Basically, this is a ruling that says you can brag about your crimes to a reporter, and they can publish your account, and they are free to cover up your crime.
Macenstein: I read that after the Apple ads aired, Apple sort of advised you to not try to capitalize on your celebrity, and sort of fade away. Why do you think that was?
Ellen: A multinational company obviously doesn't want to be associated with weed. Their instructions made me want to capitalize on it though.
An engineer, a chemist and a mathematician are staying in three adjoining cabins at an old motel. First the engineer's coffee maker sets fire. He smells the smoke, wakes up, unplugs the coffe maker, throws it out the window, and goes back to sleep. Later that night, the chemist smells smoke too. He wakes up and sees that a cigarette butt has set the trash can on fire. He says to himself, "Hmm, How does one put out a fire? One can reduce the temperature of the fuel below the flash point, isolate the burning material from oxygen, or both. This could be accomplished by applying water." So he picks up the trash can, puts it in the shower stall, turns on the water, and when the fire is out, goes back to sleep. The mathematician of course has been watching all this out the window. So later, when he finds that his pipe ashes have set the bedsheet on fire, he is not in the least taken aback. He says: "Aha! A solution exists!" and goes back to sleep.
The existence of a solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist, and doesn't mean the problem isn't hard. The reason there are lots of tools to manage concurrency is not because concurrency is easy, it's because concurrency is hard. And so is getting people to use the tools. If it wasn't, we'd all be using Smalltalk or Lisp - derived languages, rather than a dozen languages modelled on 'C'.:)
Going back to my example of the Amiga, protected memory (as anther poster has pointed out) is a tool that Commodore could have used to manage concurrency better in AmigaDOS. It was a well-known tool, but Commodore was unwilling to accept the additional cost of upgrading from the 68000 to the 68010 (used, for example, in the contemporary AT&T 3b1) and the accompanying performance impact.
Existing software is another complication that will lead to fine-grained concurrency having a bigger impact than it perhaps should. Again, the Amiga is a great example: Commodore did provide a hook to allow applications to live in protected memory and only use shared memory for access to shared resources (memory allocated without MEMF_PUBLIC set was intended for protected memory in later models), but unfortunately too many programmers left that flag off in allocating structures that had to be shared, or allocated them on the stack, so implementing PRIVATE memory would have broken too much software for them to follow through.
What made the Amiga unstable was the lack of memory protection, not the multitasking.
None of the other contemporary systems that the Amiga was compared to had memory protection either... and they weren't objectively a lot more stable than the Amiga... and they were less stable than the Amiga was if you stuck to native applications and didn't make significant use of the concurrency that the real-time microkernel made possible.
So the point you should have taken from my comment isn't "multitasking made the Amiga unstable", but that "multitasking exacerbated the problems caused by the lack of memory protection that was the norm for personal computers in 1985".
Concurrency is a hard problem, and unexpected interactions between asynchronous events in concurrent environments has been a periodic bugbear for almost as long as computers have been interactive.
It's what made the Amiga look less reliable than its competitors... if you only ran one native program at a time it was a lot more stable than MacOS or MS-DOS, because the OS provided a much richer set of services so applications didn't have to replicate them... but most people took advantage of the multitasking and when something crashed in the background the lack of memory protection meant the whole thing went down, and non-native software that wasn't written with multitasking in mind could produce the most entertaining crashes.
These days we all have good protected mode multitasking operating systems, but we don't have good easy ways to distribute an application across multiple cores. Until we do, most applications are going to be written to run single-threaded and depend on the OS to use the other cores to speed up the rest of the system, both at the application level and doing things like running graphics libraries on another core.
Until we have so many cores that the OS can't make effective use of them I don't think there's even going to be much of an attempt to make use of them for more developers. And then we're going to go through a painful period like we went through before Microsoft discovered multitasking.
The things they're describing aren't "dumb terminals" (which is a TM of Lear Siegler International), by any stretch of the imagination. They're dumber than Xterms, but they're smarter than any of the "smart terminals" that LSI was competing with.
I'm hardly a fan of Apple's "cool technology". I hate the iPod's stupid click-wheel and the only reason I have a Mac is because I can't run OS X on a Thinkpad... and every new version of OS X has had more stupid technology jammed in with the good UNIX core. And I'll probably get modded down for saying this... I usually do.
Anything that makes DRM more convenient and less obtrusive, whether it's Apple opening up Fairplay or adopting Microsoft's Janus, makes DRM more acceptable to hoi polloi. If Norway gets their way it will hasten the day when you can't get most popular music without DRM *at all*.
"We believe consumers have a right to play material purchased online on a portable device of their own choice," the five organisations said. Contract clauses that make this impossible or too inconvenient are unfair and should be revoked, they declared. A positive answer to solve this question might be for instance renegotiating with record-companies so that the music can be sold without DRM, start licensing of their own DRM or the development of a common DRM for the industry as a whole.
Of these three options, the only one in the consumer's interest is the first. Any further splintering of the DRM market by having the record companies licensing their own DRM would be a short-term thing... the end result would be a common DRM standard by the industry... and that would most likely be Microsoft's Janus since it gives the labels the most control.
This decision will promote DRM in the long run.
on
Norway Outlaws iTunes
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· Score: 1
The more inconvenient and intrusive DRM is, the harder it is for people to accept DRM. By refusing to license Fairplay, Apple is keeping the DRM market splintered between it and Microsoft's Janus instead of simply taking that market over. And by keeping the DRM landscape splintered, Apple is keeping DRM in people's minds and keeping Microsoft's much stronger DRM from getting a foothold in the market.
There's probably less than 1,000 people on the planet who can give a good answer to these questions [...]
Depending on your definition of "a good answer" there are either a good many more than that, or none at all. And given the controversy surrounding String Theory, I dare say that the likely candidates would disagree as to which thousand actually have a good answer:
Perhaps the first person to realize that nuclear fusion was the key to what makes the sun go on shining was Eddington. Certainly he was one of the first persons to develop the idea systematically, and equally certainly he believed that he was the first to think of it. There is a story of Eddington sitting out one balmy evening with a girlfriend. She said, "Aren't the stars pretty?" And he said, "Yes, and I'm the only person in the world who knows what makes them shine."
It's a nice story, but it's none too likely. Eddington was a lifelong bachelor, a Quaker, and a workaholic, too busy to have much time for idle philandering.
Your comment is already addressed by my last paragraph: So either this level of technology is impossible to achieve, or we're back to the question of why no species has done it yet. There's lots of plausible answers, of course, but this paper sheds no light on them.
The Fermi Paradox isn't "why hasn't this approach to exploring the galaxy succeeded", but "why, if life is as common as it seems it should be, hasn't any approach succeeded."
If you're a professional software developer, you're not going to buy Boot Camp, you're going to buy VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, because the $50 difference will pay for itself in the time saved waiting for your Mac to reboot and your software to start up... within the first *week*.
Boot Camp is for Mac fanboy gamers (if that's not an oxymoron) and hesitant switchers and people who need to run Windows once or twice a week.
Whenever Apple fanboys whine at me about how the iPod must be great because it's so popular, I point out that Windows is more popular than MacOS... so just because something is popular doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
But whatever can you point to for people who actually like Windows? Daytime Soaps? George W. Bush? McDonalds? Adult Swim?
Let's assume you have a civilization capable of building, fuelling, and launching an autonomous probe like the one described. What is this civilization going to look like?
1. It's incredibly stable. It's launching an exploration program using probes that are going to take billions of years to get a result back to the original civilization. It expects to be around to pick them up.
By the same logic:
2. Individual members are incredibly long-lived, or the society is static and conservative enough that individual goals are submerged. They expect that the people around in a few billion years still care about the stuff they're doing, AND they care about the people who'll be around then.
The technology he's postulating is also very advanced.
3. Large scale space-based industry is routine enough for them to build probes capable of refuelling themselves using the raw materials in an as-yet-unexplored solar system, with surplus fuel to launch and recover the sub-probes. If they can do that, they can do the same thing in their own solar system.
If the probes are cheap by their standards, there's no reason not to keep building them indefinitely. So let's say they're expensive. Let's say it takes this civilization a hundred years to build a probe. Why do they stop after 800 years? They're long-lived, stable, conservative, so assuming they have the will to do it in the first place why would they stop building probes? As the author notes, probes break down.
So what happens when you add another probe into the search every century, indefinitely? Well, after a million years you've got 10,000 probes out there. Now you're looking at a search time measured in millions rather than billions of years, and it only takes millions of years to do it.
But why are they doing this? Looking for planets to colonize, perhaps? If they're just looking for civilizations they'd do much better depending on "signal intelligence".
But if they've got the ability to send out colonies, even the most conservative long-lived space-based civilization is going to figure out eventually that they don't actually need habitable planets to support a permanent colony. It's riskier without habitable planets, but even if the planetless colony is 10 times less stable than the home system you're still better off with your civilization in two baskets. And before long (in the terms of this civilization) you've got a roughly spherical shell of colonized star systems, expanding as fast as they can reach new systems. At 0.1C colonizing (not just exploring) the galaxy is going to take mere millions of years.
However, one should note that there could be complications with using self-replicating probes. Tipler (1980) himself points out that the program controlling the selfreplicating probes would have to have so high an intelligence that it might "go into business for itself" and become out of control of the humans who designed it, resulting in unforeseeable consequences.
On the other hand, what if the self-replicating probes are members of the designing species themselves?
So either this level of technology is impossible to achieve, or we're back to the question of why no species has done it yet. There's lots of plausible answers, of course, but this paper sheds no light on them.
When you drag the government into it, YOU'RE complicating things. The government doesn't matter, because legislation is just another tactic being used by the media companies to prevent the death of their business.
You could have made that same statement any time in the past century, at least. Without continued government intervention the "media business" would be about the size of the cookbook business.
I'm not kidding. If everyone pulled their fingers out and just let the free market market work, with music having no more protection than recipes, that's how big the music business would be. Soon as people had the ability to copy and pass around piano rolls it would have been all over.
because legislation is just another tactic being used by the media companies to prevent the death of their business
It's not "just another tactic", it's pretty much the only one they have.
It's not the government's idea.
It sure is. It's explicitly the government's job to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. You seem to be assuming that the media companies are something fundamentally different their historical prcursors have been doing over the past two and a quarter centuries. You also seem to be assuming that there's no legitimate reason for the government to want to intervene.
It's just piano rolls all over again, with the government on a white horse propping up the business.
the government is not intervening to support anyone
Sure it is. Now you're the one who's overcomplicating things. Whether the law gets created because legislatures are being tricked or not (and I don't think they're anywhere near as naive as you're implying), it's still government intervention to protect their profits. If you can sweep all my whole marketing and business model details under the rug, then you can't turn around and haul the details of how corporations get corporate socialism through the legislature out and pick it apart.
So it's really both software and hardware improvements that have done the trick.
Plus good old "meatball AI", because games don't have to really get it exactly right, they just have to make it look better than their competitors and their own previous generation.
DRM is pushed by tech companies like a narcotic and some music labels are stupid enough to buy into it. Steve Jobs told the labels that DRM wouldn't work, and had to talk them around to accepting half a loaf with Apple's "honor system" quality protection:
"When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content.
"What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it." -- Steve Jobs
you can NEVER play it on anything else except by circumventing the DRM.
Burning a CD from iTunes using iTunes own CD-burning function that's explicitly supported by Apple for burning files you bought from the iTunes store is "circumvention"?
The latest single from famous artist may be in high demand but that demand is nullify by the unlimited supply cause by releasing it unencumbered.
The problem is that "not releasing it unencumbered" is not an option. Not only do you have to, at some point, convert the content into a format that can be read by HomoSapiens1.0, but the physical media is unencumbered. If the goal was simply to prevent 'unlimited supply' then selling each customer an un-DRMed personally-watermarked copy would be much more effective, since it only takes one person converting the content to HomoSapiens1.0-compatible format for the 'unlimited supply' to show up... but if you could identify that person and make an example of a few of them you'd kill large-scale copying dead.
In a way, we do vote with our wallets as evident by the success of iTunes and FairPlay DRM.
And iTunes explicitly lets you convert the content into an unencumbered format. Yes, it costs a little bit of quality, but not as much as removing a watermark would.:)
I spent some time on it around 1994, at 20 MIPS, and it took hours to simulate a few seconds. It was just too early. Today, though, the hardware is here.
Are today's processors really that fast? You're talking about on the order of 1000:1 speedup to get real-time ragdoll physics in 3d if it took hours to get seconds a decade ago.
e) Whatever maximizes my income. That may be anything from $2 on up, depending on the market, what my competition is doing, what the sunk costs are, and what kind of market segmentation is possible. Even if I can convince people to pay $100 for it, I might still make more money selling it for $10 if there's enough people willing to buy it for $10 but not $100.
Especially if my competitor is selling it for $12.
Trying to sell people The White Album as many times as possible is not going to maximize your income, because there just aren't enough rabid fans who'll buy the same thing over and over again.
The media industry as we know it today DOES NOT HAVE a long term.
Even if you grant that point for the sake of argument, a real capitalist responds to that by changing his business model.
The term for government intervention to artificially support people when they are no longer able to support themselves without it is "socialism", not "capitalism". Whether the people involved are recording industry executives or garment workers is beside the point.
Slashdot Mirror
First, let's fix a typo:
Basically, this is a ruling that says you can brag about your crimes to a reporter, and they can publish your account, and they are free to cover up your crime.
Second: yes, for a civil suit, that's true.
Macenstein: I read that after the Apple ads aired, Apple sort of advised you to not try to capitalize on your celebrity, and sort of fade away. Why do you think that was?
:)
Ellen: A multinational company obviously doesn't want to be associated with weed. Their instructions made me want to capitalize on it though.
Sounds like my teenager.
An engineer, a chemist and a mathematician are staying in three adjoining cabins at an old motel. First the engineer's coffee maker sets fire. He smells the smoke, wakes up, unplugs the coffe maker, throws it out the window, and goes back to sleep. Later that night, the chemist smells smoke too. He wakes up and sees that a cigarette butt has set the trash can on fire. He says to himself, "Hmm, How does one put out a fire? One can reduce the temperature of the fuel below the flash point, isolate the burning material from oxygen, or both. This could be accomplished by applying water." So he picks up the trash can, puts it in the shower stall, turns on the water, and when the fire is out, goes back to sleep. The mathematician of course has been watching all this out the window. So later, when he finds that his pipe ashes have set the bedsheet on fire, he is not in the least taken aback. He says: "Aha! A solution exists!" and goes back to sleep.
:)
The existence of a solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist, and doesn't mean the problem isn't hard. The reason there are lots of tools to manage concurrency is not because concurrency is easy, it's because concurrency is hard. And so is getting people to use the tools. If it wasn't, we'd all be using Smalltalk or Lisp - derived languages, rather than a dozen languages modelled on 'C'.
Going back to my example of the Amiga, protected memory (as anther poster has pointed out) is a tool that Commodore could have used to manage concurrency better in AmigaDOS. It was a well-known tool, but Commodore was unwilling to accept the additional cost of upgrading from the 68000 to the 68010 (used, for example, in the contemporary AT&T 3b1) and the accompanying performance impact.
Existing software is another complication that will lead to fine-grained concurrency having a bigger impact than it perhaps should. Again, the Amiga is a great example: Commodore did provide a hook to allow applications to live in protected memory and only use shared memory for access to shared resources (memory allocated without MEMF_PUBLIC set was intended for protected memory in later models), but unfortunately too many programmers left that flag off in allocating structures that had to be shared, or allocated them on the stack, so implementing PRIVATE memory would have broken too much software for them to follow through.
What made the Amiga unstable was the lack of memory protection, not the multitasking.
None of the other contemporary systems that the Amiga was compared to had memory protection either... and they weren't objectively a lot more stable than the Amiga... and they were less stable than the Amiga was if you stuck to native applications and didn't make significant use of the concurrency that the real-time microkernel made possible.
So the point you should have taken from my comment isn't "multitasking made the Amiga unstable", but that "multitasking exacerbated the problems caused by the lack of memory protection that was the norm for personal computers in 1985".
Concurrency is a hard problem, and unexpected interactions between asynchronous events in concurrent environments has been a periodic bugbear for almost as long as computers have been interactive.
It's what made the Amiga look less reliable than its competitors... if you only ran one native program at a time it was a lot more stable than MacOS or MS-DOS, because the OS provided a much richer set of services so applications didn't have to replicate them... but most people took advantage of the multitasking and when something crashed in the background the lack of memory protection meant the whole thing went down, and non-native software that wasn't written with multitasking in mind could produce the most entertaining crashes.
These days we all have good protected mode multitasking operating systems, but we don't have good easy ways to distribute an application across multiple cores. Until we do, most applications are going to be written to run single-threaded and depend on the OS to use the other cores to speed up the rest of the system, both at the application level and doing things like running graphics libraries on another core.
Until we have so many cores that the OS can't make effective use of them I don't think there's even going to be much of an attempt to make use of them for more developers. And then we're going to go through a painful period like we went through before Microsoft discovered multitasking.
The things they're describing aren't "dumb terminals" (which is a TM of Lear Siegler International), by any stretch of the imagination. They're dumber than Xterms, but they're smarter than any of the "smart terminals" that LSI was competing with.
I'm hardly a fan of Apple's "cool technology". I hate the iPod's stupid click-wheel and the only reason I have a Mac is because I can't run OS X on a Thinkpad... and every new version of OS X has had more stupid technology jammed in with the good UNIX core. And I'll probably get modded down for saying this... I usually do.
Anything that makes DRM more convenient and less obtrusive, whether it's Apple opening up Fairplay or adopting Microsoft's Janus, makes DRM more acceptable to hoi polloi. If Norway gets their way it will hasten the day when you can't get most popular music without DRM *at all*.
The more inconvenient and intrusive DRM is, the harder it is for people to accept DRM. By refusing to license Fairplay, Apple is keeping the DRM market splintered between it and Microsoft's Janus instead of simply taking that market over. And by keeping the DRM landscape splintered, Apple is keeping DRM in people's minds and keeping Microsoft's much stronger DRM from getting a foothold in the market.
Depending on your definition of "a good answer" there are either a good many more than that, or none at all. And given the controversy surrounding String Theory, I dare say that the likely candidates would disagree as to which thousand actually have a good answer:
With some research, you may even be able to use your kitchen microwave to generate some fusion reactions.
I think the stuff at the back of my refrigerator beat you to it.
Your comment is already addressed by my last paragraph: So either this level of technology is impossible to achieve, or we're back to the question of why no species has done it yet. There's lots of plausible answers, of course, but this paper sheds no light on them.
The Fermi Paradox isn't "why hasn't this approach to exploring the galaxy succeeded", but "why, if life is as common as it seems it should be, hasn't any approach succeeded."
If you're a professional software developer, you're not going to buy Boot Camp, you're going to buy VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, because the $50 difference will pay for itself in the time saved waiting for your Mac to reboot and your software to start up... within the first *week*.
Boot Camp is for Mac fanboy gamers (if that's not an oxymoron) and hesitant switchers and people who need to run Windows once or twice a week.
If "sane" means "doesn't pay any attention to anything that happened before the iPod", then I bear the title proudly.
Whenever Apple fanboys whine at me about how the iPod must be great because it's so popular, I point out that Windows is more popular than MacOS... so just because something is popular doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
But whatever can you point to for people who actually like Windows? Daytime Soaps? George W. Bush? McDonalds? Adult Swim?
What's the "light side"? As far as I can see it's *all* dark.
1. It's incredibly stable. It's launching an exploration program using probes that are going to take billions of years to get a result back to the original civilization. It expects to be around to pick them up.
By the same logic:
2. Individual members are incredibly long-lived, or the society is static and conservative enough that individual goals are submerged. They expect that the people around in a few billion years still care about the stuff they're doing, AND they care about the people who'll be around then.
The technology he's postulating is also very advanced.
3. Large scale space-based industry is routine enough for them to build probes capable of refuelling themselves using the raw materials in an as-yet-unexplored solar system, with surplus fuel to launch and recover the sub-probes. If they can do that, they can do the same thing in their own solar system.
If the probes are cheap by their standards, there's no reason not to keep building them indefinitely. So let's say they're expensive. Let's say it takes this civilization a hundred years to build a probe. Why do they stop after 800 years? They're long-lived, stable, conservative, so assuming they have the will to do it in the first place why would they stop building probes? As the author notes, probes break down.
So what happens when you add another probe into the search every century, indefinitely? Well, after a million years you've got 10,000 probes out there. Now you're looking at a search time measured in millions rather than billions of years, and it only takes millions of years to do it.
But why are they doing this? Looking for planets to colonize, perhaps? If they're just looking for civilizations they'd do much better depending on "signal intelligence".
But if they've got the ability to send out colonies, even the most conservative long-lived space-based civilization is going to figure out eventually that they don't actually need habitable planets to support a permanent colony. It's riskier without habitable planets, but even if the planetless colony is 10 times less stable than the home system you're still better off with your civilization in two baskets. And before long (in the terms of this civilization) you've got a roughly spherical shell of colonized star systems, expanding as fast as they can reach new systems. At 0.1C colonizing (not just exploring) the galaxy is going to take mere millions of years.
On the other hand, what if the self-replicating probes are members of the designing species themselves?
So either this level of technology is impossible to achieve, or we're back to the question of why no species has done it yet. There's lots of plausible answers, of course, but this paper sheds no light on them.
When you drag the government into it, YOU'RE complicating things. The government doesn't matter, because legislation is just another tactic being used by the media companies to prevent the death of their business.
You could have made that same statement any time in the past century, at least. Without continued government intervention the "media business" would be about the size of the cookbook business.
I'm not kidding. If everyone pulled their fingers out and just let the free market market work, with music having no more protection than recipes, that's how big the music business would be. Soon as people had the ability to copy and pass around piano rolls it would have been all over.
because legislation is just another tactic being used by the media companies to prevent the death of their business
It's not "just another tactic", it's pretty much the only one they have.
It's not the government's idea.
It sure is. It's explicitly the government's job to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. You seem to be assuming that the media companies are something fundamentally different their historical prcursors have been doing over the past two and a quarter centuries. You also seem to be assuming that there's no legitimate reason for the government to want to intervene.
It's just piano rolls all over again, with the government on a white horse propping up the business.
the government is not intervening to support anyone
Sure it is. Now you're the one who's overcomplicating things. Whether the law gets created because legislatures are being tricked or not (and I don't think they're anywhere near as naive as you're implying), it's still government intervention to protect their profits. If you can sweep all my whole marketing and business model details under the rug, then you can't turn around and haul the details of how corporations get corporate socialism through the legislature out and pick it apart.
Thanks for the followup!
So it's really both software and hardware improvements that have done the trick.
Plus good old "meatball AI", because games don't have to really get it exactly right, they just have to make it look better than their competitors and their own previous generation.
Steve Jobs told the labels that DRM wouldn't work, and had to talk them around to accepting half a loaf with Apple's "honor system" quality protection:
you can NEVER play it on anything else except by circumventing the DRM.
Burning a CD from iTunes using iTunes own CD-burning function that's explicitly supported by Apple for burning files you bought from the iTunes store is "circumvention"?
The latest single from famous artist may be in high demand but that demand is nullify by the unlimited supply cause by releasing it unencumbered.
:)
The problem is that "not releasing it unencumbered" is not an option. Not only do you have to, at some point, convert the content into a format that can be read by HomoSapiens1.0, but the physical media is unencumbered. If the goal was simply to prevent 'unlimited supply' then selling each customer an un-DRMed personally-watermarked copy would be much more effective, since it only takes one person converting the content to HomoSapiens1.0-compatible format for the 'unlimited supply' to show up... but if you could identify that person and make an example of a few of them you'd kill large-scale copying dead.
In a way, we do vote with our wallets as evident by the success of iTunes and FairPlay DRM.
And iTunes explicitly lets you convert the content into an unencumbered format. Yes, it costs a little bit of quality, but not as much as removing a watermark would.
I spent some time on it around 1994, at 20 MIPS, and it took hours to simulate a few seconds. It was just too early. Today, though, the hardware is here.
Are today's processors really that fast? You're talking about on the order of 1000:1 speedup to get real-time ragdoll physics in 3d if it took hours to get seconds a decade ago.
A real capitalist answers "D".
Nonsense.
A real capitalist answers "E".
What's "E"?
e) Whatever maximizes my income. That may be anything from $2 on up, depending on the market, what my competition is doing, what the sunk costs are, and what kind of market segmentation is possible. Even if I can convince people to pay $100 for it, I might still make more money selling it for $10 if there's enough people willing to buy it for $10 but not $100.
Especially if my competitor is selling it for $12.
Trying to sell people The White Album as many times as possible is not going to maximize your income, because there just aren't enough rabid fans who'll buy the same thing over and over again.
The media industry as we know it today DOES NOT HAVE a long term.
Even if you grant that point for the sake of argument, a real capitalist responds to that by changing his business model.
The term for government intervention to artificially support people when they are no longer able to support themselves without it is "socialism", not "capitalism". Whether the people involved are recording industry executives or garment workers is beside the point.