Libertarianism sounds like a nice idea, on paper. Until you get sick from the unregulated chemicals in your Libertarian Utopian job
Pollution of other peoples property would be considered "harming others".
Such a shame the pollution is on my inviolable property, there's no government regulations to even suggest what is a pollutant and you'll have to spend the next 50 years in court proving that it's my fault the aquifer carried what I prefer to call "chemical suppliments" onto your property, and that these "chemical suppliments" are somehow harmful.
, discover that your Libertarian Health Care determines this to be a pre-existing condition and drops your coverage,
You really should have read those papers before you signed them.
Yes, of course! Shame on me for not studying law, or having enough money to hire a dozen lawyers to divine the exact routes which this company layed out plainly before me, in Latin, precisely how they intended to subvert actually paying off any liabilities. What was I thinking, right?
your at will employer fires you
Why didn't you include severance pay in the contract? It doesn't sound very libertarian to forbid those kinds of contracts.
Because of course every job is contract labor, on salary and not hourly minimum wage.. oh wait, no minimum wage in Libertopia!
and all your savings are wiped out in yet another unregulated stock market collapse.
As opposed to a good old regulated stock market collapse. I really fail to see the difference. And quite a lot of stocks is doing fine, so stock market collapses is a limited problem for your savings if you have properly diversified your portfolio.
Of course, everyone has a stock portfolio and minored in stock manipu..management along with that law degree. Also everyone naturally has the wealth to diversify in the first place too, right?
Here's the difference between a regulated stock market collapse and a non-regulated stock market collapse: Open a history book, look up Black Tuesday. If you can't figure it out from there, well there's just no hope for you.
It's cute that you choose to defend the formation of unions in a Libertarian utopia but make no attempt to suggest their won't be rampant pollution, corporate fascism, recurring economic disruption and bitter social Darwinism. Bravo!
You might want to ponder how the Libertarian claims of personal liberty as long as it doesn't harm anyone mesh with their defense that a business (ie. Sacred Property Owner) has the right to hire children and work them to death because hey, they're free to work somewhere else if they want. Oh, also that Libertarians consider children their parents property to be treated as the parents see fit and if the kid doesn't like getting bad touched or beaten for dinner they have the right to run away. So it's totally fine if their parents sell them to a workhouse, when they're ready to seize self-ownership, why they can flee to better opportunities!
If you're a bank executive you can make unethical gambles with other people's money, try to hide your losses, and bring down the world economy putting millions of people out of work. Go to jail? No, you don't even lose your annual bonus that's worth more than most people earn in 50 lifetimes.
But if you paint a sign and get out in the streets to protest, you run a serious risk of being billy-clubbed and pepper-sprayed by the police.
Guess which one of those two is most likely to be a Libertarian.
Except you go to make a claim against the insurance company and find out that surprise, they have no intention of ever paying you anything and have more than enough lawyers to keep you tied up in courts for longer than you'll live so go die already. Oh and your account has been canceled, because how dare you!
As for your statistics, stastistics are bullshit and I can pull enough statistics together to prove that the rise in Bronies is lowering crime stats if I want. Anybody can cherry pick stats.
Libertarianism sounds like a nice idea, on paper. Until you get sick from the unregulated chemicals in your Libertarian Utopian job, discover that your Libertarian Health Care determines this to be a pre-existing condition and drops your coverage, your at will employer fires you from your non-union job (remember, you have freedom but don't even think about forming a Union, Liberty!) and all your savings are wiped out in yet another unregulated stock market collapse. Then you're cold, sick and homeless and wondering why nobody cares that you did everything the way you were supposed to and still failed miserably so go die in a hole and by the way there's a $10 hole fee.
A large majority of nerds are anti-social, high on the autism spectrum and have never lived outside of their parents house while they read Randian screeds how they'll one day take over the world as the 'parasites' burn and masturbate to the photos from the hidden cam they installed in the girls restroom at school.
FTFY
The publishers were doing fine, and continue to do fine. They still continue to make most of their profits from physical books, btw, which they seem to have no problem selling through Amazon and allowing Amazon to set the price for. In the vast majority of e-book listings, in fact, the PHYSICAL PAPER BOOK COSTS LESS THAN THE E-BOOK, and yet e-book sales account for only 25%-30% of publisher profits.
How exactly, does that work btw? I can buy a CD for $15, but download the album in MP3 format for $9.99. A DVD costs $20, buying the download is $15. Yet only in books is the digital copy routinely priced higher than the physical copy. Yet you want to tell me the publishers are going bankrupt? The same publishers who would gleefully close down all public libraries and have openly accused them of theft? How do you defend these a-holes and feel good about yourself?
That said, I question the ethics of Amazon's own pricing plan if it caused such a problem for publishers, and I find it hard to believe that something like that wouldn't have damaged consumers as much if not more in the long term. Here's my reasoning: Amazon, as we all know, was willing to sell titles at a loss to maintain their low prices. This sounds great for consumers, because we save money right away. But over time, the businesses that can't afford to sell titles at a loss go under. Amazon no longer needs that super-low price to be the lowest price around because their price is the only price, now they can finally sell it for a profit without fear of consumers just walking to a book store or clicking over to the next site. Book prices go back up, competition is gone with little hope of return, and Amazon stands over the corpses of Borders and B&N triumphantly.
People said the same thing about Wal-Mart, except somehow Target spanks their a** every quarter. Either way, your supposition has a few problems, notably Amazon, unlike Apple, still sells the physical copies of the books, as well as the e-books. Said physical copies are NOT covered by the Apple agreement and Amazon is free to price them as it wishes. Amazon, as a part of their business, allows other retailers to compete with them ON THE SAME PAGE. You can see other prices for both new and used books, right there next to Amazon's price. Regardless of the price Amazon chooses to sell their physical books for, THE PUBLISHER WAS PAID! They got their money, upfront. Amazon could give paperbacks away for free and put a dollar in your pocket for taking it and it would not effect the publishers at all. Lastly, it is not illegal to have a monopoly, but it IS illegal to abuse it. If some fabled day came in the future where Amazon used their control of the market to force publishers to charge less, then they are free to take them to court over it or seek a government investigation.
Let's be perfectly clear here as well. This deal was never about Apple helping out publishers either. The sales of ebooks through Apple is a rounding error on their balance sheet, they were worried about a visible chink in their 30% cut of sales through iTunes and they didn't want to have to manage an actual competing store front for books. Apple isn't a book seller, they just wanted the smoothest method they could get to a) offer books, which people wanted on their iDevices, and b) get 30% off the top of that. It was either buy books at wholesale, setup a division to manage prices and take a loss like Amazon, or collude to change how the market was structured. Guess which one they picked.
Prior to Apple's arrangement with publishers, retailers like Amazon could buy e-books wholesale and offer whatever prices they chose. Apple colluded with the publishers to change from a wholesale to an agency model FORCING all other retailers to abide by agency terms and removing the wholesale option. Amazon tried to fight this and several publishers stopped selling books through Amazon until they caved, solely because of Apple's backing. If Apple hadn't supported the agency model and they hadn't colluded with the other publishers, none of them would have risked cutting off their largest customer, Amazon to strong-arm them into the new terms.
For non-agency titles (in other words, titles that Amazon purchases to sell under the wholesale model,) Amazon reserves the right to set and change the price as it sees fit, although it will still remit the same wholesale amount back to the publisher or author. If Amazon drops its price for a title below that of Apple or Barnes & Noble, even without the knowledge of the publisher or author, Apple and Barnes & Noble have the right to match Amazon's price.
Read that through again. The blogger you are sourcing is misrepresenting what a "Most Favored Nation" agreement is. When a retailer, such as Amazon, buys a product at wholesale, either a book or a pipe fitting, they have the right to set whatever price they wish for that item. If they're cutting into their own profit that doesn't matter and is not illegal, the manufacturer/distributor/publisher was paid their asking price. This is not a MFN clause, it's standard retail practice.
Apple's deal changed that. Retailers could no longer set their own prices. If they didn't charge the price the publishers demanded then they would not be sold any books, and several publishers did withhold books from Amazon until they agreed to their scheme. They could no longer use pricing as a competitive tool against Apple, which is why Apple is in court and not Amazon.
The problem with e-book prices, in the main, is the perception of value. When they are listed next to the retail prices for the paperback version and it's still cheaper to have a paperback shipped to your home, then something is very very wrong. When the e-book version of a book that has been out of print for a decade or more hits the market for $9.99, you know that's not a fair price.
Prior to e-books, when a publisher stopped printing a book, their profit from that book was done. If it was a very popular book they might order more printings, but again, when the printing stopped so did that books revenue stream. This was a problem for the publisher, the author and the reader. The publisher and author's side is easy to understand; no new income, but consider also the reader that didn't know about that author at the time, it's been 20 years and they just read an author's newest novel which is part of a series and they feel a desire to read their older books. If they are lucky they might be able to track down a copy from a library or hunt through a few used book stores for one, neither of which gets any profits back to the author. Or conversely they found a dog eared used copy in a flea market and want to read more of that author's works, but the author died and all their books are out of print.
E-books, and Amazon created a new revenue stream for publishers, buying up books at wholesale (for which they paid what the publishers asked! how is that anti-publisher??) and selling those e-books below their own costs to expand a market from a niche curiosity into every day ubiquity. E-books continue to generate revenue long after the printing presses shut down, unlike paper books. So these poor, taken advantage of publishers went from zero profits after print to "some" profits. Oooo, evil Amazon, how could you mistreat them so???
It was the publishers with Apple's help that decided "some" profit wasn't enough, they wanted moar! So now you get numerous cases where the e-book's price is HIGHER than the paperback!! I've seen e-books listed for the hardcover price years after the book was released and used paperback copies were selling for $1 right beside it.
I swear, the only publisher that ever really understood e-books was Baen. Give the old books away for free as advertising for the new books, it's not like they were making money sitting on a hard drive waiting for a new print run!
First off, Amazon built the e-book market. When e-books started they were just niche amusements people got for their Palm Pilots and Windows PDA's. Publishers didn't care about them at all and made zero effort to establish them.
Amazon laid the groundwork, connected their store to a decent e-book reader and made e-books into the market it is today.
They were also not bankrupting any publishers. They paid the wholesale price for the books that the publishers asked for and then CUT THEIR OWN PROFIT MARGIN by selling lower than what they paid. The publishers already made a profit off the hardcover, the paperback and the e-books.
The problem wasn't that publishers were getting paid, in fact e-book sales were keeping alive books that were decades out of print and creating new profit where none had existed before. It was that they didn't feel they were getting enough. These are the same publishers that have said publicly that Libraries are stealing profits from them, btw. They are the reason an e-book now retails the same price as the hardcover even when the paperback is being sold simultaneously. Publishers are the reason an e-book can retail for $9.99 when the paperback sells for $7, if it's still even in print.
The publishers jumped into Apple's arms when they proposed their deal because it gave them a way to increase their profits and if it wasn't shady they wouldn't have all settled with the government rather than stand with Apple in their defense.
Don't forget that Apple controls the apps through their app store and competing book reading apps can't purchase e-books through their app like Apple's, you have to open a web browser and go to their webstore to make a purchase.
It's pretty sad when someone can't even work up the reading comprehension to grasp the story from a short summary.
In total, if you play the cracked version of the game, the simulator will ramp up the rate of piracy for your simulated company's games, so you will lose. It stacks the odds against you.
It's not just lawyers. I had a telemarketer call me once at work to pitch some ridiculous SEO 'get on the front page of Google' service, and when he figured out that I wasn't listening to him he just went into a rant about how unprofessional "I" was and how if I worked for him he'd fire me. I was laughing my ass off when I hung up on the idiot.
You're not considering the other issues such as having to go through multiple state audits when they want to challenge if you're sending them enough of the revenue that you're collecting for them. Finding out that oops, this country in this state raised their tax rate and you didn't know but now they're taking you to court for not paying the right fees is not how you want to run a business.
In the end, the big chains that can afford it (Amazon) will have distribution centers in each state and completely dodge the issue, while all the added burden will go to their smaller competitors.
I'm glad you have 5 or 10 years for an anti-trust suit to wind it's way through the courts to fix something that should never have been broken dude, but most of us just want to get our work done and move on.
You must be unaware of the fact that there are very clear instances where bending over for a customer is the worst thing a company can do. This "customer" is in the wrong, regardless if Musk has the personality of a rabid wolverine on PMS.
Because 99.99999% of the world who are not Tesla engineers won't have a fracking clue what the data means, so in the interest if making their explanation understandable they interpreted the data for us.
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing also made this important point: 'Amazon didn't have to honor the takedown notice. Takedown notices are a copyright thing, a creature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They don't apply to trademark claims. This is Amazon taking voluntary steps that are in no way required in law.'"
Yet, either way Amazon will be the one getting sued by one or both of these people.
I've been an Apple fan of its peripheral devices for a few years now. I got in on the original Iphone and ever since then have bought quite a few of the products that Apple puts out. The problem in almost all of their launches is that they have initial problems, clean them up, and then things work out great for those who like their products. The only real part of the problem is that people want the next thing right now rather than waiting a month or so and figuring out if the device is everything they hoped it would be. Because of that, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for buyers until after the warming period has ended. I'll probably buy an Iphone 5 myself, but I'll buy it AFTER they've worked out the kinks, making it the phone I want rather than the phone that I MUST HAVE.
There is a flaw in your argument. If everyone is "smart" and waits for the bugs to shake out, then nobody will buy a product when it releases, the bugs won't be discovered before you feel it's safe enough to buy one and quite likely, with dismal initial sales the product will disappear from shelves, ie HP's WebOS tablet or they'll decide it's not worth investing more money into fixing a troubled product.
So shut your mouth and have some sympathy for the suckers paying up to be beta testers to ensure you get a nice finished product.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering Thunderbolt cables are $40 a piece, I'm sure that's exactly how it's designed.
Libertarianism sounds like a nice idea, on paper. Until you get sick from the unregulated chemicals in your Libertarian Utopian job
Pollution of other peoples property would be considered "harming others".
Such a shame the pollution is on my inviolable property, there's no government regulations to even suggest what is a pollutant and you'll have to spend the next 50 years in court proving that it's my fault the aquifer carried what I prefer to call "chemical suppliments" onto your property, and that these "chemical suppliments" are somehow harmful.
, discover that your Libertarian Health Care determines this to be a pre-existing condition and drops your coverage,
You really should have read those papers before you signed them.
Yes, of course! Shame on me for not studying law, or having enough money to hire a dozen lawyers to divine the exact routes which this company layed out plainly before me, in Latin, precisely how they intended to subvert actually paying off any liabilities. What was I thinking, right?
your at will employer fires you
Why didn't you include severance pay in the contract? It doesn't sound very libertarian to forbid those kinds of contracts.
Because of course every job is contract labor, on salary and not hourly minimum wage.. oh wait, no minimum wage in Libertopia!
and all your savings are wiped out in yet another unregulated stock market collapse.
As opposed to a good old regulated stock market collapse. I really fail to see the difference. And quite a lot of stocks is doing fine, so stock market collapses is a limited problem for your savings if you have properly diversified your portfolio.
Of course, everyone has a stock portfolio and minored in stock manipu..management along with that law degree. Also everyone naturally has the wealth to diversify in the first place too, right? Here's the difference between a regulated stock market collapse and a non-regulated stock market collapse: Open a history book, look up Black Tuesday. If you can't figure it out from there, well there's just no hope for you.
It's cute that you choose to defend the formation of unions in a Libertarian utopia but make no attempt to suggest their won't be rampant pollution, corporate fascism, recurring economic disruption and bitter social Darwinism. Bravo!
You might want to ponder how the Libertarian claims of personal liberty as long as it doesn't harm anyone mesh with their defense that a business (ie. Sacred Property Owner) has the right to hire children and work them to death because hey, they're free to work somewhere else if they want. Oh, also that Libertarians consider children their parents property to be treated as the parents see fit and if the kid doesn't like getting bad touched or beaten for dinner they have the right to run away. So it's totally fine if their parents sell them to a workhouse, when they're ready to seize self-ownership, why they can flee to better opportunities!
Yes, rely on those private charities!
If you're a bank executive you can make unethical gambles with other people's money, try to hide your losses, and bring down the world economy putting millions of people out of work. Go to jail? No, you don't even lose your annual bonus that's worth more than most people earn in 50 lifetimes.
But if you paint a sign and get out in the streets to protest, you run a serious risk of being billy-clubbed and pepper-sprayed by the police.
Guess which one of those two is most likely to be a Libertarian.
Except you go to make a claim against the insurance company and find out that surprise, they have no intention of ever paying you anything and have more than enough lawyers to keep you tied up in courts for longer than you'll live so go die already. Oh and your account has been canceled, because how dare you!
As for your statistics, stastistics are bullshit and I can pull enough statistics together to prove that the rise in Bronies is lowering crime stats if I want. Anybody can cherry pick stats.
Libertarianism sounds like a nice idea, on paper. Until you get sick from the unregulated chemicals in your Libertarian Utopian job, discover that your Libertarian Health Care determines this to be a pre-existing condition and drops your coverage, your at will employer fires you from your non-union job (remember, you have freedom but don't even think about forming a Union, Liberty!) and all your savings are wiped out in yet another unregulated stock market collapse. Then you're cold, sick and homeless and wondering why nobody cares that you did everything the way you were supposed to and still failed miserably so go die in a hole and by the way there's a $10 hole fee.
A large majority of nerds are anti-social, high on the autism spectrum and have never lived outside of their parents house while they read Randian screeds how they'll one day take over the world as the 'parasites' burn and masturbate to the photos from the hidden cam they installed in the girls restroom at school. FTFY
The publishers were doing fine, and continue to do fine. They still continue to make most of their profits from physical books, btw, which they seem to have no problem selling through Amazon and allowing Amazon to set the price for. In the vast majority of e-book listings, in fact, the PHYSICAL PAPER BOOK COSTS LESS THAN THE E-BOOK, and yet e-book sales account for only 25%-30% of publisher profits.
How exactly, does that work btw? I can buy a CD for $15, but download the album in MP3 format for $9.99. A DVD costs $20, buying the download is $15. Yet only in books is the digital copy routinely priced higher than the physical copy. Yet you want to tell me the publishers are going bankrupt? The same publishers who would gleefully close down all public libraries and have openly accused them of theft? How do you defend these a-holes and feel good about yourself?
That said, I question the ethics of Amazon's own pricing plan if it caused such a problem for publishers, and I find it hard to believe that something like that wouldn't have damaged consumers as much if not more in the long term. Here's my reasoning: Amazon, as we all know, was willing to sell titles at a loss to maintain their low prices. This sounds great for consumers, because we save money right away. But over time, the businesses that can't afford to sell titles at a loss go under. Amazon no longer needs that super-low price to be the lowest price around because their price is the only price, now they can finally sell it for a profit without fear of consumers just walking to a book store or clicking over to the next site. Book prices go back up, competition is gone with little hope of return, and Amazon stands over the corpses of Borders and B&N triumphantly.
People said the same thing about Wal-Mart, except somehow Target spanks their a** every quarter. Either way, your supposition has a few problems, notably Amazon, unlike Apple, still sells the physical copies of the books, as well as the e-books. Said physical copies are NOT covered by the Apple agreement and Amazon is free to price them as it wishes. Amazon, as a part of their business, allows other retailers to compete with them ON THE SAME PAGE. You can see other prices for both new and used books, right there next to Amazon's price. Regardless of the price Amazon chooses to sell their physical books for, THE PUBLISHER WAS PAID! They got their money, upfront. Amazon could give paperbacks away for free and put a dollar in your pocket for taking it and it would not effect the publishers at all. Lastly, it is not illegal to have a monopoly, but it IS illegal to abuse it. If some fabled day came in the future where Amazon used their control of the market to force publishers to charge less, then they are free to take them to court over it or seek a government investigation.
Let's be perfectly clear here as well. This deal was never about Apple helping out publishers either. The sales of ebooks through Apple is a rounding error on their balance sheet, they were worried about a visible chink in their 30% cut of sales through iTunes and they didn't want to have to manage an actual competing store front for books. Apple isn't a book seller, they just wanted the smoothest method they could get to a) offer books, which people wanted on their iDevices, and b) get 30% off the top of that. It was either buy books at wholesale, setup a division to manage prices and take a loss like Amazon, or collude to change how the market was structured. Guess which one they picked.
Prior to Apple's arrangement with publishers, retailers like Amazon could buy e-books wholesale and offer whatever prices they chose. Apple colluded with the publishers to change from a wholesale to an agency model FORCING all other retailers to abide by agency terms and removing the wholesale option. Amazon tried to fight this and several publishers stopped selling books through Amazon until they caved, solely because of Apple's backing. If Apple hadn't supported the agency model and they hadn't colluded with the other publishers, none of them would have risked cutting off their largest customer, Amazon to strong-arm them into the new terms.
Except Steve Jobs approached the publishers and suggested the arrangement to begin with.
For non-agency titles (in other words, titles that Amazon purchases to sell under the wholesale model,) Amazon reserves the right to set and change the price as it sees fit, although it will still remit the same wholesale amount back to the publisher or author. If Amazon drops its price for a title below that of Apple or Barnes & Noble, even without the knowledge of the publisher or author, Apple and Barnes & Noble have the right to match Amazon's price.
Read that through again. The blogger you are sourcing is misrepresenting what a "Most Favored Nation" agreement is. When a retailer, such as Amazon, buys a product at wholesale, either a book or a pipe fitting, they have the right to set whatever price they wish for that item. If they're cutting into their own profit that doesn't matter and is not illegal, the manufacturer/distributor/publisher was paid their asking price. This is not a MFN clause, it's standard retail practice. Apple's deal changed that. Retailers could no longer set their own prices. If they didn't charge the price the publishers demanded then they would not be sold any books, and several publishers did withhold books from Amazon until they agreed to their scheme. They could no longer use pricing as a competitive tool against Apple, which is why Apple is in court and not Amazon.
" What I have trouble determining in this shift from physical media to digital is how the artists are making out in this brave new world."
A couple of artists that sell e-books direct through Amazon have become millionaires actually. http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/03/amanda-hocking-and-99-cent-kindle.html
The problem with e-book prices, in the main, is the perception of value. When they are listed next to the retail prices for the paperback version and it's still cheaper to have a paperback shipped to your home, then something is very very wrong. When the e-book version of a book that has been out of print for a decade or more hits the market for $9.99, you know that's not a fair price.
Prior to e-books, when a publisher stopped printing a book, their profit from that book was done. If it was a very popular book they might order more printings, but again, when the printing stopped so did that books revenue stream. This was a problem for the publisher, the author and the reader. The publisher and author's side is easy to understand; no new income, but consider also the reader that didn't know about that author at the time, it's been 20 years and they just read an author's newest novel which is part of a series and they feel a desire to read their older books. If they are lucky they might be able to track down a copy from a library or hunt through a few used book stores for one, neither of which gets any profits back to the author. Or conversely they found a dog eared used copy in a flea market and want to read more of that author's works, but the author died and all their books are out of print.
E-books, and Amazon created a new revenue stream for publishers, buying up books at wholesale (for which they paid what the publishers asked! how is that anti-publisher??) and selling those e-books below their own costs to expand a market from a niche curiosity into every day ubiquity. E-books continue to generate revenue long after the printing presses shut down, unlike paper books. So these poor, taken advantage of publishers went from zero profits after print to "some" profits. Oooo, evil Amazon, how could you mistreat them so???
It was the publishers with Apple's help that decided "some" profit wasn't enough, they wanted moar! So now you get numerous cases where the e-book's price is HIGHER than the paperback!! I've seen e-books listed for the hardcover price years after the book was released and used paperback copies were selling for $1 right beside it.
I swear, the only publisher that ever really understood e-books was Baen. Give the old books away for free as advertising for the new books, it's not like they were making money sitting on a hard drive waiting for a new print run!
First off, Amazon built the e-book market. When e-books started they were just niche amusements people got for their Palm Pilots and Windows PDA's. Publishers didn't care about them at all and made zero effort to establish them.
Amazon laid the groundwork, connected their store to a decent e-book reader and made e-books into the market it is today.
They were also not bankrupting any publishers. They paid the wholesale price for the books that the publishers asked for and then CUT THEIR OWN PROFIT MARGIN by selling lower than what they paid. The publishers already made a profit off the hardcover, the paperback and the e-books.
The problem wasn't that publishers were getting paid, in fact e-book sales were keeping alive books that were decades out of print and creating new profit where none had existed before. It was that they didn't feel they were getting enough. These are the same publishers that have said publicly that Libraries are stealing profits from them, btw. They are the reason an e-book now retails the same price as the hardcover even when the paperback is being sold simultaneously. Publishers are the reason an e-book can retail for $9.99 when the paperback sells for $7, if it's still even in print.
The publishers jumped into Apple's arms when they proposed their deal because it gave them a way to increase their profits and if it wasn't shady they wouldn't have all settled with the government rather than stand with Apple in their defense.
Don't forget that Apple controls the apps through their app store and competing book reading apps can't purchase e-books through their app like Apple's, you have to open a web browser and go to their webstore to make a purchase.
It's pretty sad when someone can't even work up the reading comprehension to grasp the story from a short summary.
In total, if you play the cracked version of the game, the simulator will ramp up the rate of piracy for your simulated company's games, so you will lose. It stacks the odds against you.
It's not just lawyers. I had a telemarketer call me once at work to pitch some ridiculous SEO 'get on the front page of Google' service, and when he figured out that I wasn't listening to him he just went into a rant about how unprofessional "I" was and how if I worked for him he'd fire me. I was laughing my ass off when I hung up on the idiot.
You're not considering the other issues such as having to go through multiple state audits when they want to challenge if you're sending them enough of the revenue that you're collecting for them. Finding out that oops, this country in this state raised their tax rate and you didn't know but now they're taking you to court for not paying the right fees is not how you want to run a business.
In the end, the big chains that can afford it (Amazon) will have distribution centers in each state and completely dodge the issue, while all the added burden will go to their smaller competitors.
I'm glad you have 5 or 10 years for an anti-trust suit to wind it's way through the courts to fix something that should never have been broken dude, but most of us just want to get our work done and move on.
You must be unaware of the fact that there are very clear instances where bending over for a customer is the worst thing a company can do. This "customer" is in the wrong, regardless if Musk has the personality of a rabid wolverine on PMS.
Because 99.99999% of the world who are not Tesla engineers won't have a fracking clue what the data means, so in the interest if making their explanation understandable they interpreted the data for us.
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing also made this important point: 'Amazon didn't have to honor the takedown notice. Takedown notices are a copyright thing, a creature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They don't apply to trademark claims. This is Amazon taking voluntary steps that are in no way required in law.'"
Yet, either way Amazon will be the one getting sued by one or both of these people.
I've been an Apple fan of its peripheral devices for a few years now. I got in on the original Iphone and ever since then have bought quite a few of the products that Apple puts out. The problem in almost all of their launches is that they have initial problems, clean them up, and then things work out great for those who like their products. The only real part of the problem is that people want the next thing right now rather than waiting a month or so and figuring out if the device is everything they hoped it would be. Because of that, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for buyers until after the warming period has ended. I'll probably buy an Iphone 5 myself, but I'll buy it AFTER they've worked out the kinks, making it the phone I want rather than the phone that I MUST HAVE.
There is a flaw in your argument. If everyone is "smart" and waits for the bugs to shake out, then nobody will buy a product when it releases, the bugs won't be discovered before you feel it's safe enough to buy one and quite likely, with dismal initial sales the product will disappear from shelves, ie HP's WebOS tablet or they'll decide it's not worth investing more money into fixing a troubled product.
So shut your mouth and have some sympathy for the suckers paying up to be beta testers to ensure you get a nice finished product.