"Who would pay $1.99 to download a television episode that only costs about $0.0014 to see on cable?
If someone were to watch TV for 18 hrs/day, 7 days/week, that's ~540 hours/month. Skipping commercials, that's about 800 hrs/month of programming, or 1600 episodes. At $0.0014 per episode, this guy must be paying only $1.12 per month for cable. He would be nuts to pay $1.99 for a single show.
Meanwhile, in the real world, someone who is paying $60/month for cable and watching TV for 40hrs/month, might find $1.99 for a show quite reasonable.
If a man or a woman or a company pays tax payment but similar man or woman or a company doesn't pay it, then that is not fair.
Why do taxes need to be "fair"? They don't exist as some sort of mandatory punishment you commiserate with colleagues about, they exist to gather the funds necessary for governance and social programs. Fairness is far less a virtue than maintaining efficiency.
Consider this: below a certain income level, it costs more to monitor, collect, and audit the taxes than the government actually receives. What is the point of taxing those citizens? To be "fair"? What is the point of everyone else paying more taxes just to ensure that all citizens are taxed in some arbitrarily decreed "balanced" manner? It's sheer stupidity, and it's exactly the mindset that created the modern US Tax Code boondoggle.
It's not a difficult task to trim the tax code to meet two criteria: everybody pays less and the total receipts are revenue-neutral. What is hard is attempting to keep it "fair". Would you accept a new system where you paid 10% less taxes, but your neighbors paid 30% less? Has your standard of living actually dropped if your neighbors can then afford bigger shinies? How much extra are you willing to pay, just to maintain the self-satisfaction of "fairness"?
Fairness and efficiency are effectively exclusive. Everybody is a special case with special needs if you examine closely. This is neither new nor surprising. Yet we continually waste billions of dollars every April to rediscover the same knowledge, every year, all under the banner of "Fairness".
The private key for your motherboard will be - it will never leave a single chip. Sure, if you have the hardware you can in theory obtain it, but this will require stuff like electron microscopes.
How do you account for this hole:
1) Asus' servers get "hacked". 2) The keys to all Asus motherboards get posted on the web 3) Sales of Asus motherboards skyrocket. 4) Asus issues a press release to the effect of: "It was the fault of those damn dirty hackers. We have no idea how this happened. Excuse us; we must return to sifting through this mountain of cash".
The hardware manufacturers have no incentive to play nice with the Trusted Computing scheme. This is just a repeat of DVD Region Coding. The manufacturers just started producing players that ignore the region code, because they outsold the locked players. Of course the first few on the market were "accidents", "mistakes", and "test designs".
In a Trusted Computing world, machines with a broken TC implementation will be cheaper to make and command a higher price in stores. What do you think will prevail?
I can see how musicians can earn money by performing, but that doesn't apply to the movie industry. Reproductions are all they have. What business model do you propose?
1) Offer simultaneous worldwide releases. Invisible lines in the dirt are meaningless here. 2) Offer content on whatever medium the consumers prefer. Charge for transfers at cost. 3) Offer webcasts and live webchat interviews with your directors and actors. Fans will pay top dollar for that crap. 4) Offer tours, appearances, and other ways of reaching out to your fanbase. Get those celebrities out shaking hands with fans. 5) Dispense with the "Magic of Hollywood" crap. Rabid fans want to see the gory details, all the way through. Sell it to them. Sell the outtakes, the mistakes, the innanely stupid events. Sell the access. 6) Profit. There is no ???
Situation's a bit different in Europe. The airports in Budapest and Vienna have free wi-fi, and it's blazingly fast. In fact, when I recently had to fly out from Vienna, I got to the airport 36 hours early so I could get several films through Bittorrent.
It's that kind of juvenile behavior that kills off free wi-fi services. They are there for people to check itineraries, keep in touch with their friends/family/colleagues, and other minor conveniences. They don't exist for jackasses to park on for days to download movies.
"Free to use" does not mean "Free to abuse". If you want more bandwidth, pay for it yourself.
Not stolen. Nothing has been removed from possession of its owner. Infringing.
Actually, "stealing" is correct term.
You infringe the copyright of a published work. You steal an unpublished work.
If you haven't published something, you still own it entirely, with all rights of ownership...not just the rights of copy and distribution. If someone makes a copy of your unpublished manuscript, you have lost something real and valuable: the right of introduction. You can no longer monetize the debut of your work, for that right was stolen.
It's not trial and error. It's a binary search algorithm [wikipedia.org] that executed within O(log n) time.:P
Think of it like turning a knob back and forth, getting closer to the setting you feel is best.
That method will only deliver a local maximum of a polynomial function. If your game has any complexity at all, your proposed method is even less useful than trial and error.
The last fifty years of what? If you're talking about the US, it isn't a democracy; it's a limited republic with some facist elements. Democracy is where every "person" being governed has an equal say in the governing of society. Needless to say, it doesn't scale well.
A pure democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. As a form of governance, it is only effective for highly homogenous societies.
You completely miss the point. Its obvious that MS's (and most other corporations) sole goal is to maximize profit. The question is- should we, as society, allow such organizations to exist?
Absolutely. Entities that exist for a sole purpose are inherently "trustworthy" by the pragmatic meaning of "trust"...they are transparently predictable. Predictable is good.
Beyond a certain size, a corporation can no longer be anthropomorphized to an entity capable of emulating human behavior. They have no "soul", no "conscience", nor any sense of "good" and "evil". They are simply successful or unsuccessful, determined by the only metric with any meaning to them...money.
We find corporations to be useful entities, but we cannot expect them to police themselves, because it is simply not in their nature. That we must accept, while also accepting and upholding the task to monitor and contain them. If we shirk that responsibility, that's society's fault, not the corporations'.
If one wants to see what happens when a corporation attempts to police itself, one must examine any large socialist government. They are certainly not the first organization one would call upon if one wished to actually accomplish any useful work.
Is it a wise move to allow such massive accumulation of wealth and power in what basicly amounts to a sociopathic organization?
A wolf is not a sociopath; it's just a wolf. The sociopaths are the citizens who do nothing while a wolf behaves as wolves do.
We're not; you are though. The SunRay server software has a "WanRay" component which allows you to use a SunRay over a WAN; there are even WLAN-capable laptop form-factor SunRay devices from Tadpole. This means that you could have a SunRay at home and at work (or just take one with you) and wherever you are, your desktop state is retained at the server and available when you stick the smartcard in the front. I used to run SunRays in a physics lab, the only real problem in that setting was with sharing resources between users, but I think that the processor set interface which Solaris now has would obviate that.
A portable desktop in a "laptop form-factor device"? Sounds intriguing...I think you may be on to something.
My wife is a perfect example of someone who *doesn't* need Windows. She logs on in the AM to check her Yahoo mail account, checks the local news, buys some stuff from Amazon or eBay, then heads to work.
That's not a matter of not needing Windows, that's a matter of someone not needing a desktop PC at all. Imagine a cell phone cradle that supported a keyboard/mouse/monitor console. She has one console at home, has one at work, and she carries her "desktop" in her purse.
I'm still curious why we are still years away from practical products like this.
Except if it were, it would seriously impact the longevity of the product, rendering it useless for things like construction. Who wants a building that's going to fall apart in ten or twenty years because of bacteria eating it?
Developers, Architects, Engineers, Contractors, Laborers, Brokers, Agents, Lawyers, and everyone else who makes money replacing it.
The world learned a long time ago that there is no money to be made in selling products that last.
For example. Who would you hire to do the wiring in your house, and electrician or an electrical engineer?
An engineer will understand why UTP wiring needs to be terminated with the proper pairings. An electrician will just test conductivity on the pins and assume the job is done. Usually there is a reason behind the "overcomplicating" that engineers do.
That's the thing about free speech. If you define "free but you can't deceive", then it's not free anymore. And I don't like that slippery slope, so I'm willing to live with being deceived. In the end it's my fault for believing them, not their fault for writing junk.
If you are being paid to advertise a position, it was never free(libre) speech in the first place. It's commercial speech and has been regulated for centuries. You can't advertise Twinkies as a cure for cancer if you make money selling Twinkies, and society is far better off for having restricted such fraudulent or deceptive speech.
I can believe this if this is (lord help me) an "old economy" company. As business look to reduce costs (or heck, find a way to afford startup costs) it makes sense to utilize home offices which, in essence, cost you nothing.
"Old Economy" or "New Economy" doesn't matter. Companies are still run by people, and people haven't changed. One important factor is that people have a harder time saying, "no", in person. If you are present in the office, you will generally have an easier time getting the better projects, the better staff, and the better funding, and you will look better for it. If you are just an email and a voice, it's much harder to snatch the career advancing opportunities. This has always been the case for branch-office staffers too.
"Out of sight, out of mind" hasn't gone away with the advent of telecommuting.
Bloggers who don't receive an income in exchange for their work aren't affected.
So if I use ads and merchandise to support my site and try to make something of a living off of my writing I have to register as a lobbyist?
Yes, yes, and most definitely yes.
If you are getting paid to stump for a candidate and don't disclose that, you are deceiving your audience. This isn't an attempt to restrict the free press, it's an attempt to improve on truth in advertising. You can still say what you wish about a candidate, but if their opponent buys 10,000 of your t-shirts, you need to mention that litte detail too.
There's the allegations and the company response. You can make up your own mind about which side you believe....or you could actually weigh the evidence both sides present instead of making a judgement based solely on opening remarks...
It's "just a rope and grapnel"...connected to some GPS aided computer telemetry.
So they still use hooks to pull something up. Great. I still use wheels when I travel. I don't revel in the marvels of ancient wheel technology just because of that.
They wouldn't bother with this one unless they really did have a case against the teacher. There have been cases before of teachers browsing to whitehouse.com during a grade-school civics case. Those end up with alot of embarassed faces and future policy changes, not teacher prosecution.
The prosecutor is fighting an uphill battle, given peoples' collective frustration with spyware, do he probably wouldn't be chasing this if it didn't have some real merit we aren't hearing about.
It's amazing to me that there are companies "making fertilizer out of 3rd world babies" (not literally of course) and that there are people willing to invest in them. Two thousand years of christian and moral advancement was completely undone by capitalism. All of our moral concepts and upbringing are thrown out the window as soon as we are forced to earn money to earn a living.
"Two thousand years of christian and moral advancement"...why does that phrase make me picture a horde of Crusaders marching through Palestine with torches and pitchforks?
I don't think it was the capitalism that germinated the idea of doing evil in the name of your god.
Fire departments are similar. We still have places where fire departments charge a fee. If you pay the fee and have a fire, they put it out. If you don't pay the fee, they let your house burn. Property owners should pay for fire departments.
I'm sure you'll change your opinion when your neighbor's house is burning and the fly embers will ignite your house if the fire is not properly contained.
So, I can use the same cable box with a built-in DVR that I have now, or I can go out, spend a couple hundred for one (or for a TiVO), and plug in a cablecard for which I will probably pay the same monthly rate I am paying for the existing setup. Net result: I'm out of pocket the cost of a box which does the same thing the one I already have does. So long as the cable company doesn't decide to stop providing the existing boxes, I can ignore this whole thing.
Consumer choice will benefit you whether you switch or not. Your cable provider will need to compete with set top box features instead of their current luxury of forcing your purchase/rental of a one product because they have a monopoly on a different product.
Slashdot Mirror
"Who would pay $1.99 to download a television episode that only costs about $0.0014 to see on cable?
If someone were to watch TV for 18 hrs/day, 7 days/week, that's ~540 hours/month. Skipping commercials, that's about 800 hrs/month of programming, or 1600 episodes. At $0.0014 per episode, this guy must be paying only $1.12 per month for cable. He would be nuts to pay $1.99 for a single show.
Meanwhile, in the real world, someone who is paying $60/month for cable and watching TV for 40hrs/month, might find $1.99 for a show quite reasonable.
If a man or a woman or a company pays tax payment but similar man or woman or a company doesn't pay it, then that is not fair.
Why do taxes need to be "fair"? They don't exist as some sort of mandatory punishment you commiserate with colleagues about, they exist to gather the funds necessary for governance and social programs. Fairness is far less a virtue than maintaining efficiency.
Consider this: below a certain income level, it costs more to monitor, collect, and audit the taxes than the government actually receives. What is the point of taxing those citizens? To be "fair"? What is the point of everyone else paying more taxes just to ensure that all citizens are taxed in some arbitrarily decreed "balanced" manner? It's sheer stupidity, and it's exactly the mindset that created the modern US Tax Code boondoggle.
It's not a difficult task to trim the tax code to meet two criteria: everybody pays less and the total receipts are revenue-neutral. What is hard is attempting to keep it "fair". Would you accept a new system where you paid 10% less taxes, but your neighbors paid 30% less? Has your standard of living actually dropped if your neighbors can then afford bigger shinies? How much extra are you willing to pay, just to maintain the self-satisfaction of "fairness"?
Fairness and efficiency are effectively exclusive. Everybody is a special case with special needs if you examine closely. This is neither new nor surprising. Yet we continually waste billions of dollars every April to rediscover the same knowledge, every year, all under the banner of "Fairness".
The private key for your motherboard will be - it will never leave a single chip. Sure, if you have the hardware you can in theory obtain it, but this will require stuff like electron microscopes.
How do you account for this hole:
1) Asus' servers get "hacked".
2) The keys to all Asus motherboards get posted on the web
3) Sales of Asus motherboards skyrocket.
4) Asus issues a press release to the effect of: "It was the fault of those damn dirty hackers. We have no idea how this happened. Excuse us; we must return to sifting through this mountain of cash".
The hardware manufacturers have no incentive to play nice with the Trusted Computing scheme. This is just a repeat of DVD Region Coding. The manufacturers just started producing players that ignore the region code, because they outsold the locked players. Of course the first few on the market were "accidents", "mistakes", and "test designs".
In a Trusted Computing world, machines with a broken TC implementation will be cheaper to make and command a higher price in stores. What do you think will prevail?
I can see how musicians can earn money by performing, but that doesn't apply to the movie industry. Reproductions are all they have. What business model do you propose?
1) Offer simultaneous worldwide releases. Invisible lines in the dirt are meaningless here.
2) Offer content on whatever medium the consumers prefer. Charge for transfers at cost.
3) Offer webcasts and live webchat interviews with your directors and actors. Fans will pay top dollar for that crap.
4) Offer tours, appearances, and other ways of reaching out to your fanbase. Get those celebrities out shaking hands with fans.
5) Dispense with the "Magic of Hollywood" crap. Rabid fans want to see the gory details, all the way through. Sell it to them. Sell the outtakes, the mistakes, the innanely stupid events. Sell the access.
6) Profit. There is no ???
Situation's a bit different in Europe. The airports in Budapest and Vienna have free wi-fi, and it's blazingly fast. In fact, when I recently had to fly out from Vienna, I got to the airport 36 hours early so I could get several films through Bittorrent.
It's that kind of juvenile behavior that kills off free wi-fi services. They are there for people to check itineraries, keep in touch with their friends/family/colleagues, and other minor conveniences. They don't exist for jackasses to park on for days to download movies.
"Free to use" does not mean "Free to abuse". If you want more bandwidth, pay for it yourself.
Not stolen. Nothing has been removed from possession of its owner.
Infringing.
Actually, "stealing" is correct term.
You infringe the copyright of a published work.
You steal an unpublished work.
If you haven't published something, you still own it entirely, with all rights of ownership...not just the rights of copy and distribution. If someone makes a copy of your unpublished manuscript, you have lost something real and valuable: the right of introduction. You can no longer monetize the debut of your work, for that right was stolen.
It's not trial and error. It's a binary search algorithm [wikipedia.org] that executed within O(log n) time. :P
Think of it like turning a knob back and forth, getting closer to the setting you feel is best.
That method will only deliver a local maximum of a polynomial function. If your game has any complexity at all, your proposed method is even less useful than trial and error.
The last fifty years of what? If you're talking about the US, it isn't a democracy; it's a limited republic with some facist elements. Democracy is where every "person" being governed has an equal say in the governing of society. Needless to say, it doesn't scale well.
A pure democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. As a form of governance, it is only effective for highly homogenous societies.
Actually, 80% of CEOs never work as CEOs again...
Actually, 80% of CEOs never worked in the first place...
You completely miss the point. Its obvious that MS's (and most other corporations) sole goal is to maximize profit. The question is- should we, as society, allow such organizations to exist?
Absolutely. Entities that exist for a sole purpose are inherently "trustworthy" by the pragmatic meaning of "trust"...they are transparently predictable. Predictable is good.
Beyond a certain size, a corporation can no longer be anthropomorphized to an entity capable of emulating human behavior. They have no "soul", no "conscience", nor any sense of "good" and "evil". They are simply successful or unsuccessful, determined by the only metric with any meaning to them...money.
We find corporations to be useful entities, but we cannot expect them to police themselves, because it is simply not in their nature. That we must accept, while also accepting and upholding the task to monitor and contain them. If we shirk that responsibility, that's society's fault, not the corporations'.
If one wants to see what happens when a corporation attempts to police itself, one must examine any large socialist government. They are certainly not the first organization one would call upon if one wished to actually accomplish any useful work.
Is it a wise move to allow such massive accumulation of wealth and power in what basicly amounts to a sociopathic organization?
A wolf is not a sociopath; it's just a wolf. The sociopaths are the citizens who do nothing while a wolf behaves as wolves do.
We're not; you are though. The SunRay server software has a "WanRay" component which allows you to use a SunRay over a WAN; there are even WLAN-capable laptop form-factor SunRay devices from Tadpole. This means that you could have a SunRay at home and at work (or just take one with you) and wherever you are, your desktop state is retained at the server and available when you stick the smartcard in the front. I used to run SunRays in a physics lab, the only real problem in that setting was with sharing resources between users, but I think that the processor set interface which Solaris now has would obviate that.
A portable desktop in a "laptop form-factor device"? Sounds intriguing...I think you may be on to something.
Is test an ASAT missile.
They just did...in true non-violent style, no less.
My wife is a perfect example of someone who *doesn't* need Windows. She logs on in the AM to check her Yahoo mail account, checks the local news, buys some stuff from Amazon or eBay, then heads to work.
That's not a matter of not needing Windows, that's a matter of someone not needing a desktop PC at all. Imagine a cell phone cradle that supported a keyboard/mouse/monitor console. She has one console at home, has one at work, and she carries her "desktop" in her purse.
I'm still curious why we are still years away from practical products like this.
Except if it were, it would seriously impact the longevity of the product, rendering it useless for things like construction. Who wants a building that's going to fall apart in ten or twenty years because of bacteria eating it?
Developers, Architects, Engineers, Contractors, Laborers, Brokers, Agents, Lawyers, and everyone else who makes money replacing it.
The world learned a long time ago that there is no money to be made in selling products that last.
For example. Who would you hire to do the wiring in your house, and electrician or an electrical engineer?
An engineer will understand why UTP wiring needs to be terminated with the proper pairings. An electrician will just test conductivity on the pins and assume the job is done. Usually there is a reason behind the "overcomplicating" that engineers do.
That's the thing about free speech. If you define "free but you can't deceive", then it's not free anymore. And I don't like that slippery slope, so I'm willing to live with being deceived. In the end it's my fault for believing them, not their fault for writing junk.
If you are being paid to advertise a position, it was never free(libre) speech in the first place. It's commercial speech and has been regulated for centuries. You can't advertise Twinkies as a cure for cancer if you make money selling Twinkies, and society is far better off for having restricted such fraudulent or deceptive speech.
I can believe this if this is (lord help me) an "old economy" company. As business look to reduce costs (or heck, find a way to afford startup costs) it makes sense to utilize home offices which, in essence, cost you nothing.
"Old Economy" or "New Economy" doesn't matter. Companies are still run by people, and people haven't changed. One important factor is that people have a harder time saying, "no", in person. If you are present in the office, you will generally have an easier time getting the better projects, the better staff, and the better funding, and you will look better for it. If you are just an email and a voice, it's much harder to snatch the career advancing opportunities. This has always been the case for branch-office staffers too.
"Out of sight, out of mind" hasn't gone away with the advent of telecommuting.
Bloggers who don't receive an income in exchange for their work aren't affected.
So if I use ads and merchandise to support my site and try to make something of a living off of my writing I have to register as a lobbyist?
Yes, yes, and most definitely yes.
If you are getting paid to stump for a candidate and don't disclose that, you are deceiving your audience. This isn't an attempt to restrict the free press, it's an attempt to improve on truth in advertising. You can still say what you wish about a candidate, but if their opponent buys 10,000 of your t-shirts, you need to mention that litte detail too.
There's the allegations and the company response. ...or you could actually weigh the evidence both sides present instead of making a judgement based solely on opening remarks...
You can make up your own mind about which side you believe.
It's "just a rope and grapnel"...connected to some GPS aided computer telemetry.
So they still use hooks to pull something up. Great. I still use wheels when I travel. I don't revel in the marvels of ancient wheel technology just because of that.
They wouldn't bother with this one unless they really did have a case against the teacher. There have been cases before of teachers browsing to whitehouse.com during a grade-school civics case. Those end up with alot of embarassed faces and future policy changes, not teacher prosecution.
The prosecutor is fighting an uphill battle, given peoples' collective frustration with spyware, do he probably wouldn't be chasing this if it didn't have some real merit we aren't hearing about.
It's amazing to me that there are companies "making fertilizer out of 3rd world babies" (not literally of course) and that there are people willing to invest in them. Two thousand years of christian and moral advancement was completely undone by capitalism. All of our moral concepts and upbringing are thrown out the window as soon as we are forced to earn money to earn a living.
"Two thousand years of christian and moral advancement"...why does that phrase make me picture a horde of Crusaders marching through Palestine with torches and pitchforks?
I don't think it was the capitalism that germinated the idea of doing evil in the name of your god.
Without copyright, how does an artist put bread on the table? How do we expect them to pay the rent?
Live performance, commissioned work, patronage, SPP, etc, etc. There are plenty of alternatives.
Fire departments are similar. We still have places where fire departments charge a fee. If you pay the fee and have a fire, they put it out. If you don't pay the fee, they let your house burn. Property owners should pay for fire departments.
I'm sure you'll change your opinion when your neighbor's house is burning and the fly embers will ignite your house if the fire is not properly contained.
So, I can use the same cable box with a built-in DVR that I have now, or I can go out, spend a couple hundred for one (or for a TiVO), and plug in a cablecard for which I will probably pay the same monthly rate I am paying for the existing setup. Net result: I'm out of pocket the cost of a box which does the same thing the one I already have does. So long as the cable company doesn't decide to stop providing the existing boxes, I can ignore this whole thing.
Consumer choice will benefit you whether you switch or not. Your cable provider will need to compete with set top box features instead of their current luxury of forcing your purchase/rental of a one product because they have a monopoly on a different product.