>> "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells."
And therein lies the great deception... many people believe that such technologies will get cheaper as they become more widely used. Just subsidize it to "jump-start" the market, and voila! Free energy! Or so goes the sales pitch.
Unfortunately, people who have studied economics for more than five seconds understand that increased demand leads to higher prices, not lower prices.
CPU prices don't come down because people buy them, they come down because Intel make better ones year after year. It's (at best) questionable whether that level of innovation will be possible with solar energy. But if it is possible, then subsidies won't be needed.
This is why concert and sports tickets have gone up in price so much.
As we live our lives more and more online, as we download whatever movies we want to see or surf to one of a zillion channels, the one experience that technology can't replace is contact with other humans. Demand for tickets of all sorts is higher than ever, while the supply/demand ratio for recorded music has made selling it a waste of time.
In the 70's, bands would go on tour to promote record sales. Now they make recordings so they can go on tour.
According to the Wikipedia entry, these guns were used by Argentina in the Falklands war in 1982, and the digital fire control system is from 1985. How do they qualify as high-tech robotic cannons? This was just a horrible training accident with ancient weapons.
>> depends entirely on the total amount of money ultimately made
Exactly. And that's what the record industry has just never been able to figure out. Not that their task is easy. But ultimately, an artist doesn't (shouldn't) care whether he sells 1,000,000 at ten cents or 100,000 at a dollar. But they haven't really figured out how to charge ten cents effectively, and... oh fuck, we all know by now how clueless they are. The main point being that fighting piracy only helps them sell more downloads in theory. In practice, that business will cease to exist in its traditional form.
More revealing is the new Madonna contract with LiveNation instead of a record company. Performance is where the money is nowadays, not in selling discs or even downloads. In the 70's, bands would go on tour to sell their records. Now, bands record CD's so they can go on tour. It's completely logical if you think about how the economics have changed.
Government always defends against the last disaster, and they're fairly good at it. Since 9/11, no gang of hijackers has crashed an airliner into a tall building.
Seriously, at the time of 9/11, they were still looking for bombs hidden in radios, which brought down Pan-Am 103 in the early 80's.
Now they check shoes.
What next? Depends on what works for the terrorists next. Then they'll start searching for that.
Anyplace USPS is competing with FedEx and UPS, it's being subsidized by its monopoly on first class and junk mail. Where do you think those Post Offices and mailboxes come from? And their express service is okay if you're not very fussy, but that's about it. They do have budget ground service that's.. well it's cheaper than UPS Ground. But Tracking? On-time delivery? Miserable.
Again, I have no problem paying the nice people to walk around all day and deliver junk mail and wear a uniform, if that's what they want to do with their lives. But no, not even close to competing with the private companies; I can't remember the last time I sent anything via USPS when I had a choice.
I've no problems with compassion, no problems with helping the less able, or even the less ambitious. That's why I'm not a libertarian.
For example, I think the purpose of the US Postal Service monopoly is to provide stable jobs for people who aren't very ambitious and/or not very talented. Stated that way, I think it's a good use of money. But if you tell me that it's a good way to deliver the mail, then that's bullshit. If you took away their monopoly, they'd be out of business within a year.
>> Getting the big money out of politics would be a very good thing, though I don't see any easy path to doing so...
To get the money out of politics, the best path is to cut taxes and limit governmental power.
Inevitably, many special interests want to petition the government for redress, and that's a pretty important right in itself. If we decide ahead of time who can lobby government and by what means, then it's self-defeating. It's the slippery slope down the "more regulation will produce more freedom" line of thinking. The biggest, richest, most powerful groups will always have the most influence, no matter how you try to disguise it.
I once had hopes for the libertarian wing of the Repubs, but have learned that it's in the nature of democratic government that you can't hold onto power while simultaneously giving it up. I finally realized I could do more good by persuading people to think clearly about freedom, than by, y'know, voting.
BTW, I had similar hopes for the Dems back in the 60's & 70's, too. Back then I thought "liberal" meant that when in doubt, you err on the side of permissiveness. But over the years, I realized that it just meant passing a bunch of rules to make us live more like "liberals". Fuck that.
The problem will not be solved by replacing Republicans with Democrats. It will only change the rationale. Dems will probe for child molesters and music pirates instead of terrorists, but they're not going to loosen government's grip.
The problem will be solved when Americans finally ask, "How the fuck can government regulate our telephone lines when we have a First Ammendment?"
>>not the current soviet-like lack of selection that you seem to be enjoying in the US right now.
Well, then go buy an iPhone. Oops, you can't. Sorry, cheap shot but I couldn't resist. I'm not saying the US is any better, we certainly have our own share of market distortions and government favoritism in telecom.
But really, the more regulations you have, the less free the market is. Even if they're worded to make it sound like they're fostering competition, in all cases, they are actually limiting it. Usually on behalf of a taxpaying constituent; in this case they're benefiting Nokia, Ericsson and the carriers who lost out on the iPhone deal. If you think they're doing it for the consumer you're naive.
When governments claim that more regulation will yield more freedom, it's Orwellian doublespeak in its purest and vilest form.
I guess it would have been more accurate to say that in the 80's & 90's, Apple charged a heavy premium for their proprietary platform. In recent years, they've reduced prices to be more competitive, and they're rapidly taking home PC share from Windows. Whatever the market share numbers were, Apple pretty much just sold to graphics pros and latte snobs before they introduced the Intel Macs.
BTW, Apple's share of sales peaked in 1992-1994 because that's when Microsoft got everybody hooked on the 24-month upgrade cycle. That gravy train ended with XP, and MSFT stock has pretty much flatlined since. Meanwhile, AAPL is up 10x and still running. Sort of like Microsoft in the 90's. But I do think Apple is a much more benign company than Microsoft was in its day. I mean, Apple actually makes stuff people WANT. Microsoft mostly made their money selling upgrades that people felt they HAD to buy.
>> all a corporations care about is more power (which usually takes the form of money)
No it ALWAYS takes the form of money. Money is NOT power. Corporations can't kill people or throw them in jail. Governments can. That's the only real power.
Wealth is created, but political power is finite. Freedom (the opposite of political power) is finite. Once you give it to government, you can't make more to replace it. The only way to get it back is to reduce the power of government, which rarely happens peacefully. So I tend to be very sensitive about giving government power in the first place. And I think it's foolish to extend governmental power over a frivolous electronic gizmo like an iPhone.
Ya have to remember that many of the goodies to copyright holders were handed out by the previous Democrat administration. In better times, Republicans would take a more libertarian stance. Unfortunately, current Republicans have become reflexively "pro-business" instead of favoring free markets. However, if you expect any change when Hollywood's preferred party comes to power.... forget it.
Now... if I were a stockholder listening to these media companies outline their strategy, my first question would be... "Okay, so you're going to stop piracy. That's fine. Now how are you going to sell product?"
Somehow, it's as if the CEOs believe the lawyers' arguments that they'd actually sell $222,000 worth of product if they could stop this woman from pirating. How freaking dumb to you have to be to believe that?
Fact is, they could totally eliminate online piracy, and they'd still be unable to make money selling CD's, and the old record companies show NO skill whatsoever at selling downloads. You can't create value by making your product harder to use. They can extract a little cash, but, to paraphrase Keynes... in the long run, the record companies are all dead.
And during the years when Apple practiced lock-in most thoroughly, they were the least successful.
Their current success owes a great deal to their embrace of free software and open standards. Their hardware now runs most any OS. Mac hardware makes a great paltform for Windows or Linux, albeit at a small price premium. It's a price I happily pay, just to avoid a commoditized box with Taiwanese styling, engineered to hit the lowest price point.
The problem with having every part open and interchangeable is that everything becomes commoditized, and everything gets designed for low price. Linux is great... but it's basically a kit, not a product. Same with a Windows PC, to a lesser extent. But a Mac is a product. You buy a Mac, you pretty much know what you're getting. It turns out that people who don't spend their entire lives installing OS's actually like that. And Apple is selling them by the boatloads.
Meanwhile, Microsoft continues is descent into irrelevance. No amount of proprietary leverage can obfuscate the fact that Vista sort of sucks and nobody really lusts for it. Yes, MS will remain in business and they'll remain profitable, but the MS of the 90's is a memory. I've gone months on my new PC without having to install my 8 year old copy of Office 2000 on my 6 year old copy of XP.
The point being: the market takes its revenge and regulates lock-in far more effectively than people appreciate. Yes, people, there IS justice in the world, it just takes a while.
If Nokia or somebody else can produce an open smartphone that people prefer to the iPhone, they will, and they'll be successful with it. It might take five years, and you may want it in six months. But that's not worth invoking the power of government to try to solve. And when did government solve anything in six months? How long did the Microsoft anti-trust suits drag on, and did they accomplish *anything* for the consumer? Last I checked, Microsoft still sucks.
It's pretty clear, Apple is the new Microsoft. They're so freaking successful that everybody figures they must be cheating. They're starting to leverage their proprietary assets. And they're becoming the company everybody loves to hate, just like MS in the '90's.
The difference is, Apple is making some f'ing awesome products, and people are falling over each other to buy them. Compare products: iPhone or Windows 98? Ever see somebody show off their Windows upgrade to a girl at a bar?
Some people just hate success. The fuss over locked iPhones has just taken this crowd to a new low of childishness. Where were you losers the last ten years when the practice became commonplace? Clue alert: Verizon sells Verizon-branded phones that.. surprise... only work on Verizon's network!!! OMG!!! Where's the outrage? Instead, the losers wait until there's a phone they actually want and suddenly discover a heretofore unknown principle to stand on.
Apple/ATT bundling (if it's even a bad thing) is a rich country's problem, and the whining over the iPhone is truly pathetic, like a rich girl who wanted a different color BMW for her birthday. This used to be a country that valued freedom, now people go whining to Big Brother to fix every little problem in their lives. Pathetic. At the rate we're going, in 100 years Americans will all be working on assembly lines making electronic doodahs for the wealthy Chinese.
Well, I'm suspicious of the idea of treating intellectual property the same way you'd treat physical property. That sort of thinking is behind most of the problems with IP law.
But instead of Congress trying to sell consumers on schemes like net neutrality, perhaps they could pass a few laws that would, y'know, actually make the marketplace work a little better:
1 - If you can subscribe to something over the Internet, you have have to be able to cancel over the Internet. We'll call it the "Able tO canceL" act, or AOL act for short.
2 - Make software vendors print the license agreement on the outside of the box, or make it available on the web site as BEFORE purchase.
3 - Better yet, publish a few "standard" commercial licenses with various terms, and allow vendors to just specify, say, "US Type 7 Consumer License," so you wouldn't have to read each one. And vendors wouldn't have to hire a lawyer before they could sell something. Too good an idea to ever be enacted, unfortunately.
The idea that Rove tricked the country into voting Republican is a conceit; it spares the Dems from examining their own role in the losses, which was substantial.
You can't win elections by blaming the public, which is what the Dems did. By elevating Rove to the level of genius, the underlying message was, "you voters are stupid." Amazingly, voters don't like hearing that, and they tend to reject those who say it, even if they're right.
Dems also marched alongside many who were plainly anti-American; when you're focused on Bush, those people can seem like allies, but they're not, and the public knows it.
As for the Republicans, they were doing fine until they got elected and realized that "reducing the size of government" suddenly applied to them, and decided to forget the whole idea.
"Mr Rove is one of the chief architects of the Republican Revolution"
Don't you mean he's one of the people responsible for ending it? As far as I can see, the Republicans have been winning less and less over the last 8 years, to the point where most pundits believe the Dems will win the presidency and both houses of Congress in '08. The only people happy about Rove's departure should be Republicans.
On the other hand, since so many Democrats think he's some sort of genius... what does that say?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine why Google and Yahoo would form a partnership in order to weaken Yahoo. That's the one thing that Yahoo management is good at.
>> "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells."
And therein lies the great deception... many people believe that such technologies will get cheaper as they become more widely used. Just subsidize it to "jump-start" the market, and voila! Free energy! Or so goes the sales pitch.
Unfortunately, people who have studied economics for more than five seconds understand that increased demand leads to higher prices, not lower prices.
CPU prices don't come down because people buy them, they come down because Intel make better ones year after year. It's (at best) questionable whether that level of innovation will be possible with solar energy. But if it is possible, then subsidies won't be needed.
This is why concert and sports tickets have gone up in price so much.
As we live our lives more and more online, as we download whatever movies we want to see or surf to one of a zillion channels, the one experience that technology can't replace is contact with other humans. Demand for tickets of all sorts is higher than ever, while the supply/demand ratio for recorded music has made selling it a waste of time.
In the 70's, bands would go on tour to promote record sales. Now they make recordings so they can go on tour.
Apple needs to update their promotional materials for Leopard. Turns out it has 301 new features.
I suspect the modern German army is more likely to go on strike than to go on attack.
The good news is, scientists have developed a robotic nose. The bad news is, it's a dog's nose, so it robotically sniffs your butt.
According to the Wikipedia entry, these guns were used by Argentina in the Falklands war in 1982, and the digital fire control system is from 1985. How do they qualify as high-tech robotic cannons? This was just a horrible training accident with ancient weapons.
>> depends entirely on the total amount of money ultimately made
Exactly. And that's what the record industry has just never been able to figure out. Not that their task is easy. But ultimately, an artist doesn't (shouldn't) care whether he sells 1,000,000 at ten cents or 100,000 at a dollar. But they haven't really figured out how to charge ten cents effectively, and... oh fuck, we all know by now how clueless they are. The main point being that fighting piracy only helps them sell more downloads in theory. In practice, that business will cease to exist in its traditional form.
More revealing is the new Madonna contract with LiveNation instead of a record company. Performance is where the money is nowadays, not in selling discs or even downloads. In the 70's, bands would go on tour to sell their records. Now, bands record CD's so they can go on tour. It's completely logical if you think about how the economics have changed.
Government always defends against the last disaster, and they're fairly good at it. Since 9/11, no gang of hijackers has crashed an airliner into a tall building.
Seriously, at the time of 9/11, they were still looking for bombs hidden in radios, which brought down Pan-Am 103 in the early 80's.
Now they check shoes.
What next? Depends on what works for the terrorists next. Then they'll start searching for that.
Anyplace USPS is competing with FedEx and UPS, it's being subsidized by its monopoly on first class and junk mail. Where do you think those Post Offices and mailboxes come from? And their express service is okay if you're not very fussy, but that's about it. They do have budget ground service that's.. well it's cheaper than UPS Ground. But Tracking? On-time delivery? Miserable.
Again, I have no problem paying the nice people to walk around all day and deliver junk mail and wear a uniform, if that's what they want to do with their lives. But no, not even close to competing with the private companies; I can't remember the last time I sent anything via USPS when I had a choice.
I've no problems with compassion, no problems with helping the less able, or even the less ambitious. That's why I'm not a libertarian.
For example, I think the purpose of the US Postal Service monopoly is to provide stable jobs for people who aren't very ambitious and/or not very talented. Stated that way, I think it's a good use of money. But if you tell me that it's a good way to deliver the mail, then that's bullshit. If you took away their monopoly, they'd be out of business within a year.
Typical Orwellian doublespeak: "It is Apple that have locked them self out of EU by not obeying our laws!"
Good grief, do you have ANY clue how totalitarian what you just wrote is?
Please, read "1984".
>> Getting the big money out of politics would be a very good thing, though I don't see any easy path to doing so...
To get the money out of politics, the best path is to cut taxes and limit governmental power.
Inevitably, many special interests want to petition the government for redress, and that's a pretty important right in itself. If we decide ahead of time who can lobby government and by what means, then it's self-defeating. It's the slippery slope down the "more regulation will produce more freedom" line of thinking. The biggest, richest, most powerful groups will always have the most influence, no matter how you try to disguise it.
I once had hopes for the libertarian wing of the Repubs, but have learned that it's in the nature of democratic government that you can't hold onto power while simultaneously giving it up. I finally realized I could do more good by persuading people to think clearly about freedom, than by, y'know, voting.
BTW, I had similar hopes for the Dems back in the 60's & 70's, too. Back then I thought "liberal" meant that when in doubt, you err on the side of permissiveness. But over the years, I realized that it just meant passing a bunch of rules to make us live more like "liberals". Fuck that.
The problem will not be solved by replacing Republicans with Democrats. It will only change the rationale. Dems will probe for child molesters and music pirates instead of terrorists, but they're not going to loosen government's grip.
The problem will be solved when Americans finally ask, "How the fuck can government regulate our telephone lines when we have a First Ammendment?"
>>not the current soviet-like lack of selection that you seem to be enjoying in the US right now.
Well, then go buy an iPhone. Oops, you can't. Sorry, cheap shot but I couldn't resist. I'm not saying the US is any better, we certainly have our own share of market distortions and government favoritism in telecom.
But really, the more regulations you have, the less free the market is. Even if they're worded to make it sound like they're fostering competition, in all cases, they are actually limiting it. Usually on behalf of a taxpaying constituent; in this case they're benefiting Nokia, Ericsson and the carriers who lost out on the iPhone deal. If you think they're doing it for the consumer you're naive.
When governments claim that more regulation will yield more freedom, it's Orwellian doublespeak in its purest and vilest form.
Good news for consumers... unless they're in Europe and want an iPhone.
Let me get this straight.... you REALLY think such regulation would prompt somebody to make a better phone than Apple?
Why would they?
They no longer have to!
If I were a phone maker, I'd say, "Thank you for locking out our toughest competitor."
Score another one for corporations who scam consumers into thinking regulation is good for them. Pay attention, this is how it's done folks.
I guess it would have been more accurate to say that in the 80's & 90's, Apple charged a heavy premium for their proprietary platform. In recent years, they've reduced prices to be more competitive, and they're rapidly taking home PC share from Windows. Whatever the market share numbers were, Apple pretty much just sold to graphics pros and latte snobs before they introduced the Intel Macs.
BTW, Apple's share of sales peaked in 1992-1994 because that's when Microsoft got everybody hooked on the 24-month upgrade cycle. That gravy train ended with XP, and MSFT stock has pretty much flatlined since. Meanwhile, AAPL is up 10x and still running. Sort of like Microsoft in the 90's. But I do think Apple is a much more benign company than Microsoft was in its day. I mean, Apple actually makes stuff people WANT. Microsoft mostly made their money selling upgrades that people felt they HAD to buy.
>> all a corporations care about is more power (which usually takes the form of money)
No it ALWAYS takes the form of money. Money is NOT power. Corporations can't kill people or throw them in jail. Governments can. That's the only real power.
Wealth is created, but political power is finite. Freedom (the opposite of political power) is finite. Once you give it to government, you can't make more to replace it. The only way to get it back is to reduce the power of government, which rarely happens peacefully. So I tend to be very sensitive about giving government power in the first place. And I think it's foolish to extend governmental power over a frivolous electronic gizmo like an iPhone.
Ya have to remember that many of the goodies to copyright holders were handed out by the previous Democrat administration. In better times, Republicans would take a more libertarian stance. Unfortunately, current Republicans have become reflexively "pro-business" instead of favoring free markets. However, if you expect any change when Hollywood's preferred party comes to power.... forget it.
Now... if I were a stockholder listening to these media companies outline their strategy, my first question would be... "Okay, so you're going to stop piracy. That's fine. Now how are you going to sell product?"
Somehow, it's as if the CEOs believe the lawyers' arguments that they'd actually sell $222,000 worth of product if they could stop this woman from pirating. How freaking dumb to you have to be to believe that?
Fact is, they could totally eliminate online piracy, and they'd still be unable to make money selling CD's, and the old record companies show NO skill whatsoever at selling downloads. You can't create value by making your product harder to use. They can extract a little cash, but, to paraphrase Keynes... in the long run, the record companies are all dead.
And during the years when Apple practiced lock-in most thoroughly, they were the least successful.
Their current success owes a great deal to their embrace of free software and open standards. Their hardware now runs most any OS. Mac hardware makes a great paltform for Windows or Linux, albeit at a small price premium. It's a price I happily pay, just to avoid a commoditized box with Taiwanese styling, engineered to hit the lowest price point.
The problem with having every part open and interchangeable is that everything becomes commoditized, and everything gets designed for low price. Linux is great... but it's basically a kit, not a product. Same with a Windows PC, to a lesser extent. But a Mac is a product. You buy a Mac, you pretty much know what you're getting. It turns out that people who don't spend their entire lives installing OS's actually like that. And Apple is selling them by the boatloads.
Meanwhile, Microsoft continues is descent into irrelevance. No amount of proprietary leverage can obfuscate the fact that Vista sort of sucks and nobody really lusts for it. Yes, MS will remain in business and they'll remain profitable, but the MS of the 90's is a memory. I've gone months on my new PC without having to install my 8 year old copy of Office 2000 on my 6 year old copy of XP.
The point being: the market takes its revenge and regulates lock-in far more effectively than people appreciate. Yes, people, there IS justice in the world, it just takes a while.
If Nokia or somebody else can produce an open smartphone that people prefer to the iPhone, they will, and they'll be successful with it. It might take five years, and you may want it in six months. But that's not worth invoking the power of government to try to solve. And when did government solve anything in six months? How long did the Microsoft anti-trust suits drag on, and did they accomplish *anything* for the consumer? Last I checked, Microsoft still sucks.
It's pretty clear, Apple is the new Microsoft. They're so freaking successful that everybody figures they must be cheating. They're starting to leverage their proprietary assets. And they're becoming the company everybody loves to hate, just like MS in the '90's.
The difference is, Apple is making some f'ing awesome products, and people are falling over each other to buy them. Compare products: iPhone or Windows 98? Ever see somebody show off their Windows upgrade to a girl at a bar?
Some people just hate success. The fuss over locked iPhones has just taken this crowd to a new low of childishness. Where were you losers the last ten years when the practice became commonplace? Clue alert: Verizon sells Verizon-branded phones that.. surprise... only work on Verizon's network!!! OMG!!! Where's the outrage? Instead, the losers wait until there's a phone they actually want and suddenly discover a heretofore unknown principle to stand on.
Apple/ATT bundling (if it's even a bad thing) is a rich country's problem, and the whining over the iPhone is truly pathetic, like a rich girl who wanted a different color BMW for her birthday. This used to be a country that valued freedom, now people go whining to Big Brother to fix every little problem in their lives. Pathetic. At the rate we're going, in 100 years Americans will all be working on assembly lines making electronic doodahs for the wealthy Chinese.
>>the Act will weaken the patent system, devalue patents, and encourage infringement
But are there any negative effects?
Well, I'm suspicious of the idea of treating intellectual property the same way you'd treat physical property. That sort of thinking is behind most of the problems with IP law.
But instead of Congress trying to sell consumers on schemes like net neutrality, perhaps they could pass a few laws that would, y'know, actually make the marketplace work a little better:
1 - If you can subscribe to something over the Internet, you have have to be able to cancel over the Internet. We'll call it the "Able tO canceL" act, or AOL act for short.
2 - Make software vendors print the license agreement on the outside of the box, or make it available on the web site as BEFORE purchase.
3 - Better yet, publish a few "standard" commercial licenses with various terms, and allow vendors to just specify, say, "US Type 7 Consumer License," so you wouldn't have to read each one. And vendors wouldn't have to hire a lawyer before they could sell something. Too good an idea to ever be enacted, unfortunately.
The idea that Rove tricked the country into voting Republican is a conceit; it spares the Dems from examining their own role in the losses, which was substantial.
You can't win elections by blaming the public, which is what the Dems did. By elevating Rove to the level of genius, the underlying message was, "you voters are stupid." Amazingly, voters don't like hearing that, and they tend to reject those who say it, even if they're right.
Dems also marched alongside many who were plainly anti-American; when you're focused on Bush, those people can seem like allies, but they're not, and the public knows it.
As for the Republicans, they were doing fine until they got elected and realized that "reducing the size of government" suddenly applied to them, and decided to forget the whole idea.
"Mr Rove is one of the chief architects of the Republican Revolution"
Don't you mean he's one of the people responsible for ending it? As far as I can see, the Republicans have been winning less and less over the last 8 years, to the point where most pundits believe the Dems will win the presidency and both houses of Congress in '08. The only people happy about Rove's departure should be Republicans.
On the other hand, since so many Democrats think he's some sort of genius... what does that say?