The problem is that "the shareholders" (of any voting block size) are all "in the club" and would never ask a potential new CEO to accept anything as *shudder* gauche as liability. The things that are deemed acceptable, even for owners of tiny little $10M companies, wouldn't pass the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" fairness test of an 8 year old.
The corporation is owned by the shareholders. If the CEO doesn't pay then the shareholders do, out of the assets of the corporation they own. They clearly don't have any incentive to pay out of their own assets rather than making the CEO pay. They just know that they have a choice, either to pay the CEO more to compensate for taking on the liability or to pay him less and have the corporation assume it. Basically, paying the CEO to insure them against liability, because he (theoretically) is the lowest cost avoider. You can speculate about what it says that they choose not to do that, but what does it matter to you how they choose to buy insurance?
At the same time, the owner (secretly) offers himself a block of shares four times as large as the employees at 1/4 market price, restricted for a period of 6 months. This only comes out after 6 months have passed and the owner's sale of a portion of these shares is made public.
OK, so the owner is secretly diluting the shares he promised to the employees, is that the problem? Because I would expect that to be illegal. Insider trading, no?
No, regulation is definitely required, what I'm for is cutting away at ridiculous fees the patent office charges.
The patent office fees aren't the problem. The fees are in the three figure range; nobody is really deterred by the fees. The problem is the lawyers. Drafting and prosecuting a patent application can cost thousands of lawyer-hours, and lawyers ain't exactly cheap. And you can easily get a patent issued without a lawyer, you'll just have a worthless patent because unless you know what you're doing the claims won't actually cover anything useful or will be trivially invalidated by some infringing corporation that does have a lawyer.
It also isn't particularly germane to the topic of innovation as deregulation has always led to less competition in the US, I'm not aware of any cases where that didn't happen.
You are a victim of corporate sleight of hand. Past instances of deregulation have involved removing regulations that protect customers, employees and third parties while leaving in place the ones that create a morass of bureaucracy for small competitors. What we need is the opposite of that: Retaining the regulations that curb negative externalities but removing the mountains of red tape.
The carrier does not allow the user to avoid the subsidy. If you want a mobile device, you pay the monthly fee and you get the subsidy. And you want the mobile device whether you can use it to play games or not. So even the subsidized cost is not an incremental cost; the user will pay it whether they use the device to play games or not. Think about it this way: If you buy a mobile device that you can use as a console, you can use it to avoid buying a separate console. If you buy a console, you can't use it to avoid buying a separate mobile device.
you're figuring that I want to buy every member of my family a $600 handheld device, because doing so is somehow better/cheaper than a Playstation.
Parents buy their kids phones. It's not a new thing. So same as above, if you already have it then it doesn't cost additional money.
Second, that your argument about speed is circular: Faster hardware is not necessary because games do not require faster hardware because faster hardware is not necessary.
Are you even trying to use logic? A causation cycle is not a circular argument. Chickens cause eggs. Eggs cause chickens. The fact that there is a cycle does not disprove the existence of chickens.
No, corporate personhood is all about granting nearly all individual rights to a faceless entity and taking away nearly all responsibilities from the entity and those who control it.
Corporate personhood is not the problem. The problem with Citizens United is not "corporations are people." It's not even "money is speech." It's the inherent fact that speech costs money, so people with no money get no speech. And there is an easy fix for that: Public financing of elections. But people don't like it, because they don't want their dollars going to political campaigns. (Apparently they would prefer that it be AT&T's dollars.)
People just don't seem to understand what limited liability is. If you're the CEO of a corporation and you hire an assassin to kill your competitor's engineering team, you go to jail for murder. Limited liability has nothing to do with it.
If you sell toys with lead paint, the victims sues and gets a judgment. If the corporation is not bankrupted by the judgment, limited liability doesn't do anything. The corporation pays the victims, the end. If the shareholders want the CEO to pay the judgment, they can put that in his employment contract before it happens, or they can condition his future employment on him paying it. It's completely between the CEO and the shareholders.
All limited liability does is make it so that if the judgment is so large that it bankrupts the entire corporation, the victims can't go after the shareholders or the officers too. Unless the corporation ceases to exist, it doesn't really come into play. It isn't the cause of corruption in Washington and it isn't the cause of music labels ripping off the artists.
What it is is a moral hazard in finance: The corporation can take your money and make a risky bet at a 40:1 margin. If they win the bet then they make the corporation a billion dollars and take home a fair chunk of that as a bonus. If they lose then the entire company goes bankrupt but the officers don't have to pay for it. And the solution there isn't even to eliminate limited liability, it's disclosure requirements. If you're a securities trader making a trade that, if you lose, will cause you to be unable to pay what you promised, you should have to disclose that to the other party or be subject to criminal penalties. Then nobody in their right mind will be willing to be the other side of those transactions and the problem will go away.
Corporate personhood is not the problem. Limited liability is not the problem. The problem is that we have more government spending than tax revenue but nobody wants to pay more taxes and nobody is willing to gore their own ox. The problem is that wealthy and organized parties like record labels and telecoms are better able to shape legislation than unorganized parties like artists and consumers.
You can't take the money and power out of money and power. All you can do is see to it that you get your share.
The problem the OP points out is not going to be solved by knowing how to hunt and fish.
The problem is that you can cripple our ability to feed 7 billion people without at all reducing the number of people. You can go into the woods and hunt a deer, but so can a million other people, which means that in two weeks after the stores run out of food there won't be any deer left to hunt.
But there are obvious government-level solutions to problems like this. You just create a "strategic food reserve" of nonperishable food (i.e. food that would last five years in storage), and that contains enough food to feed the nation for a year. You can rotate the stock every year, selling the 1-year-old food on the world market and replacing it with freshly canned food. Then we have a year to fix whatever problem impaired our ability to grow new food, so problem solved.
There is a cheaper way to do this. You subsidize the machines. Make them cheaper than cheap labor. Then you immediately have huge demand that builds economies of scale, which allows you to phase out the subsidy over time once economies of scale have made the automation cost lower than the cheap labor cost.
Your post is modded funny, but it's true. And it's the reason that unions are dying. The nature of unions is inherently to make labor more expensive. The employer has to pay significant costs for negotiators, then pay for whatever increase in benefits the union negotiates for the employees. There is no real opportunity for savings; it's pretty much a zero-sum game.
So the union comes in, the labor costs go up, then the employer realizes that with the new, higher labor costs, the cost of moving the operation to China is now substantially less than the wage differential between US union employees and Chinese sweatshop workers. Naturally the same calculus applies comparing union labor to automation, with the additional advantage that you don't need to move your factory away from where your consumers are.
Even where the employer has no opportunity for automation or off-shoring, if the employer has competitors with non-union labor then over time the non-union competitor will have more profits to use for expansion, will be able to undercut the union employer's prices, etc., with the result that companies without union employees grow and companies with union employees shrink.
The exception is government employees' unions. When those unions get more concessions, it allows them to charge higher dues without the employees feeling the pinch, which allows them to spend more money lobbying for more union contracts and union benefits, creating (depending on whether you're a government union employee or a taxpayer) a virtuous or vicious cycle of ever more tax dollars going to government union employees.
Even though I mentioned it, you still ignore price.
In (just to pick some numbers) 2015, a game console costing $300 will have better graphics abilities than a $300 handheld, simply because non-mobile platforms don't have the same design constraints and goals that handheld platforms do.
And a $600 mobile device (which the phone carrier will subsidize down to $200) might have equivalent graphics, and save you from having to buy both.
As to speed: Yeah, sure. And, by God, I could play Crysis on my 7-year-old single-core Dell laptop, if I wanted to prove a point by doing so. But it's a far more enjoyable (and prettier) experience on my quad-core SLI desktop.
I never said there don't exist games that benefit from faster hardware. Crysis is obviously one of the most resource intensive games. And yet, you can still run it at 30+ fps on very high with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo.
Until games become absolutely photorealistic, the machines that run them will never be fast enough, and we're obviously quite a long way from that level of perfection.
You're missing one of the considerations in game design, which is the current state of user hardware. Games get designed for the hardware that users will have. The developers aren't going to design a game that will run at 5 fps on half their customers' hardware. They could make games that are completely photorealistic today, but nobody has the hardware to run them, so they don't.
Or let's put it a different way. The XBOX360 is from 2005. The Wii is from 2006. Even if newer consoles are released over the next few years, the installed base of people who only have the existing consoles will be large enough that developers won't make a substantial number of titles that require the faster hardware until the bulk of their prospective customers actually have faster devices. A 2014 mobile device doesn't have to beat a 2014 XBOX, it only has to match a 2005 XBOX and it will be fast enough for enough recent games that plenty of people will put off buying a newer console until there are a larger number of games that require them. And then the mobile devices become part of the installed base and developers see to it that their new games run well on them.
And WTF would I want a "docking station" for, except to complicate my life? Who in the hell would want their personal telephone/pocket computer tied up playing games in the livingroom, especially if it takes extra hardware that is otherwise useless to make it worth doing?
I say "docking station" but if you prefer it could just as well be wireless.
Let me put it a different way: It's a console, perhaps made by Apple or Google, that integrates with your mobile device. There is no reason you would have to take the device out of your pocket. It doesn't stop you from using it while your kids are playing games. It doesn't stop your kids from playing games when you take your phone with you to work, because they have their own phones.
The advantage is that it has all your stuff on it. If you go to your friend's house and use his console then you still have all your music and video, all your saved games, all your user preferences, etc.
Storing it all in "the cloud" is lame. Your media would have some crap DRM that only lets you play them on a fixed number of devices to stop you sharing your cloud password with The Pirate Bay. If you have 1080p videos and you're in a place with a 10Mbps internet connection then you can't stream them from the cloud, but you could play them over wifi from a device in your pocket. If Sony's servers get hacked and Anonymous deletes all your stuff or your private files end up on Facebook, you're SOL. If you have all your stuff in the Sony cloud and you buy an XBOX, you're SOL. The cloud is hype from cloud vendors.
Yes, obviously price is not the sole factor in purchasing decisions. The point is that if Google can provide an experience comparable to Apple then lower prices gives them the advantage. And you might notice that Amazon is still the number two digital music store, and that's without the iPod/iPhone hook that Apple has or that Google would have with Android, without a large promotional effort (I've never seen a commercial for Amazon music downloads), etc.
The reality doesn't matter anyway. What matters is what the record labels think would happen. They're still under the impression that you "can't compete with free." The idea that customers are not that price sensitive isn't consistent with their thought process. (Unless they're lying every time they say things like that, obviously. I mean, they are the record labels.)
I completely agree that today's mobile devices are not a replacement for a console. But consider how they're likely to evolve over time, as the adoption rate increases. Imagine the Windows 8 lunacy but starting from the other end. You have your device that has all your data on it and you realize that it would be nice when at home to be able to plug it into a dock connected to your TV or monitor and get a UI designed for the bigger screen. The mobile device becomes a console as soon as you plug it in. You can play all your digital music on your home stereo, watch Netflix on your TV, use a full sized keyboard to type emails or documents, etc. One device to replace your PC as well as your XBOX. At that point the only advantage a console has is performance, which leads to this:
As handhelds get faster/better/cheaper, so does everything else. And nothing else has any of the worries about size, heat dissipation, or power consumption like mobiles do.
You're assuming that faster is always better, rather than there being a threshold level of performance that once reached allows the device to run a particular class of games. Think about it: How many new games really require more than a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo circa 2006?
On top of that, nothing says you can't have a docking station that uses the mobile device to read your preferences and files from but has its own, faster processor and memory, if that turns out to be a sufficiently large advantage. Think Apple TV or Google TV but running Android with a UI designed for large screens.
Of course it's unreasonable. But is it a search or seizure under the constitution? Cue all the arguments about how they could get the same result by paying a squadron of police $100,000/year each plus benefits to sit in front of your house and follow you around all day and all night whenever you leave.
If the answer was obvious then we wouldn't need the Supreme Court to decide it.
Or let's pick a different example. Suppose I own a printing press or a web server or whatever other means of publication. Can Congress pass a law consistent with the First Amendment prohibiting me from writing and publishing an article about what a jackass Joe Biden is? Of course not.
But what about if I write the article but somebody else has the printing press, and they agree with my article so they agree to publish it for free? Still no? Now what happens if I write the article, the person with the printing press will publish it if they get paid, and someone who agrees with my article is willing to pay them? If you say no then you strike down campaign finance laws. Money is speech. If you say yes then Congress can prohibit your article from being published just because you can't personally afford to pay for it. No money is no speech.
Tell me there is no room for reasonable people to differ on that.
The difference is that Microsoft stays with something until they dominate the industry. The original XBox lost money from beginning to end. Now Microsoft's game operation is profitable, and they and Nintendo are on top, Sony is in trouble and Sega is forgotten.
The trouble is that XBOX is still on the balance sheet as a net operating loss because of the billions of dollars they sunk into it. All they've accomplished is to stop losing money year over year. They're still in a giant hole compared with having put the same money in US treasury bonds or whatever else you like. And there is every indication that going forward, mobile devices will become faster and start replacing consoles as gaming devices for ever more resource intensive games, which creates a serious question as to whether they will ever even make back their initial investment.
They gained 4% market share in search last year, and are now at 30%.
Bing's market share is attributable almost entirely to it being the default search engine in Internet Explorer. And Internet Explorer's market share has been on a slow decline for about a decade with no indication of stopping. Incidentally, what does it say about Bing that it's the default in Internet Explorer but has lower market share than Internet Explorer does?
The free stuff doesn't count.
The free stuff produces ad revenue. Is ad revenue somehow not money?
Sony as a whole is rather large, but their music division is not that big.
The real issue is that nobody could ever buy all the major music labels and make it past the antitrust authorities.
Of course, they could just buy whichever one has the most attractive catalog and then fire most of the management and replace them with people with souls and then stop acting in lockstep with the rest of the cartel. I would love to see the reaction of the other labels if one of them suddenly started selling tracks for less than half the cartel price and giving new artists well-balanced contracts instead of bending them over. It would be like watching a corporation have a heart attack.
I suspect the problem is that there is no agreement that makes all the parties happy. Google's modus operandi is to sell at low margins and make it up on volume. The labels want to make more money from Google than they do from Apple.
The problem is that the natural compromise is for Google to pay more to the labels for each song but then sell them to the public for less. Google would love that because nobody is going to buy a song on iTunes for $.99 if they can get it on Google Music for $.79, and even if that meant near zero margins they could just make their money by putting ads on the website like they do for everything else. But the labels don't want that because they would just be trading Google for Apple as the dominant music store.
So the labels go in and demand that Google sell for at least what Apple is selling for, but that they pay the labels more for each song. And that's obviously a sucker bet because it's the opposite problem. Nobody is going to pay $1.19 for something on Google Music that is $.99 on iTunes, so Google would be stuck charging the same price but receiving a smaller cut. And why would Google want to accept terms worse than what the labels have shown they're willing to accept from Google's competitor?
Which leaves giving Google the Apple deal, which doesn't make anybody happy because the labels don't get any higher margins and Google can't differentiate their product through price competition.
They are supposed to evaluate based on the Constitution of the United States.
The problem is that the Constitution doesn't actually tell you the answer in 99% of cases. Take the case currently up for decision about the police attaching a GPS tracker to the suspect's car without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment says this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It doesn't say anything specifically about GPS tracking devices. Whether it applies to them is entirely a matter of opinion. It's a policy question. There are arguments for both sides. There is no right or wrong answer until such time as the SCOTUS tells us what it is.
The idea that courts should interpret the law in any kind of consistent way is incompatible with allowing the legislature to pass ambiguous laws. Every ambiguity has to be resolved one way or another and the choice in the case of first impression is largely discretionary, which means it gets made according to the judge's political preferences.
The only way to stop that would be for the court, rather than interpreting the law, to instead strike down any piece of legislation containing an ambiguity and make the legislature go back and fix it. That would keep the legislature in charge of all the policy decisions. Whether putting the legislature in charge of all the policy decisions is a good idea is a different question.
You're only arguing implicitly that the efforts to reduce file sharing have been ineffective. What happens when you legalize what was once a black market is that the costs of avoiding the ban disappear and are recaptured by the buyers and sellers in the form of higher margins at lower prices, which can pay for increases in quality etc. If the ban is ineffective then those costs are small.
Of course, if the ban is ineffective then maintaining it is a complete waste of resources on the enforcement side -- just because the cost of avoiding the ban are small doesn't necessarily mean the costs of attempting to enforce it are, or that there are no negative externalities on other parties like independent artists or software developers.
It seems to me you've made the opposite point to the one you wanted to. Maybe we should stop using the law to try to fix problems on the internet. The consequences to freedom and innovation have been raised time after time, but even on top of that, it seems apparent that the laws actually make the problem worse.
I mean look at botnets. We impose severe criminal penalties for breaking into computers. What happens? It deters all the script kiddies and the hobbyists from poking into systems in relatively innocuous ways that make apparent to the operator that they've been compromised and prompt them to clean the systems and patch the vulnerabilities. Net result: A decrease in petty crime in exchange for a stark increase in the number of vulnerable systems on the internet that are subsequently infected by stealth malware written by offshore criminal syndicates. We trade a decrease in the number of pranksters who open your CD tray remotely for an increase in identity theft, fraud and the distribution of child pornography.
It isn't at all obvious that that is an improvement over caveat emptor. There are known measures that people can take to prevent malware infection. Install patches, don't run shady binaries, etc. Script kiddies are like an inoculation -- it prompts the immune system to take defensive measures. And it may sting a bit but better that than to have the first sign of infection be $30,000 missing from your bank account.
The median being above the average is inconsistent with the existence of the problem to be solved. The problem is that the large majority of people hold on to lower tier connections until there exist applications to use faster connections, but the applications don't arrive until there are a critical mass of users with faster connections. The median user is then by definition one of the large majority with the lower tier / lower cost connection. The average is comprised predominantly of those users, plus the scant few who do subscribe to the higher tiers who bring up the average slightly, so that the average is slightly above the median. In consequence the median user will pay slightly more than at present, but in return he gets a much faster connection. That seems unlikely to cause the user to want to switch.
AND the networks would have to meet the demand of all subscribers simultaneously having access to the maximum bandwidth available, which is likely unfeasible, so more likely the max rated bandwidth would have to be scaled back and your "power users" would be pissed off.
You're assuming people would immediately use more bandwidth just because it's available. That isn't really what happens. The number of users who run their connections at 100% all the time are a very small minority. For any other users, adding more bandwidth doesn't materially increase the amount of data transferred, it only makes the transfer finish sooner.
That is, naturally, until the applications that require the additional bandwidth are produced and people start to adopt them. Then there will be more usage and the carrier will have to expand capacity, but that was the point of the exercise. If it turns out that new high bandwidth applications become hugely popular then the carriers will have to spend money upgrading the network and may have to increase prices, but that's what's supposed to happen. It's supply and demand. If there is a lot of demand then the price goes up to pay to increase supply. Then, if after the upgrades are paid for there is sufficient supply to meet demand, the prices can go back down. If not then prices stay high to fund further upgrades until the demand is satisfied.
There is a decision to be made as to how much to increase prices to fund necessary upgrades immediately as opposed to leaving monthly fees lower and rolling out upgrades more slowly, but that's pretty easy to determine on the basis of the volume of hate mail you get complaining about network performance.
So you're happy to never see another upgrade then, is that it? Or would you like to present some other method of paying for upgrades if no one will pay extra for faster connections until there are higher bandwidth applications and the applications don't come until there are a critical mass of people with faster connections?
For that matter (and obviously I'm being too lazy to look this up right now), is there not a way to turn it off on a per-device level rather than system wide?
This is really the problem. People don't want to pay for a faster connection if there are no applications that need it, but there is no business case for an application that needs it until people have the connections. Take Netflix at 1080p. If they released it they would have a million customers with 16Mbps connections blaming Netflix for the choppiness (or the auto-downgrade to 720p when they paid for 1080p) because it would require 20Mbps per stream.
What ISPs need to do is charge all customers the same rate, where that rate includes a certain amount to pay for a regular stream of upgrades. Then when the upgrade comes everybody gets it. That helps the ISP because getting slightly more money from every customer is much more profitable than getting substantially more money from very few customers, and because it ensures that applications that require 100Mbps+ connections will be created and give people a reason to continue paying for a wired connection instead of just tethering to their phones. (The customers naturally benefit from a perpetual succession of upgrades for only slightly more than they would pay for perpetual stagnation.)
Which is fine, because the sentence has 80 characters. 80 bits of entropy is pretty secure. The NSA could crack it within your lifetime (especially given continued future advances in processor speed), but that isn't most people's threat model. And you could, again, always use a longer sentence if that is your threat model. A 120 character sentence is well into "sun burns out first" territory.
What I'm saying is that the substitutions are useless. The increase in difficulty of remembering them is greater than the increase in entropy you get from them.
Performing the substitutions consistently would only provide a single bit of entropy total. The attacker just has his dictionary of words, then performs all the substitutions on all the words, which doubles the size of the dictionary but no more. If some letters have more than one possible substitution (e.g. a->@ or a->4) you would slightly more than double the size of the dictionary, but it's still less than two bits of entropy. It's close to nothing; an attack that takes two or four hours is going to succeed almost anywhere that an attack that takes one hour would succeed.
Doing the substitutions inconsistently gets you more, but still not much. Take your example "T3n Thous4nd g1gaw4ttz is 4ll On3 ne3dz- yes". You use about 20 characters that have common substitutions. (Maybe you can think of some other possible substitutions, but even if you had a possible substitution for every character it wouldn't change the point.) For each character you can either substitute it or not, so you get one bit of entropy each. Assuming you even need the entropy, you can get twenty or thirty bits of entropy by adding two or three additional words to the phrase. Now which is easier to remember: The extra words, or which of the letters you substituted?
Then keep using the version of Linux you have until it's time for a hardware upgrade. It's not like Windows is any different -- try running Vista or Windows 7 on basically anything sold before Vista was released. It's slower than a dog and half the hardware doesn't have drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that "the shareholders" (of any voting block size) are all "in the club" and would never ask a potential new CEO to accept anything as *shudder* gauche as liability. The things that are deemed acceptable, even for owners of tiny little $10M companies, wouldn't pass the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" fairness test of an 8 year old.
The corporation is owned by the shareholders. If the CEO doesn't pay then the shareholders do, out of the assets of the corporation they own. They clearly don't have any incentive to pay out of their own assets rather than making the CEO pay. They just know that they have a choice, either to pay the CEO more to compensate for taking on the liability or to pay him less and have the corporation assume it. Basically, paying the CEO to insure them against liability, because he (theoretically) is the lowest cost avoider. You can speculate about what it says that they choose not to do that, but what does it matter to you how they choose to buy insurance?
At the same time, the owner (secretly) offers himself a block of shares four times as large as the employees at 1/4 market price, restricted for a period of 6 months. This only comes out after 6 months have passed and the owner's sale of a portion of these shares is made public.
OK, so the owner is secretly diluting the shares he promised to the employees, is that the problem? Because I would expect that to be illegal. Insider trading, no?
No, regulation is definitely required, what I'm for is cutting away at ridiculous fees the patent office charges.
The patent office fees aren't the problem. The fees are in the three figure range; nobody is really deterred by the fees. The problem is the lawyers. Drafting and prosecuting a patent application can cost thousands of lawyer-hours, and lawyers ain't exactly cheap. And you can easily get a patent issued without a lawyer, you'll just have a worthless patent because unless you know what you're doing the claims won't actually cover anything useful or will be trivially invalidated by some infringing corporation that does have a lawyer.
It also isn't particularly germane to the topic of innovation as deregulation has always led to less competition in the US, I'm not aware of any cases where that didn't happen.
You are a victim of corporate sleight of hand. Past instances of deregulation have involved removing regulations that protect customers, employees and third parties while leaving in place the ones that create a morass of bureaucracy for small competitors. What we need is the opposite of that: Retaining the regulations that curb negative externalities but removing the mountains of red tape.
The carrier does not allow the user to avoid the subsidy. If you want a mobile device, you pay the monthly fee and you get the subsidy. And you want the mobile device whether you can use it to play games or not. So even the subsidized cost is not an incremental cost; the user will pay it whether they use the device to play games or not. Think about it this way: If you buy a mobile device that you can use as a console, you can use it to avoid buying a separate console. If you buy a console, you can't use it to avoid buying a separate mobile device.
you're figuring that I want to buy every member of my family a $600 handheld device, because doing so is somehow better/cheaper than a Playstation.
Parents buy their kids phones. It's not a new thing. So same as above, if you already have it then it doesn't cost additional money.
Second, that your argument about speed is circular: Faster hardware is not necessary because games do not require faster hardware because faster hardware is not necessary.
Are you even trying to use logic? A causation cycle is not a circular argument. Chickens cause eggs. Eggs cause chickens. The fact that there is a cycle does not disprove the existence of chickens.
No, corporate personhood is all about granting nearly all individual rights to a faceless entity and taking away nearly all responsibilities from the entity and those who control it.
Corporate personhood is not the problem. The problem with Citizens United is not "corporations are people." It's not even "money is speech." It's the inherent fact that speech costs money, so people with no money get no speech. And there is an easy fix for that: Public financing of elections. But people don't like it, because they don't want their dollars going to political campaigns. (Apparently they would prefer that it be AT&T's dollars.)
People just don't seem to understand what limited liability is. If you're the CEO of a corporation and you hire an assassin to kill your competitor's engineering team, you go to jail for murder. Limited liability has nothing to do with it.
If you sell toys with lead paint, the victims sues and gets a judgment. If the corporation is not bankrupted by the judgment, limited liability doesn't do anything. The corporation pays the victims, the end. If the shareholders want the CEO to pay the judgment, they can put that in his employment contract before it happens, or they can condition his future employment on him paying it. It's completely between the CEO and the shareholders.
All limited liability does is make it so that if the judgment is so large that it bankrupts the entire corporation, the victims can't go after the shareholders or the officers too. Unless the corporation ceases to exist, it doesn't really come into play. It isn't the cause of corruption in Washington and it isn't the cause of music labels ripping off the artists.
What it is is a moral hazard in finance: The corporation can take your money and make a risky bet at a 40:1 margin. If they win the bet then they make the corporation a billion dollars and take home a fair chunk of that as a bonus. If they lose then the entire company goes bankrupt but the officers don't have to pay for it. And the solution there isn't even to eliminate limited liability, it's disclosure requirements. If you're a securities trader making a trade that, if you lose, will cause you to be unable to pay what you promised, you should have to disclose that to the other party or be subject to criminal penalties. Then nobody in their right mind will be willing to be the other side of those transactions and the problem will go away.
Corporate personhood is not the problem. Limited liability is not the problem. The problem is that we have more government spending than tax revenue but nobody wants to pay more taxes and nobody is willing to gore their own ox. The problem is that wealthy and organized parties like record labels and telecoms are better able to shape legislation than unorganized parties like artists and consumers.
You can't take the money and power out of money and power. All you can do is see to it that you get your share.
The problem the OP points out is not going to be solved by knowing how to hunt and fish.
The problem is that you can cripple our ability to feed 7 billion people without at all reducing the number of people. You can go into the woods and hunt a deer, but so can a million other people, which means that in two weeks after the stores run out of food there won't be any deer left to hunt.
But there are obvious government-level solutions to problems like this. You just create a "strategic food reserve" of nonperishable food (i.e. food that would last five years in storage), and that contains enough food to feed the nation for a year. You can rotate the stock every year, selling the 1-year-old food on the world market and replacing it with freshly canned food. Then we have a year to fix whatever problem impaired our ability to grow new food, so problem solved.
There is a cheaper way to do this. You subsidize the machines. Make them cheaper than cheap labor. Then you immediately have huge demand that builds economies of scale, which allows you to phase out the subsidy over time once economies of scale have made the automation cost lower than the cheap labor cost.
Right, because the central bank has an interest in preventing small-scale automation. How does that help them, exactly?
Your post is modded funny, but it's true. And it's the reason that unions are dying. The nature of unions is inherently to make labor more expensive. The employer has to pay significant costs for negotiators, then pay for whatever increase in benefits the union negotiates for the employees. There is no real opportunity for savings; it's pretty much a zero-sum game.
So the union comes in, the labor costs go up, then the employer realizes that with the new, higher labor costs, the cost of moving the operation to China is now substantially less than the wage differential between US union employees and Chinese sweatshop workers. Naturally the same calculus applies comparing union labor to automation, with the additional advantage that you don't need to move your factory away from where your consumers are.
Even where the employer has no opportunity for automation or off-shoring, if the employer has competitors with non-union labor then over time the non-union competitor will have more profits to use for expansion, will be able to undercut the union employer's prices, etc., with the result that companies without union employees grow and companies with union employees shrink.
The exception is government employees' unions. When those unions get more concessions, it allows them to charge higher dues without the employees feeling the pinch, which allows them to spend more money lobbying for more union contracts and union benefits, creating (depending on whether you're a government union employee or a taxpayer) a virtuous or vicious cycle of ever more tax dollars going to government union employees.
Even though I mentioned it, you still ignore price.
In (just to pick some numbers) 2015, a game console costing $300 will have better graphics abilities than a $300 handheld, simply because non-mobile platforms don't have the same design constraints and goals that handheld platforms do.
And a $600 mobile device (which the phone carrier will subsidize down to $200) might have equivalent graphics, and save you from having to buy both.
As to speed: Yeah, sure. And, by God, I could play Crysis on my 7-year-old single-core Dell laptop, if I wanted to prove a point by doing so. But it's a far more enjoyable (and prettier) experience on my quad-core SLI desktop.
I never said there don't exist games that benefit from faster hardware. Crysis is obviously one of the most resource intensive games. And yet, you can still run it at 30+ fps on very high with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo.
Until games become absolutely photorealistic, the machines that run them will never be fast enough, and we're obviously quite a long way from that level of perfection.
You're missing one of the considerations in game design, which is the current state of user hardware. Games get designed for the hardware that users will have. The developers aren't going to design a game that will run at 5 fps on half their customers' hardware. They could make games that are completely photorealistic today, but nobody has the hardware to run them, so they don't.
Or let's put it a different way. The XBOX360 is from 2005. The Wii is from 2006. Even if newer consoles are released over the next few years, the installed base of people who only have the existing consoles will be large enough that developers won't make a substantial number of titles that require the faster hardware until the bulk of their prospective customers actually have faster devices. A 2014 mobile device doesn't have to beat a 2014 XBOX, it only has to match a 2005 XBOX and it will be fast enough for enough recent games that plenty of people will put off buying a newer console until there are a larger number of games that require them. And then the mobile devices become part of the installed base and developers see to it that their new games run well on them.
And WTF would I want a "docking station" for, except to complicate my life? Who in the hell would want their personal telephone/pocket computer tied up playing games in the livingroom, especially if it takes extra hardware that is otherwise useless to make it worth doing?
I say "docking station" but if you prefer it could just as well be wireless.
Let me put it a different way: It's a console, perhaps made by Apple or Google, that integrates with your mobile device. There is no reason you would have to take the device out of your pocket. It doesn't stop you from using it while your kids are playing games. It doesn't stop your kids from playing games when you take your phone with you to work, because they have their own phones.
The advantage is that it has all your stuff on it. If you go to your friend's house and use his console then you still have all your music and video, all your saved games, all your user preferences, etc.
Storing it all in "the cloud" is lame. Your media would have some crap DRM that only lets you play them on a fixed number of devices to stop you sharing your cloud password with The Pirate Bay. If you have 1080p videos and you're in a place with a 10Mbps internet connection then you can't stream them from the cloud, but you could play them over wifi from a device in your pocket. If Sony's servers get hacked and Anonymous deletes all your stuff or your private files end up on Facebook, you're SOL. If you have all your stuff in the Sony cloud and you buy an XBOX, you're SOL. The cloud is hype from cloud vendors.
Yes, obviously price is not the sole factor in purchasing decisions. The point is that if Google can provide an experience comparable to Apple then lower prices gives them the advantage. And you might notice that Amazon is still the number two digital music store, and that's without the iPod/iPhone hook that Apple has or that Google would have with Android, without a large promotional effort (I've never seen a commercial for Amazon music downloads), etc.
The reality doesn't matter anyway. What matters is what the record labels think would happen. They're still under the impression that you "can't compete with free." The idea that customers are not that price sensitive isn't consistent with their thought process. (Unless they're lying every time they say things like that, obviously. I mean, they are the record labels.)
I completely agree that today's mobile devices are not a replacement for a console. But consider how they're likely to evolve over time, as the adoption rate increases. Imagine the Windows 8 lunacy but starting from the other end. You have your device that has all your data on it and you realize that it would be nice when at home to be able to plug it into a dock connected to your TV or monitor and get a UI designed for the bigger screen. The mobile device becomes a console as soon as you plug it in. You can play all your digital music on your home stereo, watch Netflix on your TV, use a full sized keyboard to type emails or documents, etc. One device to replace your PC as well as your XBOX. At that point the only advantage a console has is performance, which leads to this:
As handhelds get faster/better/cheaper, so does everything else. And nothing else has any of the worries about size, heat dissipation, or power consumption like mobiles do.
You're assuming that faster is always better, rather than there being a threshold level of performance that once reached allows the device to run a particular class of games. Think about it: How many new games really require more than a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo circa 2006?
On top of that, nothing says you can't have a docking station that uses the mobile device to read your preferences and files from but has its own, faster processor and memory, if that turns out to be a sufficiently large advantage. Think Apple TV or Google TV but running Android with a UI designed for large screens.
Of course it's unreasonable. But is it a search or seizure under the constitution? Cue all the arguments about how they could get the same result by paying a squadron of police $100,000/year each plus benefits to sit in front of your house and follow you around all day and all night whenever you leave.
If the answer was obvious then we wouldn't need the Supreme Court to decide it.
Or let's pick a different example. Suppose I own a printing press or a web server or whatever other means of publication. Can Congress pass a law consistent with the First Amendment prohibiting me from writing and publishing an article about what a jackass Joe Biden is? Of course not.
But what about if I write the article but somebody else has the printing press, and they agree with my article so they agree to publish it for free? Still no? Now what happens if I write the article, the person with the printing press will publish it if they get paid, and someone who agrees with my article is willing to pay them? If you say no then you strike down campaign finance laws. Money is speech. If you say yes then Congress can prohibit your article from being published just because you can't personally afford to pay for it. No money is no speech.
Tell me there is no room for reasonable people to differ on that.
The difference is that Microsoft stays with something until they dominate the industry. The original XBox lost money from beginning to end. Now Microsoft's game operation is profitable, and they and Nintendo are on top, Sony is in trouble and Sega is forgotten.
The trouble is that XBOX is still on the balance sheet as a net operating loss because of the billions of dollars they sunk into it. All they've accomplished is to stop losing money year over year. They're still in a giant hole compared with having put the same money in US treasury bonds or whatever else you like. And there is every indication that going forward, mobile devices will become faster and start replacing consoles as gaming devices for ever more resource intensive games, which creates a serious question as to whether they will ever even make back their initial investment.
They gained 4% market share in search last year, and are now at 30%.
Bing's market share is attributable almost entirely to it being the default search engine in Internet Explorer. And Internet Explorer's market share has been on a slow decline for about a decade with no indication of stopping. Incidentally, what does it say about Bing that it's the default in Internet Explorer but has lower market share than Internet Explorer does?
The free stuff doesn't count.
The free stuff produces ad revenue. Is ad revenue somehow not money?
Sony as a whole is rather large, but their music division is not that big.
The real issue is that nobody could ever buy all the major music labels and make it past the antitrust authorities.
Of course, they could just buy whichever one has the most attractive catalog and then fire most of the management and replace them with people with souls and then stop acting in lockstep with the rest of the cartel. I would love to see the reaction of the other labels if one of them suddenly started selling tracks for less than half the cartel price and giving new artists well-balanced contracts instead of bending them over. It would be like watching a corporation have a heart attack.
I suspect the problem is that there is no agreement that makes all the parties happy. Google's modus operandi is to sell at low margins and make it up on volume. The labels want to make more money from Google than they do from Apple.
The problem is that the natural compromise is for Google to pay more to the labels for each song but then sell them to the public for less. Google would love that because nobody is going to buy a song on iTunes for $.99 if they can get it on Google Music for $.79, and even if that meant near zero margins they could just make their money by putting ads on the website like they do for everything else. But the labels don't want that because they would just be trading Google for Apple as the dominant music store.
So the labels go in and demand that Google sell for at least what Apple is selling for, but that they pay the labels more for each song. And that's obviously a sucker bet because it's the opposite problem. Nobody is going to pay $1.19 for something on Google Music that is $.99 on iTunes, so Google would be stuck charging the same price but receiving a smaller cut. And why would Google want to accept terms worse than what the labels have shown they're willing to accept from Google's competitor?
Which leaves giving Google the Apple deal, which doesn't make anybody happy because the labels don't get any higher margins and Google can't differentiate their product through price competition.
They are supposed to evaluate based on the Constitution of the United States.
The problem is that the Constitution doesn't actually tell you the answer in 99% of cases. Take the case currently up for decision about the police attaching a GPS tracker to the suspect's car without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment says this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It doesn't say anything specifically about GPS tracking devices. Whether it applies to them is entirely a matter of opinion. It's a policy question. There are arguments for both sides. There is no right or wrong answer until such time as the SCOTUS tells us what it is.
The idea that courts should interpret the law in any kind of consistent way is incompatible with allowing the legislature to pass ambiguous laws. Every ambiguity has to be resolved one way or another and the choice in the case of first impression is largely discretionary, which means it gets made according to the judge's political preferences.
The only way to stop that would be for the court, rather than interpreting the law, to instead strike down any piece of legislation containing an ambiguity and make the legislature go back and fix it. That would keep the legislature in charge of all the policy decisions. Whether putting the legislature in charge of all the policy decisions is a good idea is a different question.
You're only arguing implicitly that the efforts to reduce file sharing have been ineffective. What happens when you legalize what was once a black market is that the costs of avoiding the ban disappear and are recaptured by the buyers and sellers in the form of higher margins at lower prices, which can pay for increases in quality etc. If the ban is ineffective then those costs are small.
Of course, if the ban is ineffective then maintaining it is a complete waste of resources on the enforcement side -- just because the cost of avoiding the ban are small doesn't necessarily mean the costs of attempting to enforce it are, or that there are no negative externalities on other parties like independent artists or software developers.
It seems to me you've made the opposite point to the one you wanted to. Maybe we should stop using the law to try to fix problems on the internet. The consequences to freedom and innovation have been raised time after time, but even on top of that, it seems apparent that the laws actually make the problem worse.
I mean look at botnets. We impose severe criminal penalties for breaking into computers. What happens? It deters all the script kiddies and the hobbyists from poking into systems in relatively innocuous ways that make apparent to the operator that they've been compromised and prompt them to clean the systems and patch the vulnerabilities. Net result: A decrease in petty crime in exchange for a stark increase in the number of vulnerable systems on the internet that are subsequently infected by stealth malware written by offshore criminal syndicates. We trade a decrease in the number of pranksters who open your CD tray remotely for an increase in identity theft, fraud and the distribution of child pornography.
It isn't at all obvious that that is an improvement over caveat emptor. There are known measures that people can take to prevent malware infection. Install patches, don't run shady binaries, etc. Script kiddies are like an inoculation -- it prompts the immune system to take defensive measures. And it may sting a bit but better that than to have the first sign of infection be $30,000 missing from your bank account.
If the median is above the average
The median being above the average is inconsistent with the existence of the problem to be solved. The problem is that the large majority of people hold on to lower tier connections until there exist applications to use faster connections, but the applications don't arrive until there are a critical mass of users with faster connections. The median user is then by definition one of the large majority with the lower tier / lower cost connection. The average is comprised predominantly of those users, plus the scant few who do subscribe to the higher tiers who bring up the average slightly, so that the average is slightly above the median. In consequence the median user will pay slightly more than at present, but in return he gets a much faster connection. That seems unlikely to cause the user to want to switch.
AND the networks would have to meet the demand of all subscribers simultaneously having access to the maximum bandwidth available, which is likely unfeasible, so more likely the max rated bandwidth would have to be scaled back and your "power users" would be pissed off.
You're assuming people would immediately use more bandwidth just because it's available. That isn't really what happens. The number of users who run their connections at 100% all the time are a very small minority. For any other users, adding more bandwidth doesn't materially increase the amount of data transferred, it only makes the transfer finish sooner.
That is, naturally, until the applications that require the additional bandwidth are produced and people start to adopt them. Then there will be more usage and the carrier will have to expand capacity, but that was the point of the exercise. If it turns out that new high bandwidth applications become hugely popular then the carriers will have to spend money upgrading the network and may have to increase prices, but that's what's supposed to happen. It's supply and demand. If there is a lot of demand then the price goes up to pay to increase supply. Then, if after the upgrades are paid for there is sufficient supply to meet demand, the prices can go back down. If not then prices stay high to fund further upgrades until the demand is satisfied.
There is a decision to be made as to how much to increase prices to fund necessary upgrades immediately as opposed to leaving monthly fees lower and rolling out upgrades more slowly, but that's pretty easy to determine on the basis of the volume of hate mail you get complaining about network performance.
So you're happy to never see another upgrade then, is that it? Or would you like to present some other method of paying for upgrades if no one will pay extra for faster connections until there are higher bandwidth applications and the applications don't come until there are a critical mass of people with faster connections?
For that matter (and obviously I'm being too lazy to look this up right now), is there not a way to turn it off on a per-device level rather than system wide?
This is really the problem. People don't want to pay for a faster connection if there are no applications that need it, but there is no business case for an application that needs it until people have the connections. Take Netflix at 1080p. If they released it they would have a million customers with 16Mbps connections blaming Netflix for the choppiness (or the auto-downgrade to 720p when they paid for 1080p) because it would require 20Mbps per stream.
What ISPs need to do is charge all customers the same rate, where that rate includes a certain amount to pay for a regular stream of upgrades. Then when the upgrade comes everybody gets it. That helps the ISP because getting slightly more money from every customer is much more profitable than getting substantially more money from very few customers, and because it ensures that applications that require 100Mbps+ connections will be created and give people a reason to continue paying for a wired connection instead of just tethering to their phones. (The customers naturally benefit from a perpetual succession of upgrades for only slightly more than they would pay for perpetual stagnation.)
Which is fine, because the sentence has 80 characters. 80 bits of entropy is pretty secure. The NSA could crack it within your lifetime (especially given continued future advances in processor speed), but that isn't most people's threat model. And you could, again, always use a longer sentence if that is your threat model. A 120 character sentence is well into "sun burns out first" territory.
What I'm saying is that the substitutions are useless. The increase in difficulty of remembering them is greater than the increase in entropy you get from them.
Performing the substitutions consistently would only provide a single bit of entropy total. The attacker just has his dictionary of words, then performs all the substitutions on all the words, which doubles the size of the dictionary but no more. If some letters have more than one possible substitution (e.g. a->@ or a->4) you would slightly more than double the size of the dictionary, but it's still less than two bits of entropy. It's close to nothing; an attack that takes two or four hours is going to succeed almost anywhere that an attack that takes one hour would succeed.
Doing the substitutions inconsistently gets you more, but still not much. Take your example "T3n Thous4nd g1gaw4ttz is 4ll On3 ne3dz- yes". You use about 20 characters that have common substitutions. (Maybe you can think of some other possible substitutions, but even if you had a possible substitution for every character it wouldn't change the point.) For each character you can either substitute it or not, so you get one bit of entropy each. Assuming you even need the entropy, you can get twenty or thirty bits of entropy by adding two or three additional words to the phrase. Now which is easier to remember: The extra words, or which of the letters you substituted?
Then keep using the version of Linux you have until it's time for a hardware upgrade. It's not like Windows is any different -- try running Vista or Windows 7 on basically anything sold before Vista was released. It's slower than a dog and half the hardware doesn't have drivers.