"Traditional musicians make money from performing concerts and giving lessons. Recordings are advertisement, not the main product."
Only very popular artists make money from shows. Most are getting paid $100 for a shitty bar gig. Selling music online at least gives them a chance at making a living at music.
"And there are many pathways to changing the system so that it doesn't screw everyone who isn't financially succesful, but they all involve paying attention to people's bank accounts to figure out who's doing the screwing."
So what's your answer? giving people with small bank accounts more money and creating an upper limit on success?
You act as if making money is evil and is somehow "screwing" the poor.
"President Obama has set the salary cap at 500,000 for any of the companies that the government bailed out (ie. 10x), and that seems like a reasonable starting point to me."
I don't support the government dictating the wages of any employee of a private company (aside from minimum wage). It shouldn't be a "start". It's the result of a private company borrowing money from the tax payers. I hope it's a special situation that is not repeated.
"You can only live in one house, cruise around in one boat and drive one car at a time. At a certain point, bigger and bigger salaries for top CEO's stop increasing the real quality of life of an executive and instead just becomes a way of keeping track of how much better than the next CEO they are - ie. the marginal utility of every extra dollar a CEO earns approaches zero, but it is in our nature to always want more, so the salaries grow way beyond the point at which further increases are meaningless."
I may just want a billion dollars just because. Neither I nor any CEO should have to justify where they are going to spend our money.
"The same amount of money however, makes a much bigger difference to employees at the bottom end of the pay scale, and would overall improve the standard of the average employee much more, and generally make for happier employees."
Maybe so, but that's up to a private company. Not you.
"I am just questioning the huge disparity between the top levels and the bottom levels, which are by and large maid at the expense of the guys on the bottom rung."
As an employee, you are only paid what someone is willing to pay you. The reason the maid is paid so little is because anyone can do that job. It takes little or no experience or education.
Top level employees have a lot of responsibility. They are also educated and many times risk more than the average employee. You can question the disparity, but it's really up to the company how they are going to spend their own money. If you don't like it, start your own company.
"I was hindered by 'traditional' education. Maths was the best example, they gave us a sheet with 100 sums of the same type. I solved the first 5 on paper, the next 5 in my head. And the rest I skipped. Of course performance was measured by the amount of sheets you had finished. "
If your boss gives you 10 things to do..and you only do 5 (because you think they are stupid/worthless), should you still expect him to be satisfied?
"I cheated myself trough a LOT of classes, never been caught."
This doesn't make you more intelligent than anyone.
If you take the SATS and score a 1300, and I get the answer key and get a perfect score, it doesn't mean I am any smarter than you. Any monkey can get the answers/cheat.
"start later, and be performance orientated and not generally goal orientated."
School usually starts between 7am and 9am. This is when most people also start work. It's a nice preparation for the working world.
How is school not performance orientated? You do homework (and are graded on performance) and you take tests (also graded on performance).
Getting rid of goals is just silly.
"homework hurts kids more then helps."
Why does it hurt more than help? When I was in school, the classes that had no homework generally resulted in kids doing nothing after class and scrambling to try and study 3 weeks of material in a couple of days, to pass the tests. When you do this, you don't really retain the information you memorized in a few short days.
I would give myself homework every night and check it in the back of the book. I was almost always prepared for the tests. Most people (especially under 18) do not have the discipline to do this. Homework is almost a sort of discipline training.
"About half the US population is sitting in jail as a result of drug related offences - due the the war on drugs and 3 strikes policies there. It's also a big part of the reason why California is going bankrupt."
I doubt a "big" part of the reason California is going bankrupt is because of people in jail. The main reason is because of all the super liberal social programs that pissed away all of the tax payers dollars.
"The other difference is in the US, workers are sold the dream that anyone has an equal chance to make it big if they work hard enough at it, and workers are free to complain long and loud about the system , their bosses, how much the government sucks, etc."
You do have an equal chance. Hard work has to do with it, but it also takes a little bit of luck and a good idea (something that's actually worth money).
"In China, they had a revolution that was supposed to make everyone equal"
Does a society really want everyone to be equal? Everyone should have an equal chance, but human nature dictates that some people will put more effort into life than others
"For example, do you think that the average CEO of a company really does such a magnificent job compared to the average employee, that they should be paid 531 times the average hourly worker?"
Why does it matter? Private companies can pay their employees whatever they want to. If they want to pay the CEO $10 million dollars and the regular employees $10/hour, there should be no problems.
"There is definitely a case for CEOs getting paid more than a regular worker, (say, 10x), as they do have a great deal more responsibility and a rarer set of skills compared to the average worker, but that level of difference is a sign of a broken and unfair system, just as it is in China."
I love how you just throw a number out there and think that's it's "fair".
"The only difference between Chinese and Americans is that Americans think they're free. Just because we have nice TVs doesn't mean we have it so much better than the average Chinese."
It has nothing to do with "nice TVs". We are allowed to speak out against the government without getting thrown in jail. There is more than one political party (every US citizen has a chance to vote) and we can run businesses without having to pay off the corrupt government. There is no such thing as a license to have a certain amount of kids in the US.
"The government, often through corporate pressure, should not have to create artificial scarcity just so you, those like you, or those that leech off you can have a viable business model of selling virtual widgets. The same way I have no sympathy for print media, newspapers and their ilk, I have no sympathy for the music industry. Sorry if technology is obsoleting your business model. Do what others before you have done, and innovate or learn a new skill."
This kind of thinking will result in consumers having to pay monthly fees for most software (software as a service FTW). Businesses aren't stupid, they will find ways around piracy.
I also have no sympathy for people when their job gets outsourced to a country that pays a cheaper wage. "Innovate or learn a new skill"
"Like a 20th century horse dealer sending an angry letter to Ford demanding the return of his customers. Like it or not it costs nothing to copy now and that means you can't sell as many copies as you used to, doesn't matter whether you think that's "right" or not. It's a pretty damn simple fact."
This is a bad analogy and I'm really sick of hearing it. When automobiles came out, it was innovation (and real competition). Piracy is nothing more than copying the original. It's not competition nor innovative.
It would be like a horse dealer sending an angry letter to ford because he started a horse dealership and he called it the same exact name as that dealer and made people think he was that dealer.
"And a doctor worked their entire life to have the knowledge and skillset to cure a patient... but a doctor doesn't get paid every time the patient's heart beats."
Your analogy is wrong. Doctors do get paid every time they work on you.
"Listen, I'm all for a fair compensation for the artists, and against copyright infringement... but your specific argument doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny."
"And I work in residential construction. I have apprenticed and studied for years to gain the skills I employ but I don't get to collect a royalty check every time someone uses a door I installed..."
No, but you get paid each time you install a door. Since you installed a door in bob's house, should you now install it in my house for free?
Artists get paid each time someone buys music, but each one of those people are getting enjoyment out of it.
Also, if they only got paid once, they would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the first copy.
"box office name recognition is the worst thing to happen to movies ever. "
It's just human nature at work. People like an actor and want to go an see a movie. This brings in more ticket sales and the actor (because he/she is known to bring in a shit-ton of sales, can demand a high salary).
The same thing happens in politics. Many times people don't vote based on the best candidate for the job, but for some reason they may like them.
"Actors and licensees don't need to be set up for life on one movie. If acting is your job, you can live on $500k per year. That will cover plane tickets and expensive clothes. Do 2 movies per year and, minus taxes and expenses, you'll have a very comfortable life *working*, not spending my ticket money on hookers and blow and mansions for MTV's Cribs."
I don't see how anyone can dictate this. The market really decides the price.
"How many walk away because their product will not make a profit... based on how many in the past have failed, due to piracy? "
How do you ever prove such a thing? It's not like anybody can get accurate statistics on how many times something was pirate as opposed to purchased.
The problem is that piracy has muddied the waters. I often wonder if it's why we see so many shitty movies, software, and games these days. Companies don't know if there are terrible sales due to piracy or a genuinely bad product. If piracy didn't exist and people just didn't buy something, they would know for sure that they need to make a better product and we, as consumers, would start seeing better products.
"Few, if any, sales were lost to my piracy. I simply could not afford the things I was pirating."
It's not a lost sale, but it changes the mindset of people, which results in lost sales. If everyone knows they can get something for free (and continue to download it for free), eventually, they will just expect it.
Look at iPhone apps. Since most are.99-$1, if you try to sell one for $30 (no matter how good it is), you will most likely not get any sales because people expect it to be cheap.
This is why companies need to fight piracy. If not, they will lose the ability to sell any product.
"It was either Hugh Hefner or someone else at Playboy who said that they realize that their work is pirated and while they have been known to crack the whip when it got out of hand, they also realize that at least their work is good enough for someone to consider to pirate and that it keeps them in the public view even if they aren't directly making money from it."
Why don't we hold the GPL to the same standard? When it's used in proprietary projects and not the source of the project is not given out for free, at least someone is using it.
Instead, like piracy, the person is sued in court (and many of the people here say it's "stealing")
"They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country like in the US where everyone must get the latest HDTV, big cars and just spend money on non-important items and entertainment. That is how US has been doing for many many years and loaning more and more money along the way."
Except they allow the government to put them in jail for practicing free speech, organized religion, or anything against the best interest of the top members. The government has been known to "acquire" private property as they see fit and there is a one-child rule where you need to get a license from the government to have more than one.
Have you ever been to China? The people in the big cities (IE: making a living that is as much as or more than people in the US) buy just as many "useless" gadgets. The rest don't because they are more worried about getting enough food to eat.
"even though they now possess the knowledge and can do it themselves,"..so you know how to play all of the songs that you download?
Many people like you confuse the hard work that put into making the album (which is not easy) and the split second it takes to copy the resulting work (which any moron on the Internet can do)
"people on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is)."
So, if it isn't caused by humans, than why do we need carbon credits? Many governments around the world are forcing people to buy these (Obama has been trying to do the same in the US), which just means more money going into the pockets of the government. If that money is not going to be used for its intended purpose (fixing the global warming issue that humans caused) I see a big problem with it.
It is well known that Al gore has invested in carbon credit and other green-energy related companies.
I might believe him a little more if it didn't seem like he was only doing it for the money. If Al Gore really cared about the environment, his "green-energy" companies would be non-profit (and he would not make any money from them).
"If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us."
Your post is what I don't like about pro-climate people. You want to help the environment at all costs. Even if it means lying to the public. If you want people to help the environment, don't con them or guilt them into giving money.
"Upfront costs are one off costs, and if software was to start expensive and rapidly reduce to near zero cost as the initial costs were covered that would make a lot more sense. Instead, it starts expensive and remains expensive until superseded, the upfront costs are rapidly recovered and then its pure profit from there on."
Your problem seems to all be about profits. Profiting isn't illegal, immoral, or wrong, as long as you aren't misleading your customers.
"if you allow open distribution (ala gpl) then even the bandwidth costs are minimised because users can distribute among themselves, and third parties can redistribute for you (eg mirror sites etc)..."
If you are basing it off of GPL software, you are required to offer users the ability to download it. You can't just use upstreams. I seem to remember a company getting in trouble over this a few years back.
"Support costs are *rarely* included in the purchase price of software, and if they are the support options are extremely limited. Support usually costs extra, sometimes a lot more and there is no reason this support couldn't be offered alongside freely available software (see redhat)."
Another problem for small companies is that they could spend a couple of years building a great piece of software. They release it as open source, for free, and try to make money on support. Since it's free and anybody can make money on it, a much larger company, with more resources could come along and start taking over the market before the smaller company even has a chance.
"I would rather not pay $39.99/month *or* $99 for your software... I would pay monthly for a service, and expect the service to continue being provided for as long as i continued paying. Wether that service is worth the price you try to charge is another matter."
It's SaaS. Maybe you have heard of it? Many companies are starting to do this.
"I would also expect you to provide security fixes for as long as i was paying, no leaving me stuck with abandonware."
Since I'm running all of the software on my servers, you wouldn't really have any say in the security fixes. Abandonware also wouldn't really even come into play, because you wouldn't have anything on your servers to be abandoned. My service may shutdown, but then I won't be charging you anymore.
"It's a far cry from providing a one off download or even just a "license code" for a huge sum of money."
The free market decides this. If software is too expensive, people won't buy it (and the company will be forced to lower their prices). This isn't scamming anyone.
"I would also demand that you provide an exit strategy before signing up for your service, ie you must make all the data stored in your service available to me in a standard format appropriate to the type of data so that i can move to a competing provider."
Good luck with that.
"What i want is for the vast majority of software to be commoditized, and reduced to reasonable costs with similar margins to other business areas. Like hardware, the margins on that are razor thin and you can't possibly argue that the relative openness of the x86 hardware has been detrimental.... Or would you prefer a return to the days when proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation?"
I would like the market to decide, not a group of open source zealots or the government. I also don't really know what more you want from the current industry. Pretty much every software market has tons of competition and cheap prices.
"Or would you prefer a return to the days when proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation?"
If the market could bear it, I don't really see a problem with it. Proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation, and they might actually get some people to pay for it.
"Peking was pronounced Peking until very recently,"
It was pronounced peking by westerners, not natives. It's still pronounced the same as it was, which is closer to "beijing". The spelling change happened in 1949.
not really. It provides an easier way for westerners to learn how to pronounce mandarin.
"The spelling Beijing is pretty stupid as far as romanizations go."
It actually might be better to use the zhuyin system to learn mandarin because it uses another character set (and it's not as easy to get confused with other romanized languages).
"The issue is that proprietary software allows ridiculous profit margins (close to 100% since the software costs nothing to distribute and economies of scale are pretty much linear since the upfront costs remain the same regardless of volume)... Now no industry could possibly achieve such margins if there is any competition, so proprietary vendors stifle competition through lock-in.."
It costs nothing to distribute (which still isn't nothing. There are bandwidth costs). However, applications like adobe photoshop cost millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create. You are also leaving out the cost of support. As volume increases, support costs also increase.
"Open source vendors are unable to rip their customers off by selling zero cost goods at ridiculous markups because if they did someone else could come along and offer the same code for a cheaper price, instead they must make their money selling services... Services have a constant ongoing cost to actually provide the service, and these costs increase as you provide service to more customers."
How is software "zero-cost"? Nothing is zero-cost. Unless you have a machine that can magically create complex software at the push of a button.
"The proprietary software market is effectively a scam, which sooner or later will come to an end... Customers will wake up and realise just how badly they're being ripped off, but until then the fraudsters will make as much as they can out of it."
Are you serious?. Selling software is a way for small businesses to stay in the market, because they don't have to pay for more hardware or employees as volume increases. If proprietary software was gone, we would end up with a few big software companies.
Open source is actually devaluing developers. Because many open source apps give businesses mostly what they need (the carefully engineered parts are given away for free), they can get away with hiring someone at a low-wage to make some additions (who doesn't need to have as much experience).
I think of it like the auto industry. Before, you needed to hire an engineer to work on a car..and now, you only need a mechanic. The difference is that instead of taking many years for this to happen, it's happening right now.
Open source developers that have a regular day job programming shouldn't complain when their job is outsourced to India or the Philippines or they are replaced by an inexperienced/lower-paid/less educated person.
I also don't know how people are being "ripped off". Would you rather pay me $39.99/month for my software or a flat-fee of $99?
"The services market on the other hand is far more reasonable and although competition may eventually result in consolidation and razor thin margins, there is a lower limit."
so if I convert my proprietary app to a web service and charge a monthly fee, I am no longer "ripping my customer off"?
Eventually this will happen anyway. Because of rampant piracy (which is only getting worse), I could see many proprietary application companies converting everything to a service.
I guess this is what you want? The inability to install any piece of software and having all of your data stored on another server?
Slashdot Mirror
"Traditional musicians make money from performing concerts and giving lessons. Recordings are advertisement, not the main product."
Only very popular artists make money from shows. Most are getting paid $100 for a shitty bar gig. Selling music online at least gives them a chance at making a living at music.
"And there are many pathways to changing the system so that it doesn't screw everyone who isn't financially succesful, but they all involve paying attention to people's bank accounts to figure out who's doing the screwing."
So what's your answer? giving people with small bank accounts more money and creating an upper limit on success?
You act as if making money is evil and is somehow "screwing" the poor.
"President Obama has set the salary cap at 500,000 for any of the companies that the government bailed out (ie. 10x), and that seems like a reasonable starting point to me."
I don't support the government dictating the wages of any employee of a private company (aside from minimum wage). It shouldn't be a "start". It's the result of a private company borrowing money from the tax payers. I hope it's a special situation that is not repeated.
"You can only live in one house, cruise around in one boat and drive one car at a time. At a certain point, bigger and bigger salaries for top CEO's stop increasing the real quality of life of an executive and instead just becomes a way of keeping track of how much better than the next CEO they are - ie. the marginal utility of every extra dollar a CEO earns approaches zero, but it is in our nature to always want more, so the salaries grow way beyond the point at which further increases are meaningless."
I may just want a billion dollars just because. Neither I nor any CEO should have to justify where they are going to spend our money.
"The same amount of money however, makes a much bigger difference to employees at the bottom end of the pay scale, and would overall improve the standard of the average employee much more, and generally make for happier employees."
Maybe so, but that's up to a private company. Not you.
"I am just questioning the huge disparity between the top levels and the bottom levels, which are by and large maid at the expense of the guys on the bottom rung."
As an employee, you are only paid what someone is willing to pay you. The reason the maid is paid so little is because anyone can do that job. It takes little or no experience or education.
Top level employees have a lot of responsibility. They are also educated and many times risk more than the average employee. You can question the disparity, but it's really up to the company how they are going to spend their own money. If you don't like it, start your own company.
"I was hindered by 'traditional' education. Maths was the best example, they gave us a sheet with 100 sums of the same type. I solved the first 5 on paper, the next 5 in my head. And the rest I skipped. Of course performance was measured by the amount of sheets you had finished. "
If your boss gives you 10 things to do..and you only do 5 (because you think they are stupid/worthless), should you still expect him to be satisfied?
"I cheated myself trough a LOT of classes, never been caught."
This doesn't make you more intelligent than anyone.
If you take the SATS and score a 1300, and I get the answer key and get a perfect score, it doesn't mean I am any smarter than you. Any monkey can get the answers/cheat.
"start later, and be performance orientated and not generally goal orientated."
School usually starts between 7am and 9am. This is when most people also start work. It's a nice preparation for the working world.
How is school not performance orientated? You do homework (and are graded on performance) and you take tests (also graded on performance).
Getting rid of goals is just silly.
"homework hurts kids more then helps."
Why does it hurt more than help? When I was in school, the classes that had no homework generally resulted in kids doing nothing after class and scrambling to try and study 3 weeks of material in a couple of days, to pass the tests. When you do this, you don't really retain the information you memorized in a few short days.
I would give myself homework every night and check it in the back of the book. I was almost always prepared for the tests. Most people (especially under 18) do not have the discipline to do this. Homework is almost a sort of discipline training.
"About half the US population is sitting in jail as a result of drug related offences - due the the war on drugs and 3 strikes policies there.
It's also a big part of the reason why California is going bankrupt."
I doubt a "big" part of the reason California is going bankrupt is because of people in jail. The main reason is because of all the super liberal social programs that pissed away all of the tax payers dollars.
"The other difference is in the US, workers are sold the dream that anyone has an equal chance to make it big if they work hard enough at it, and workers are free to complain long and loud about the system , their bosses, how much the government sucks, etc."
You do have an equal chance. Hard work has to do with it, but it also takes a little bit of luck and a good idea (something that's actually worth money).
"In China, they had a revolution that was supposed to make everyone equal"
Does a society really want everyone to be equal? Everyone should have an equal chance, but human nature dictates that some people will put more effort into life than others
"For example, do you think that the average CEO of a company really does such a magnificent job compared to the average employee, that they should be paid 531 times the average hourly worker?"
Why does it matter? Private companies can pay their employees whatever they want to. If they want to pay the CEO $10 million dollars and the regular employees $10/hour, there should be no problems.
"There is definitely a case for CEOs getting paid more than a regular worker, (say, 10x), as they do have a great deal more responsibility and a rarer set of skills compared to the average worker, but that level of difference is a sign of a broken and unfair system, just as it is in China."
I love how you just throw a number out there and think that's it's "fair".
"The only difference between Chinese and Americans is that Americans think they're free. Just because we have nice TVs doesn't mean we have it so much better than the average Chinese."
It has nothing to do with "nice TVs". We are allowed to speak out against the government without getting thrown in jail. There is more than one political party (every US citizen has a chance to vote) and we can run businesses without having to pay off the corrupt government. There is no such thing as a license to have a certain amount of kids in the US.
"The government, often through corporate pressure, should not have to create artificial scarcity just so you, those like you, or those that leech off you can have a viable business model of selling virtual widgets. The same way I have no sympathy for print media, newspapers and their ilk, I have no sympathy for the music industry. Sorry if technology is obsoleting your business model. Do what others before you have done, and innovate or learn a new skill."
This kind of thinking will result in consumers having to pay monthly fees for most software (software as a service FTW). Businesses aren't stupid, they will find ways around piracy.
I also have no sympathy for people when their job gets outsourced to a country that pays a cheaper wage. "Innovate or learn a new skill"
"Like a 20th century horse dealer sending an angry letter to Ford demanding the return of his customers. Like it or not it costs nothing to copy now and that means you can't sell as many copies as you used to, doesn't matter whether you think that's "right" or not. It's a pretty damn simple fact."
This is a bad analogy and I'm really sick of hearing it. When automobiles came out, it was innovation (and real competition). Piracy is nothing more than copying the original. It's not competition nor innovative.
It would be like a horse dealer sending an angry letter to ford because he started a horse dealership and he called it the same exact name as that dealer and made people think he was that dealer.
"And a doctor worked their entire life to have the knowledge and skillset to cure a patient... but a doctor doesn't get paid every time the patient's heart beats."
Your analogy is wrong. Doctors do get paid every time they work on you.
"Listen, I'm all for a fair compensation for the artists, and against copyright infringement... but your specific argument doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny."
Neither does yours.
"And I work in residential construction. I have apprenticed and studied for years to gain the skills I employ but I don't get to collect a royalty check every time someone uses a door I installed..."
No, but you get paid each time you install a door. Since you installed a door in bob's house, should you now install it in my house for free?
Artists get paid each time someone buys music, but each one of those people are getting enjoyment out of it.
Also, if they only got paid once, they would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the first copy.
"Logically, if you just flip the reasoning, any artist whose work is never pirated, should be the richest one, right?"
That is a logical fallacy. If your work is never pirated, you have more of a chanced of being the richest one, which I don't think is too much to ask.
"box office name recognition is the worst thing to happen to movies ever. "
It's just human nature at work. People like an actor and want to go an see a movie. This brings in more ticket sales and the actor (because he/she is known to bring in a shit-ton of sales, can demand a high salary).
The same thing happens in politics. Many times people don't vote based on the best candidate for the job, but for some reason they may like them.
"Actors and licensees don't need to be set up for life on one movie. If acting is your job, you can live on $500k per year. That will cover plane tickets and expensive clothes. Do 2 movies per year and, minus taxes and expenses, you'll have a very comfortable life *working*, not spending my ticket money on hookers and blow and mansions for MTV's Cribs."
I don't see how anyone can dictate this. The market really decides the price.
"How many walk away because their product will not make a profit... based on how many in the past have failed, due to piracy? "
How do you ever prove such a thing? It's not like anybody can get accurate statistics on how many times something was pirate as opposed to purchased.
The problem is that piracy has muddied the waters. I often wonder if it's why we see so many shitty movies, software, and games these days. Companies don't know if there are terrible sales due to piracy or a genuinely bad product. If piracy didn't exist and people just didn't buy something, they would know for sure that they need to make a better product and we, as consumers, would start seeing better products.
Instead, we are seeing more protection schemes.
"Few, if any, sales were lost to my piracy. I simply could not afford the things I was pirating."
It's not a lost sale, but it changes the mindset of people, which results in lost sales. If everyone knows they can get something for free (and continue to download it for free), eventually, they will just expect it.
Look at iPhone apps. Since most are .99-$1, if you try to sell one for $30 (no matter how good it is), you will most likely not get any sales because people expect it to be cheap.
This is why companies need to fight piracy. If not, they will lose the ability to sell any product.
"It was either Hugh Hefner or someone else at Playboy who said that they realize that their work is pirated and while they have been known to crack the whip when it got out of hand, they also realize that at least their work is good enough for someone to consider to pirate and that it keeps them in the public view even if they aren't directly making money from it."
Why don't we hold the GPL to the same standard? When it's used in proprietary projects and not the source of the project is not given out for free, at least someone is using it.
Instead, like piracy, the person is sued in court (and many of the people here say it's "stealing")
"They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country like in the US where everyone must get the latest HDTV, big cars and just spend money on non-important items and entertainment. That is how US has been doing for many many years and loaning more and more money along the way."
Except they allow the government to put them in jail for practicing free speech, organized religion, or anything against the best interest of the top members. The government has been known to "acquire" private property as they see fit and there is a one-child rule where you need to get a license from the government to have more than one.
Have you ever been to China? The people in the big cities (IE: making a living that is as much as or more than people in the US) buy just as many "useless" gadgets. The rest don't because they are more worried about getting enough food to eat.
"even though they now possess the knowledge and can do it themselves," ..so you know how to play all of the songs that you download?
Many people like you confuse the hard work that put into making the album (which is not easy) and the split second it takes to copy the resulting work (which any moron on the Internet can do)
"people on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is)."
So, if it isn't caused by humans, than why do we need carbon credits? Many governments around the world are forcing people to buy these (Obama has been trying to do the same in the US), which just means more money going into the pockets of the government. If that money is not going to be used for its intended purpose (fixing the global warming issue that humans caused) I see a big problem with it.
It is well known that Al gore has invested in carbon credit and other green-energy related companies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html
I might believe him a little more if it didn't seem like he was only doing it for the money. If Al Gore really cared about the environment, his "green-energy" companies would be non-profit (and he would not make any money from them).
"If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us."
Your post is what I don't like about pro-climate people. You want to help the environment at all costs. Even if it means lying to the public. If you want people to help the environment, don't con them or guilt them into giving money.
"ecause the making of money is not the only measure of "success"."
The entire purpose of a business is to make money, so this is the measure of success. If this isn't your goal, then you shouldn't be in business.
"Upfront costs are one off costs, and if software was to start expensive and rapidly reduce to near zero cost as the initial costs were covered that would make a lot more sense. Instead, it starts expensive and remains expensive until superseded, the upfront costs are rapidly recovered and then its pure profit from there on."
Your problem seems to all be about profits. Profiting isn't illegal, immoral, or wrong, as long as you aren't misleading your customers.
"if you allow open distribution (ala gpl) then even the bandwidth costs are minimised because users can distribute among themselves, and third parties can redistribute for you (eg mirror sites etc)..."
If you are basing it off of GPL software, you are required to offer users the ability to download it. You can't just use upstreams. I seem to remember a company getting in trouble over this a few years back.
"Support costs are *rarely* included in the purchase price of software, and if they are the support options are extremely limited. Support usually costs extra, sometimes a lot more and there is no reason this support couldn't be offered alongside freely available software (see redhat)."
Another problem for small companies is that they could spend a couple of years building a great piece of software. They release it as open source, for free, and try to make money on support. Since it's free and anybody can make money on it, a much larger company, with more resources could come along and start taking over the market before the smaller company even has a chance.
"I would rather not pay $39.99/month *or* $99 for your software... I would pay monthly for a service, and expect the service to continue being provided for as long as i continued paying. Wether that service is worth the price you try to charge is another matter."
It's SaaS. Maybe you have heard of it? Many companies are starting to do this.
"I would also expect you to provide security fixes for as long as i was paying, no leaving me stuck with abandonware."
Since I'm running all of the software on my servers, you wouldn't really have any say in the security fixes. Abandonware also wouldn't really even come into play, because you wouldn't have anything on your servers to be abandoned. My service may shutdown, but then I won't be charging you anymore.
"It's a far cry from providing a one off download or even just a "license code" for a huge sum of money."
The free market decides this. If software is too expensive, people won't buy it (and the company will be forced to lower their prices). This isn't scamming anyone.
"I would also demand that you provide an exit strategy before signing up for your service, ie you must make all the data stored in your service available to me in a standard format appropriate to the type of data so that i can move to a competing provider."
Good luck with that.
"What i want is for the vast majority of software to be commoditized, and reduced to reasonable costs with similar margins to other business areas. Like hardware, the margins on that are razor thin and you can't possibly argue that the relative openness of the x86 hardware has been detrimental.... Or would you prefer a return to the days when proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation?"
I would like the market to decide, not a group of open source zealots or the government. I also don't really know what more you want from the current industry. Pretty much every software market has tons of competition and cheap prices.
"Or would you prefer a return to the days when proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation?"
If the market could bear it, I don't really see a problem with it. Proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation, and they might actually get some people to pay for it.
"Peking was pronounced Peking until very recently,"
It was pronounced peking by westerners, not natives. It's still pronounced the same as it was, which is closer to "beijing". The spelling change happened in 1949.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing
"Pinyin is a retarded system."
not really. It provides an easier way for westerners to learn how to pronounce mandarin.
"The spelling Beijing is pretty stupid as far as romanizations go."
It actually might be better to use the zhuyin system to learn mandarin because it uses another character set (and it's not as easy to get confused with other romanized languages).
"The issue is that proprietary software allows ridiculous profit margins (close to 100% since the software costs nothing to distribute and economies of scale are pretty much linear since the upfront costs remain the same regardless of volume)... Now no industry could possibly achieve such margins if there is any competition, so proprietary vendors stifle competition through lock-in.."
It costs nothing to distribute (which still isn't nothing. There are bandwidth costs). However, applications like adobe photoshop cost millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create. You are also leaving out the cost of support. As volume increases, support costs also increase.
"Open source vendors are unable to rip their customers off by selling zero cost goods at ridiculous markups because if they did someone else could come along and offer the same code for a cheaper price, instead they must make their money selling services... Services have a constant ongoing cost to actually provide the service, and these costs increase as you provide service to more customers."
How is software "zero-cost"? Nothing is zero-cost. Unless you have a machine that can magically create complex software at the push of a button.
"The proprietary software market is effectively a scam, which sooner or later will come to an end... Customers will wake up and realise just how badly they're being ripped off, but until then the fraudsters will make as much as they can out of it."
Are you serious?. Selling software is a way for small businesses to stay in the market, because they don't have to pay for more hardware or employees as volume increases. If proprietary software was gone, we would end up with a few big software companies.
Open source is actually devaluing developers. Because many open source apps give businesses mostly what they need (the carefully engineered parts are given away for free), they can get away with hiring someone at a low-wage to make some additions (who doesn't need to have as much experience).
I think of it like the auto industry. Before, you needed to hire an engineer to work on a car..and now, you only need a mechanic. The difference is that instead of taking many years for this to happen, it's happening right now.
Open source developers that have a regular day job programming shouldn't complain when their job is outsourced to India or the Philippines or they are replaced by an inexperienced/lower-paid/less educated person.
I also don't know how people are being "ripped off". Would you rather pay me $39.99/month for my software or a flat-fee of $99?
"The services market on the other hand is far more reasonable and although competition may eventually result in consolidation and razor thin margins, there is a lower limit."
so if I convert my proprietary app to a web service and charge a monthly fee, I am no longer "ripping my customer off"?
Eventually this will happen anyway. Because of rampant piracy (which is only getting worse), I could see many proprietary application companies converting everything to a service.
I guess this is what you want? The inability to install any piece of software and having all of your data stored on another server?