, what I don't know is how much movie licensing costs. Find those numbers, and I we can get much more specific.
Isn't movielink.com owned by one or more studios? Whatever licensing fees are involved could be pretty straightforward. It's going to work differently from the way DVDs are sold to Blockbuster for $150, instead it's a per download fee forever. So I'm guessing about one dollar since the studio will still be getting money for it even five years from now.
I read a few of your other posts. You seem more interested in stirring up hornets' nests than having meaningful debate. You let your ideology make you emotional and so you jump to conclusions without reading posts carefully enough to consider complicated points. You make it sound like you consider issues in black and white, ignoring the shades of gray that exist in the real world. Sure you were careful enough to say " excessive government interference", because if you'd left that word out you'd truly be a libertarian with no grasp of reality. Yet you're unwilling to consider how much government interference is needed? I make a post concerning that and you start typing before reading and thinking enough. Bra-vo.
"You shouldn't have brought up other carbon containing material" Coal as the main source, well as other things possible in the future, WHAT on earth is wrong with that statement???
In the field of alternative energies, turning carbon containing material into oil means rendering corn into ethanol, switchgrass into ethanol, turkey ofal into oil, or other biomass being cooked under head and pressure to produce oil. Now yes ethanol is not oil, but they're both fuels. Since you should know this, you should know what other people will think you're talking about. In your head you meant coal into oil, and perhaps Canadian oil sands into oil, and Rocky Mountain oil shales into oil. What you actually said also included biomass-into-oil, which is a NEW technology still being refined (pardon the pun).
As for your main concept that coal-into-oil will limit what the market will bear for what oil companies can charge for what they pump out out of the ground, on that we agree. Now lets get back to my main point that the oil companies are making record profits and margins, raising prices for any excuse they can use no matter how trivial, then taking more time than they should to slowly lower prices back down. The coal-into-oil companies want massive profits and margins too, so no doubt they'll take advantage of the thirsty world market and keep their prices high as well. We started debating that over here. I thought we finished it too since you haven't replied to my last post in that thread.
One nitpick: I assume you meant to say "I couldn't care less." You'll might go farther in this world and be taken more seriously if you learn the difference between "I could care less", and "I couldn't care less."
Math-wise I don't remember how I goofed up and got 6. If it's a full 25GB then theoretically that's 9.5 hours. As for the overhead, how so? When I get a really popular bittorrent downloading, it can max out my connection for most of the time it's going. Very little of that ends up being overhead.
Additionally, since the majority of HDTVs only have pixels to actually display 720p,
I can't believe that's possibly true. EVERYTHING sold in stores now, and for the past several years, is 1080. The only exceptions I can think of may be the old Plasma screens, and they're not incredibly popular.
Oh man are you in for a surprise.
Go over to Bestbuy's website and start clicking through their TVs like I did. Of the 4 "specials" they've got listed, their Hitachi UltraVision 55" Plasma HDTV for $4,299 has a maximum resolution of 1366x768. Oh but that's a plasma and I don't know how old the model is. So the other special, a Samsung 32" Widescreen Flat-Panel LCD for $1,499 is also just 1366x768.
Then under "Shop By Price", I clicked on "$3000 and Up" and it turns out that the first three TVs listed turn out to be:
Took long enough, eh?
Believe it! Consumers are STILL being talked into buying NEW 1366x768 HDTVs!
Streaming audio? VoIP calls? The user has this high-speed internet connection for a reason... And every bit of bandwidth you take away from the download, increases the download time noticably.
Streaming audio is usually 128kbps at most. On a 6Mbps, that's a whopping 2.1% of the connection! Looks like someone downloading a movie while streaming music is gonna have need to kill an extra 9 minutes before they watch. Maybe they could eat an extra bowl of bran and spend 9 minutes more in the bathroom.
As for VoIP, that takes up much much less than 128. We're talking about transmitting voice, not music, for crying out loud.
($3.50) surely wouldn't be a net loss, but I don't think that would give them the profit margin to compete with conventional services. And that's not mentioning this high-end Tivo you're going to have to purchase up-front. DRM usually kills services that attempt this kind of thing.
For the cost of sending 25GB over the net, you don't have any numbers do you? Just a guess that the cost is more than $2 but less than $3.50?
Meanwhile a 300GB drive is down to $100 retail. Plenty of people are buying Tivos, so why won't this work again? Netflix is profittable and their margins are slim-to-none. With movies over IP people get the convenience of delivery in less than 24 hours, and no more envelopes to mail back or go missing/stolen. In a few years the cost of the hardware will decrease, while more people will have 6Mbps broadband or even higher. The hardware and service could go live today and be profittable even from just the early adopters, who evangelize it for free.
Glad that you agree with me that they can't set ANY price they want, that was what you suggested with the water analogy.
...turn coal or any other carbon containing material into oil.
Nice try. Your grandparent post was at 3:28am. My post that mentioned water wasn't until 4:24am. I don't know how you read into the future posts, but you could make a lot of money if you work on that skill, even if you neglect your reading comprehension.
You shouldn't have brought up other carbon containing material since your point is only correct about coal. I was addressing your error about turning non-coal biomass into oil. Seriously, work on your reading comprehension and critical thinking.
It depends on the water scenario. Suppose there are 10 rich people and 100 poor/middle class people in need of water. If the 10 rich people can continally pay me $1000 per bottle, I'd make more money from them than if I sold everyone water for $10/bottle. $1100 vs. $10,000.
That is basically what the pharmaceutical companies do when they charge $50,000 for a course of cancer treatments. Most people in the world die because they can't pay.
As for oil, those companies are worth so many many billions of dollars that they can buy up all the alternative energy companies that aren't tightly, privately held. That hasn't happened just yet, because a few oil companies are working on building their own plants. They'll buy out the competition when they become a realistic threat.
The simple fact is the demand curve for oil is more inelastic than elastic, meaning the oil companies could raise prices another dollar per gallon, and because the world infrastructure is built around oil-power, people and companies will have to pay the higher price. It will take a decade before alternative energies (including pebble-bed nuclear) can scale up to meet the needs of the US, let alone world-wide.
This pricing scheme won't work. Why would I pay equivalent prices to standard rental and have to wait hours or days, when I could get the DVD at the local rental shop and be watching it tonight? And at that price all the DVD ownership vs. renting relationships stay the same. Why rent a DVD I already know I like for $4 when I could buy it for $10 at Walmart and come out ahead in the long run?
Because you don't have to wait more than half a day, and in a few years you won't have to wait at all. Because you're a lazy SOB who doesn't want to go down to the video rental store just to find out they're out of the movie you wanted. Because you don't want to go back two days later to return the movie.
And you pay $4 because you know you probably aren't going to watch the movie again because there are hundreds or thousands of other good movies just waiting to be seen. Especially if it's a movie that got mixed reviews and you're wary about paying $10 for something you might not like after all.
Gee, then why are the plants to turn turkey feathers and guts into oil just a year old or still being planned or built? Along with rendering other biomass types? Old has nothing to do with it. The technology wasn't mature, the ideal temperatures, pressures, and cooking times for creating the oil were unknown.
Biodiesel would be cheaper than oil at that point, so your argument that they have no potential competition and can set any price they want is false and shows your lack of background information on the resource base.
I never said they could set any price they want. Try and show me where I did. Now as you imply, biodiesel presently has higher production costs, so it only becomes economically viable to produce when oil is selling for XX dollars a barrel. You've just agreed with my statement where I said:
Sounds like that buzzer meant you're the one who is wrong. Work on your reading comprehension and critical thinking for the sake of everyone else in this world.
So is collusion and oligarchy okay too? How about monopolies? The the Company can charge even more. If people are dying of thirst and I'm the only one with water, can I charge whatever I want? I am not directly likening oil to water, they are separate scenarios.
You, like Impy, also missed my point. There is a difference between someone being a fuckhead because it's legal, and whether it's ethical and fair to be a fuckhead.
First off, the pipes won't be big enough for HDTV in reasonable download time for well-over a decade. Just calculate how many days it would take to download a 50GB movie on your connection.
In my comment above yours, I did the math for 20GB, although HD-DVDs coming in between about 22-25GB. Unless my math is wrong, a 6Mbps Comcast cable connection could download a movie in about 6 hours, which means about 4 hours of waiting if it's a 2 hour-long film. That's 10 hours of waiting over my 3Mbps AT&T DSL.
Additionally, since the majority of HDTVs only have pixels to actually display 720p, the file size for those users can be only 11-12GB, meaning just one hour of buffering/waiting for the 6Mbps connection.
The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.
But how much bandwidth does the average user use while surfing? Next to nothing. The box downloading the movie just needs to find out the maximum available bandwidth and then scale back a bit so there's 128kbps available, or if it plays nice, have it adjust as needed. Even if the average user has P2P-using children, that could be limited to 50kBps.
Then just like Netflix has users select movies they want to watch soon, this box should come with a 300 or 500GB hard drive that downloads movies before the users get around to watching them.
Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.
So how much is the market rate for large customers for 12GB or 24GB? I agree that $2 isn't going to happen. My video rental store charges $3.50. How about that?
Then please define uneven. When I watched The Bourne Supremacy and Inside Man in a 4 year-old AMC multiplex in Emeryville, I saw what appeared to be blur as action unfolded or the camera panned over the sets. I couldn't make out as much detail as I wanted to because the picture was blured.
As for film resolution, if it's scanned at 4K, and then an interpositive and internegative have to be made, the generational loss would imply what ends up on a screen is significantly less than 4K. Personally, I saw SW Episode 3 back-to-back first in film, then digital, and there was enough detail blurred from the film shaking (jittering?) that I'd call the detail a tie. In fact because the digital image wasn't shaking I noticed the pixels sometimes, which is of course the strong argument for 4K. I think 2K on a medium screen instead of the multiplex's largest would look quite excellent.
Blurry pans and fast action don't bother you as much as the alternative? What about those who say the eventual projection in a multiplex is only equivalent to about 2K anyway?
And I really thought 2K was going to be 2048x1536, not 2048x1080. That's rather annoying. JVC's D-ILA chip is 2048x1536 and used by Kodak. Now I'm torn over which I'd prefer.
Make that jitter, not judder then. Just following the terminology of the GP to not be confusing.
My understanding is that the standard calls for true 48fps at 2K, which I'd rather see happen than 4K at 24fps. I've heard from others that by the time a movie gets shown in a multiplex, it's a multi-generation print with likely only 1K of resolution making it to the screen. My back-to-back viewing of Star Wars Episode 3 of the film then the digital projection seemed to bear this out. In fact I think the projector used might have only been capable of 1080 or 1280 lines, not the 1536 used in 2K projection (2048x1536).
The film projection seemed like it might have still had more detail to it, but because of the judder, it was hard to be sure. The judder-free digital projection was wonderfully clear and crisp. So much so that the lack of resolution became all too apparent in some slow, dragging shots of the film. So I'll take actual 2K the detail will be satisfactory, more than compensated by the beautiful fluidity of 48fps.
True, but fast-action shots/pans are still common in dramas, comedies, and horror too. Even musicals would benefit in the dancing, not that there's many, if any of them anymore being made in the USA.
As for myself, I'm bothered by the low frame rate even on my small TV or monitor.
You're just an idiot if you're pretty sure you're only going to watch a movie once or twice and then buy it for keeps instead of renting it for $3.50.
As for HD-movies on demand, I'm sure the bandwidth is coming, but to stream a 20GB film in just two hours as it's being watched will saturate a 24Mbps connection. My DSL is presently 3Mbps, and I think Comcast cable is 6Mbps. If people don't mind waiting 4 hours (out of 6) for the Comcast connection to load the movie, or 10 hours (out of 12) for 3Mbps, then present tech will work. Alternatively people will select movies they're interested in and those will download days in advance. This is workable tech since a 500GB hard drive can hold 25 HD-movies at any one time. But if the users want one that hasn't pre-loaded, they'll have to wait.
Now one final idea that I think is important is that most HDTVs only have 720 lines, or maybe 768, not 1080. Since that is half the pixels of 1080p, that means there ought to be a 10GB, 720p version to download in half the time. Meaning that people who now have 6Mbps only need to wait a single hour before watching the still-downloading movie.
So in conclusion, I like this idea. In fact it ought to be made available as soon as possible, because it will just grow as people pressure their DSL and Cable companies to fatten their pipes.
Last I'd heard, CRTs had the best color, contrast, and often brightness compared to the other technologies. So a very high quality CRT ought to beat the DLP HDTV for $1300. Also, weren't CRTs for a while the only consumer sets capable of true 1920x1080 output? In fact, for $1300, is that DLP HDTV going to do that, or just 1365x768 or 1280x720?
At any rate, you missed my point. How highly am I supposed to think of an oil executive who amassed a billion-dollar fortune and then gives most of it away? He got it by bleeding others at the pump.
Oil profits and profit margins are at all-time highs. The volatility of gasoline prices is rediculous. They spike up sooner than they should after an event and then take overly long to come down. Except they don't come down as far as they should either.
When alternatives become economically viable, they don't lower the price of gasoline, they only help keep it from going up. It takes R&D breakthroughs to lower the production costs of the alternative energy sources to lower gas prices. I'm expecting those will be forthcoming, but meanwhile the country has been hurting from price increases that have happened too quickly. If gas went up a dollar over five years that would be manageable, but one or two years is too quickly for people to adjust.
And it's sad that you don't mention how little drilling in ANWAR will lower the price of a gallon of gas. Less than $0.25 I believe. It's also sad that extraordinarilly profittable oil companies are still getting billions in federal subsidies for what they could easily pay for themselves.
Also, define "unnoticeable." Like from space looking down so you could see several thousand square miles?
Walmart is still the cheapest place to buy just about everything. They can charge whatever they want. You are free to shop somewhere else and employees are free to work somewhere else.
Thank you Captain Obvious Capitalist (COC). Oh, and the whole point of the study is that Walmart can leave prices where they are, that is, not charge consumers any extra, but pay workers more just by accepting the same profit margin the company had in 1997. The question is whether Walmart should pay its workers more out of ethics and fairness to them and the communities surrounding their stores.
Even if the Walton family members decide in a decade to give most of their fortunes away, they will still have accumulated them by sucking money out of every community where there's a store. The result is shuttered storefronts, net lost jobs, and the Walmart workers usually being paid so little they suck money from State assistance programs.
As for Microsoft, I agree with you there that its prices are reasonable. That's why I brought up the oil and pharmaceutical companies.