"patents on medicines are used to deprive people unable to pay for it from life"
Funny, I thought pharma patents were designed (albeit imperfectly) to convince someone to spend years and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to design, produce, and test medications that are key to saving and improving human lives. Or maybe we don't need that, since the Indian, Brazilian, and Thai pharma companies are generating all the innovation anyway. Oh, wait, they're not.
The system can tolerate and survive with a certain amount of patent violation, just like a store can stay open even with a certain amount of shoplifting. It it gets too large, however, the store just shuts down, and then nobody can buy the product.
At the LOW end (like 400- 600 sq foot -- which is ALL most people can afford) it is $5 for crappy, $10 for luxury, which is what I originally said,... My original numbers still stand, and yes, it's expensive and yes, it fucking sucks.
No, your original numbers don't stand. For example, look at Rose's website (one of the priciest landlords in the city). 450sqft apartments are renting for $2500, with some as much as $3200, for prime Chelsea. That's still only about $7/month. Again, $5/sqft is quite doable for lux apartments, even relatively small ones (600 sqft), and it's easily doable for somewhat larger apartments (my rent is about $3.50/sqft in a premium location, high floor).
Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.
This just isn't true. You can get a very nice 1k sqft apartment in a great bldg in Manhattan for $5k/month (which is still incredibly high). $5/sqft/month is the going rate for apartments in lux bldgs - walkups are less, and I don't know of ANYWHERE renting for $10/sqft/month.
there is NO PROBLEM with traffic in Manhattan!
Well, I guess that depends on your opinion of a traffic problem. Most would disagree with you.
5. plans/contracts are among the most expensive in the developed world
People keep on saying this, and I just don't see it.
I can get 450 anytime minutes, unlimited Long Distance, unlimited nights and weekends, nationwide long distance and roaming, and a free Razr for (including taxes) about $45/month from Verizon on a 2-year contract.
T-Mobile in Germany will charge me E58/month (about $78) for 400 minutes, phone's free (or E1), no free nights or weekends, no free roaming beyond Germany (which has about 1/3 the population of the US) and again a 2-year contract. One difference is that this plan includes free incoming calls, while the Verizon one doesn't (although, under the Verizon plan, your friends don't have to pay a surcharge to call you).
Seems like the Verizon plan is a lot less expensive than the German plan...
Maybe I'm wrong here, correct me if I am, but it looks like US cellular service is actually a pretty darn good deal.
Not quite. The problem is, if you had one provider with flat-rate pricing and one with per-bit pricing, you'd have a huge adverse selection problem - all the heavy users (who cost more to serve, and are hence less profitable) would flock to the flat-rate pricing company, while the light users (who cost less to serve, and are therefore more profitable customers) stick with the per-bit pricing company. As a result, the flat-rate company will soon introduce per-bit pricing.
" it will be a cold day in hell when we start paying a flat rate for unfettered wireless access as we do with the internet."
Expect things to change, but the other way around. Over the next couple of years, you're increasingly going to see implementations of "pay by the bit" for home broadband connections, as are in place in many other countries.
Wireless spectrum is limited, and cell towers don't come free, so charging heavier users more is only reasonable.
If your doctor wants to use an ISP that restricts his email, that's his business. You can certainly go to another doctor, but you aren't his ISP's customer (he is), so if he's happy with an ISP that charges people to send him mail, that's his call, not yours. If the ISP wanted to only accept mail from domains that start with Q, then it could do so - your doctor might have grounds to complain, especially if they didn't inform him of it, but you certainly don't - his service, his payment, his call.
"Verizon has been granted a monopoly on copper as long as they serve as a common carrier."
Um, what monopoly did the government grant? You're welcome to go out there and deploy your own network, if you like, so long as you can show that you have the financial wherewithal to back it up, and not leave municipalities with dug-up streets to deal with after you go belly-up.
Asia is large and growing rapidly, but a huge portion of that growth is driven by sales to the US market - remember that the US economy is more than five times the size of the Chinese economy, and nearly twice the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean economies combined. Loss of access to the US market would be a huge lose/lose for both Asian economies AND the US.
While you're right about the RIAA, you're wrong about Atlantic Records. Atlantic is owned by Warner Music Group, but Warner Music is an independent company, with no connection to Time Warner (which doesn't use the AOL name anymore). Warner Music (ticker WMG) was sold off about two years ago, so Time Warner (ticker TWX) has no connection to this lawsuit
"Compare mobile phones in europe to here....a better deal there"
I often hear this claimed, but it just doesn't seem true to me.
I pay $45/month, all-in, for 400 peak minutes/month and unlimited nights and weekends, including local and long distance, anywhere in the US, and a free RAZR (2-year contract).
Looking at (as an example), Vodafone in the UK, I see a 500 minute/month plan, with no free nights and weekends, a free RAZR, and an 18-month contract, for 30 pounds, or about $60.
Sure, there are differences between the offerings (US has free nights/weekends, UK has somewhat more minutes, UK doesn't pay for incoming calls, UK contract's 6 months shorter, US includes roaming to an area of 300MM people, UK doesn't include the rest of Europe, etc.), but they don't appear to be radically different - if anything, the US offer seems rather a better deal ($180 cheaper/year). Certainly, this doesn't appear to support a clear conclusion that cellphone deals are that much better in Europe than the US...
If poster to which I was responding was alleging that companies are delivering results that are below average for those companies, that's not true either. Corporate profits as a whole are doing extremely well. Are some companies doing less well than they have in the past? Sure - General Motors isn't exactly lighting up the scoreboard. Google, on the other hand, is growing incredibly fast.
The Dow Jones Average is up, but most individual stocks are still trading low and many companies are posting lower-than-average numbers. You can't look at the average itself and use that as a reliable indicator of the health of the economy.
1. All the major indices with the exception of the tech-heavy NASDAQ are at or near all-time highs, including the broadest-based (i.e. Russell 2000). The NASDAQ is at post-bubble highs.
2. Most individual stocks are not "trading low," whatever that means. See my comment above.
3. Many companies are posting "lower-than-average" numbers. In fact, about half of them are (that's what average means), unless you meant median, in which case exactly half of them are.
Your point that the market conditions don't tell the whole story about the US economy is well-taken, but the assertion that the equity markets aren't doing well just isn't supported by the facts.
Irrelevant? No. Limited in its appeal to mobile corporate users? Yes. Without the ability to install custom apps on it, the chance that the iPhone will be a popular choice for mobile corporate users does seem pretty slim. That being said, I hardly think Apple cares, it's not their target market anyway.
"Wal*Mart is unlikely to make this work, because (whatever you think of them) their excellences are not in innovative use of technology."
Honestly, this is completely wrong. What made Wal*Mart the juggernaut is EXACTLY the effective use of technology. Wal*Mart invested in computerized inventory and a company-wide satellite-based data network way before anyone else. As a result, they knew EXACTLY what was selling in each store, and could manage inventory much, much better than anyone else. Brought down costs, and ensured that the products were actually on the shelves.
The barrier to getting people to sign up for wireless service (or a lot of other subscription services) has always been equipment cost. Even though a customer is likely to pay $1k or more in service fees over the course of a 24-month contract, consumers focus on the $300 upfront for the phone, not the monthly fee. Cut the phone price, and more people sign up.
BTW, for you folks who don't want to sign up for a contract, you don't have to. Get your own phone (paying retail price), and Cingular or Verizon or Sprint will put you on a month-to-month contract, no problem. There's no way the economics work, though, to have free RAZRs and no contract.
If you're going to quote websites verbatim and at length, you really need to cite them. This is lifted wholesale from www.libcom.org. As to the content of the piece itself, well, I'm going to stick with the old adage about trying to teach a pig to talk: don't do it, it'll frustrate you and annoy the pig.
Listen, the RIAA can decide who to sue and who not to sue. If I come over, take your car, and crash it, you'll probably sue me (quite apart from criminal issues). If your brother does the same thing, you probably wouldn't sue. The fact that RIAA would have the right to sue doesn't in any way oblige them to do so.
Anyone in North Korea who can afford iPods and cognac is a high-ranking member of the regime, and hence far, far from "innocent." You seem to have this idea that these sanctions will affect thousands of middle managers or low-ranking military officers - they won't. They'll just affect a few hundred people at the very top of probably the most vicious totalitarian dictatorship on the planet. Objecting to these sanctions because they'll affect a few people beyond Kim Jong Il is like objecting to sanctions on Nazi Germany because they'd affect Goering and Himmler, not just Hitler. And yes, I've read Godwin's law, but if there's anyplace where comparison to the Nazis is apt, it's North Korea (and perhaps Pol Pot's Cambodia).
Huh? Honestly, I really don't understand your point here. Exactly which of these sanctions will in any way affect "innocent people and families" in North Korea? This isn't Singapore we're talking about here - getting three squares a day and having a TV (that's hardwired to receive only the one state-run TV channel) make you a rich man. Heck, denial of any of these items wouldn't even be a true "hardship" for any family in the US (annoying/disappointing, yes, but not a true hardship).
"What kind of idiot buys a gadget with a battery sealed in it? I know that I certainly wouldn't, but millions upon millions of people continue to throw their dollars at these pieces of crap, and when they die, they buy ANOTHER one, often from the same company."
Well, this kind of idiot would. My Nano has a battery sealed in it. As a result, Apple could pack the electronics in even tighter, resulting in a smaller device, which I prefer. In a few years, when the battery eventually dies, I can either (a) send it to Apple, or (b) just junk it and buy a new one with more memory/better screen/direct neural input/whatever. Frankly, the fact that you can't comprehend that someone wouldn't _want_ to user-maintain his iPod indicates a shocking lack of imagination on your part.
"I could get any number of PS3 untis (our BB had at least 10 in a pyramid on the floor, and who knows how many more in the back),"
Where exactly do you live that had large numbers of unsold PS3? Someplace where Sony managers come every week and kill one member of each household while beating puppies?
If those units are still just sitting around, might I suggest buying all 10 and reselling them on eBay? While prices are down, you can still get $1k or more/unit, which would be a tidy $4k profit for you...
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"patents on medicines are used to deprive people unable to pay for it from life"
Funny, I thought pharma patents were designed (albeit imperfectly) to convince someone to spend years and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to design, produce, and test medications that are key to saving and improving human lives. Or maybe we don't need that, since the Indian, Brazilian, and Thai pharma companies are generating all the innovation anyway. Oh, wait, they're not.
The system can tolerate and survive with a certain amount of patent violation, just like a store can stay open even with a certain amount of shoplifting. It it gets too large, however, the store just shuts down, and then nobody can buy the product.
At the LOW end (like 400- 600 sq foot -- which is ALL most people can afford) it is $5 for crappy, $10 for luxury, which is what I originally said, ... My original numbers still stand, and yes, it's expensive and yes, it fucking sucks.
No, your original numbers don't stand. For example, look at Rose's website (one of the priciest landlords in the city). 450sqft apartments are renting for $2500, with some as much as $3200, for prime Chelsea. That's still only about $7/month. Again, $5/sqft is quite doable for lux apartments, even relatively small ones (600 sqft), and it's easily doable for somewhat larger apartments (my rent is about $3.50/sqft in a premium location, high floor).
Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.
This just isn't true. You can get a very nice 1k sqft apartment in a great bldg in Manhattan for $5k/month (which is still incredibly high). $5/sqft/month is the going rate for apartments in lux bldgs - walkups are less, and I don't know of ANYWHERE renting for $10/sqft/month.
there is NO PROBLEM with traffic in Manhattan!
Well, I guess that depends on your opinion of a traffic problem. Most would disagree with you.
5. plans/contracts are among the most expensive in the developed world
People keep on saying this, and I just don't see it.
I can get 450 anytime minutes, unlimited Long Distance, unlimited nights and weekends, nationwide long distance and roaming, and a free Razr for (including taxes) about $45/month from Verizon on a 2-year contract.
T-Mobile in Germany will charge me E58/month (about $78) for 400 minutes, phone's free (or E1), no free nights or weekends, no free roaming beyond Germany (which has about 1/3 the population of the US) and again a 2-year contract. One difference is that this plan includes free incoming calls, while the Verizon one doesn't (although, under the Verizon plan, your friends don't have to pay a surcharge to call you).
Seems like the Verizon plan is a lot less expensive than the German plan...
Maybe I'm wrong here, correct me if I am, but it looks like US cellular service is actually a pretty darn good deal.
"develop technology so that I do not have to remove my shoes everytime I want to smoke at a stopover?"
Such technology already exists.
Not quite. The problem is, if you had one provider with flat-rate pricing and one with per-bit pricing, you'd have a huge adverse selection problem - all the heavy users (who cost more to serve, and are hence less profitable) would flock to the flat-rate pricing company, while the light users (who cost less to serve, and are therefore more profitable customers) stick with the per-bit pricing company. As a result, the flat-rate company will soon introduce per-bit pricing.
" it will be a cold day in hell when we start paying a flat rate for unfettered wireless access as we do with the internet."
Expect things to change, but the other way around. Over the next couple of years, you're increasingly going to see implementations of "pay by the bit" for home broadband connections, as are in place in many other countries.
Wireless spectrum is limited, and cell towers don't come free, so charging heavier users more is only reasonable.
If your doctor wants to use an ISP that restricts his email, that's his business. You can certainly go to another doctor, but you aren't his ISP's customer (he is), so if he's happy with an ISP that charges people to send him mail, that's his call, not yours. If the ISP wanted to only accept mail from domains that start with Q, then it could do so - your doctor might have grounds to complain, especially if they didn't inform him of it, but you certainly don't - his service, his payment, his call.
"Verizon has been granted a monopoly on copper as long as they serve as a common carrier."
Um, what monopoly did the government grant? You're welcome to go out there and deploy your own network, if you like, so long as you can show that you have the financial wherewithal to back it up, and not leave municipalities with dug-up streets to deal with after you go belly-up.
Asia is large and growing rapidly, but a huge portion of that growth is driven by sales to the US market - remember that the US economy is more than five times the size of the Chinese economy, and nearly twice the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean economies combined. Loss of access to the US market would be a huge lose/lose for both Asian economies AND the US.
While you're right about the RIAA, you're wrong about Atlantic Records. Atlantic is owned by Warner Music Group, but Warner Music is an independent company, with no connection to Time Warner (which doesn't use the AOL name anymore). Warner Music (ticker WMG) was sold off about two years ago, so Time Warner (ticker TWX) has no connection to this lawsuit
"Compare mobile phones in europe to here....a better deal there"
I often hear this claimed, but it just doesn't seem true to me.
I pay $45/month, all-in, for 400 peak minutes/month and unlimited nights and weekends, including local and long distance, anywhere in the US, and a free RAZR (2-year contract).
Looking at (as an example), Vodafone in the UK, I see a 500 minute/month plan, with no free nights and weekends, a free RAZR, and an 18-month contract, for 30 pounds, or about $60.
Sure, there are differences between the offerings (US has free nights/weekends, UK has somewhat more minutes, UK doesn't pay for incoming calls, UK contract's 6 months shorter, US includes roaming to an area of 300MM people, UK doesn't include the rest of Europe, etc.), but they don't appear to be radically different - if anything, the US offer seems rather a better deal ($180 cheaper/year). Certainly, this doesn't appear to support a clear conclusion that cellphone deals are that much better in Europe than the US...
Maybe I'm wrong, though - thoughts?
If poster to which I was responding was alleging that companies are delivering results that are below average for those companies, that's not true either. Corporate profits as a whole are doing extremely well. Are some companies doing less well than they have in the past? Sure - General Motors isn't exactly lighting up the scoreboard. Google, on the other hand, is growing incredibly fast.
The Dow Jones Average is up, but most individual stocks are still trading low and many companies are posting lower-than-average numbers. You can't look at the average itself and use that as a reliable indicator of the health of the economy.
1. All the major indices with the exception of the tech-heavy NASDAQ are at or near all-time highs, including the broadest-based (i.e. Russell 2000). The NASDAQ is at post-bubble highs.
2. Most individual stocks are not "trading low," whatever that means. See my comment above.
3. Many companies are posting "lower-than-average" numbers. In fact, about half of them are (that's what average means), unless you meant median, in which case exactly half of them are.
Your point that the market conditions don't tell the whole story about the US economy is well-taken, but the assertion that the equity markets aren't doing well just isn't supported by the facts.
Irrelevant? No. Limited in its appeal to mobile corporate users? Yes. Without the ability to install custom apps on it, the chance that the iPhone will be a popular choice for mobile corporate users does seem pretty slim. That being said, I hardly think Apple cares, it's not their target market anyway.
"I wonder how long it will be before they move to more popular formats."
Given that iPods have a 70% share of music players sold, I think Steve Jobs is probably pretty comfortable with the "popularity" of AAC.
"Wal*Mart is unlikely to make this work, because (whatever you think of them) their excellences are not in innovative use of technology."
Honestly, this is completely wrong. What made Wal*Mart the juggernaut is EXACTLY the effective use of technology. Wal*Mart invested in computerized inventory and a company-wide satellite-based data network way before anyone else. As a result, they knew EXACTLY what was selling in each store, and could manage inventory much, much better than anyone else. Brought down costs, and ensured that the products were actually on the shelves.
The barrier to getting people to sign up for wireless service (or a lot of other subscription services) has always been equipment cost. Even though a customer is likely to pay $1k or more in service fees over the course of a 24-month contract, consumers focus on the $300 upfront for the phone, not the monthly fee. Cut the phone price, and more people sign up.
BTW, for you folks who don't want to sign up for a contract, you don't have to. Get your own phone (paying retail price), and Cingular or Verizon or Sprint will put you on a month-to-month contract, no problem. There's no way the economics work, though, to have free RAZRs and no contract.
On a storage basis, standard def runs about 1.5Gbytes/hr, and HD about 7Gbytes/hour.
If you're going to quote websites verbatim and at length, you really need to cite them. This is lifted wholesale from www.libcom.org. As to the content of the piece itself, well, I'm going to stick with the old adage about trying to teach a pig to talk: don't do it, it'll frustrate you and annoy the pig.
Listen, the RIAA can decide who to sue and who not to sue. If I come over, take your car, and crash it, you'll probably sue me (quite apart from criminal issues). If your brother does the same thing, you probably wouldn't sue. The fact that RIAA would have the right to sue doesn't in any way oblige them to do so.
Anyone in North Korea who can afford iPods and cognac is a high-ranking member of the regime, and hence far, far from "innocent." You seem to have this idea that these sanctions will affect thousands of middle managers or low-ranking military officers - they won't. They'll just affect a few hundred people at the very top of probably the most vicious totalitarian dictatorship on the planet. Objecting to these sanctions because they'll affect a few people beyond Kim Jong Il is like objecting to sanctions on Nazi Germany because they'd affect Goering and Himmler, not just Hitler. And yes, I've read Godwin's law, but if there's anyplace where comparison to the Nazis is apt, it's North Korea (and perhaps Pol Pot's Cambodia).
Huh? Honestly, I really don't understand your point here. Exactly which of these sanctions will in any way affect "innocent people and families" in North Korea? This isn't Singapore we're talking about here - getting three squares a day and having a TV (that's hardwired to receive only the one state-run TV channel) make you a rich man. Heck, denial of any of these items wouldn't even be a true "hardship" for any family in the US (annoying/disappointing, yes, but not a true hardship).
"What kind of idiot buys a gadget with a battery sealed in it? I know that I certainly wouldn't, but millions upon millions of people continue to throw their dollars at these pieces of crap, and when they die, they buy ANOTHER one, often from the same company."
Well, this kind of idiot would. My Nano has a battery sealed in it. As a result, Apple could pack the electronics in even tighter, resulting in a smaller device, which I prefer. In a few years, when the battery eventually dies, I can either (a) send it to Apple, or (b) just junk it and buy a new one with more memory/better screen/direct neural input/whatever. Frankly, the fact that you can't comprehend that someone wouldn't _want_ to user-maintain his iPod indicates a shocking lack of imagination on your part.
"I could get any number of PS3 untis (our BB had at least 10 in a pyramid on the floor, and who knows how many more in the back),"
Where exactly do you live that had large numbers of unsold PS3? Someplace where Sony managers come every week and kill one member of each household while beating puppies?
If those units are still just sitting around, might I suggest buying all 10 and reselling them on eBay? While prices are down, you can still get $1k or more/unit, which would be a tidy $4k profit for you...