The rumble in the DS is every bit as good as anything immersion has ever produced. They peaked with the iFeel, and now they're just a has-been patent clearing house.
I don't know about you, but I did the same thing and almost failed out of many of my classes. Sure, I learned a lot from hacking, tinkering, and reading my way through High School and Middle School; but curiously enough, none of it counted as completed homework assignments. It certainly didn't earn me any sympathy from the teachers who's classes I was falling asleep in during the day. Pre-college education is about conformity more than about learning. (Take the top 10 graduates from any high-school class, and there is a good chance that as many as five of them are completely unqualified to do anything but earn the high-score in the trivia game at their local bar.) Any independant activity that distracts you from the pre-canned assignments is going to have a negative effect on your grades regardless of whether it is productive or not.
You say it "certainly would have" improved your grades. Well, did it?
I think a big part of the problem is that you're comparing different things and wondering why they have different prices.
This article successfully trolled people into making pointless and futile semantic arguments.
No business pays the list price. Not for Microsoft products, not for RedHat products, not for almost *any* products. The more you buy, the less per unit/seat/support call you are going to pay, because the company has that much less overhead to recoup on your business, but even Joe Blow Inc. isn't paying full list on that single copy (even of Windows). Sure, they'll take your check if you are dumb enough not to negotiate before cutting the PO, but there isn't a chance in hell that when you call up SuSE, Microsoft, Montevista, etc.. that they are going to let you go with a competitor simply because they were slightly underbid.
It says that the stupid Trademarkable Name(TM) thing wasn't a one off, and we can expect all future networking interfaces to have some stupid name in the future. Not only will that be insanely annoying, but it will allow companies to collect royalties to be able to claim compatability with 'open' protocols indefinatly. Yes, technology companies have finally found a direct revenue way to exploit the previously harmless trademark laws, and to bypass that pesky patent term length limit.
That's fairly subjective. I'm sure that many see it as overfunded. Additionally, unless you have a reasonable expectation that you are going to find something different than the last time you dug, aren't we better off leaving this stuff alone. I'd be willing to bet that the fossils are safer where they are than they ever will be after we dig them up.
Try living next door to a guy who occationally welds in his garage at night without your knowledge and see how long it takes to figure out why your POTS line disconnects on some evenings...
Cable generally is pretty crappy, but if it doesn't survive power outages in your area then you have a particularly terrible provider. There is probably a battery alarm somewhere that they are just ignoring.
I'm skeptical about your 45 year old TV story though. If it was true, and the tech was worth his paycheck, it should have taken them under a day to figure out the problem. They were probably lying. They may not even know why your service started working again.
It sounds like you have lots of drives. After a drive has been in service over a year, failure rates of 8-10% per year are not that uncommon. Your Fireball drives are at least that old, since after the Maxtor buyout, Quantum branded hard drives were no longer sold. If you've got 250-300 machines with older hard drives, you should consider a drive death every couple weeks as normal.
Western Digital used to suck, but their quality has inproved signifigantly the last few years as they have tried to move into the enterprise storage market. Just make sure you buy the ones with the 3 or 5 year warranties.
From what I've seen, it's models and not brands that make the difference. Every brand has a series of drives that just don't cut it. There were a few years back in the late '90s when Western Digital drives were particularly crappy, but that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
In the course of past jobs, I've probably returned about 200 drives under warranty (out of probably 4000-5000 drives installed). The failure rate for the replacement drives was never above average for the replacement drives with the exception of two models. One was an old Quantum low-end 3.5" model in the 2-4GB range that I can't remember the name of, and the other was the notorious version of the IBM deskstar. However in the deskstar case, the second round of replacements were a far superior drive, many of which I still have in use today.
On the other hand, I have seen machines that seemed to eat hard drives for lunch, and in the end a few minutes with a scope always showed unstable voltage from the powersupply during bootup.
Generaly I'd say my hard drive warranty experience has been positive; especially since, more often than not, I have received either faster or higher capacity drives as replacements.
Most of what you list are attempts to replace a good or service with another good or service that does not provide the same benefits.
I don't know what you are talking about. Everything I listed has a corresponding historical event where excessive taxation of a product that is supply bound led to either upheval or outright armed rebellion; in none of those events did consumption decline.
Actually, taxes on polluting industries have reduced the amount of air pollution in the US by 70% from levels in the past.
Try again. That was due to regulation and tax credits. Go ahead. Try to come up with an example of polution reduction where the only control imposed was a tax on either the pollution or the use of a polluting substance. You won't find an example that wasn't accompanied by a hard regulation on polution reduction, or a credit for the reduction of emissions. I, however, can easily give examples of taxes on consumption that have failed, including the Connecticut gas tax, and the national gas guzzler tax on low MPG automobiles (a year has yet to go by when every single Corvette and Viper that rolled off the line failed to sell at a profit).
Capacitors leak charge across the dielectric. To increase the charge capacity of a capacitor, you increase the surface area of the charged plates, move the plates closer together, or most likely, both. Moving the plates closer together means a thinner dielectric, which, obviously, will have a lower resistance than a thicker dielectric of the same type, and thus a higher leakage current. Large capacity capacitors don't typically maintain their charge for very long.
You can read more about capacitors in many places on the web. Try clicking on that link and searching for the word 'leak'.
You now claim that you burn gas, this somehow allows me to live a luxurious lifestyle is a more direct and non-theoretical relationship? Pass that pipe on over here boy, I want a puff of what you're smoking.
I think you're the one smoking something. I said that both of those things were indirect.
Yes you were. You never showed that life would be any worse over all if we all used other fuel sources like nuclear or tidal. Thus your inherent assertion that my life would be less luxurious or more costly without oil is very theoretical and in my opinion, presumptuous.
I would assert that we would never have been able to develop those things to their full potential (or at all in the case of nuclear) without fossil fuels.
The more expensive that oil is, the less oil will be used overall, thus reducing the global problem.
The demand for oil is so high (partially because many people simply couldn't survive the winter in their area of the world without it) that you would have to raise the price more signifigantly than anybody has ever proposed to get to the point where we didn't use every drop pumped out of the ground. Generally the price goes up because demand is high, so I'm not sure how you figure that high prices lead to reduced consumption overall. As far as artificially raising the price to curtail demand of an essential commodity, well, if you think that will work you obviously haven't studied history. How well has it worked for tobacco or alcohol? There have been wars faught when govenrments have finally pushed the taxes to the point where people couldn't afford essentials or luxury items in the past... Tea, spices... You don't have to be an economist that is on an oil company payroll, you just have to be an economist that payed attention in highschool history class. Hell, even the bible has stories about how poorly taxation for behavior control is. You cannot come up with a single example of such a tax that has worked as intended. I'm not thinking this trough very far? You're not thinking at all.
I could not get Verizon DSL in my town, but it was the first in my area to get FiOS. I now have 30Mbit down and 2Mbit up with 5 static IPs. It's also infinitely more stable than my Comcast was.
What we are in a position to judge is the direct health risks, pollution concerns, and other environmental hazards that are a direct result of fossil fuel use, not an indirect cost or benefit.
Using the word 'direct' to describe an indirect effect does not make the effect any more direct. You get bonus sleezeball points for the tourist trade in Alaska comment, which is so clearly not even close to what I was talking about when I was talking about indirect benefits that it isn't even funny. I was talking about the indirect benefits of using fossil fuels, not theoretical indirect benefits of the indirect consequences of using fossil fuels. Furthermore, tourism in Alaska would probably be harmed by global warming, and were it helped, it would be a boon to Alaskans, not to society.
I was speaking of justification and benefits of taxing oil use, not details of any implementation, for which I'm not really a qualified judge.
That's all well and good, but I don't know how you can expect anybody to know that in the context of this particular discussion. I am not sure how you can look at this thread and think that it is about taxing oil use, and not about this particular law.
The main benefit to such a plan is to provide incentive for less fossil fuel use, through increasing the cost to those who use it.
You mean the main benefit to the hypothetical plan that none of us knew you were talking about? This law is not your hypothetical plan.
Plenty of economists have shown how dumb your hypothetical plan is, even if you disregard the fact that every drop of oil that is produced will be consumed even if California, or all of Western Civilization stops consuming it. But that was not what I was talking about. I was talking about how dumb *this* law is.
Oil based fuels contribute to detrimental factors in our society that are not reflected in the cost of the product.
They have all sorts of indirect beneficial factors too, and non-users reap those benefits. Without oil you wouldn't be wealthy enough to afford your liberal point of view. Should the person who bikes every day (Which is no big deal, BTW, heating and power generation consume far, far more oil than personal transporation) be taxed for the indirect benefits they recieve from oil use? Then why should the users be taxed for the indirect consequences? This is especially true since you can't even put a credible value on the indirect costs, nor can you claim that the costs are higher than the benefits.
Nope. The law forbids them from raising the prices in California to make up for said cost,
All that law does is allow supporters to feel a false sense of ethics, and fool gullible people. The law is completely unenforcable, and technically impossible not to violate.
BT says to Shell, "Yeah we're going to stop selling into the multibillion dollar CA market, we'll pull out right after you do."
No, what it will do is increase the cost of oil produced in California, causing suppliers to buy elsewhere. The state already gets a cut of revenues from oil pumped in CA, so what will actually happen is that oil companies will take their purchasing business elsewhere, or the pre-tax price of oil from CA will have to drop, and the state will experience a net drop in tax revenues. The only people who will benefit will be the private investors in companies that received public funds for alternative energy research. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank with *your* money, while *you* deal with the consequences. When you boil this down to basics, the law is a tax credit for ultra-wealthy investors at the expense of the oil industry and the individual tax payer. Man, am I glad I don't live in California.
Let's say the numbers are exactly right, and 5% of potential PS3 customers don't buy one based solely on that one feature... How much of Sony's revenue did Immersion want in order to license the patent from them? Just because a decision pisses off some survey takers, internet fanboys, and potential customers doesn't mean it was a bad decision.
For the record, I don't miss rumble at all in the Wavebird, and typically turn it off during long sessions with a corded controller because I *hate* it. So I may be biased.
Don't get excited until they tell you how long it holds a charge while you're not using it.
$9 to go 500 miles seems like a great deal (we're talking about cash here, not the environment. That $9 of electricity was probably generated with coal. Renewable sources can't even cover what we use *now*, so they don't stand a chance if we signifigantly increase our electricity usage), but if you only drive 20 miles and then park for three days only to come back to a discharged cap, then you can keep it and I'll stick to my chemical energy storage.
If your assumptions are true, You're right, but I think you make some faulty assumptions. I think the analysts make some faulty assumptions too, and they certainly have a poor track record, so I see no reason to believe them. You also say some things that are plain incorrect.
If Blueray follows the same adoption rate as DVD then in four years Blueray players will still cost $250!
Unlike the previous generation of video players, the current generation re-uses most of the technology from high speed DVD readers. The manufacturing cost will drop on BluRay and HD-DVD *much* faster than DVD did.
HD-DVD is cheaper and easier to manufacture.
This is just plain wrong. They both use the same key expensive components: the laser, and the video decompression hardware. The PS3 has an advantage in the latter department in that the game playing hardware can play double duty as a video processor. This is a key area where the analysts have dropped the ball, The cost of a BluRay player doesn't have to be added to the cost of the PS3, only the cost of the reader, which is essentially a high speed DVD drive with an expensive blue laser. The blue laser won't be expensive for long, and HD-DVD uses the same one.
I dont think people will be happy to swallow Sony's premium pricing on games either.
This one is still too tough to call. Dispite all the made up trash talk on the internet, the fact of the matter is that PS3 games are almost certainly going to cost the same as 360 games. It is an absolute certainty that games which are released for both platforms will cost the same amount on both platforms. It is very likely that 90% of the libraries of the two systems will be ports between the two. This is still a premium price at $60 a game though, and it hasn't been working well for Microsoft thus far. I predict that within a year, PS3 and 360 games will have to drop to $54.99 in order to compete with Nintendo. I also see 'Greatest Hits' versions coming out even sooner, and having a pricepoint of $35.
Sony has another advantage this generation that they didn't have in the previous generation. In the long run, the most expensive component in their system will continue to be the CPU. They were smart and made the PS3 CPU sufficently flexable that it will be the brains of many of their other electronic devices. This should keep the scale high, spread the R&D costs to many product lines, and push manufacturing costs down through scale faster than previously possible. Can they build the PS3 for $250 four years from now? Sure they can, but they won't... They'll be building it for between $90 and $110 instead.
You are right about their competition though. It doesn't matter if they can give them away for free. If the good games are on their competitior's machine, they won't make any money. Sony has to look out for Nintendo. It is also true that they have nowhere to go but down... But that is always true when you're on top.
As a nitpick, you should consider breaking your posts up into paragraphs. It's really hard to read when it is all in one blob of text like that.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're implying is that because they don't sell laptops without Windows, they don't sell PCs without Windows? How does that work?
(posted from a Dell Precision 370 that was purchased without any OS)
Neither of the top two vendors bundle Windows as mandatory.
When I say top two, I mean Dell and HP.
When you buy a PC, you buy a PC running Windows.
That's funny, I've purchased dozens of PCs in the last 15 years, and I've never bought a PC running Windows...
This used to be true.
The rumble in the DS is every bit as good as anything immersion has ever produced. They peaked with the iFeel, and now they're just a has-been patent clearing house.
I don't know about you, but I did the same thing and almost failed out of many of my classes. Sure, I learned a lot from hacking, tinkering, and reading my way through High School and Middle School; but curiously enough, none of it counted as completed homework assignments. It certainly didn't earn me any sympathy from the teachers who's classes I was falling asleep in during the day. Pre-college education is about conformity more than about learning. (Take the top 10 graduates from any high-school class, and there is a good chance that as many as five of them are completely unqualified to do anything but earn the high-score in the trivia game at their local bar.) Any independant activity that distracts you from the pre-canned assignments is going to have a negative effect on your grades regardless of whether it is productive or not.
You say it "certainly would have" improved your grades. Well, did it?
I think a big part of the problem is that you're comparing different things and wondering why they have different prices.
This article successfully trolled people into making pointless and futile semantic arguments.
No business pays the list price. Not for Microsoft products, not for RedHat products, not for almost *any* products. The more you buy, the less per unit/seat/support call you are going to pay, because the company has that much less overhead to recoup on your business, but even Joe Blow Inc. isn't paying full list on that single copy (even of Windows). Sure, they'll take your check if you are dumb enough not to negotiate before cutting the PO, but there isn't a chance in hell that when you call up SuSE, Microsoft, Montevista, etc.. that they are going to let you go with a competitor simply because they were slightly underbid.
If this remains true for long after DirectX 10 is released, DirectX will cease to be the dominant platform for PC games.
Most PCs will not be upgraded for years, and game writers are not going to cut themselves of from a majority of the market.
What does this say about Bluetooth
It says that the stupid Trademarkable Name(TM) thing wasn't a one off, and we can expect all future networking interfaces to have some stupid name in the future. Not only will that be insanely annoying, but it will allow companies to collect royalties to be able to claim compatability with 'open' protocols indefinatly. Yes, technology companies have finally found a direct revenue way to exploit the previously harmless trademark laws, and to bypass that pesky patent term length limit.
Paleontology is fairly underfunded
That's fairly subjective. I'm sure that many see it as overfunded. Additionally, unless you have a reasonable expectation that you are going to find something different than the last time you dug, aren't we better off leaving this stuff alone. I'd be willing to bet that the fossils are safer where they are than they ever will be after we dig them up.
Try living next door to a guy who occationally welds in his garage at night without your knowledge and see how long it takes to figure out why your POTS line disconnects on some evenings...
Cable generally is pretty crappy, but if it doesn't survive power outages in your area then you have a particularly terrible provider. There is probably a battery alarm somewhere that they are just ignoring.
I'm skeptical about your 45 year old TV story though. If it was true, and the tech was worth his paycheck, it should have taken them under a day to figure out the problem. They were probably lying. They may not even know why your service started working again.
Nah, it wasn't a fireball.
It sounds like you have lots of drives. After a drive has been in service over a year, failure rates of 8-10% per year are not that uncommon. Your Fireball drives are at least that old, since after the Maxtor buyout, Quantum branded hard drives were no longer sold. If you've got 250-300 machines with older hard drives, you should consider a drive death every couple weeks as normal.
I can't say I've ever used a fujitsu drive...
Western Digital used to suck, but their quality has inproved signifigantly the last few years as they have tried to move into the enterprise storage market. Just make sure you buy the ones with the 3 or 5 year warranties.
From what I've seen, it's models and not brands that make the difference. Every brand has a series of drives that just don't cut it. There were a few years back in the late '90s when Western Digital drives were particularly crappy, but that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
You hit the nail on the head.
In the course of past jobs, I've probably returned about 200 drives under warranty (out of probably 4000-5000 drives installed). The failure rate for the replacement drives was never above average for the replacement drives with the exception of two models. One was an old Quantum low-end 3.5" model in the 2-4GB range that I can't remember the name of, and the other was the notorious version of the IBM deskstar. However in the deskstar case, the second round of replacements were a far superior drive, many of which I still have in use today.
On the other hand, I have seen machines that seemed to eat hard drives for lunch, and in the end a few minutes with a scope always showed unstable voltage from the powersupply during bootup.
Generaly I'd say my hard drive warranty experience has been positive; especially since, more often than not, I have received either faster or higher capacity drives as replacements.
a year has yet to go by when every single Corvette and Viper that rolled off the line failed to sell at a profit
Obviously I meant to say 'hasn't failed'.
Most of what you list are attempts to replace a good or service with another good or service that does not provide the same benefits.
I don't know what you are talking about. Everything I listed has a corresponding historical event where excessive taxation of a product that is supply bound led to either upheval or outright armed rebellion; in none of those events did consumption decline.
Actually, taxes on polluting industries have reduced the amount of air pollution in the US by 70% from levels in the past.
Try again. That was due to regulation and tax credits. Go ahead. Try to come up with an example of polution reduction where the only control imposed was a tax on either the pollution or the use of a polluting substance. You won't find an example that wasn't accompanied by a hard regulation on polution reduction, or a credit for the reduction of emissions. I, however, can easily give examples of taxes on consumption that have failed, including the Connecticut gas tax, and the national gas guzzler tax on low MPG automobiles (a year has yet to go by when every single Corvette and Viper that rolled off the line failed to sell at a profit).
Capacitors leak charge across the dielectric. To increase the charge capacity of a capacitor, you increase the surface area of the charged plates, move the plates closer together, or most likely, both. Moving the plates closer together means a thinner dielectric, which, obviously, will have a lower resistance than a thicker dielectric of the same type, and thus a higher leakage current. Large capacity capacitors don't typically maintain their charge for very long.
You can read more about capacitors in many places on the web. Try clicking on that link and searching for the word 'leak'.
I said personal transport, and your statistic includes trucking and commercial transport.
My numbers and your numbers say the same thing.
You now claim that you burn gas, this somehow allows me to live a luxurious lifestyle is a more direct and non-theoretical relationship? Pass that pipe on over here boy, I want a puff of what you're smoking.
I think you're the one smoking something. I said that both of those things were indirect.
Yes you were. You never showed that life would be any worse over all if we all used other fuel sources like nuclear or tidal. Thus your inherent assertion that my life would be less luxurious or more costly without oil is very theoretical and in my opinion, presumptuous.
I would assert that we would never have been able to develop those things to their full potential (or at all in the case of nuclear) without fossil fuels.
The more expensive that oil is, the less oil will be used overall, thus reducing the global problem.
The demand for oil is so high (partially because many people simply couldn't survive the winter in their area of the world without it) that you would have to raise the price more signifigantly than anybody has ever proposed to get to the point where we didn't use every drop pumped out of the ground. Generally the price goes up because demand is high, so I'm not sure how you figure that high prices lead to reduced consumption overall. As far as artificially raising the price to curtail demand of an essential commodity, well, if you think that will work you obviously haven't studied history. How well has it worked for tobacco or alcohol? There have been wars faught when govenrments have finally pushed the taxes to the point where people couldn't afford essentials or luxury items in the past... Tea, spices... You don't have to be an economist that is on an oil company payroll, you just have to be an economist that payed attention in highschool history class. Hell, even the bible has stories about how poorly taxation for behavior control is. You cannot come up with a single example of such a tax that has worked as intended. I'm not thinking this trough very far? You're not thinking at all.
I could not get Verizon DSL in my town, but it was the first in my area to get FiOS. I now have 30Mbit down and 2Mbit up with 5 static IPs. It's also infinitely more stable than my Comcast was.
Don't give up hope.
What we are in a position to judge is the direct health risks, pollution concerns, and other environmental hazards that are a direct result of fossil fuel use, not an indirect cost or benefit.
Using the word 'direct' to describe an indirect effect does not make the effect any more direct. You get bonus sleezeball points for the tourist trade in Alaska comment, which is so clearly not even close to what I was talking about when I was talking about indirect benefits that it isn't even funny. I was talking about the indirect benefits of using fossil fuels, not theoretical indirect benefits of the indirect consequences of using fossil fuels. Furthermore, tourism in Alaska would probably be harmed by global warming, and were it helped, it would be a boon to Alaskans, not to society.
I was speaking of justification and benefits of taxing oil use, not details of any implementation, for which I'm not really a qualified judge.
That's all well and good, but I don't know how you can expect anybody to know that in the context of this particular discussion. I am not sure how you can look at this thread and think that it is about taxing oil use, and not about this particular law.
The main benefit to such a plan is to provide incentive for less fossil fuel use, through increasing the cost to those who use it.
You mean the main benefit to the hypothetical plan that none of us knew you were talking about? This law is not your hypothetical plan.
Plenty of economists have shown how dumb your hypothetical plan is, even if you disregard the fact that every drop of oil that is produced will be consumed even if California, or all of Western Civilization stops consuming it. But that was not what I was talking about. I was talking about how dumb *this* law is.
Oil based fuels contribute to detrimental factors in our society that are not reflected in the cost of the product.
They have all sorts of indirect beneficial factors too, and non-users reap those benefits. Without oil you wouldn't be wealthy enough to afford your liberal point of view. Should the person who bikes every day (Which is no big deal, BTW, heating and power generation consume far, far more oil than personal transporation) be taxed for the indirect benefits they recieve from oil use? Then why should the users be taxed for the indirect consequences? This is especially true since you can't even put a credible value on the indirect costs, nor can you claim that the costs are higher than the benefits.
Nope. The law forbids them from raising the prices in California to make up for said cost,
All that law does is allow supporters to feel a false sense of ethics, and fool gullible people. The law is completely unenforcable, and technically impossible not to violate.
BT says to Shell, "Yeah we're going to stop selling into the multibillion dollar CA market, we'll pull out right after you do."
No, what it will do is increase the cost of oil produced in California, causing suppliers to buy elsewhere. The state already gets a cut of revenues from oil pumped in CA, so what will actually happen is that oil companies will take their purchasing business elsewhere, or the pre-tax price of oil from CA will have to drop, and the state will experience a net drop in tax revenues. The only people who will benefit will be the private investors in companies that received public funds for alternative energy research. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank with *your* money, while *you* deal with the consequences. When you boil this down to basics, the law is a tax credit for ultra-wealthy investors at the expense of the oil industry and the individual tax payer. Man, am I glad I don't live in California.
Let's say the numbers are exactly right, and 5% of potential PS3 customers don't buy one based solely on that one feature... How much of Sony's revenue did Immersion want in order to license the patent from them? Just because a decision pisses off some survey takers, internet fanboys, and potential customers doesn't mean it was a bad decision.
For the record, I don't miss rumble at all in the Wavebird, and typically turn it off during long sessions with a corded controller because I *hate* it. So I may be biased.
Don't get excited until they tell you how long it holds a charge while you're not using it.
$9 to go 500 miles seems like a great deal (we're talking about cash here, not the environment. That $9 of electricity was probably generated with coal. Renewable sources can't even cover what we use *now*, so they don't stand a chance if we signifigantly increase our electricity usage), but if you only drive 20 miles and then park for three days only to come back to a discharged cap, then you can keep it and I'll stick to my chemical energy storage.
If your assumptions are true, You're right, but I think you make some faulty assumptions. I think the analysts make some faulty assumptions too, and they certainly have a poor track record, so I see no reason to believe them. You also say some things that are plain incorrect.
If Blueray follows the same adoption rate as DVD then in four years Blueray players will still cost $250!
Unlike the previous generation of video players, the current generation re-uses most of the technology from high speed DVD readers. The manufacturing cost will drop on BluRay and HD-DVD *much* faster than DVD did.
HD-DVD is cheaper and easier to manufacture.
This is just plain wrong. They both use the same key expensive components: the laser, and the video decompression hardware. The PS3 has an advantage in the latter department in that the game playing hardware can play double duty as a video processor. This is a key area where the analysts have dropped the ball, The cost of a BluRay player doesn't have to be added to the cost of the PS3, only the cost of the reader, which is essentially a high speed DVD drive with an expensive blue laser. The blue laser won't be expensive for long, and HD-DVD uses the same one.
I dont think people will be happy to swallow Sony's premium pricing on games either.
This one is still too tough to call. Dispite all the made up trash talk on the internet, the fact of the matter is that PS3 games are almost certainly going to cost the same as 360 games. It is an absolute certainty that games which are released for both platforms will cost the same amount on both platforms. It is very likely that 90% of the libraries of the two systems will be ports between the two. This is still a premium price at $60 a game though, and it hasn't been working well for Microsoft thus far. I predict that within a year, PS3 and 360 games will have to drop to $54.99 in order to compete with Nintendo. I also see 'Greatest Hits' versions coming out even sooner, and having a pricepoint of $35.
Sony has another advantage this generation that they didn't have in the previous generation. In the long run, the most expensive component in their system will continue to be the CPU. They were smart and made the PS3 CPU sufficently flexable that it will be the brains of many of their other electronic devices. This should keep the scale high, spread the R&D costs to many product lines, and push manufacturing costs down through scale faster than previously possible. Can they build the PS3 for $250 four years from now? Sure they can, but they won't... They'll be building it for between $90 and $110 instead.
You are right about their competition though. It doesn't matter if they can give them away for free. If the good games are on their competitior's machine, they won't make any money. Sony has to look out for Nintendo. It is also true that they have nowhere to go but down... But that is always true when you're on top.
As a nitpick, you should consider breaking your posts up into paragraphs. It's really hard to read when it is all in one blob of text like that.