I don't care if someone has my name, picture, iris scan, birth mark, and sperm sample. If I decide one day to kill a bunch of bankers, ID'ing me won't bring those parasites back from the dead.
This is where Precrime comes into play. A foregone conclusion that police officers will arrest people in the future for crimes they were going to commit if not stopped by the law, and the justice system will be altered so people who were going to commit a crime can be treated as convicted of the crime.
If you will commit a crime it has already been anticipated in the manner of time and date, you get picked up by authorities before you even knew you were going to commit a crime.
The Iris scanners could even help with this, as long as the authorities have a way of knowing the last place you were scanned, they should in theory have a way of automatically knowing where to send a detachment of troops to arrest you to prevent the crime from being attempted, they just need to ensure access to the database (thanks to the Patriot Act, that should be no problem).
Tuesday, Aug 24th, 2010
Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen.
... forms of pre-crime technology in use or under development include surveillance cameras that can predict when a crime is about to occur and alert police, and even neurological brain scanners that can read people’s intentions before they act, thus
detecting whether or not a person has “hostile intent”.
The British government has previously debated introducing pre-crime laws in the name of fighting terrorism. The idea was that suspects would be put on trial using MI5 or MI6 intelligence of an expected terror attack. This would be enough to convict if found to be true “on the balance of probabilities”, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.
The government even has plans to collect lifelong records on all residents starting at the age of five, in order to screen for those who might be more likely to commit crimes in the future.
Google and In-Q-Tel have recently injected a sum of up to $10 million each into a company called Recorded Future, which uses analytics to scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, which is used to “assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
The company describes its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence” and says it can also “predict the future”.
Tobacco is grandfathered in. People have a tradition of smoking it, have legal access to it already, it is protected by lobbyists, and banning it would do some serious harm to legitimate businesses and have a lasting severe negative impact on the economy. Plus the detrimental effects of being deprived (if you are addicted) are even more severe than exposure to Tobacco.
Detrimental effects are not as serious as illegal drugs, if tobacco is not smoked in excess, and it is profitable for the government to tax this, much like they tax gambling.
Someone exposed to your secondhand tobacco smoke may have an unpleasant experience, but it won't have any significant or permanent effect based on that; unless you already have some serious disease(s), only significant exposures to Tobacco over a long period of time pose severe risks, and in that case, there are natural things like 'Fire' or burned-something-in-the-oven that are similarly risky.
Liquor has no detrimental effect if consumed in moderation, it can have significant beneficial effects.
Note that certain activities related to Liquor are illegal. For example, you cannot consume a large amount of liquor and then operate a motor vehicle
Nor can you drive a boat or plane.
If you smoke Tobacco, it is not legal for you to throw your cigarette out the window of your car as a means of disposal, or toss your hot cigarette buts into the bushes.
The same thing about insignificant immediate harm in moderation cannot be said of LSD, Coke, etc. They generally do immediate and serious permanent damage even if only small amounts are consumed.
They are particularly dangerous to children, the developmental effects are extremely severe, and by the time parents find a child is using a drug, it is too late.
At least with Alcohol or Tobacco, the effects are less, and a long or large amount of abuse is required before the damage is permanent and irreversible, which is likely to be detected.
It should also be noted people do have a "right" to do things to themselves, that have beneficial effect, or consume products even if they may prove ultimately hamrful, and a government does not have any legitimate right to prevent you from doing things to yourself or consuming things, just because they have a theory that consuming the thing could eventually be detrimental to you.
However, the government have a legitimate right to prevent citizens from doing things that will be fatal to themselves or that might seriously harm other people or property.
In regards to the drugs that are illegal, they are so harmful that there can be no legally allowed amount -- even the slightest amount impairs people mentally and does permanent harm.
If possessing or using these drugs was legal, there would be a chance that people unaware of what a certain drug even was; would be exposed to it, without their informed consent.
A canonical example would be people being pressured or forced into using the drug, due to exposure to other people (e.g. friends) using the drug, or through deception.
For example... someone secretly 'spiking the punch' with LSD
Yes, Liquor could be used to do the same thing; however, the 'detrimental effect' is much smaller; one night, and a hangover, maybe.
In this manner, 'legalizing' a drug, or letting it be treated as food, in effect takes away the rights of people to refuse to use it.
US banks are required to keep seven years of history, so it is available to you if you really want it.
Yes, if you are willing to pay the fees. Usually an 'account research fee' and a fee per statement you want, this can be costly.
These are provided to you in hard copy format, so good luck getting the information accurately back into a computer.
Or (maybe) some banks will provide you it electronically in some way, probably by mailing a CD.
If you were a large enterprise, you may get your statements that way normally; it's in theory possible some banks may offer this to consumers for record retrieval.
However, even then you may have JPEGs or PDF scanned images that you will have fun OCR'ing to get into your accounting software
Now, if you have enough money in your account (you're of sufficient high net worth) they may be able to give you better service.
You wouldn't need to ask your bank for records, your personal accountant would already have collected all that information, prepared whichever reports you had wanted
and uploaded everything to your private server.
Personally, while Windows is currently ahead of Ubuntu (user base, # of devs, apps, etc) I think before long it's going to start playing catch up to Ubuntu. Ubuntu has got a lot of momentum.
Err... yeah... my point is, why guess?
Maybe learn iOS now, get your app supporting apple's device, because there are more users.
Design your app with an aim for multi-platform compatibility, use a multi platform framework if possible.
Work on porting your app to Android once you have it working on iOS.
The winner here is to have one app that works on as many platforms as possible, then you don't exclude part of your market for running a different device:)
DVD-A not available for most albums, so that's right out -- might be cheaper to just buy 10 copies of every record, and treat them as consumables, unless you have thousands of records. I assume if there was more consumer demand the price of optical players would go down, eventually, though the technology was patented, so that could be a barrier to someone else making a product.
You would need something really special to convince joe public of the merit of keeping these huge disks around, however.
If you have not, consider heading over to the FCC's Broadband website, and report a broadband dead zone, run their speed tests, etc. Get all your friends to do the same, even if they have to sign on with a dial-up internet connection to do it.
Who knows if it will make any difference, but they are building a database of underserved areas.... and there may be government action, incentives, etc, to improve matters now or in the future.
I assume the more reports they get for an area from different people, the more likely someone is to take notice and move that area "higher up on the list" of areas that are suffering from poor choice, incumbent monopolization, etc.
I guess your bank has so few customers using ATMs and they have maybe one or two tellers who sit around bored all day waiting for a customer to come perform a transaction, so the ATM doesn't actually save them money; or something like that.
Either that or their management perhaps has issues.
I think you're the exception to the rule.
I would never want to open an account at a bank that did some er crap like that; I use ATM service for deposits and withdrawls from time to time, so that would be costly:)
ATM transactions save them money. The ONLY reason they charge a surcharge is because they lobbied Congress to allow them to do so. They were already making money by spending less. Which do you think costs more? A bank building with tellers inside or a dumb box and phone line? There is zero legitimate reason to ever charge an ATM fee. They simply make money over and above their massive savings.
What part of 3rd party don't you understand?
These organizations didn't even have tellers before ATMs, or they weren't providing services to people who did not have an account with them.
For example: you could not go to a convenience store and withdraw money from your bank account and get cash right there, before the convenience stores started buying and operating ATMs, to get surcharge $$$ for the service.
As for banks: You can't go to $RANDOM_BANK_OTHER_THAN_YOURS and see a teller to withdraw money from your account at $YOUR_BANK, unless you have an account there.
Some banks might offer check cashing services to non-account holders, for an extra free, most do not, they require ID of an account holder to cash a check at an in-person teller.
With ATMs, they are providing services to people (who are not their customers), whom they never provided servies to before; purely for the convenience of other people.
There is no profit in cashing a non-customer's check or allowing your facilities to be used by a non-customer, unless you charge a fee for the service.
For you, it may be like this, but I'd rather be able to visit any site using my mobile device, even if it crashes or is sluggish.
Then it seems like Android might be the perfect one for you to choose.
Of course there are some tradeoffs involved, see: you can still choose to have Flash on your mobile device, you just have to pick a different device -- and the tradeoff is you might have to give up unique benefits you see of the iPhone in order to take that path.
And a disadvantage that you may have more crashing or sluggishness on sites you visit that use flash, that would be completely usable if your device did not support flash.
The average person (not web-savvy computer user) is not going to be happy having to figure out how to disable or enable flash on a per-site basis, or as they are browsing, or have to jump through hoops.
And if their device is slow or crashing, it's not "Flash", as far as the user is concerned, these feelings are that it is the device is responsible.
See, we already get this with computers -- they say things like 'my Dell is running slowly', 'this computer is slow'; when it's really the Windows OS installation that is slow.
Ultimately: the hardware gets blamed for everything, but moreso for smart phones than other types of devices.
I don't see how having the capability limits your choice.
Not having the capability removes you from having a choice between something good and something bad.
Also: Do you really try to apply this argument more generally? For example, if one downloaded application crashes on your iPhone do you never download and install an app again?
Apple has an App store approval process to reduce your choice in this regard. The idea is buggy/unstable apps can be removed from the app store or not approved in the first place.
The app store approval process hurts developers, but it does help users (somewhat) in this regard.
It would just be nice if Apple didn't reject apps because they re-implemented iPhone functionality in a superior way, or did something cool that threaten corporate profits (tethering, VoIP, Google Voice, for example).
When have you ever seen a bank charge their customers to use the ATM?
I think using the ATM to make deposits and withdrawls at your own bank is universally free, basically, unless you are overdrafting (or something).
That i've seen no banks charge their customers... 3rd party ATM network operators offer ATM withdrawls as a service with a surcharge, but they are 3rd parties, not the person's bank; those ATMs wouldn't even exist, if not for the ability to lay a surcharge, and the "service" is the location of the ATM, not the mere fact it's an ATM.
Similarly other banks allow non-customers to use their ATMs to make withdrawls, in exchange for a surcharge.
But these aren't really like bank tellers at all, they are just cash disbursement machines, for example, you cannot make deposits at them like you can at your own bank's ATM.:)
Some banks offer a refund of such ATM surcharges, either limited $$ per month or unlimited, i'm thinking E*Trade Bank, Charles Schwab Checking, ING Direct, Merrill Lynch, Arcacia, Everbank, GMAC, USAA, and others.
Many banks also have 'home network', where there are no surcharges to transactions on ATMs 'in the network'. You can avoid surcharges, either by picking the right bank, or by going to the right ATM, there are a wealth of choices.
ATM surcharge is an idiot tax:)
[Or a tax for people who are in need cash fast in an emergency, from some casino or convenience store with a 3rd party operator]
Sometimes you have to pay for extra convenience. But your bank is indeed happy to let you use their ATMs for free, instead of using the teller -- they won't charge -- in fact, they'll encourage it.
I'm curious... if there was a substantial discount for using automated checkout (or surcharge for using non-automated checkout), would you still think the same way.... or would you go for that discount, how much is the friendly/helpful checkout staff worth to you, and is it enough for you to sacrifice a little bit of $$$ to take that route?:)
That sounds awfully like the older people who complain about "self checkouts" at a supermarket. For one thing, they're not mandatory (at least not yet)
What do you think will happen if supermarkets start offering a 15% discount on the total of your purchase for using self-checkout? (After marking all the items in the store up 17%, of course)
You think Android has any similarity whatsoever to MacOS' rendering system?
Perhaps Adobe did not do such a great job of porting Flash to MacOS.
Being able to run passably is not something good enough to be worth betting the business on. Apple wants to create a certain user experience on their platform, running passably would detract from that experience, be a mood killer, and make the iOS no better than the Android platform.
As compared to today, where iPhone as a platform, its users get a superior experience doing what they can do on it, compared to when Android users do what they can do on their platform.
Yes, the iOS cannot do as much as Android, and users will sometimes be inconvenienced, but it works better, faster, more reliably, for what it does do.
For example, if you want to watch a Youtube video on an iPhone, you don't have to load a browser and sit through ridiculous hanging, Flash lag, or other distracting occurences.
Everything that works at all is seamless.
If a website requires flash, you get to immediately see it's not going to work, so you can avoid wasting your time with a crappy slow choppy site, and save that for later to visit on your laptop or desktop.
Just because their official story is "it's in the red", does not mean there was not money made by the studios and networks who are responsible for the film.
Hollywood accounting is not limited to movies. An example is the Warner Bros. television series Babylon 5 created by J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski, who wrote 90% of the episodes in addition to producing the show, would receive a generous cut of profits if not for Hollywood accounting.[citation needed] The series, which was profitable in each of its five seasons from 1993–1998, has garnered more than US$1 billion for Warner Bros., most recently US$500 million in DVD sales alone. But in the last profit statement given to Straczynski, Warner Bros. claimed the property was $80 million in debt. "Basically," says Straczynski, "by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."[12]
The only reason this model is sustainable is because most of the TV shows cost is paid by advertisers. If the advertising subsidy is removed, the price skyrockets. Look at the cost of the direct-to-video episodes of Babylon 5 and Stargate SG1 (~$10 per hour).
The studios got their money back a long time ago. Any sales are almost pure profit. Basically... this is just the sort of premium people are willing to pay.
If there weren't lots of avid fans who would pay that much, the direct-to-video episodes would either be less expensive or (more likely), not exist at all, because they spend their time and money making direct to video episodes of only things that will be extremely profitable.
Plus studios would be concerned --- if they sold it for less, people might come to expect that in the future.
That, and paying all the various rightholders involved.
Videos of major television shows are definitely massively more expensive to produce than some mechanic putting together a video howto on his own.
Think of how many directors, actors, writers, editors, set designers, makeup artists, cameramen, support staff are employed by Babylon 5, and Starget SG1, all entitled to either a big salary, or specified payment per performance (e.g. X pennies per copy of the video sold).
Plus dedicated costs of facilities, editing time, rental time on extremely expensive studio equipment, maintenance of dedicated facilities, etc; the list goes on.
The TV series will be popular, highly viewed, and profitable -- as measured by ratings - and video sales are just icing on the cake, otherwise the networks would have killed it almost immediately, as soon as it ceased to be uber-profitable.
I forgot to mention the bigger risk is not BT or TPB.
The bigger risk is someone else sees you selling videos, and sees how they sell (if you are successful), and gets the idea about doing the same thing, to compete with you, since you don't have a robust competitive advantage -- many mechanics would be capable of making those sorts of videos.
People would not necessarily buy from you just because you are first -- you would have to differentiate your product, you would have to be better, which is extremely difficult, since they would be making their product after seeing yours.
Cost and time equipment costs may be significant for you, but the equipment is not that expensive, not prohibitive enough to prevent copycats.
Time requirements are huge, but there are other people who have that too, esp. if they think they can 'follow in your footsteps' and make/sell similar videos (though at your expense)
Although it's a fascinating concept.
For all I know, there are already people doing this, anyways......
Then I realized that some dickhead would probably just take the videos, put them up on Piratebay and I would be left poor and broke after spending a crapload of time and money on this project so I said fuck it.
What's a reasonable price to you?
$2 per video on iTunes?
Seriously, there is always the possibility some 'dick' will steal. You can have a mechanic shop, tomorrow or 10 years from now some dick can smash the window and steal things.
The attractiveness of anyone pirating is minimal.
As far as I know, it's primarily popular commercial titles that get uploaded and actually stay available. One person can't really upload it and provide availability for it; if there aren't multiple seeds or lots of downloaders, noone's getting it at a reasonable speed.
In the media industry, the possibility of piracy is part of the cost of doing business.
If the content is good enough and appeals to a large enough audience, people will buy it.
Most people don't visit TPB by the way. Of course there are people who download from TPB, but not everyone, and you might get exposure to your content by people who would never find you anyways.
If there would be enough interest in it for people to pirate en masse, then there would almost certainly be enough interest for you to publish and profit from advertising, if that is what you expect.
Publish low-quality almost-full-length preview versions on Youtube, with significant amounts of advertising for the real thing plus paid ads.
With HD "extended versions" for sale on DVD / iTunes, and all DRM to boot.
Is what I would say the winning strategy would be.
Assuming such videos would even have people interested in the subject (lack of interest is a more likely reason for failure of media than piracy -- notoriety is almost always economically beneficial for someone).
You don't get it... some troll is going to get a court issue an order for a shutdown of an 'eBay website under the act', from some judge who has never heard of eBay... then eBay will have to petition the court, and wait 3 to 15 business days for the court to agree to accept their emergency petition to re-instate the site <G>
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother with the head detachment? Sounds messy... They could haul you around, drugged out, in a wheelchair, and it would look less suspicious.
If they keep the blood circulating, are you really dead?
I don't care if someone has my name, picture, iris scan, birth mark, and sperm sample. If I decide one day to kill a bunch of bankers, ID'ing me won't bring those parasites back from the dead.
This is where Precrime comes into play. A foregone conclusion that police officers will arrest people in the future for crimes they were going to commit if not stopped by the law, and the justice system will be altered so people who were going to commit a crime can be treated as convicted of the crime.
If you will commit a crime it has already been anticipated in the manner of time and date, you get picked up by authorities before you even knew you were going to commit a crime. The Iris scanners could even help with this, as long as the authorities have a way of knowing the last place you were scanned, they should in theory have a way of automatically knowing where to send a detachment of troops to arrest you to prevent the crime from being attempted, they just need to ensure access to the database (thanks to the Patriot Act, that should be no problem).
If they did that, the eyeball would almost immediately become unscannable and useless.
Tobacco is grandfathered in. People have a tradition of smoking it, have legal access to it already, it is protected by lobbyists, and banning it would do some serious harm to legitimate businesses and have a lasting severe negative impact on the economy. Plus the detrimental effects of being deprived (if you are addicted) are even more severe than exposure to Tobacco. Detrimental effects are not as serious as illegal drugs, if tobacco is not smoked in excess, and it is profitable for the government to tax this, much like they tax gambling.
Someone exposed to your secondhand tobacco smoke may have an unpleasant experience, but it won't have any significant or permanent effect based on that; unless you already have some serious disease(s), only significant exposures to Tobacco over a long period of time pose severe risks, and in that case, there are natural things like 'Fire' or burned-something-in-the-oven that are similarly risky.
Liquor has no detrimental effect if consumed in moderation, it can have significant beneficial effects.
Note that certain activities related to Liquor are illegal. For example, you cannot consume a large amount of liquor and then operate a motor vehicle
Nor can you drive a boat or plane.
If you smoke Tobacco, it is not legal for you to throw your cigarette out the window of your car as a means of disposal, or toss your hot cigarette buts into the bushes.
The same thing about insignificant immediate harm in moderation cannot be said of LSD, Coke, etc. They generally do immediate and serious permanent damage even if only small amounts are consumed.
They are particularly dangerous to children, the developmental effects are extremely severe, and by the time parents find a child is using a drug, it is too late. At least with Alcohol or Tobacco, the effects are less, and a long or large amount of abuse is required before the damage is permanent and irreversible, which is likely to be detected.
It should also be noted people do have a "right" to do things to themselves, that have beneficial effect, or consume products even if they may prove ultimately hamrful, and a government does not have any legitimate right to prevent you from doing things to yourself or consuming things, just because they have a theory that consuming the thing could eventually be detrimental to you.
However, the government have a legitimate right to prevent citizens from doing things that will be fatal to themselves or that might seriously harm other people or property.
In regards to the drugs that are illegal, they are so harmful that there can be no legally allowed amount -- even the slightest amount impairs people mentally and does permanent harm.
If possessing or using these drugs was legal, there would be a chance that people unaware of what a certain drug even was; would be exposed to it, without their informed consent.
A canonical example would be people being pressured or forced into using the drug, due to exposure to other people (e.g. friends) using the drug, or through deception.
For example... someone secretly 'spiking the punch' with LSD
Yes, Liquor could be used to do the same thing; however, the 'detrimental effect' is much smaller; one night, and a hangover, maybe.
In this manner, 'legalizing' a drug, or letting it be treated as food, in effect takes away the rights of people to refuse to use it.
If none of the non-redacted books were ever accessible to retailers or consumers, then this is not likely.
US banks are required to keep seven years of history, so it is available to you if you really want it.
Yes, if you are willing to pay the fees. Usually an 'account research fee' and a fee per statement you want, this can be costly. These are provided to you in hard copy format, so good luck getting the information accurately back into a computer.
Or (maybe) some banks will provide you it electronically in some way, probably by mailing a CD. If you were a large enterprise, you may get your statements that way normally; it's in theory possible some banks may offer this to consumers for record retrieval.
However, even then you may have JPEGs or PDF scanned images that you will have fun OCR'ing to get into your accounting software
Now, if you have enough money in your account (you're of sufficient high net worth) they may be able to give you better service.
You wouldn't need to ask your bank for records, your personal accountant would already have collected all that information, prepared whichever reports you had wanted and uploaded everything to your private server.
Personally, while Windows is currently ahead of Ubuntu (user base, # of devs, apps, etc) I think before long it's going to start playing catch up to Ubuntu. Ubuntu has got a lot of momentum.
Err... yeah... my point is, why guess?
Maybe learn iOS now, get your app supporting apple's device, because there are more users. Design your app with an aim for multi-platform compatibility, use a multi platform framework if possible.
Work on porting your app to Android once you have it working on iOS. The winner here is to have one app that works on as many platforms as possible, then you don't exclude part of your market for running a different device :)
DVD-A not available for most albums, so that's right out -- might be cheaper to just buy 10 copies of every record, and treat them as consumables, unless you have thousands of records. I assume if there was more consumer demand the price of optical players would go down, eventually, though the technology was patented, so that could be a barrier to someone else making a product.
You would need something really special to convince joe public of the merit of keeping these huge disks around, however.
Not if you buy one of these $20,000 laser turntables :-)
If you have not, consider heading over to the FCC's Broadband website, and report a broadband dead zone, run their speed tests, etc. Get all your friends to do the same, even if they have to sign on with a dial-up internet connection to do it.
Who knows if it will make any difference, but they are building a database of underserved areas.... and there may be government action, incentives, etc, to improve matters now or in the future. I assume the more reports they get for an area from different people, the more likely someone is to take notice and move that area "higher up on the list" of areas that are suffering from poor choice, incumbent monopolization, etc.
I guess your bank has so few customers using ATMs and they have maybe one or two tellers who sit around bored all day waiting for a customer to come perform a transaction, so the ATM doesn't actually save them money; or something like that.
Either that or their management perhaps has issues.
I think you're the exception to the rule. I would never want to open an account at a bank that did some er crap like that; I use ATM service for deposits and withdrawls from time to time, so that would be costly :)
ATM transactions save them money. The ONLY reason they charge a surcharge is because they lobbied Congress to allow them to do so. They were already making money by spending less. Which do you think costs more? A bank building with tellers inside or a dumb box and phone line? There is zero legitimate reason to ever charge an ATM fee. They simply make money over and above their massive savings.
What part of 3rd party don't you understand?
These organizations didn't even have tellers before ATMs, or they weren't providing services to people who did not have an account with them.
For example: you could not go to a convenience store and withdraw money from your bank account and get cash right there, before the convenience stores started buying and operating ATMs, to get surcharge $$$ for the service.
As for banks: You can't go to $RANDOM_BANK_OTHER_THAN_YOURS and see a teller to withdraw money from your account at $YOUR_BANK, unless you have an account there.
Some banks might offer check cashing services to non-account holders, for an extra free, most do not, they require ID of an account holder to cash a check at an in-person teller.
With ATMs, they are providing services to people (who are not their customers), whom they never provided servies to before; purely for the convenience of other people.
There is no profit in cashing a non-customer's check or allowing your facilities to be used by a non-customer, unless you charge a fee for the service.
For you, it may be like this, but I'd rather be able to visit any site using my mobile device, even if it crashes or is sluggish.
Then it seems like Android might be the perfect one for you to choose.
Of course there are some tradeoffs involved, see: you can still choose to have Flash on your mobile device, you just have to pick a different device -- and the tradeoff is you might have to give up unique benefits you see of the iPhone in order to take that path.
And a disadvantage that you may have more crashing or sluggishness on sites you visit that use flash, that would be completely usable if your device did not support flash.
The average person (not web-savvy computer user) is not going to be happy having to figure out how to disable or enable flash on a per-site basis, or as they are browsing, or have to jump through hoops.
And if their device is slow or crashing, it's not "Flash", as far as the user is concerned, these feelings are that it is the device is responsible.
See, we already get this with computers -- they say things like 'my Dell is running slowly', 'this computer is slow'; when it's really the Windows OS installation that is slow.
Ultimately: the hardware gets blamed for everything, but moreso for smart phones than other types of devices.
I don't see how having the capability limits your choice.
Not having the capability removes you from having a choice between something good and something bad.
Also: Do you really try to apply this argument more generally? For example, if one downloaded application crashes on your iPhone do you never download and install an app again?
Apple has an App store approval process to reduce your choice in this regard. The idea is buggy/unstable apps can be removed from the app store or not approved in the first place.
The app store approval process hurts developers, but it does help users (somewhat) in this regard.
It would just be nice if Apple didn't reject apps because they re-implemented iPhone functionality in a superior way, or did something cool that threaten corporate profits (tethering, VoIP, Google Voice, for example).
When have you ever seen a bank charge their customers to use the ATM? I think using the ATM to make deposits and withdrawls at your own bank is universally free, basically, unless you are overdrafting (or something).
That i've seen no banks charge their customers... 3rd party ATM network operators offer ATM withdrawls as a service with a surcharge, but they are 3rd parties, not the person's bank; those ATMs wouldn't even exist, if not for the ability to lay a surcharge, and the "service" is the location of the ATM, not the mere fact it's an ATM.
Similarly other banks allow non-customers to use their ATMs to make withdrawls, in exchange for a surcharge.
But these aren't really like bank tellers at all, they are just cash disbursement machines, for example, you cannot make deposits at them like you can at your own bank's ATM. :)
Some banks offer a refund of such ATM surcharges, either limited $$ per month or unlimited, i'm thinking E*Trade Bank, Charles Schwab Checking, ING Direct, Merrill Lynch, Arcacia, Everbank, GMAC, USAA, and others.
Many banks also have 'home network', where there are no surcharges to transactions on ATMs 'in the network'. You can avoid surcharges, either by picking the right bank, or by going to the right ATM, there are a wealth of choices.
ATM surcharge is an idiot tax :)
[Or a tax for people who are in need cash fast in an emergency, from some casino or convenience store with a 3rd party operator]
Sometimes you have to pay for extra convenience. But your bank is indeed happy to let you use their ATMs for free, instead of using the teller -- they won't charge -- in fact, they'll encourage it.
I'm curious... if there was a substantial discount for using automated checkout (or surcharge for using non-automated checkout), would you still think the same way.... or would you go for that discount, how much is the friendly/helpful checkout staff worth to you, and is it enough for you to sacrifice a little bit of $$$ to take that route? :)
That sounds awfully like the older people who complain about "self checkouts" at a supermarket. For one thing, they're not mandatory (at least not yet)
What do you think will happen if supermarkets start offering a 15% discount on the total of your purchase for using self-checkout? (After marking all the items in the store up 17%, of course)
You think Android has any similarity whatsoever to MacOS' rendering system?
Perhaps Adobe did not do such a great job of porting Flash to MacOS.
Being able to run passably is not something good enough to be worth betting the business on. Apple wants to create a certain user experience on their platform, running passably would detract from that experience, be a mood killer, and make the iOS no better than the Android platform.
As compared to today, where iPhone as a platform, its users get a superior experience doing what they can do on it, compared to when Android users do what they can do on their platform.
Yes, the iOS cannot do as much as Android, and users will sometimes be inconvenienced, but it works better, faster, more reliably, for what it does do.
For example, if you want to watch a Youtube video on an iPhone, you don't have to load a browser and sit through ridiculous hanging, Flash lag, or other distracting occurences. Everything that works at all is seamless.
If a website requires flash, you get to immediately see it's not going to work, so you can avoid wasting your time with a crappy slow choppy site, and save that for later to visit on your laptop or desktop.
What, you mean Hollywood Accounting?
Just because their official story is "it's in the red", does not mean there was not money made by the studios and networks who are responsible for the film.
See choice quote:
The only reason this model is sustainable is because most of the TV shows cost is paid by advertisers. If the advertising subsidy is removed, the price skyrockets. Look at the cost of the direct-to-video episodes of Babylon 5 and Stargate SG1 (~$10 per hour).
The studios got their money back a long time ago. Any sales are almost pure profit. Basically... this is just the sort of premium people are willing to pay.
If there weren't lots of avid fans who would pay that much, the direct-to-video episodes would either be less expensive or (more likely), not exist at all, because they spend their time and money making direct to video episodes of only things that will be extremely profitable. Plus studios would be concerned --- if they sold it for less, people might come to expect that in the future.
That, and paying all the various rightholders involved.
Videos of major television shows are definitely massively more expensive to produce than some mechanic putting together a video howto on his own.
Think of how many directors, actors, writers, editors, set designers, makeup artists, cameramen, support staff are employed by Babylon 5, and Starget SG1, all entitled to either a big salary, or specified payment per performance (e.g. X pennies per copy of the video sold).
Plus dedicated costs of facilities, editing time, rental time on extremely expensive studio equipment, maintenance of dedicated facilities, etc; the list goes on.
The TV series will be popular, highly viewed, and profitable -- as measured by ratings - and video sales are just icing on the cake, otherwise the networks would have killed it almost immediately, as soon as it ceased to be uber-profitable.
I forgot to mention the bigger risk is not BT or TPB.
The bigger risk is someone else sees you selling videos, and sees how they sell (if you are successful), and gets the idea about doing the same thing, to compete with you, since you don't have a robust competitive advantage -- many mechanics would be capable of making those sorts of videos.
People would not necessarily buy from you just because you are first -- you would have to differentiate your product, you would have to be better, which is extremely difficult, since they would be making their product after seeing yours.
Cost and time equipment costs may be significant for you, but the equipment is not that expensive, not prohibitive enough to prevent copycats.
Time requirements are huge, but there are other people who have that too, esp. if they think they can 'follow in your footsteps' and make/sell similar videos (though at your expense)
Although it's a fascinating concept. For all I know, there are already people doing this, anyways......
Then I realized that some dickhead would probably just take the videos, put them up on Piratebay and I would be left poor and broke after spending a crapload of time and money on this project so I said fuck it.
What's a reasonable price to you?
$2 per video on iTunes?
Seriously, there is always the possibility some 'dick' will steal. You can have a mechanic shop, tomorrow or 10 years from now some dick can smash the window and steal things.
The attractiveness of anyone pirating is minimal. As far as I know, it's primarily popular commercial titles that get uploaded and actually stay available. One person can't really upload it and provide availability for it; if there aren't multiple seeds or lots of downloaders, noone's getting it at a reasonable speed.
In the media industry, the possibility of piracy is part of the cost of doing business.
If the content is good enough and appeals to a large enough audience, people will buy it. Most people don't visit TPB by the way. Of course there are people who download from TPB, but not everyone, and you might get exposure to your content by people who would never find you anyways.
If there would be enough interest in it for people to pirate en masse, then there would almost certainly be enough interest for you to publish and profit from advertising, if that is what you expect.
Publish low-quality almost-full-length preview versions on Youtube, with significant amounts of advertising for the real thing plus paid ads.
With HD "extended versions" for sale on DVD / iTunes, and all DRM to boot.
Is what I would say the winning strategy would be. Assuming such videos would even have people interested in the subject (lack of interest is a more likely reason for failure of media than piracy -- notoriety is almost always economically beneficial for someone).
You don't get it... some troll is going to get a court issue an order for a shutdown of an 'eBay website under the act', from some judge who has never heard of eBay... then eBay will have to petition the court, and wait 3 to 15 business days for the court to agree to accept their emergency petition to re-instate the site <G>