My take on the bandwidth surcharge situation was that the insanely low caps and bandwidth surcharges were designed to fend off online video. Think about it: If your favorite shows were available online legally (let's leave less-than-100%-legal sources out of the equation for the purposes of this argument), why would you need to buy cable TV service? So Time Warner sets the bandwidth limit low and charges for overages. If subscribers don't use online video out of fear of going over their limit, cable wins. If people continue to use online video and go over their limit (thus paying overage fees), cable wins.
Network Neutrality could still come into the equation. Apparently, Joost is shopping itself to cable companies. One of the interested companies is Time Warner. If Time Warner buys Joost and reinstates their cap/overage plan (which they've already indicated they want to do), would Joost use count towards your bandwidth limit? Or would using Time Warner's own online video service be exempt from the same limits that YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc are subject too?
Unless you teach sex-ed in an all-girl's catholic school. True story: My wife taught in one of those (Health class, no less). Luckily for her, they brought in an outside speaker to do the sex ed segment. Not so luckily, the woman starts in with disinformation like "condoms contain tiny holes which will let sperm and viruses through." This woman was seriously trying to scare the kids into never using condoms with the goal that they would rely on abstinence!
My wife was so angry that she walked out of the room for the remainder of the segment. At least one student came up to my wife afterwords and asked if it was true. My wife was afraid to go against the "church teaching" that this outside woman was apparently giving, but also didn't want to help spread disinformation. She tried to subtly steer the student into doing her own research. My wife also objected to her principal about it who denied that the woman had ever said anything like this before. Since my wife left the school later on (unrelated reasons), we don't know if this woman was brought back.
I understand that, in a religious-based school, abstinence will be taught as the best method possible (and yes, it is 100% effective), but giving the kids blatant misinformation like that isn't going to help them. It just means that, should they decide to have sex, they'll just skip the condom (why use it if it has holes?) and will get an STD or will get pregnant.
My company falls in the "outdated intranet software" category. Some software that is critical for us to run won't work with IE7 or IE8. So our users are stuck with IE6. Since they're using IE6, I'm forced to remain on IE6 to test out our Intranet (different intranet site, this one I designed with IE6/7/8 & FF compatibility) on IE6. However, my problem is that I still need to test out our public website on IE7 and IE8 (which outside users use). Thank goodness for http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ . It lets me run IE7 and IE8 while still having IE6 on my computer.
To be completely fair, even with existing election machines you need trust. Where I vote, we use the old Push Lever style voting machines. I need to trust that it won't discard my vote (either via malice or accident) if I vote for Candidate A versus Candidate B. Computers could be used for voting in a way that is more trust-worthy than the current voting machines that I use. The computer could print a filled out ballot that says in human and machine readable language that I voted for Candidate A. Another computer could count the ballots. If a recount was needed or if fraud was alleged, a portion of ballots could be machine and human counted. If the two counting methods didn't match up enough, you would know that something was fishy. The key here is the ability to verify your trust in the machine by doing human counting. Pure machine counting (like in the Diebold machines that don't have paper trails) should not be trusted because there is no way to verify the results.
My wife's parents have a dinosaur in their house called a cockatoo. They used to have 2 of them and when they both squawked (screeched might be a better term) together they would answer the phone: "Hello, Jurassic Park."
In fact, to anthropomorphize the disease a little, the goal it should strive for is not to cause any negative reactions in the host (which implicitly means it can't be triggering the immune system to attack it), and so to benignly infect every human on the planet from now until doomsday.
That's what I do when I play Pandemic. I make my virus as infectious as possible but shut off all of the lethalities. So my virus spreads across the entire world killing almost no one. *THEN* I make it lethal.
I'm safe too. I keep kosher. [channeling type="right-wing preacher"]Clearly this is God punishing Christians for abandoning the Torah/Old Testament laws! Repent and ye shall be saved![/channeling]
Nah. I'll just use the cheat codes to give myself unlimited money. Then I'll use my diplomats to buy off those Aztec ironclads as well as all of the Aztec cities. Finally, I'll use the Aztec's own former forces to decimate their capital city. I might leave it in a barely functioning state if I feel like toying with them or I might take it over and destroy their civilization entirely. I call it my "Borg" strategy.
First it was the AOL users who invaded the Internet. Now the dead are going to haunt us online also? I miss the good old days when AOL users were locked behind their walled garden and the dead didn't twitter about their decomposition.
Is it possible for the RIAA to drop the case in order to stop these proceedings? I know that's a tactic they've used in the past when things didn't go their way. Hopefully, they won't be able to just say "oops, our bad" and stop any investigation into their tactics.
How long? Well, I'm typing this on a laptop that my office purchased for me in 2004. It is over 4 years old and works just fine for my needs. The Operating System that it runs is Windows XP - an OS which dates to 2001. Even if you consider XP from SP2 (the point where many finally agreed that XP got into its prime), this would put the OS at 2004. So my 4 year old hardware on 4-8 year old software is good enough for my uses. (My uses are E-mail, web browsing, office suite work, web programming, database work, some graphic design, some photo editing, the occasional light video edit, etc.) If I was offered a more powerful PC, I guess I would take it but I don't really feel like this one has lived out its entire life yet. Most of my performance issues are software-based (Company mandated AV software: McAfee Antivirus. Yuck.) not hardware based.
"And even HD is overkill if you ask many older people"
Hey, I'm not old! I'm only 34. Seriously, though, I think that HD is overkill for my needs. My television works just fine and I have no desire to upgrade to an HD set. Money is limited and I would rather spend the cash on other things than a new television when my existing standard definition 32" TV works just fine. I don't think that HD would matter much sitting 5 feet away from a 32" HD TV. (I don't have room in my house for a TV much bigger than 32".)
Obviously, the universe is only 6,000 years old and this "evidence" was cleverly planted by God. You can tell by the way he's giving scientists the raspberry!
* First they ignore you, * then they ridicule you, * then they fight you, * then you think you win, * then they pay a congressman to pass a law declaring them the winner.
So your example of ancient material being digitized is concert recordings from the past 30 years? You and I have a *COMPLETELY* different definition of ancient!
Now I have a mental image of the Pope raising a solar panel above his head and saying "I HAVE THE POOOOOWER!" (Yes, my brain is fried and I'm mixing the Pope up with He-Man. Obviously my brain needs sleep. Of course, it would be much more fun to sleep deprive it a bit more and see what else pops up.)
If copyright were shortened to a more reasonable length of time, I'd be willing to bet that piracy would drop. However, there will always be a group of people who pirate everything. Their reasoning might vary ("Copyright should be even shorter!" "The price should be even lower!" "Copyright shouldn't exist at all!" "It's my right to copy anything I want!" "I'm sticking it to 'the Man'!" etc) but they would still pirate even if the prices went rock-bottom-barely-covering-costs and the terms went down to near-zero.
Put those people aside though (as they're not a reasonable market for any content creator to target) and I do believe that many people could be converted from pirates to content purchasers if the copyright length was reduced.
As another poster said, the $5 comes from work. How it really works is this:
1. 10 people deposit $100 each into a bank. The bank now has $1,000 in their vault. In return for the deposits, the bank promises each person some interest (say 1.5%) on their money. 2. Small Business Owner comes in and needs a loan. The bank lends him $1,000 at 5% interest. 3. Small Business Owner uses that money on his business to increase sales. He winds up making (after other expenses) $1,500. 4. Small Business Owner pays back the $1,050 ($1,000 + 5%) to the bank leaving him with $450 profit. 5. The bank uses the $50 profit from the loan to pay the interest on the 10 accounts: $1.50 each. 6. The bank makes a profit of $35.
Repeat this on a much larger scale (more/larger deposits, more/larger loans, etc) and the bank makes very nice profits.
And if you try to point out that money "magically" gets created in step 3, it doesn't. People get paid for their work. They then use that money to buy goods and services. Those payments are used to pay other people for their work. Money isn't created (except by the central bank), it is circulated from person to person.
I'm not too sure of this. People will either seek support online (e.g. computer help forums) or bring their computer to computer repair shops (GeekSquad and the like). Windows XP, when properly maintained, can last for quite awhile still. This is especially true of businesses. More and more they are realizing that they can get by with their current versions for years past when Microsoft tells them it is time to upgrade.
Except that a lot of people are requesting that their computers come "downgraded" to Windows XP. I don't remember a big downgrading movement when Windows XP was released. At least not as big as it is now. Certainly, name brand companies, like Dell, didn't go around proclaiming that they would install Windows 98 on your computer instead of Windows XP.
I've said this for years. Microsoft's biggest competition is themselves. Why upgrade from XP to Vista (or Windows 7)? The new flashy features aren't going to really win that many people over. In the Office arena, why upgrade from Office 97/2000/XP to the latest versions? Chances are, if you're running Office 97/2000/XP, the new versions aren't really going to offer you anything new you can use. The old versions are "good enough."
This used to be Microsoft's strength over Linux/Mac. Yes, Linux/Mac may have been better in many (perhaps even most) areas, but Microsoft Windows was "good enough." This "good enough" status kept people from switching operating systems (and office suites). Now, the "good enough" that kept people on Windows/Office is keeping people on OLD versions of Windows/Office. Microsoft now finds itself fighting against the very strength that helped maintain their monopoly for many years. And if they can't overcome their own old versions of Windows/Office (the major profit centers of Microsoft), the entire company could be in danger!
Businesses are cautious, but they're even more cautious during an economic downturn. If Windows XP is working for a small business, and that business is struggling (or even just has the threat of future struggles hanging over their head), the business is going to keep costs down by any means. Paying money to upgrade their OS just because the new version is out is a logical place to start. Especially if an OS upgrade could break things and/or require staff training. I would think that the economic downturn is equaling less sales for Microsoft for Vista and less pre-orders for Windows 7.
Slashdot Mirror
My take on the bandwidth surcharge situation was that the insanely low caps and bandwidth surcharges were designed to fend off online video. Think about it: If your favorite shows were available online legally (let's leave less-than-100%-legal sources out of the equation for the purposes of this argument), why would you need to buy cable TV service? So Time Warner sets the bandwidth limit low and charges for overages. If subscribers don't use online video out of fear of going over their limit, cable wins. If people continue to use online video and go over their limit (thus paying overage fees), cable wins.
Network Neutrality could still come into the equation. Apparently, Joost is shopping itself to cable companies. One of the interested companies is Time Warner. If Time Warner buys Joost and reinstates their cap/overage plan (which they've already indicated they want to do), would Joost use count towards your bandwidth limit? Or would using Time Warner's own online video service be exempt from the same limits that YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc are subject too?
Unless you teach sex-ed in an all-girl's catholic school. True story: My wife taught in one of those (Health class, no less). Luckily for her, they brought in an outside speaker to do the sex ed segment. Not so luckily, the woman starts in with disinformation like "condoms contain tiny holes which will let sperm and viruses through." This woman was seriously trying to scare the kids into never using condoms with the goal that they would rely on abstinence!
My wife was so angry that she walked out of the room for the remainder of the segment. At least one student came up to my wife afterwords and asked if it was true. My wife was afraid to go against the "church teaching" that this outside woman was apparently giving, but also didn't want to help spread disinformation. She tried to subtly steer the student into doing her own research. My wife also objected to her principal about it who denied that the woman had ever said anything like this before. Since my wife left the school later on (unrelated reasons), we don't know if this woman was brought back.
I understand that, in a religious-based school, abstinence will be taught as the best method possible (and yes, it is 100% effective), but giving the kids blatant misinformation like that isn't going to help them. It just means that, should they decide to have sex, they'll just skip the condom (why use it if it has holes?) and will get an STD or will get pregnant.
My company falls in the "outdated intranet software" category. Some software that is critical for us to run won't work with IE7 or IE8. So our users are stuck with IE6. Since they're using IE6, I'm forced to remain on IE6 to test out our Intranet (different intranet site, this one I designed with IE6/7/8 & FF compatibility) on IE6. However, my problem is that I still need to test out our public website on IE7 and IE8 (which outside users use). Thank goodness for http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ . It lets me run IE7 and IE8 while still having IE6 on my computer.
To be completely fair, even with existing election machines you need trust. Where I vote, we use the old Push Lever style voting machines. I need to trust that it won't discard my vote (either via malice or accident) if I vote for Candidate A versus Candidate B. Computers could be used for voting in a way that is more trust-worthy than the current voting machines that I use. The computer could print a filled out ballot that says in human and machine readable language that I voted for Candidate A. Another computer could count the ballots. If a recount was needed or if fraud was alleged, a portion of ballots could be machine and human counted. If the two counting methods didn't match up enough, you would know that something was fishy. The key here is the ability to verify your trust in the machine by doing human counting. Pure machine counting (like in the Diebold machines that don't have paper trails) should not be trusted because there is no way to verify the results.
My wife's parents have a dinosaur in their house called a cockatoo. They used to have 2 of them and when they both squawked (screeched might be a better term) together they would answer the phone: "Hello, Jurassic Park."
That's what I do when I play Pandemic. I make my virus as infectious as possible but shut off all of the lethalities. So my virus spreads across the entire world killing almost no one. *THEN* I make it lethal.
I don't think I could take the annoying dancing lemurs.
I'm safe too. I keep kosher. [channeling type="right-wing preacher"]Clearly this is God punishing Christians for abandoning the Torah/Old Testament laws! Repent and ye shall be saved![/channeling]
Nah. I'll just use the cheat codes to give myself unlimited money. Then I'll use my diplomats to buy off those Aztec ironclads as well as all of the Aztec cities. Finally, I'll use the Aztec's own former forces to decimate their capital city. I might leave it in a barely functioning state if I feel like toying with them or I might take it over and destroy their civilization entirely. I call it my "Borg" strategy.
First it was the AOL users who invaded the Internet. Now the dead are going to haunt us online also? I miss the good old days when AOL users were locked behind their walled garden and the dead didn't twitter about their decomposition.
Here's hoping that they can't successfully weasel their way out of this. I'd like to see a court strike down their obvious abuses of the legal system.
Is it possible for the RIAA to drop the case in order to stop these proceedings? I know that's a tactic they've used in the past when things didn't go their way. Hopefully, they won't be able to just say "oops, our bad" and stop any investigation into their tactics.
How long? Well, I'm typing this on a laptop that my office purchased for me in 2004. It is over 4 years old and works just fine for my needs. The Operating System that it runs is Windows XP - an OS which dates to 2001. Even if you consider XP from SP2 (the point where many finally agreed that XP got into its prime), this would put the OS at 2004. So my 4 year old hardware on 4-8 year old software is good enough for my uses. (My uses are E-mail, web browsing, office suite work, web programming, database work, some graphic design, some photo editing, the occasional light video edit, etc.) If I was offered a more powerful PC, I guess I would take it but I don't really feel like this one has lived out its entire life yet. Most of my performance issues are software-based (Company mandated AV software: McAfee Antivirus. Yuck.) not hardware based.
"And even HD is overkill if you ask many older people"
Hey, I'm not old! I'm only 34. Seriously, though, I think that HD is overkill for my needs. My television works just fine and I have no desire to upgrade to an HD set. Money is limited and I would rather spend the cash on other things than a new television when my existing standard definition 32" TV works just fine. I don't think that HD would matter much sitting 5 feet away from a 32" HD TV. (I don't have room in my house for a TV much bigger than 32".)
Obviously, the universe is only 6,000 years old and this "evidence" was cleverly planted by God. You can tell by the way he's giving scientists the raspberry!
Unfortunately, all too often it winds up being:
* First they ignore you,
* then they ridicule you,
* then they fight you,
* then you think you win,
* then they pay a congressman to pass a law declaring them the winner.
So your example of ancient material being digitized is concert recordings from the past 30 years? You and I have a *COMPLETELY* different definition of ancient!
Now I have a mental image of the Pope raising a solar panel above his head and saying "I HAVE THE POOOOOWER!" (Yes, my brain is fried and I'm mixing the Pope up with He-Man. Obviously my brain needs sleep. Of course, it would be much more fun to sleep deprive it a bit more and see what else pops up.)
If copyright were shortened to a more reasonable length of time, I'd be willing to bet that piracy would drop. However, there will always be a group of people who pirate everything. Their reasoning might vary ("Copyright should be even shorter!" "The price should be even lower!" "Copyright shouldn't exist at all!" "It's my right to copy anything I want!" "I'm sticking it to 'the Man'!" etc) but they would still pirate even if the prices went rock-bottom-barely-covering-costs and the terms went down to near-zero.
Put those people aside though (as they're not a reasonable market for any content creator to target) and I do believe that many people could be converted from pirates to content purchasers if the copyright length was reduced.
Those won't work. Any Slashdot reader can tell you: The goggles! They do nothing!
(Yes, even I am groaning as I'm posting this.)
As another poster said, the $5 comes from work. How it really works is this:
1. 10 people deposit $100 each into a bank. The bank now has $1,000 in their vault. In return for the deposits, the bank promises each person some interest (say 1.5%) on their money.
2. Small Business Owner comes in and needs a loan. The bank lends him $1,000 at 5% interest.
3. Small Business Owner uses that money on his business to increase sales. He winds up making (after other expenses) $1,500.
4. Small Business Owner pays back the $1,050 ($1,000 + 5%) to the bank leaving him with $450 profit.
5. The bank uses the $50 profit from the loan to pay the interest on the 10 accounts: $1.50 each.
6. The bank makes a profit of $35.
Repeat this on a much larger scale (more/larger deposits, more/larger loans, etc) and the bank makes very nice profits.
And if you try to point out that money "magically" gets created in step 3, it doesn't. People get paid for their work. They then use that money to buy goods and services. Those payments are used to pay other people for their work. Money isn't created (except by the central bank), it is circulated from person to person.
I'm not too sure of this. People will either seek support online (e.g. computer help forums) or bring their computer to computer repair shops (GeekSquad and the like). Windows XP, when properly maintained, can last for quite awhile still. This is especially true of businesses. More and more they are realizing that they can get by with their current versions for years past when Microsoft tells them it is time to upgrade.
Except that a lot of people are requesting that their computers come "downgraded" to Windows XP. I don't remember a big downgrading movement when Windows XP was released. At least not as big as it is now. Certainly, name brand companies, like Dell, didn't go around proclaiming that they would install Windows 98 on your computer instead of Windows XP.
I've said this for years. Microsoft's biggest competition is themselves. Why upgrade from XP to Vista (or Windows 7)? The new flashy features aren't going to really win that many people over. In the Office arena, why upgrade from Office 97/2000/XP to the latest versions? Chances are, if you're running Office 97/2000/XP, the new versions aren't really going to offer you anything new you can use. The old versions are "good enough."
This used to be Microsoft's strength over Linux/Mac. Yes, Linux/Mac may have been better in many (perhaps even most) areas, but Microsoft Windows was "good enough." This "good enough" status kept people from switching operating systems (and office suites). Now, the "good enough" that kept people on Windows/Office is keeping people on OLD versions of Windows/Office. Microsoft now finds itself fighting against the very strength that helped maintain their monopoly for many years. And if they can't overcome their own old versions of Windows/Office (the major profit centers of Microsoft), the entire company could be in danger!
Businesses are cautious, but they're even more cautious during an economic downturn. If Windows XP is working for a small business, and that business is struggling (or even just has the threat of future struggles hanging over their head), the business is going to keep costs down by any means. Paying money to upgrade their OS just because the new version is out is a logical place to start. Especially if an OS upgrade could break things and/or require staff training. I would think that the economic downturn is equaling less sales for Microsoft for Vista and less pre-orders for Windows 7.