Did she even ask for a continuation? If she just ignored the whole thing, of course she's going to get screwed. Perhaps she will find the cash for a lawyer who can help her appeal the ruling and get a temporary stay of the court ordered payment. At least then she might get to present a defense.
What you may not realize is that 1/3 of a typical US salary is quite a nice living for someone in India
Hell, 1/3 of a typical silicon valley engineers salary is a decent living in about 80% of the US (by land area, not by population). You'd be suprised what $50-$60k will get you outside of the insane market-peak areas of the US.
Okay, I didn't rtfa, but it probably wouldn't have mattered (and it's not the/. way, after all). Will this mean there will be no unsigned drivers, or that unsigned drivers will have to work through the kernel like WinNT 3.5? Aside from all the DRM lock-down, bend-the-consumer-over-a-rail implications, this would also prevent home hacking and diy projects, and could have all sorts of implications for hobbiests.
So, is this a way to prevent crashes (a la 3.5, no Ring 0 access) or is it a way to tighten the noose for the content industry?
Well, I dropped pay-Eudora in favor of T-bird, in hopes of losing vendor lock-in on the format and an annual software fee. To be honest, I liked eudora better, but I can get around in thunderbird. Problem is, t-bird is such a space hog - the last time I looked I had over a gig and a half of storage in my directory, and that was just from the last 14-18 months. If eudora turns out to be a viable oss project and the future is truly bright, I'll probably switch back. Imho, this looks like a graceful EOL for Eudora as a qualcomm supported product. Hopefully theres a satble base of users that will maintain it at a high level. (I'm not a programmer - i can guarantee you wouldn't want me writing code!)
But all of your oil negative countries count as zero, and never affect the total. If the US were to tap some of its vast oil resources (be they of the coast of florida ot in the arctic), that would affect the equation, but the "oil production" would go from zero for the US to zero, despite a (assumed) net gain of several million barrels in world production (choose the appropriate time scale to make tht number appropriate in size). It presumes that any nation which is not currently exporting will never find more oil, and will never export. Perhaps a valid assumption, but if you're looking for peak oil, shouldn't you look at all the production?
Does it last longer than about 1:45 on a charge going full blast? I've got a similarly configured M70 and (aside from the two motherboard replacements, one CD/DCD replacement, lack of DVI on the unit, flaky rubber feet, no memory card slots and no FW) it will blow through a fresh battery in just under 2 hours under moderate/full load, and in under a year the battery is lucky to go for 1:40 with the wireless on. That and all the heat dissapation seems to go right into your lap.
I've got a bit of upgrade fever (17" vs 15.4" 1920 screen), but don't want to be another beta tester for Dell just yet.
Wouldn't that be traffiking in circumvention? Either way, he would have to code it and use his version. He can't just switch to, say, DVDdecrypter (which is what I use, btw) after making a "sample" code. Besides, just coding up a working decrypter probably isn't enough. I suspect a front and back end app with a blank decryption module might be considered unlawful. It certainly would if he were a terrorist;-)
I'd like to say that I decrypt all my discs with downloaded freeware as a show of civil disobedience, but (a) I don't have the HD space for all of them just yet and (b) I mostly do it to make working discs so my 4 year old doesn't bust the originals. The (c) part is so I can loan discs to friends/family without actually loaning my original. I don't even like to handle them myself, as it seems I can scratch a disc just by looking at it wrong. Some of my CDs are just awful.
We don't know how long PEX will really last. CPVC is no longer very wisepread. PB piping here appears to be caught up in litigation, too. There just isn't a 100 year track record on the stuff. I know of hydronic systems which have failed using it (though they are anecdotal, at best).
The fact is that copper works. It has its drawbacks (degradation under certain hard water conditions, water hammer effects), but it's durable and proven. If I'm building a half-million dollar house I plan to live in for the next 40 years, do I save the $800 on PEX over copper? Probably not. If I'm a builder with a 1 year statutory liability and 100 houses to build, I save that $80,000 and go buy me a new boat.
Okay, so I skimmed that article. All these graphs and charts seem to be based on a non-zero origin - the export quantity of oil. Shouldn't you start with the total capacity of oil (not just exports), then subtract the projected use of oil to get a net supply-demand curve and extrapolate dollars (or future world collapse) from there?
Also, this whole discussion misses an enormous fact of economics - as one item gets expensive, consumers will find substitutes of comparable value to fill their needs. There is debate over the CPI in the US, as they use a (relatively) fixed shopping list. If the price of beef (for instance) doubles, people will eat more chicken until a more equitbale price point returns for beef. "Alternative" energy isn't quite as well developed, but we are seeing direct reactions to the oil prices of the last few years (I like to tell my Republican friends that I paid less than a dollar a gallon for gas at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency, and I'm disappointed that their President has cost me more in gas than he has saved me in tax cuts). The movement of energy supply and demand moves on a larger time scale - several years to decades - simply due to the infrastructure required. Peak Oil, whenever it occurs, will not be an "event" but rather a long term, low angle curve which is extended indefinitely by technology and evolutinary changes in the energy market.
Is it taxed as a percentage of the cost of the goods? If so, why not have the dive shop sell you the air as a less expensive commodity, and charge you a compression fee and a filling fee. Both would be based on the size of the tank.
As a side note, I live in a county with a merchant's inventory tax. Every year on December 31st, you must declare the value of all of your company's merchandise which is located within the county. That value is taxed (at a small fraction of a percent, decreasing in one or two steps, I think). The largest car dealer in the county has its major showrooms here, but other showrooms and facilities in neighboring couties with much lower (and capped) taxes on merchants inventory. Every December 30th, the company moves all of its cars from my county to the next one over, and declares just the fixed merchandise (parts and such), then moves them back on Jan 2. They have won several court battles over the process.
Sort of. Ask any plumber which he prefers to install, he'll say PEX - he can charge a larger margin on the materials and his crew finishes a job faster. Ask any builder about PEX and it's the next coming - they put it in every house they build. Well, every house except their own, which they plumb with copper. Interesting.
Oh, sure, your might consider it fair use to burn them in any format you want, but those discs are encrypted.
So, either you need to demonstrate that you can code an entire decryption and storage program for transferring those movies, or we just might need to have you talk to Bruno about where you acquired your illegal decryption software. You see, it's legal for you to do this on your own, but nobody is allowed to help you, by law.
Isn't modern government swell! [/sarcasm]
BTW - I think the digital movie-only version should be on par with a typical 1 or 2 night rental fee; maybe less if it can't be burned to a playable DVD. I'd still buy the physical version (and, hey, I did!) because it comes with the packaging (which I promptly store and never look at again) and the extras (which I might look at on one in five discs I get). More importantly, it means I've got a copy I can _resell_ if I decide I don't want it anymore. $14.99 paid less $8 recovered on ebay when I'm tired of it = $7 net value. Take away the values of the extras and I'd say iTunes is about $6-8 overpriced.
IMO, Target is just looking for leverage. It's a game retailers play all the time. Not really news, unless you take the point that the online version is, indeed, an inferior version and the studios are about to admit that fact.
Maybe I've just been out of the scene for too long, but the last time I checked, nobody had blown up anybody else's satellites, and we were still cooperating on that monetary black hole known as the ISS.
As for GWB, I think it was a somewhat provacative statement. It sounds like you're not from the US, but if you hadn't noticed we're not exactly in the position to go picking fights with more people at the moment. I'm also not conviced that the President is fully aware of that fact, except as it related to poll numbers.
If they were going for the phone book, wouldn't they have at least looked at the HVAC installers and pawnbrokers and named the company AAAAConsulting.com?
You're missing the point (though you will certainly accuse me of the same). The context makes no particular difference in my mind - the intent has not changed. GWB would like to militarize space, rather than dealing with the issues on the ground. It's not the natural saber rattling that bothers me so much as the direct intent to move this conflict between "us" and "them" to orbit.
It is because of the way he said it, for one thing.
FTFS: develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.
He was doing pretty well up to that point, assuming that you ignore the fact that he's spent all of our money performing escalatio on the Iraqi insurgency.
What I read was "I want to jumpstart the manned space program, even though we don't have any money to do so, because it's such a feelgood topic to bring up right before the election. Also, I'd like to make sure we spend a good bit of money on space weaponry, because we just might have to saddle up to dispense some justice should someone we don't like start muscling in on this whole 'outer space' thing we've got going."
Its disingenuous to propose a large increase in manned space (high $$$, high popularity, low science) when the budget deficit is so large. It also runs counter to most of the non-military goals of space exploration to talk about engaging in warfare in orbit. Those of us who have memories longer than a year or two remember his goal to get to Mars, but have yet to see the $2T line item in the budget for such an undertaking. Hey George, Show Me The Money.
I say we (meaning the US, S. Korea, and Japan, (others?)) should have lived up to to terms of our agreement with NK back in 1994. That would have been a good start.
I also think that if we hadn't been spending so much time defending GHWB's honor, we would have had more presidential time devoted to finding a solution to this. As it is, Bush appears to have mostly blown off N. Korea with his "I won't negotiate" stance. As President there are a lot of things which will demand your time - you don't need to go looking for them, or you'll end up with too much to focus on.
You forgot the part where the board of directors of the SuperSoaker company (Republican Congress, 1994-), along with the investors (S. Korea, Japan) decided they didn't like the SuperSoaker deal and decided not to send the SuperSoakers they had promised.
That's not to say that there would have still been problems, but when you make a deal and then don't hold up your part of the bargain, why are you suprised when the other side doesn't either?
And if Bush was so all-God-fired about just WMD or Nukes (and I see you've taken to the President's pheonic spelling convention), then we would have been a bit more proactive on the N. Korean front.
I was refering to the Visa Check Card version. You get one with just about any checking account around me unless you specifically deny it. I had to specifically request _not_ to get one on my checking account in favor of a standard ATM card.
Not really. This proof of the existance of the solution won't substatially affect the real-world application of fluid dynamics (including aerodynamics) for quite a ling time (maybe within my lifetime, probably not). Numerical and real simulation will still guide the principal advances at the full assembly level. Nonetheless, this is a pretty cool event. I remember studying N-S in undergrad. Still makes the hair on the backof my neck stand up is apprehension. (tensor math and pdes both make me ill).
Actually, the old B&M store Mothers would replace damaged/worn out/broken tapes, essentially free of charge. But that was the exception. Audible, one of the first large online vendors for digital audio (spoken, of course) will let you retrieve your audio from the library you've bought in the past.
If you "license" content from iTunes, you're not buying a physical product. You bought a licence, and you should damned well expect that that license - unless othewise stated - is perpetual. There is no media to replace. I could see a minimal bandwidth charge for re-download ($0.01-0.02) if you want to be a pita about it, but an iTunes song and a CD are entirely different items.
I'm with you on the limited "good" tracks thing, though it's not exclusively a modern phenominon. There have always been better and worse tracks on most albums. Not every song is a "hit," and not every song an artist creates is going to stike a particular listenesrs fancy. The great thing about iTunes, et. al., is that you can purchase the tracks you like. Me? Oh, no. I screen most of my music (what little new music I actually listen to) by checking it out on usenet or from allofmp3. Good albums get purchased in CD form and ripped to FLAC. Lousy ones languish on my hard drive until I decide I need more room.
Oddly enough, I rarely download movies - I usually buy them in DVD form. Every year or so I cull the ones I don't like by selling them on ebay or amazon. The difference is that a new DVD, on sale, is usually under $15, often obtainable for $10-12 or less on the used market in good condition, and holds a $7-10 resale value (say $5-7 net after transaction fees). Any given disc might "cost" me $2-5 to "rent" indefinitely. Contrast that with new CDs, and you're forking over more cash (initial cost is higher and resale is generally abyssmal) for shorter playtime. I have yet to figure out why the soundtrack to a movie can cost more than the movie itself. Here's an example: Amazon has X-men 3 for $13.99 on DVD, the soundtrack is also $13.99. Resale prices on the soundtrack are $2 lower than the movie. The original x-men movie is $9.99, but the soundtrack is $18.98.
Yeah, but there's no dynamic allocation of resources with iTunes Cards. If you have a credit/debit card, you can buy 2 songs from itunes and the rest of your money is still allocatable for other things. Once you buy an iTunes card its good only for iTunes.
Besides, I don't buy the whole "no credit card" thing, unless they really mean that they can't overspend and run up huge debt by buying more than they can afford. Debit cards (aka Visa Check Cards) are given out like candy at all the banks I know.
Surely if there were no real impetus to create one, then either Google wouldn't be doing it, or public libraries wouldn't exist? However, we (the people of many countries) have explicitly decided through our legislative processes to recognise the concept of copyright, with limited exemptions. Public libraries may qualify as one such exemption. I'm not sure why a private, profit-making company should expect the same treatment, nor that what Google is doing is at all equivalent in its practical effects (particularly if it goes wrong) to what public libraries do with books.
I guess I wasn't clear. There is no public push to digitize every (most) work of literature in a searchable database freely accessible to the public by a public entity with the funds to make this happen. Google want's to do it, and the result is likely to be free to use. There is no useful/convenient way to extract the full copyrighted text from the database, as they have proposed the search system to work (afaik).
The whole "everyone is doing it" sounds bad. If you change that to "common commercial practice" or "accpeted commercial operating procedure" it sound much better (though we still know what it means). Laws, much as you may not agree, are based on what the general society believes is the current "standard." As such, the voting rights have changed from "white male land owners" to "legal residents". Trademarks can be lost if taken into the common lexicon. Accounting practices change (though there are bounds at any given time). Google is playing within a grey area, and they want to show that "everyone else" believes that this grey area is closer to white than black.
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Did she even ask for a continuation? If she just ignored the whole thing, of course she's going to get screwed. Perhaps she will find the cash for a lawyer who can help her appeal the ruling and get a temporary stay of the court ordered payment. At least then she might get to present a defense.
What you may not realize is that 1/3 of a typical US salary is quite a nice living for someone in India
Hell, 1/3 of a typical silicon valley engineers salary is a decent living in about 80% of the US (by land area, not by population). You'd be suprised what $50-$60k will get you outside of the insane market-peak areas of the US.
Okay, I didn't rtfa, but it probably wouldn't have mattered (and it's not the /. way, after all). Will this mean there will be no unsigned drivers, or that unsigned drivers will have to work through the kernel like WinNT 3.5? Aside from all the DRM lock-down, bend-the-consumer-over-a-rail implications, this would also prevent home hacking and diy projects, and could have all sorts of implications for hobbiests.
So, is this a way to prevent crashes (a la 3.5, no Ring 0 access) or is it a way to tighten the noose for the content industry?
Well, I dropped pay-Eudora in favor of T-bird, in hopes of losing vendor lock-in on the format and an annual software fee. To be honest, I liked eudora better, but I can get around in thunderbird. Problem is, t-bird is such a space hog - the last time I looked I had over a gig and a half of storage in my directory, and that was just from the last 14-18 months. If eudora turns out to be a viable oss project and the future is truly bright, I'll probably switch back. Imho, this looks like a graceful EOL for Eudora as a qualcomm supported product. Hopefully theres a satble base of users that will maintain it at a high level. (I'm not a programmer - i can guarantee you wouldn't want me writing code!)
But all of your oil negative countries count as zero, and never affect the total. If the US were to tap some of its vast oil resources (be they of the coast of florida ot in the arctic), that would affect the equation, but the "oil production" would go from zero for the US to zero, despite a (assumed) net gain of several million barrels in world production (choose the appropriate time scale to make tht number appropriate in size). It presumes that any nation which is not currently exporting will never find more oil, and will never export. Perhaps a valid assumption, but if you're looking for peak oil, shouldn't you look at all the production?
Does it last longer than about 1:45 on a charge going full blast? I've got a similarly configured M70 and (aside from the two motherboard replacements, one CD/DCD replacement, lack of DVI on the unit, flaky rubber feet, no memory card slots and no FW) it will blow through a fresh battery in just under 2 hours under moderate/full load, and in under a year the battery is lucky to go for 1:40 with the wireless on. That and all the heat dissapation seems to go right into your lap.
I've got a bit of upgrade fever (17" vs 15.4" 1920 screen), but don't want to be another beta tester for Dell just yet.
Wouldn't that be traffiking in circumvention? Either way, he would have to code it and use his version. He can't just switch to, say, DVDdecrypter (which is what I use, btw) after making a "sample" code. Besides, just coding up a working decrypter probably isn't enough. I suspect a front and back end app with a blank decryption module might be considered unlawful. It certainly would if he were a terrorist ;-)
I'd like to say that I decrypt all my discs with downloaded freeware as a show of civil disobedience, but (a) I don't have the HD space for all of them just yet and (b) I mostly do it to make working discs so my 4 year old doesn't bust the originals. The (c) part is so I can loan discs to friends/family without actually loaning my original. I don't even like to handle them myself, as it seems I can scratch a disc just by looking at it wrong. Some of my CDs are just awful.
We don't know how long PEX will really last. CPVC is no longer very wisepread. PB piping here appears to be caught up in litigation, too. There just isn't a 100 year track record on the stuff. I know of hydronic systems which have failed using it (though they are anecdotal, at best).
The fact is that copper works. It has its drawbacks (degradation under certain hard water conditions, water hammer effects), but it's durable and proven. If I'm building a half-million dollar house I plan to live in for the next 40 years, do I save the $800 on PEX over copper? Probably not. If I'm a builder with a 1 year statutory liability and 100 houses to build, I save that $80,000 and go buy me a new boat.
Okay, so I skimmed that article. All these graphs and charts seem to be based on a non-zero origin - the export quantity of oil. Shouldn't you start with the total capacity of oil (not just exports), then subtract the projected use of oil to get a net supply-demand curve and extrapolate dollars (or future world collapse) from there?
Also, this whole discussion misses an enormous fact of economics - as one item gets expensive, consumers will find substitutes of comparable value to fill their needs. There is debate over the CPI in the US, as they use a (relatively) fixed shopping list. If the price of beef (for instance) doubles, people will eat more chicken until a more equitbale price point returns for beef. "Alternative" energy isn't quite as well developed, but we are seeing direct reactions to the oil prices of the last few years (I like to tell my Republican friends that I paid less than a dollar a gallon for gas at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency, and I'm disappointed that their President has cost me more in gas than he has saved me in tax cuts). The movement of energy supply and demand moves on a larger time scale - several years to decades - simply due to the infrastructure required. Peak Oil, whenever it occurs, will not be an "event" but rather a long term, low angle curve which is extended indefinitely by technology and evolutinary changes in the energy market.
Is it taxed as a percentage of the cost of the goods? If so, why not have the dive shop sell you the air as a less expensive commodity, and charge you a compression fee and a filling fee. Both would be based on the size of the tank.
As a side note, I live in a county with a merchant's inventory tax. Every year on December 31st, you must declare the value of all of your company's merchandise which is located within the county. That value is taxed (at a small fraction of a percent, decreasing in one or two steps, I think). The largest car dealer in the county has its major showrooms here, but other showrooms and facilities in neighboring couties with much lower (and capped) taxes on merchants inventory. Every December 30th, the company moves all of its cars from my county to the next one over, and declares just the fixed merchandise (parts and such), then moves them back on Jan 2. They have won several court battles over the process.
Sort of. Ask any plumber which he prefers to install, he'll say PEX - he can charge a larger margin on the materials and his crew finishes a job faster. Ask any builder about PEX and it's the next coming - they put it in every house they build. Well, every house except their own, which they plumb with copper. Interesting.
Oh, sure, your might consider it fair use to burn them in any format you want, but those discs are encrypted.
So, either you need to demonstrate that you can code an entire decryption and storage program for transferring those movies, or we just might need to have you talk to Bruno about where you acquired your illegal decryption software. You see, it's legal for you to do this on your own, but nobody is allowed to help you, by law.
Isn't modern government swell! [/sarcasm]
BTW - I think the digital movie-only version should be on par with a typical 1 or 2 night rental fee; maybe less if it can't be burned to a playable DVD. I'd still buy the physical version (and, hey, I did!) because it comes with the packaging (which I promptly store and never look at again) and the extras (which I might look at on one in five discs I get). More importantly, it means I've got a copy I can _resell_ if I decide I don't want it anymore. $14.99 paid less $8 recovered on ebay when I'm tired of it = $7 net value. Take away the values of the extras and I'd say iTunes is about $6-8 overpriced.
IMO, Target is just looking for leverage. It's a game retailers play all the time. Not really news, unless you take the point that the online version is, indeed, an inferior version and the studios are about to admit that fact.
Maybe I've just been out of the scene for too long, but the last time I checked, nobody had blown up anybody else's satellites, and we were still cooperating on that monetary black hole known as the ISS.
As for GWB, I think it was a somewhat provacative statement. It sounds like you're not from the US, but if you hadn't noticed we're not exactly in the position to go picking fights with more people at the moment. I'm also not conviced that the President is fully aware of that fact, except as it related to poll numbers.
If they were going for the phone book, wouldn't they have at least looked at the HVAC installers and pawnbrokers and named the company AAAAConsulting.com?
You're missing the point (though you will certainly accuse me of the same). The context makes no particular difference in my mind - the intent has not changed. GWB would like to militarize space, rather than dealing with the issues on the ground. It's not the natural saber rattling that bothers me so much as the direct intent to move this conflict between "us" and "them" to orbit.
It is because of the way he said it, for one thing.
FTFS: develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.
He was doing pretty well up to that point, assuming that you ignore the fact that he's spent all of our money performing escalatio on the Iraqi insurgency.
What I read was "I want to jumpstart the manned space program, even though we don't have any money to do so, because it's such a feelgood topic to bring up right before the election. Also, I'd like to make sure we spend a good bit of money on space weaponry, because we just might have to saddle up to dispense some justice should someone we don't like start muscling in on this whole 'outer space' thing we've got going."
Its disingenuous to propose a large increase in manned space (high $$$, high popularity, low science) when the budget deficit is so large. It also runs counter to most of the non-military goals of space exploration to talk about engaging in warfare in orbit. Those of us who have memories longer than a year or two remember his goal to get to Mars, but have yet to see the $2T line item in the budget for such an undertaking. Hey George, Show Me The Money.
I say we (meaning the US, S. Korea, and Japan, (others?)) should have lived up to to terms of our agreement with NK back in 1994. That would have been a good start.
I also think that if we hadn't been spending so much time defending GHWB's honor, we would have had more presidential time devoted to finding a solution to this. As it is, Bush appears to have mostly blown off N. Korea with his "I won't negotiate" stance. As President there are a lot of things which will demand your time - you don't need to go looking for them, or you'll end up with too much to focus on.
You forgot the part where the board of directors of the SuperSoaker company (Republican Congress, 1994-), along with the investors (S. Korea, Japan) decided they didn't like the SuperSoaker deal and decided not to send the SuperSoakers they had promised.
That's not to say that there would have still been problems, but when you make a deal and then don't hold up your part of the bargain, why are you suprised when the other side doesn't either?
Now we don't have to. We can nuke them pre-emptively and call it a fair fight.
And if Bush was so all-God-fired about just WMD or Nukes (and I see you've taken to the President's pheonic spelling convention), then we would have been a bit more proactive on the N. Korean front.
I was refering to the Visa Check Card version. You get one with just about any checking account around me unless you specifically deny it. I had to specifically request _not_ to get one on my checking account in favor of a standard ATM card.
Not really. This proof of the existance of the solution won't substatially affect the real-world application of fluid dynamics (including aerodynamics) for quite a ling time (maybe within my lifetime, probably not). Numerical and real simulation will still guide the principal advances at the full assembly level. Nonetheless, this is a pretty cool event. I remember studying N-S in undergrad. Still makes the hair on the backof my neck stand up is apprehension. (tensor math and pdes both make me ill).
Actually, the old B&M store Mothers would replace damaged/worn out/broken tapes, essentially free of charge. But that was the exception. Audible, one of the first large online vendors for digital audio (spoken, of course) will let you retrieve your audio from the library you've bought in the past.
If you "license" content from iTunes, you're not buying a physical product. You bought a licence, and you should damned well expect that that license - unless othewise stated - is perpetual. There is no media to replace. I could see a minimal bandwidth charge for re-download ($0.01-0.02) if you want to be a pita about it, but an iTunes song and a CD are entirely different items.
I'm with you on the limited "good" tracks thing, though it's not exclusively a modern phenominon. There have always been better and worse tracks on most albums. Not every song is a "hit," and not every song an artist creates is going to stike a particular listenesrs fancy. The great thing about iTunes, et. al., is that you can purchase the tracks you like. Me? Oh, no. I screen most of my music (what little new music I actually listen to) by checking it out on usenet or from allofmp3. Good albums get purchased in CD form and ripped to FLAC. Lousy ones languish on my hard drive until I decide I need more room.
Oddly enough, I rarely download movies - I usually buy them in DVD form. Every year or so I cull the ones I don't like by selling them on ebay or amazon. The difference is that a new DVD, on sale, is usually under $15, often obtainable for $10-12 or less on the used market in good condition, and holds a $7-10 resale value (say $5-7 net after transaction fees). Any given disc might "cost" me $2-5 to "rent" indefinitely. Contrast that with new CDs, and you're forking over more cash (initial cost is higher and resale is generally abyssmal) for shorter playtime. I have yet to figure out why the soundtrack to a movie can cost more than the movie itself. Here's an example: Amazon has X-men 3 for $13.99 on DVD, the soundtrack is also $13.99. Resale prices on the soundtrack are $2 lower than the movie. The original x-men movie is $9.99, but the soundtrack is $18.98.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a teenager)
Yeah, but there's no dynamic allocation of resources with iTunes Cards. If you have a credit/debit card, you can buy 2 songs from itunes and the rest of your money is still allocatable for other things. Once you buy an iTunes card its good only for iTunes.
Besides, I don't buy the whole "no credit card" thing, unless they really mean that they can't overspend and run up huge debt by buying more than they can afford. Debit cards (aka Visa Check Cards) are given out like candy at all the banks I know.
Surely if there were no real impetus to create one, then either Google wouldn't be doing it, or public libraries wouldn't exist? However, we (the people of many countries) have explicitly decided through our legislative processes to recognise the concept of copyright, with limited exemptions. Public libraries may qualify as one such exemption. I'm not sure why a private, profit-making company should expect the same treatment, nor that what Google is doing is at all equivalent in its practical effects (particularly if it goes wrong) to what public libraries do with books.
I guess I wasn't clear. There is no public push to digitize every (most) work of literature in a searchable database freely accessible to the public by a public entity with the funds to make this happen. Google want's to do it, and the result is likely to be free to use. There is no useful/convenient way to extract the full copyrighted text from the database, as they have proposed the search system to work (afaik).
The whole "everyone is doing it" sounds bad. If you change that to "common commercial practice" or "accpeted commercial operating procedure" it sound much better (though we still know what it means). Laws, much as you may not agree, are based on what the general society believes is the current "standard." As such, the voting rights have changed from "white male land owners" to "legal residents". Trademarks can be lost if taken into the common lexicon. Accounting practices change (though there are bounds at any given time). Google is playing within a grey area, and they want to show that "everyone else" believes that this grey area is closer to white than black.