A recent landline bill includes $12.50 for basic service. That's simple enough. Basic service.
Now add on; Federal Charge Service Provider Number.43 Federal Access Charge $5.00 Fedral Universal Serv Fund.56 Federal Excise at 3%.56 City Occupation at %6.75 State 911 at $.20 per line.20 Local 911 at $.50 per line.50 TRS Excise Funds Federal ADA Requirement at $.14 per access line.14 Telephone Assistance Program at.13 per access line.13
That's.43 + 5.00 +.56 +.58 +.75 +.20 +.50 +.14 +.13 or a total of $8.29 per month added to a $12.50 bill. This is my direct taxes for the line.
These are the directly billable to the consumer. These are easly shown. Not easy to see or show is how much QWest has to fork over that's rolled over into my $12.50 for the line. I assume they hit QWest with their share of taxes also.
Later when I get more time, I may have to get into the investor relations website and see if I can find any of that other taxes QWest pays in the fincial statements.
What part of bypass regulation did you not understand?
Think about it. The parks are regulated. To use them, it costs $. Downtown parking is regulated. It costs $. Vehicle licensing is regulated. It costs $. Booze and Smokes are regulated. It adds much $. Gasoline is regulated. It is taxed so much per gallon, they don't bother to post it on the pump anymore.
I just jumped to the obvious conclusion. That is obvious, not a conspiracy theory. Why else would they be trying to bypass a regulation if it isn't adverserly hitting the bottom line?
Just for grins, I leave my GPS on Anchor Watch. If my house suddnly relocates according to the GPS, I'll know to head for the cellar!
I think if the signal was tampered with or jammed, it would be noticed right away. There is lots of monitoring of the signal to produce correction differental signals. These station reports would be the source of the first indication something was wrong.
Even with the $10 penality, I'm saving over $200 a year with DirectTv.
The $10 penality is what is keeping me from cable internet. I don't have cable or satelite TV. Are they going to learn they are pushing DSL on those who don't want pay TV at all?
For many of us, the signal to noise ratio and the quality of programming is so bad, TV is a moot point. It's been replaced by rentals, games, music, and Internet.
Implementing the broadcast flag will only accelerate this trend. Most people on over the air TV will probably go without when the FCC mandate kicks in. Why spend hundreds of dollars for a monitor and hundreds of dollars more for a tuner. This is not going to replace the sub $200.00 27 inch TV you can currently buy. (which comes with a tuner built in!) DTV is expensive to get in and very little over the air content would convince me to invest in the receiving equipment. The broadcast flag lowers the value while rising the cost. They are going to get me to buy it how?
If the government would pull many of the burdens they placed on the telco's, then the telco's could provide resonable priced basic service.
If I pulled off all the govenment add-on fees off my bill, and the hidden ones that show up as part of the monthly basic fee (passed on costs), my bill could be about 1/3 the current price.
The telco's are trying to shed these fees as other services can now easly compete with the burdened landline providers. The high cost of a landline is one of the reasons many people ditch their landlines and go wireless or VOIP on cable. If they could provide reasonable priced landlines, then people could continue to keep them for fax, dial-up backup, etc. There just isn't enough incentive at high prices for many people to keep dial-up.
Putting it over IP doesn't necessarily make it any cheaper
It is a lot cheaper when the regulations charge huge fees for telco traffic. If the telco's shunt the call volume to internet, they go past not through the government traffic meter.
An example to demonstrate this, is if you had a generator in the back yard. To regulate it, there is a charge for the electricity generated by it going to your own house.
Instead of using only electricity from the plant that all goes through the electric meter, you add a mechanical shaft from the plant to the house and generate some of the power in the house. There is no meter on the shaft, therefore the additional cost of doing it the hard, less reliable way, is offset by the savings by not running it through the meter and paying for the delivery you do yourself on your own lines.
The telco's have the lines. The government taxes the traffic on them. Changing the format and shunting the meter to a less regulated path is where the savings are.
The taxes is why my land line is so expensive. That is why basic cell phone service is competitive with a land line, even though landline infrastructure is much less expensive.
Actualy I have a life and no cable or disk. I'm referring to some of the welfare folks who can't make ends meet, but has steak for dinner while watching cable TV and talking on the cell phone.
I rarely have steak for dinner, don't have cable TV, or a cell phone.
I also don't have lots of kids. I live within my budget and save for retirement.
I like the way you put it. Not much of the original Mickey if he is sharing a cartoon with Simba, Peter Pan, Cinderella, etc. It seems other than a few spots, he's become the corporate toastmaster/PR spokesperson. I simply don't see the clasic Mickey on TV much at all. Even when I had the Disney Channel, he was very absent other than several hundred ways to produce the station logo.
Huey, Duey and Luey are up to all kinds of advertures. Not so with Mickey. I saw lots more about Goofy and Pluto than I ever saw of the famous mouse. Donald and Daisy are regulars and you know the personality quite well. Micky is not much more than an icon and PR spoksperson without any adventures or personality.
I've since dropped the Disney and now cable completely. The classic content was hard to find and enjoy.
Ever meet anyone on welfare woried about losing their entitlements?
Ever meet anyone on welfare with cable TV and a cell phone?
Ever meet anyone on welfare having trouble with the house payment?
They struggle to get by. They tend to be hard pressed for cash. However if you want a good steak, they eat better than I do. Generaly cable TV is a requirement, not a disposable income item. The same is true for a cell phone.
The State is having a hard time keeping down the abuse of food stamps. Many on welfare eat better than I do most of the time and are more than willing to trade down for some cash which is in very short supply. I've seen them in the supermarket. They have the steaks, chicken, etc, while I'm re-stocking ramen. They can't afford to not vote for whoever is providing their basic needs, health care, food, and shelter. For many getting a job is a downgrade as they lose health care, food stamps, etc. They are unwilling risking failure trying to break out of the dependance cycle.
Many on welfare are cash short so things like reliable transportation is not there. Regular service gets skipped month to month as long as it still moves. I've been asked to fix a few friends cars. Man what sludgemobiles they were.
I do have enough income to drive a decent vehicle and maintain it.
I know the feeling. I have tons of MIDI files. I tried to find out how to transfer one I had to a phone, not buy another one. It took forever to find the information. Lots of links took you to one of 2 pages selling the tones for about a buck each.
I bought a MIDI CD commercially with 2100 MIDI files on it at 0.0047 dollars each. I wasn't interested in buying any more at 0.99 each.
Actualy I find the republicans generaly favor supply side economics, while democrats favor the welfare state and leaving no one behind.
Under the republican way, losers suffer and acheivers buy bigger houses and cars.
Under the democrat way everyone gets government housing and benifits. Nobody bothers to rise above the poverty level, because the taxes quickly take it all away to pay the entitlements. The rich don't need the money is a popular arguement.
With that in mind, The democarats are the ones to lobby to protect the studios and prevent individuals from competing with the revenue source. Don't want to hurt the industry.
The republicans are the more competition, the more common wealth, great! Create and market to your heats content. Be prepared to face stiff competition. Not everyone is going to be a success.
The industry knows who is more for their cause and can grease the correct wheels.
Drill down into the details. The RIAA only contributed $1000 this year.
However it's interesting to note the amounts by ASCAP, National Assn of Broadcasters, and National Cable Television Assn contributed in 1999-2000. Those three alone contributed $28,000.
That kind of makes the RIAA look small. The RIAA wasn't even listed in 1999-2000.
The studios such as Time-Warner, Viacom, Universal Studios, Metro-Goldyn-Mayer, and Sony are well represented however.
Not to mention that the plate is only usable for 1 visit to the restaurant after which you need to purchase a new plate. (and pay disposal fees for the old one...)
What did I miss? I thought you could keep using your same I-Pod at the I-Tunes and the same Samsung at Napster again and again. Each visit is going to cost for the dinner, but I think you can re-use the plate. Sure, if you don't have the latest version, you will have to upgrade now and then at your expense. The Napster plate won't work in the I-Tunes diner and vise-versa. It could be your refrence is when your plate is full, you have to throw out stuff to make room for the new flavors and not save the old stuff for a midnight snack years later.
It was bad enough last week seeing Master & Commander, and those damn brown spots were all over this one scene with mostly light-coloured backgrounds in it, so all I could do was sit there and think "Ok, enough with the dots!" and then lose track of what was going on with the movie.
It looks like I'm going to have to download KaZa so I too can see these famous spots everyone is talking about.;-)
I used to work in a theatre part time. I learned the same thing. The evil trick is to get the theatres to bid on the films. No attraction, no patrons, no consessions. Most time the bid is for over 80% of the ticket sales. The theatre with the most seats and has the highest return of ticket sales win the bid. That is the natural selection process where only large mega cinima's get first release blockbusters. Sometimes the bid is over 100% of ticket sales for a blockbuster. Yes you heard me right, they loose money on each ticket sold in many cases. The MPAA has found the formula to bring the money home and leave the botom of the feeding chain scratching for other ways to keep the lights on. This is the reason for the 10 minutes of advertisements. It brings in revenue from the advertiser and allows more time for you to visit the consession stand without missing the feature.
They certainly didn't make any money selling tickets!
The worm may have gotten on the machine by a service tech laptop. Somehow I don't think the ATM would have a direct link to the Internet to phone home with the info.
The answer to this is to make a simple, purpose built program, which is INCAPABLE of running externally introduced code
You mean the ATM can't run advertisements remotely loaded anymore? But we need the advertising revenue! We need consumers to buy online from our ATM advertisements.
I like the well done article. However you are missing one important bit. The customer has to buy the plate and keep it. It also will not work at a competitors restraunt. (Ipod at Napster, Samsung at Itunes, etc.)
It's simple, the food is incompatible with my current plates and I have no reason by buy a $1300 plate just to eat at the diner.
I'll eat elsewhere while the other places serve food compatible with my plates. (any brand MP3 player, DVD/MP3 player, CD/MP3 player, Linux, Win, & Apple computers, etc.)
It's kind of funny. Mickey has just became a corporate logo. Disney has been so paranoid of releasing the original content, the current generation knows nothing about the mouse except as a boring logo or company icon. Really now, have you recently seen any Mickey Mouse cartoons? (other than Steamboat Willie, Phantasia, & Silly Symphonies) Have your kids seen the Mickey Mouse Club? Do they know Annette or Cubby? Of corse the Mouse is nothing more than a logo or icon anymore. He died when they locked him away to protect him from theives.
I used to get Cable TV. I like to tinker with electronics. Do the math. They passed a law that theft of service can be billed for all channels for an extended period of time regardless of number of channels and actual length of time. The risk became high and the value dropped. I unsubscribed when they raised the price and dropped a couple channels from the package and basic became way overpriced. The premium channels were incompatible with the VCR tuner. I couldn't program it to record several programs on several channels overnight. The premium channels are very inconveinent to use. DRM copy bit on HDTV and sat TV and Digital Cable are making a repeat of these same problems.
I still get calls wanting me to subscribe. I let them know I want my old service back including the original price and programming. I've been cable free for 14 years now.
I'm interested in high speed internet for home, but they charge and extra $120 per year if I are not subscribing to the TV content also. WTF? Just sell me the service and let me pick the content. Hopefully soon I'll be able to get DSL or another service. Only widespread competition can fix this problem.
Right now, the music industry is doing the same thing. Huge costs per song if pirated, high cost of content, content restricted, and special extra cost equipment needed to use the premium content. Don't believe it? Try playing some of the new CD's in your DVD player or in your car. Try to use Itunes stuff on your Arcos or Rio. The problem with content protection is vendor hardware lock-in.
Sell me good quality MP3's. These I can use in my car, portable, Winamp on the computer, etc.
So far for music content, I'm stuck with my aging collection of CD's and CDEX. I don't buy CD's without the gurantee of compatibility the Compact Disk logo.
They may push DRM. They may get away with it. It'll just leave me holding my existing collection and not buying new content.
Even the MPAA thinks the RIAA is too expensive. I bought several DVD's of the Andy Griffith show and The Beverly Hillbillys. Guess what, they removed the original theme music due the the RIAA restrictions.
Somehow the story of the dog guarding the haystack from the cows come to mind.
The questions were retorical. No need to answer them. The intended use of the news stories and photos on Yahoo, Slashdot, avertisers are understood. Copying them and redistributing them as your own would be a problem.
Not all downloading of copyrighted content is wrong. Archiving it and re-playing it later as your own collection could be outside of the intent of the copyright holder. This is the issue the RIAA has with downloaders. Listen to it when it's played on the radio, but don't dare make a personal copy off the internet without paying for the right.
I just visited Slashdot. My browser downloaded and cached the slashdot text and copyrighted logo. Not only that I got a banner advertisement with Coloco. How soon is Yahoo, Slashdot, and advertisers going to take to nail me for downloading copyrighted material? Are the photos on the news slideshows copyrighted? Are the company logos copyrighted?
They need to make a proper distinction of copyrighted material online for distribution and not legal distribution of copyrighted materials.
I think they have everyone fooled. Note the speakers and subwoofer at the bottom of the pic.;) Why whould a flute playing robot need speakers?
Wrong,
Go back and finish the article. It's part of the lung breath control. Since when does a subwoofer reproduce flute tones? If there were midrange and tweeters, then I might suspect foul play. In paticular, look at figure 7 labled vibrating mechanism. It's for expression and vibrato.
Is there something I don't know about Apple's wireless that lets you stream to your car while commuting to work? I didn't think the Apple wireless reached that far. I commute 30 miles. If that works, I would consider getting an Apple! Otherwise I'm stuck with the in-dash MP3 player which is totaly incompatible with I-tunes.
Slashdot Mirror
OK,
.43 .56 .56 .75 .20 .50 .14 .13 per access line .13
.43 + 5.00 + .56 + .58 + .75 + .20 + .50 + .14 + .13 or a total of $8.29 per month added to a $12.50 bill. This is my direct taxes for the line.
A recent landline bill includes $12.50 for basic service. That's simple enough. Basic service.
Now add on;
Federal Charge Service Provider Number
Federal Access Charge $5.00
Fedral Universal Serv Fund
Federal Excise at 3%
City Occupation at %6
State 911 at $.20 per line
Local 911 at $.50 per line
TRS Excise Funds Federal ADA Requirement at $.14 per access line
Telephone Assistance Program at
That's
These are the directly billable to the consumer. These are easly shown. Not easy to see or show is how much QWest has to fork over that's rolled over into my $12.50 for the line. I assume they hit QWest with their share of taxes also.
Later when I get more time, I may have to get into the investor relations website and see if I can find any of that other taxes QWest pays in the fincial statements.
What part of bypass regulation did you not understand?
Think about it. The parks are regulated. To use them, it costs $. Downtown parking is regulated. It costs $. Vehicle licensing is regulated. It costs $. Booze and Smokes are regulated. It adds much $. Gasoline is regulated. It is taxed so much per gallon, they don't bother to post it on the pump anymore.
I just jumped to the obvious conclusion. That is obvious, not a conspiracy theory.
Why else would they be trying to bypass a regulation if it isn't adverserly hitting the bottom line?
Just for grins, I leave my GPS on Anchor Watch. If my house suddnly relocates according to the GPS, I'll know to head for the cellar!
I think if the signal was tampered with or jammed, it would be noticed right away. There is lots of monitoring of the signal to produce correction differental signals. These station reports would be the source of the first indication something was wrong.
Even with the $10 penality, I'm saving over $200 a year with DirectTv.
The $10 penality is what is keeping me from cable internet. I don't have cable or satelite TV. Are they going to learn they are pushing DSL on those who don't want pay TV at all?
DRM forced commercial watching
For many of us, the signal to noise ratio and the quality of programming is so bad, TV is a moot point. It's been replaced by rentals, games, music, and Internet.
Implementing the broadcast flag will only accelerate this trend. Most people on over the air TV will probably go without when the FCC mandate kicks in. Why spend hundreds of dollars for a monitor and hundreds of dollars more for a tuner. This is not going to replace the sub $200.00 27 inch TV you can currently buy. (which comes with a tuner built in!) DTV is expensive to get in and very little over the air content would convince me to invest in the receiving equipment. The broadcast flag lowers the value while rising the cost. They are going to get me to buy it how?
If the government would pull many of the burdens they placed on the telco's, then the telco's could provide resonable priced basic service.
If I pulled off all the govenment add-on fees off my bill, and the hidden ones that show up as part of the monthly basic fee (passed on costs), my bill could be about 1/3 the current price.
The telco's are trying to shed these fees as other services can now easly compete with the burdened landline providers. The high cost of a landline is one of the reasons many people ditch their landlines and go wireless or VOIP on cable. If they could provide reasonable priced landlines, then people could continue to keep them for fax, dial-up backup, etc. There just isn't enough incentive at high prices for many people to keep dial-up.
Putting it over IP doesn't necessarily make it any cheaper
It is a lot cheaper when the regulations charge huge fees for telco traffic. If the telco's shunt the call volume to internet, they go past not through the government traffic meter.
An example to demonstrate this, is if you had a generator in the back yard. To regulate it, there is a charge for the electricity generated by it going to your own house.
Instead of using only electricity from the plant that all goes through the electric meter, you add a mechanical shaft from the plant to the house and generate some of the power in the house. There is no meter on the shaft, therefore the additional cost of doing it the hard, less reliable way, is offset by the savings by not running it through the meter and paying for the delivery you do yourself on your own lines.
The telco's have the lines. The government taxes the traffic on them. Changing the format and shunting the meter to a less regulated path is where the savings are.
The taxes is why my land line is so expensive. That is why basic cell phone service is competitive with a land line, even though landline infrastructure is much less expensive.
Actualy I have a life and no cable or disk. I'm referring to some of the welfare folks who can't make ends meet, but has steak for dinner while watching cable TV and talking on the cell phone.
I rarely have steak for dinner, don't have cable TV, or a cell phone.
I also don't have lots of kids. I live within my budget and save for retirement.
I like the way you put it. Not much of the original Mickey if he is sharing a cartoon with Simba, Peter Pan, Cinderella, etc. It seems other than a few spots, he's become the corporate toastmaster/PR spokesperson. I simply don't see the clasic Mickey on TV much at all. Even when I had the Disney Channel, he was very absent other than several hundred ways to produce the station logo.
Huey, Duey and Luey are up to all kinds of advertures. Not so with Mickey. I saw lots more about Goofy and Pluto than I ever saw of the famous mouse. Donald and Daisy are regulars and you know the personality quite well. Micky is not much more than an icon and PR spoksperson without any adventures or personality.
I've since dropped the Disney and now cable completely. The classic content was hard to find and enjoy.
Ever meet anyone on welfare woried about losing their entitlements?
Ever meet anyone on welfare with cable TV and a cell phone?
Ever meet anyone on welfare having trouble with the house payment?
They struggle to get by. They tend to be hard pressed for cash. However if you want a good steak, they eat better than I do. Generaly cable TV is a requirement, not a disposable income item. The same is true for a cell phone.
The State is having a hard time keeping down the abuse of food stamps. Many on welfare eat better than I do most of the time and are more than willing to trade down for some cash which is in very short supply. I've seen them in the supermarket. They have the steaks, chicken, etc, while I'm re-stocking ramen. They can't afford to not vote for whoever is providing their basic needs, health care, food, and shelter. For many getting a job is a downgrade as they lose health care, food stamps, etc. They are unwilling risking failure trying to break out of the dependance cycle.
Many on welfare are cash short so things like reliable transportation is not there. Regular service gets skipped month to month as long as it still moves. I've been asked to fix a few friends cars. Man what sludgemobiles they were.
I do have enough income to drive a decent vehicle and maintain it.
I know the feeling. I have tons of MIDI files. I tried to find out how to transfer one I had to a phone, not buy another one. It took forever to find the information. Lots of links took you to one of 2 pages selling the tones for about a buck each.
I bought a MIDI CD commercially with 2100 MIDI files on it at 0.0047 dollars each. I wasn't interested in buying any more at 0.99 each.
Actualy I find the republicans generaly favor supply side economics, while democrats favor the welfare state and leaving no one behind.
Under the republican way, losers suffer and acheivers buy bigger houses and cars.
Under the democrat way everyone gets government housing and benifits. Nobody bothers to rise above the poverty level, because the taxes quickly take it all away to pay the entitlements. The rich don't need the money is a popular arguement.
With that in mind, The democarats are the ones to lobby to protect the studios and prevent individuals from competing with the revenue source. Don't want to hurt the industry.
The republicans are the more competition, the more common wealth, great! Create and market to your heats content. Be prepared to face stiff competition. Not everyone is going to be a success.
The industry knows who is more for their cause and can grease the correct wheels.
Drill down into the details. The RIAA only contributed $1000 this year.
However it's interesting to note the amounts by ASCAP, National Assn of Broadcasters, and National Cable Television Assn contributed in 1999-2000. Those three alone contributed $28,000.
That kind of makes the RIAA look small. The RIAA wasn't even listed in 1999-2000.
The studios such as Time-Warner, Viacom, Universal Studios, Metro-Goldyn-Mayer, and Sony are well represented however.
Not to mention that the plate is only usable for 1 visit to the restaurant after which you need to purchase a new plate. (and pay disposal fees for the old one...)
What did I miss? I thought you could keep using your same I-Pod at the I-Tunes and the same Samsung at Napster again and again. Each visit is going to cost for the dinner, but I think you can re-use the plate. Sure, if you don't have the latest version, you will have to upgrade now and then at your expense. The Napster plate won't work in the I-Tunes diner and vise-versa. It could be your refrence is when your plate is full, you have to throw out stuff to make room for the new flavors and not save the old stuff for a midnight snack years later.
It was bad enough last week seeing Master & Commander, and those damn brown spots were all over this one scene with mostly light-coloured backgrounds in it, so all I could do was sit there and think "Ok, enough with the dots!" and then lose track of what was going on with the movie.
;-)
It looks like I'm going to have to download KaZa so I too can see these famous spots everyone is talking about.
I used to work in a theatre part time. I learned the same thing. The evil trick is to get the theatres to bid on the films. No attraction, no patrons, no consessions. Most time the bid is for over 80% of the ticket sales. The theatre with the most seats and has the highest return of ticket sales win the bid. That is the natural selection process where only large mega cinima's get first release blockbusters. Sometimes the bid is over 100% of ticket sales for a blockbuster. Yes you heard me right, they loose money on each ticket sold in many cases. The MPAA has found the formula to bring the money home and leave the botom of the feeding chain scratching for other ways to keep the lights on. This is the reason for the 10 minutes of advertisements. It brings in revenue from the advertiser and allows more time for you to visit the consession stand without missing the feature.
They certainly didn't make any money selling tickets!
The worm may have gotten on the machine by a service tech laptop. Somehow I don't think the ATM would have a direct link to the Internet to phone home with the info.
The answer to this is to make a simple, purpose built program, which is INCAPABLE of running externally introduced code
You mean the ATM can't run advertisements remotely loaded anymore? But we need the advertising revenue! We need consumers to buy online from our ATM advertisements.
I like the well done article. However you are missing one important bit. The customer has to buy the plate and keep it. It also will not work at a competitors restraunt. (Ipod at Napster, Samsung at Itunes, etc.)
It's simple, the food is incompatible with my current plates and I have no reason by buy a $1300 plate just to eat at the diner.
I'll eat elsewhere while the other places serve food compatible with my plates. (any brand MP3 player, DVD/MP3 player, CD/MP3 player, Linux, Win, & Apple computers, etc.)
It's kind of funny. Mickey has just became a corporate logo. Disney has been so paranoid of releasing the original content, the current generation knows nothing about the mouse except as a boring logo or company icon. Really now, have you recently seen any Mickey Mouse cartoons? (other than Steamboat Willie, Phantasia, & Silly Symphonies) Have your kids seen the Mickey Mouse Club? Do they know Annette or Cubby? Of corse the Mouse is nothing more than a logo or icon anymore.
He died when they locked him away to protect him from theives.
I used to get Cable TV. I like to tinker with electronics. Do the math. They passed a law that theft of service can be billed for all channels for an extended period of time regardless of number of channels and actual length of time. The risk became high and the value dropped. I unsubscribed when they raised the price and dropped a couple channels from the package and basic became way overpriced. The premium channels were incompatible with the VCR tuner. I couldn't program it to record several programs on several channels overnight. The premium channels are very inconveinent to use. DRM copy bit on HDTV and sat TV and Digital Cable are making a repeat of these same problems.
I still get calls wanting me to subscribe. I let them know I want my old service back including the original price and programming. I've been cable free for 14 years now.
I'm interested in high speed internet for home, but they charge and extra $120 per year if I are not subscribing to the TV content also. WTF? Just sell me the service and let me pick the content. Hopefully soon I'll be able to get DSL or another service. Only widespread competition can fix this problem.
Right now, the music industry is doing the same thing. Huge costs per song if pirated, high cost of content, content restricted, and special extra cost equipment needed to use the premium content. Don't believe it? Try playing some of the new CD's in your DVD player or in your car. Try to use Itunes stuff on your Arcos or Rio. The problem with content protection is vendor hardware lock-in.
Sell me good quality MP3's. These I can use in my car, portable, Winamp on the computer, etc.
So far for music content, I'm stuck with my aging collection of CD's and CDEX. I don't buy CD's without the gurantee of compatibility the Compact Disk logo.
They may push DRM. They may get away with it. It'll just leave me holding my existing collection and not buying new content.
Even the MPAA thinks the RIAA is too expensive. I bought several DVD's of the Andy Griffith show and The Beverly Hillbillys. Guess what, they removed the original theme music due the the RIAA restrictions.
Somehow the story of the dog guarding the haystack from the cows come to mind.
The questions were retorical. No need to answer them. The intended use of the news stories and photos on Yahoo, Slashdot, avertisers are understood. Copying them and redistributing them as your own would be a problem.
Not all downloading of copyrighted content is wrong. Archiving it and re-playing it later as your own collection could be outside of the intent of the copyright holder. This is the issue the RIAA has with downloaders. Listen to it when it's played on the radio, but don't dare make a personal copy off the internet without paying for the right.
I just visited Slashdot. My browser downloaded and cached the slashdot text and copyrighted logo. Not only that I got a banner advertisement with Coloco. How soon is Yahoo, Slashdot, and advertisers going to take to nail me for downloading copyrighted material?
Are the photos on the news slideshows copyrighted? Are the company logos copyrighted?
They need to make a proper distinction of copyrighted material online for distribution and not legal distribution of copyrighted materials.
I think they have everyone fooled. Note the speakers and subwoofer at the bottom of the pic. ;) Why whould a flute playing robot need speakers?
Wrong,
Go back and finish the article. It's part of the lung breath control. Since when does a subwoofer reproduce flute tones? If there were midrange and tweeters, then I might suspect foul play. In paticular, look at figure 7 labled vibrating mechanism. It's for expression and vibrato.
Is there something I don't know about Apple's wireless that lets you stream to your car while commuting to work? I didn't think the Apple wireless reached that far. I commute 30 miles. If that works, I would consider getting an Apple!
Otherwise I'm stuck with the in-dash MP3 player which is totaly incompatible with I-tunes.