Did you know you could lose as much as 66 pounds by sweating on your PC? 1 ounce - The weight of the tendon they're going to have to cut out of your carpal tunnel when you try using a keyboard and mouse whilst bouncing up and down on a treadmill.
300 lbs (you know it's true, regadless of the 175 you put on your drivers license) - the dead weight your company will shed when they fire your ass for the low productivity you can manage whilst bouncing around on a treadmill, unable to type quickly or use the mouse with any accuracy.
Treadmills are great things. I personally love them as they're about the one form of exercise where my getting distracted doesn't stop them from working (on stationary bikes, my ADD tends to leave me sitting on a now very stationary bike and wondering why I'm not getting fitter) as I fall off the back if I stop. Still, put one in front of your TV and make an hour or two's TV watching a night, where you don't need to co-ordinate fine motor responses, your source of exercise.
I spend a lot of time commuting. If someone came up with a way for me to get in an energetic game of racketball during it, it'd still be a bloody stupid idea as I need to keep my fine motor control and attention on what I'm doing. The same goes for computer use. Exercise is important - but stick to times when it doesn't force interference with other important tasks.
Does no one else find it not only weird... If we had accountability, the terrorists would win. You don't want the terrorists to win, do you?
I believe Benjamin Franklin said it best when he wrote,
Those who would sacrifice their freedom for temporary security are on to a damn good thing and should never be questioned. Things are improving somewhat since the clusterf*** that is Iraq got so bad as to be undeniable. Compared to around 2002 when just about anything could be passed in the name of security and even the opposition party was scared to speak out lest they be accused of helping the terrorists win, things have got a lot better.
Even so, a lot of people are living with the guilty knowledge that they jumped on the "Do you want the terrorists to win?" bandwagon back then. Admitting you screwed up is seriously painful. Whilst they won't actively support what's happening anymore, they sure as hell don't want to have to look too closely at what the people they did support have done.
The media is a business. They sell advertising and, to get people to watch it, they show whatever will get the viewers. Often that's sensationalist drivel (Anna Nicole Smith). In this case, making people feel guilty about the people they voted for, even if they do regret it now, is a sure way to get them to turn off - a sure way to lose the advertisers.
The reality is there are countless corrupt things this administration has done: Karl Rove undeniably leaked Valerie Plame's identity and his aide has been found guilty of obstructing the investigation. The CIA was pretty much told to falsify intelligence to justify the war. Al Queda didn't exist in Iraq and there weren't chemical weapons there - now we've "liberated them", Al Queda is in Iraq and they even have chemical weapons now. Torture was openly condoned, albeit with hazy wording, right up until someone had to take the blame and then it was a few rogue troops. Torture is still routinely outsourced via "extraordinary rendition". Illegal wiretaps were performed on the bulk of the U.S. population. The list goes on...
So, you have audiences that don't want to be reminded of how badly they screwed up by supporting these people. If broadcasters are going to report something that makes their viewers uncomfortable, it had damn well better be something sensational. In the scheme of things, that emails exist to prove something relatively trivial (serious in its own right, trivial compared to the above), that the Whitehouse will weasel out of yet again anyway (Rove is blatantly guilty of the Plame leak and yet is still there), is it any wonder the news networks rank it pretty low?
Don't get me wrong: For what America is supposed to represent, it's essential these things come to light. The sad truth is, however, the media's a business selling what people want to buy and people who already feel guilty don't want to buy yet another, not very sexy story, in a long list of reasons why they made a terrible choice.
And yet, Japan enjoys the lowest rates of sex crimes of all 1st world countries. And many African states enjoy the lowest rates of hate crimes against homosexuals on the planet.
Of course, that's only if you listen to the goverment figures vs. the estimated ones and if you politely overlook it being virtually impossible to prosecute such a crime and hence get it on to the books.
Having a culture that turns a blind eye to many forms of sexual assault and thus has very low rates according to their own criteria doesn't mean much when those criteria are radically more lenient than others you're comparing them to.
This community knows, thanks to Michael Geist, that the claim is mostly ficiton. From Geist's figures: 179 camcorder versions out of 1,400 releases in 3 years. Or, approximately 60 a year.
The flaw in that logic is assuming all movies are equal in terms of revenue.
Hundreds of movies will see limited theatrical screenings and certainly never make it to pirate DVD because they're worthless to the pirates. Whilst a movie like The Station Agent is an undeniably great movie, short of winning awards, a movie about an anti social dwarf trainspotter isn't going to get the interest of many people buying pirate DVDs.
60 movies a year still equates out to the most popular new release every single week plus the secondary releases on more popular weeks.
Pulling numbers out of the usual spot: Assuming a curve that averages out to 10 movies that make $100m at the box office, 20 that make $50m, 30 that may $30m, 100 that make $10m and the remaining 1200 that make $2m in limited indie showings, you have a total box office revenue of $5.3b of that, the 60 highest earners make 2.9b. Thus under 5% of all movies account for almost 55% of all revenue.
So, Geist makes it seem as though piracy only affects 5% of the industry and thus claims of being affected by it are laughable. What he conveniently misses is that it affects the highest budget 5% that likely accounts for a huge percentage of actual revenue.
It's about on a par with Microsoft saying they're not monopolistic because they only provide one of the hundreds of OS variants out there. Technically it's true but very conveniently ignores the actual proportion of the market their one OS occupies.
Hypothetically assume you're in desperate need of money fast - be that a gambling addiction where nasty guys you owe money to are about to break your legs, you're a junky or you accidentally just installed WGA, lost your copy of XP and you need a working install if you're going to join your WOW guildmates tonight.
In short, you're the stereotypical opportunity criminal.
What are you going to steal?
TV? Too big, a bitch to carry out, hard to off load immediately. Craig's List or eBay will work... in about a week. Completely useless for cash right now.
DVD player? With many going for $40 new, you really think you'll get much for it?
Console? If you need to sell it quickly, places like CL or eBay are useless. A pawn shop isn't going to be interested in a last gen one though you might get something for a next gen unit but nowhere near its actual value.
Silverware? Do people even still have silverware?
Car? Great if you actually know someone that wants to buy a stolen car. Otherwise not something you can instantly turn in to cash.
Stereo? Bulky as hell, lucky if you get $10 a piece for it at a pawn store.
CDs? Throw a shelf full in to a bag, walk down the street looking innocent, go to any of dozens of music stores, game stores (EB certainly takes used CDs), etc. Off load for $50, no questions asked, within about fifteen minutes of deciding you need cash and breaking in to a house.
Can you name anything else you can carry out so easily, offload so easily, without needing any connections whatsoever, without having to wait several days for an auction to complete?
Now, granted, desperate people aren't going to be any less desperate so they'll simply move to a different type of crime - this not being about risk vs. long term reward. Still, RIAA conspiracies aside, it's hard to beat CDs as an instant gratification theft medium.
"I'm submitting 'Girls Are The Ones' as a response to my sister's piece, 'Boys Have Cooties,' from yesterday. I think there were a number of flaws and mistaken assumptions in my sister's reasoning, and I've tried to address them in this rebuttal, which has undergone review from some colleagues in the 'Girls Have Cooties' community."
While easier to get reviewed by people who already broadly support your viewpoint, review tends to gain its power when those idealogically opposed to you review it and still can't find flaws in it.
Just about every student house on my street got broken in to while I was at university. The first thing that got taken, long before TVs and VCRs (this was ten years back) was CD collections.
For quick and easy theft, relatively little beats CDs. Just about any music store would take them and an average even as low as a buck a piece still made them almost as good as cash and something you could rely on finding at least a hundred bucks worth in most houses with a couple of students in them.
I'm guessing this has little to nothing to do with the RIAA (save maybe getting to twist someone else's knife) and everything to do with making theft a little more difficult.
Honestly, what really happens here? Your records get kept for a month. If it's not a theft, that's the end of it. Compared to how much it sucks losing a treasured music collection, I'd more than happily put up with that in exchange for it simply being a little harder for the bastards that break in. And that's before factoring in how many people really sell their expensive CDs for next to nothing vs. how many people get their collections ripped off.
Go back 100 years, the U.S. was legendary for the blind eye it turned towards copyright theft - particularly of books.
Apparently, when the U.S. was a consumer, not a producer, of intellectual property, copyright had little meaning and they had minimal desire to stop its violation.
100 years on and a massive shift towards being a producer, other countries are terribly bad for acting exactly the same way the U.S. did when it was in that situation?
We'd better hope the predictions of China eclipsing the U.S. within 15-20 years are wrong. God forbid we have to deal with their being the only superpower, treating us like we treated others when we were the only superpower. There are more conclusive links between the U.S. government covertly supporting terrorist groups than there ever was proof of Saddam supporting them - let's hope another future superpower doesn't decide we need liberating.
The point of all of this is, yeah, your rights are being violated - but you kind of lose all sympathy when you were in the same position and did exactly the same thing.
"Our laws say that an adult subjecting a teenager or child to sexual words, images or suggestions on the internet is preying on their mental and emotional state in a sexual way. Even if you never try to meet the minor in person, and even if you never touch them or expose your naked self to them, it is a crime to attempt to engage sexually with a minor." I challenge you to find a single child abuse law that is specific to "on the internet."
It is a crime to sexually approach a child in any medium, whether you intend to have sex with them or not. Those laws were specifically written to include non physical forms to stop people from getting away with arguing they didn't actually commit the physical component so the child's unharmed.
The internet has nothing to do with it one way or another. It's simply an additional communications medium and laws that don't require a physical compontent still effect you whether it's spoken, phoned, emailed, IM'd or sent via pidgeon - the internet itself has nothing to do with it and no unique crime.
Rape on the other hand does require a physical component as the law is written. There are other harrassment laws you're likely violating but you don't meet the criteria of rape here.
The article's premise is flawed. They're looking at there being certain laws that don't require a physical componentand falsely associating them with laws that do. Sure, we could run with the analogy endlessly but, given its founding premise is wrong, that'll only lead to equally flawed conclusions.
If it is a criminal offense to sexually abuse a child on the internet, how can we say it is not possible to rape an adult online? "Abuse of a child on the internet" isn't a crime in of itself.
Contributing to the delinquency of a minor is a crime in the real world and the virtual world.
Receipt of child pornography is a crime in the real world and the virtual world.
Sex with a minor, to actually go through in court, requires the physical act. Just typing, "Yeah baby, I'm fucking you." may go through as contributing to the delinquency but doesn't fit the definition of sex with a minor.
Transporting a minor across state lines only applies if you physically do it, not if you chat with a minor interstate.
Grooming a minor is a crime in England regardless of whether it happens on line or off.
So, in all of those cases, there's an existing law that's being violated. Laws based on physical acts still require the physical act to happen. Laws based on non-physical, mental acts specifically state that.
Thus, it's not a crime to sexually abuse a child on the internet. There are a variety of laws that cover the sexual abuse of children, some of which cover non-physical acts and thus don't care about whether it's via the net, letter, phonecall, in person or via pidgeon post.
Rape, in its strict definition, requires a physical act. You can't say, "He raped me with his eyes!" and have someone arrested for rape. If someone keeps phoning you and describes raping you in graphic detail, you still can't charge them with rape though you likely can have them arrested for a bunch of telecom violations, making terroristic threats, etc.
So, no, there's no specific crime about using the internet for child abuse and there's no way rape, as it's currently defined, is committed when it's purely virtual. There may well be a bunch of other harassment laws that are more broadly defined to include non physical, emotional assaults - but rape isn't one of them.
Charming as it is to debate different laws, they're only of merit if both sides can afford to go to court.
Here's the quick version of the U.S. (civil) legal system:
Party A doesn't like something party B does.
1. Party A threatens (usually via a Cease And Desist)
2. If party B can't afford a lawsuit, they probably cave unless they're pretty sure of 3. in which case they call party A's bluff and go on to 3. anyway.
3. If party A can't afford the lawsuit, after having their bluff called, they probably cave. If they think B is bluffing, they repeat 2-3 a few more times.
4. In the rare event that both sides refuse to back down from their bluffs, it goes to court where...
5. Repeat steps 2-3 as out of court settlements. Far more money than simply sending a cease and desist letter gets involved here so most people try to get out during 2-3.
6. Maybe, just maybe, it comes down to the legal merits. Even then, it may well not end up decided on so much as reach an out of court settlement based on the likelihood of losing vs. cost of doing so rather than actual legal right/wrong.
The moral of the story is that laws are all well and good but 99% of these things come down to who has the money to fight this for longer than the other guy - they win. Sad, but also true.
We all know violent crime is on the increase, so what's causing it?
Oh, wait, violent crime isn't on the increase. That's just a false assumption based off people believing what a sensationalist media feeds them. Violent crime has actually experienced a MASSIVE downturn since Doom, Mortal Combat and Grand Theft Auto all came out.
From a peak at the end of the last Republican government (Clinton took power in early 93), violent crime dropped from aout 4,000,000 cases per year down to well under 2,000,000 cases per year when he left power (in early '01). Since then, the drop off has ceased but the fluctuation has still stayed relatively level.
It's remarkably convenient to talk about how violent computer games are training the hundreds of violent criminals on our streets and certainly gets your columns attention... yet it ignores the simple fact the numbers of violent criminals on our streets have actually had a massive downturn since videogames became available as a healthier focus for people's frustrations.
Now, I won't claim videogames deserve all of the credit. A period of relative prosperity and the greater social equality of a more centerist government, along with plenty of other factors, may have had much more to do with it...
Still, it is utterly falacious to look at what causes the terrible violent crime wave we're under when, in fact, we're experiencing vastly less of it than any time in the 35 years the records go back.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed there is no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share... 'No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. In other news, Ford's CEO mocked Ferarri: It's a $200,000 item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually look at the 1.3 billion cars that get sold, I'd prefer 60% or 70% or 80% of them to be Fords, than I would to have 2% or 3% which is what Ferarri might get.
In both cases, a company is completely happy building a niche product, that does its job exceptionally well, that they can be truly proud of, and that they can turn a profit on every single one.
Apple themselves said they were only going after 1% of the market. 1% of 1.3 billion is still 13 million. If they can turn $50 profit on each and every one of those, they walk away with an extra $650m on their bottom line next year. Not a bad kick in the teeth for the indignity of having to be exactly the market you went for.
Microsoft has a totally different model. They want global dominance in cell phones because it'll help prop up their model of making the entire world have to use your stuff if they want compatibility and then you can extort money on things like office suites. They'll happily give away their mobile O.S. if it means propping up that model.
Neither one is particularly wrong per se. They're just two totally different models that, evidently, are successful for both companies. Microsoft turns a profit, Apple turns a profit, yay for both of them.
But knocking one model for failing to succeed based on the metrics of your model... while totally succeeding on their own model's metrics and turning a profit... that's a little cheap.
What is interesting is that Apple's own figures were they were aiming for 1% market saturation but Balmer's already referencing 2-3% before it comes out. I'm curious as to whether that's a case of his not getting numbers straight, of Microsoft expecting more success for Apple than Apple's actually banking on, or whether they're just trying to raise the bar now so they can say Apple failed to meet numbers Apple never went for later.
A user activatable but then non-reversible lock that requires your iPod to check in with Apple every time it syncs to ensure its serial number isn't on a list of stolen ones. Then provide a means to access any/all serial numbers you have registered to you and lock them down.
If you don't want your iPod tied to to needing a net connection to sync, don't enable the feature. If you want to know that anyone who mugs you for it gets a worthless lump of metal and plastic - and you're fine with the trade off - turn it on.
It doesn't even need to be that universally used to take a bite out of crime. If people quickly learn the $50 iPods guys in the pub offer them (which, let's face it, they know are stolen but think they're getting a great deal and so don't care) may well not work, they're not going to hand over the $50. You don't have to disable every last stolen one to make buying a stolen one enough of a gamble that people stop doing it and thus they stop being desirable to steal.
Yes, it would become a potential pain for retailers who accept returns but a simple app could let retailers check the iPod hadn't been locked down before accepting returns. Given Apple "authorizes" retailers, this would give them a finite list of people to distribute it to and increase the value of being an authorized retailer.
Forgive my asking but where exactly does it say MSNBC are the only ones allowed to record this?
Rather than assuming they are, how about we go with the assumption they're not? At that point:
If you want to record your own damn footage, go ahead.
MSNBC are being helpful and sharing the footage they paid for a camera crew to go to, they paid for the equipment to record, they paid to make available. All they're saying is, "If you want to use the footage that we went to all of this expense for, please credit us and don't broadcast it against the slot we intend to use to make that money back and hopefully, in an entirely American way, make a profit from too."
Is it really wrong to ask for credit for something you put money in to the creation of?
Is it really wrong to say, "Hey, you're welcome to share - just not at the one time we're hoping to leverage our investment."?
Is it really wrong to say, "Please take the original stream rather than post compression or rebroadcast in a way that might interfere with those rebroadcasters' policies."?
If you get over the assumption that they have some kind of monopoly - and it appears to just be an assumption - the company giving away their work with minimal practical restrictions, whilst letting you still record your own version if you don't like them, is hardly the most heinous crime known to man.
Of course it's always more fun to assume the worst. But then you know what they say about "assume"
Isn't the point of DRM to constrict customers? The only way not to do so is to not have DRM.
Since its well known that DRM does not prevent piracy then the only purpose DRM can possibly have is restricting customers. The point of the purest concept of DRM is, "To constrict users to their legal uses."
Admittedly, every implementation so far has been a poor one, overstepping from constricting to legal rights in to outright diminishing those rights. But just because every implementation so far has been bad, that doesn't mean the core concept is exclusively bad.
Take moulds. Prior to the 1920s, most people would have said, "It is well known mould does nothing for us. The only purpose mould can possibly have is making us sick." Then along comes Fleming who shows the right mould can be used to kill all kinds of bacteria. The same has been said of viruses - which we're learning to harness now, and even bacteria.
Even more ironically, the MPAA and RIAA were some of the first to condemn P2P because "Its well known that P2P does not promote legal fair use. The only purpose P2P can possibly have is piracy." We laugh at them for their narrowmindedness on Slashdot, we lament how they can attempt to destroy a technology simply because many or most of its users do bad things with it, we scoff at how they don't really understand the full picture, then we turn around and do exactly the same thing.
We can support something like 8000 DSL subscribers on a $25K BRAS. The things they can do with BRAS today!
What college do I have to go to in order to learn how to stuff 8,000 consumers in to a single BRA? I'm not sure how you do it but it sounds like an awesome experience anyway.
A compact camera or cheap DSLR will run a sharpening algorithm over the picture before storing it.
For the mass market, this makes the picture look really sharp and therefore somehow "better".
For anyone serious about taking images, this is a cheap gimmick they can do in PhotoShop, with a lot more fine control, later whereas trying to undo it once it's been applied takes you even further away from the source image. Print the image out at a high resolution and you'll also start seeing strange color effects as edges get exaggerated and any noise being increased too.
You can artificially increase saturation too. It's another quick process in a graphics package that can be added later but is a pain to undo and retain anything close to the original image.
It also goes for brightness. Any idiot can brighten an image but you're doing it at the ultimate expense of the number of shades you're left with. Here's a simple example:
Six pixels, one channel has the values: 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255
Double the brightness: 252, 253, 253, 254, 254, 255
Reverse that process: 249, 251, 251, 253, 253, 255
See how you now have color bands?
Finally, the same goes for TVs. More or less any TV you buy from somewhere like BestBuy desperately needs calibrating. Sure, the picture looks stunningly vivid and bright. Calibrate it and most people will think it looks washed out and slightly soft. Watch it for a while though and you'll start seeing fine detail you could never have seen on the original settings. What people think looks great and what actually gives them the best picture are often totally different.
TV manufacturers know that most people want to be blown away by oversaturation, overexposure and overcontrast, thinking that'll give them a better picture. They also know that anyone who really knows what they're doing will run a calibration DVD or have a pro come out anyway. So they set their default settings to god awful levels to look good in store, knowing it'll be fixed for those for whom it matters to.
In the same way, camera manufacturers know that the cheaper the price point, the more exagerated the default settings the user expects. Thus a cell phone will be massively exagerated, a compact will be pretty exagerated, a cheap DSLR will be somewhat exagerated, a mid range DSLR will err slightly on the side of exageration but be close and a high end DSLR will do every last thing it can to match the "truth".
Those who know nothing about that, the target market for cell phone cameras and cheap compacts, will keep thinking they're getting a great deal - and that's fine for them. It's just a shame when someone like CNet, portraying themselves as experts, tries to portray that as a source of truth to people who've come to them hoping to learn more.
The industry chiefs finally realized that you get what you pay for. Amazing.
That statement is true only in a perfect equilibrium.
Most equilibriums have a degree of lag. Supply increases in one area, demand takes a while to catch up so costs are low. Demand increases in an area, supply takes a while to catch up, so costs are high.
Businesses are profitable by moving faster than that equilibrium shift and exploiting it. Businesses lose profitability the closer they are to an established equilibrium and they outright lose money when they fall behind it.
India is a great example:
There were a lot of very highly skilled engineers with minimal to no demand for their talents and thus would work for next to nothing. Smart businesses identified this and exploited them. Those businesses could now get high skill levels for very low cost.
Everyone else saw these profits, Newsweek wrote articles on it, everyone moved in to the sector. As demand increased towards supply, profitability decreased. As demand exceeded supply with many dumb U.S. businesses working on articles and quotes from three or four years earlier, costs increased rapidly, the supply of skilled engineered diminished, many poor engineers saturated the market looking for the now great wages, it became a lousy area for U.S. businesses to exploit.
The same has gone for big screen TVs. A few years ago, Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. were making a killing on every high end unit they sold. About a year ago, Walmart finally woke up, realized there was money to be made, slashed the margins so it could insert itself and killed their business model. For a long time, demand for TVs was greater than the number of stores supplying, profits were high. Once Walmart and Target realized there was money there, supply increased, profits decreased.
It happened in the U.S. with the dotcom bubble and it's happened more recently with housing. For a while, a given market is massively exploitable. Over time, everyone thinks it's exploitable, everyone moves in to doing it, the margins decrease, it loses its exploitability.
So, your statement is only partially true...
Over time, yes, you get what you pay for (you may even get less if you're on the wrong side of the wave).
BUT, if you're smart enough to identify the trends and get there ahead of others, you really can get far more than you pay for.
For those that bitch about high executive salaries, that's what they're often really getting paid for: They're people who've established they're good at staying ahead of the wave, surfing its leading edge and keeping their companies hugely profitable. If your ability can keep your company on the leading edge of the equilibrium wave, making $500m more a year than a company that rode the top of the wave, isn't it worth paying you $50m for that edge?
Man, I can't wait for next year when they finally drop below $1000 at places other than every single major retailer.
That said, the original poster also misquoted the actual article. There was no mention of Blu Ray players as a whole not dropping below $1,000 until next year - simply that Sony themselves aren't planning on dropping prices on their own models until then.
Yes, a hypothetical glut of HD-DVD players at $200, if WalMart aren't trying to use the low cost to generate large per-unit profits, could have an interesting effect. Still, we're talking 2 million players total... The XBox360 already has a $199 player and a greater than 5m units capable of adding it - yet the format war's hardly been won or even taken a lead.
That we're looking at a Christmas with next generation DVD players hitting the $200-300 mark is interesting if nothing much more than people were expecting. Overhyping it by misreading, misinterpreting and misstating everything around it, to try to elevate the drama of it however is kind of a shame.
Discs vary from ~4-8 GB. A 200 disc collection is probably in the range of just under 1.5 TB if you decide to keep all of the different files from the disc (often, most of them are things like the subtitled version or the spanish language version).
500GB runs about $120 at the moment. 1.5TB costs $360. Assuming you already have a PC that can take the drives, that's not a bad price for getting every movie at your fingertips.
On top of that, speaking as a married guy, my wife initially thought I was nuts for buying a 400 disc changer and then, as soon as every disc went in to it and the cases stopped filling her living room, she fell in love with it. With a regular player, you either get scratched disks, have to deal with wallet systems, or have to keep hundreds of DVD cases at hand. With a bulk storage system, all of that goes away.
Let's see... Anyone using a Mac, Linux, or indeed any non-Microsoft OS. That's at least 7% of the market depending on where you source your statistics. I have a Linux install on one of four machines in my home.
That's 25% market share. Except, using the entirely unscientific polling of just myself, that's zero percent of homes that have absolutely no ability to open IE.
I don't doubt Linux has a growing home user market share. I don't doubt that Apple continues to get around 5% of the home market. About half the Apple users and just about every Linux user I know also has at least one Windows box too.
The point was that far greater than the 75% of users with a Windows PC and IE as their primary choice of browser have the option. 100% of (to use your figures) 93% with windows PCs have IE installed. Of the other 7%, half the Apple group and almost all of the Linux group have a windows PC in their home. 93%+2.5%+2% = 97.5% (using hugely inaccurate numbers) of users have the option, even if they don't like doing it.
I don't dispute it's bad practice to force it. It does make an interesting point when you compare the 25% of people normally quoted as being "unable" to access an IE site to the 2.5% who truly have no means to. That's a full factor of ten difference.
It simply isn't fair on the IT workforce to have to... If it's truly unfair, why on earth are you stupid enough to be in the situation?
There's no caste system that holds people to a given role by dint of birth. With minimal exceptions for those who have the money to actually start the companies, the wealth of the family you're born in to doesn't seem to preclude management.
If there's no external force keeping people in roles, supply and demand based equilibrium takes over. If the rewards of management minus the costs of getting there and staying there are really that much better than the onerous existence of the poor, slavish techs, why the hell aren't the techs ditching it for the relatively easily accessible easy life?
Even if we accept the hypothesis that you're a masochistic martyr, determined to stay on and suffer, no matter how unjust, if one set of benefits clearly outweighed the other, wouldn't we see a massive shift of people from IT to management?
We saw it in to IT when the dotcom bubble made it hugely profitable. We saw it out of IT when the bubble burst. If equilibrium works every other time, it's curious it doesn't work this time.
Or, as an alternative hypothesis: Management has some rewards, some costs. Non managerial tech jobs have some rewards, some costs. The rewards are different: Managers get to go to golf courses, techs don't have to suck up to people they don't like as much, don't have to worry about ensuring people get to keep their jobs, avoid overtime exemption (if the law's applied correctly), etc. That people aren't surging from one to the other as the equilibrium rights itself implies that, while different, it is actually fair.
Of course, it's still human nature to bitch. Everyone else is always a worse driver, other people always take more advantage at work... It's amazing how 95% of individuals are a better person than 95% of other individuals.
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300 lbs (you know it's true, regadless of the 175 you put on your drivers license) - the dead weight your company will shed when they fire your ass for the low productivity you can manage whilst bouncing around on a treadmill, unable to type quickly or use the mouse with any accuracy.
Treadmills are great things. I personally love them as they're about the one form of exercise where my getting distracted doesn't stop them from working (on stationary bikes, my ADD tends to leave me sitting on a now very stationary bike and wondering why I'm not getting fitter) as I fall off the back if I stop. Still, put one in front of your TV and make an hour or two's TV watching a night, where you don't need to co-ordinate fine motor responses, your source of exercise.
I spend a lot of time commuting. If someone came up with a way for me to get in an energetic game of racketball during it, it'd still be a bloody stupid idea as I need to keep my fine motor control and attention on what I'm doing. The same goes for computer use. Exercise is important - but stick to times when it doesn't force interference with other important tasks.
I believe Benjamin Franklin said it best when he wrote, Those who would sacrifice their freedom for temporary security are on to a damn good thing and should never be questioned. Things are improving somewhat since the clusterf*** that is Iraq got so bad as to be undeniable. Compared to around 2002 when just about anything could be passed in the name of security and even the opposition party was scared to speak out lest they be accused of helping the terrorists win, things have got a lot better.
Even so, a lot of people are living with the guilty knowledge that they jumped on the "Do you want the terrorists to win?" bandwagon back then. Admitting you screwed up is seriously painful. Whilst they won't actively support what's happening anymore, they sure as hell don't want to have to look too closely at what the people they did support have done.
The media is a business. They sell advertising and, to get people to watch it, they show whatever will get the viewers. Often that's sensationalist drivel (Anna Nicole Smith). In this case, making people feel guilty about the people they voted for, even if they do regret it now, is a sure way to get them to turn off - a sure way to lose the advertisers.
The reality is there are countless corrupt things this administration has done: Karl Rove undeniably leaked Valerie Plame's identity and his aide has been found guilty of obstructing the investigation. The CIA was pretty much told to falsify intelligence to justify the war. Al Queda didn't exist in Iraq and there weren't chemical weapons there - now we've "liberated them", Al Queda is in Iraq and they even have chemical weapons now. Torture was openly condoned, albeit with hazy wording, right up until someone had to take the blame and then it was a few rogue troops. Torture is still routinely outsourced via "extraordinary rendition". Illegal wiretaps were performed on the bulk of the U.S. population. The list goes on...
So, you have audiences that don't want to be reminded of how badly they screwed up by supporting these people. If broadcasters are going to report something that makes their viewers uncomfortable, it had damn well better be something sensational. In the scheme of things, that emails exist to prove something relatively trivial (serious in its own right, trivial compared to the above), that the Whitehouse will weasel out of yet again anyway (Rove is blatantly guilty of the Plame leak and yet is still there), is it any wonder the news networks rank it pretty low?
Don't get me wrong: For what America is supposed to represent, it's essential these things come to light. The sad truth is, however, the media's a business selling what people want to buy and people who already feel guilty don't want to buy yet another, not very sexy story, in a long list of reasons why they made a terrible choice.
Of course, that's only if you listen to the goverment figures vs. the estimated ones and if you politely overlook it being virtually impossible to prosecute such a crime and hence get it on to the books.
Having a culture that turns a blind eye to many forms of sexual assault and thus has very low rates according to their own criteria doesn't mean much when those criteria are radically more lenient than others you're comparing them to.
The flaw in that logic is assuming all movies are equal in terms of revenue.
Hundreds of movies will see limited theatrical screenings and certainly never make it to pirate DVD because they're worthless to the pirates. Whilst a movie like The Station Agent is an undeniably great movie, short of winning awards, a movie about an anti social dwarf trainspotter isn't going to get the interest of many people buying pirate DVDs.
60 movies a year still equates out to the most popular new release every single week plus the secondary releases on more popular weeks.
Pulling numbers out of the usual spot: Assuming a curve that averages out to 10 movies that make $100m at the box office, 20 that make $50m, 30 that may $30m, 100 that make $10m and the remaining 1200 that make $2m in limited indie showings, you have a total box office revenue of $5.3b of that, the 60 highest earners make 2.9b. Thus under 5% of all movies account for almost 55% of all revenue.
So, Geist makes it seem as though piracy only affects 5% of the industry and thus claims of being affected by it are laughable. What he conveniently misses is that it affects the highest budget 5% that likely accounts for a huge percentage of actual revenue.
It's about on a par with Microsoft saying they're not monopolistic because they only provide one of the hundreds of OS variants out there. Technically it's true but very conveniently ignores the actual proportion of the market their one OS occupies.
Hypothetically assume you're in desperate need of money fast - be that a gambling addiction where nasty guys you owe money to are about to break your legs, you're a junky or you accidentally just installed WGA, lost your copy of XP and you need a working install if you're going to join your WOW guildmates tonight.
In short, you're the stereotypical opportunity criminal.
What are you going to steal?
TV? Too big, a bitch to carry out, hard to off load immediately. Craig's List or eBay will work... in about a week. Completely useless for cash right now.
DVD player? With many going for $40 new, you really think you'll get much for it?
Console? If you need to sell it quickly, places like CL or eBay are useless. A pawn shop isn't going to be interested in a last gen one though you might get something for a next gen unit but nowhere near its actual value.
Silverware? Do people even still have silverware?
Car? Great if you actually know someone that wants to buy a stolen car. Otherwise not something you can instantly turn in to cash.
Stereo? Bulky as hell, lucky if you get $10 a piece for it at a pawn store.
CDs? Throw a shelf full in to a bag, walk down the street looking innocent, go to any of dozens of music stores, game stores (EB certainly takes used CDs), etc. Off load for $50, no questions asked, within about fifteen minutes of deciding you need cash and breaking in to a house.
Can you name anything else you can carry out so easily, offload so easily, without needing any connections whatsoever, without having to wait several days for an auction to complete?
Now, granted, desperate people aren't going to be any less desperate so they'll simply move to a different type of crime - this not being about risk vs. long term reward. Still, RIAA conspiracies aside, it's hard to beat CDs as an instant gratification theft medium.
"I'm submitting 'Girls Are The Ones' as a response to my sister's piece, 'Boys Have Cooties,' from yesterday. I think there were a number of flaws and mistaken assumptions in my sister's reasoning, and I've tried to address them in this rebuttal, which has undergone review from some colleagues in the 'Girls Have Cooties' community."
While easier to get reviewed by people who already broadly support your viewpoint, review tends to gain its power when those idealogically opposed to you review it and still can't find flaws in it.
Just about every student house on my street got broken in to while I was at university. The first thing that got taken, long before TVs and VCRs (this was ten years back) was CD collections.
For quick and easy theft, relatively little beats CDs. Just about any music store would take them and an average even as low as a buck a piece still made them almost as good as cash and something you could rely on finding at least a hundred bucks worth in most houses with a couple of students in them.
I'm guessing this has little to nothing to do with the RIAA (save maybe getting to twist someone else's knife) and everything to do with making theft a little more difficult.
Honestly, what really happens here? Your records get kept for a month. If it's not a theft, that's the end of it. Compared to how much it sucks losing a treasured music collection, I'd more than happily put up with that in exchange for it simply being a little harder for the bastards that break in. And that's before factoring in how many people really sell their expensive CDs for next to nothing vs. how many people get their collections ripped off.
Go back 100 years, the U.S. was legendary for the blind eye it turned towards copyright theft - particularly of books.
Apparently, when the U.S. was a consumer, not a producer, of intellectual property, copyright had little meaning and they had minimal desire to stop its violation.
100 years on and a massive shift towards being a producer, other countries are terribly bad for acting exactly the same way the U.S. did when it was in that situation?
We'd better hope the predictions of China eclipsing the U.S. within 15-20 years are wrong. God forbid we have to deal with their being the only superpower, treating us like we treated others when we were the only superpower. There are more conclusive links between the U.S. government covertly supporting terrorist groups than there ever was proof of Saddam supporting them - let's hope another future superpower doesn't decide we need liberating.
The point of all of this is, yeah, your rights are being violated - but you kind of lose all sympathy when you were in the same position and did exactly the same thing.
It is a crime to sexually approach a child in any medium, whether you intend to have sex with them or not. Those laws were specifically written to include non physical forms to stop people from getting away with arguing they didn't actually commit the physical component so the child's unharmed.
The internet has nothing to do with it one way or another. It's simply an additional communications medium and laws that don't require a physical compontent still effect you whether it's spoken, phoned, emailed, IM'd or sent via pidgeon - the internet itself has nothing to do with it and no unique crime.
Rape on the other hand does require a physical component as the law is written. There are other harrassment laws you're likely violating but you don't meet the criteria of rape here.
The article's premise is flawed. They're looking at there being certain laws that don't require a physical componentand falsely associating them with laws that do. Sure, we could run with the analogy endlessly but, given its founding premise is wrong, that'll only lead to equally flawed conclusions.
Contributing to the delinquency of a minor is a crime in the real world and the virtual world.
Receipt of child pornography is a crime in the real world and the virtual world.
Sex with a minor, to actually go through in court, requires the physical act. Just typing, "Yeah baby, I'm fucking you." may go through as contributing to the delinquency but doesn't fit the definition of sex with a minor.
Transporting a minor across state lines only applies if you physically do it, not if you chat with a minor interstate.
Grooming a minor is a crime in England regardless of whether it happens on line or off.
So, in all of those cases, there's an existing law that's being violated. Laws based on physical acts still require the physical act to happen. Laws based on non-physical, mental acts specifically state that.
Thus, it's not a crime to sexually abuse a child on the internet. There are a variety of laws that cover the sexual abuse of children, some of which cover non-physical acts and thus don't care about whether it's via the net, letter, phonecall, in person or via pidgeon post.
Rape, in its strict definition, requires a physical act. You can't say, "He raped me with his eyes!" and have someone arrested for rape. If someone keeps phoning you and describes raping you in graphic detail, you still can't charge them with rape though you likely can have them arrested for a bunch of telecom violations, making terroristic threats, etc.
So, no, there's no specific crime about using the internet for child abuse and there's no way rape, as it's currently defined, is committed when it's purely virtual. There may well be a bunch of other harassment laws that are more broadly defined to include non physical, emotional assaults - but rape isn't one of them.
Charming as it is to debate different laws, they're only of merit if both sides can afford to go to court.
Here's the quick version of the U.S. (civil) legal system:
Party A doesn't like something party B does.
1. Party A threatens (usually via a Cease And Desist)
2. If party B can't afford a lawsuit, they probably cave unless they're pretty sure of 3. in which case they call party A's bluff and go on to 3. anyway.
3. If party A can't afford the lawsuit, after having their bluff called, they probably cave. If they think B is bluffing, they repeat 2-3 a few more times.
4. In the rare event that both sides refuse to back down from their bluffs, it goes to court where...
5. Repeat steps 2-3 as out of court settlements. Far more money than simply sending a cease and desist letter gets involved here so most people try to get out during 2-3.
6. Maybe, just maybe, it comes down to the legal merits. Even then, it may well not end up decided on so much as reach an out of court settlement based on the likelihood of losing vs. cost of doing so rather than actual legal right/wrong.
The moral of the story is that laws are all well and good but 99% of these things come down to who has the money to fight this for longer than the other guy - they win. Sad, but also true.
Actually, disturbingly, you have that backwards...
The concept was that if computers were secure anyway, threats to them would be non-issues.
The similie isn't "If murderers just stopped wanting to kill us." More accurately, it's "It's the victims' fault for being murderable."
It's about on a par with those who claim the students at VT deserved what they got because they didn't protect themselves by carrying guns.
We all know violent crime is on the increase, so what's causing it?
Oh, wait, violent crime isn't on the increase. That's just a false assumption based off people believing what a sensationalist media feeds them. Violent crime has actually experienced a MASSIVE downturn since Doom, Mortal Combat and Grand Theft Auto all came out.
Take one look at the DOJ's serious violent crime figures.
From a peak at the end of the last Republican government (Clinton took power in early 93), violent crime dropped from aout 4,000,000 cases per year down to well under 2,000,000 cases per year when he left power (in early '01). Since then, the drop off has ceased but the fluctuation has still stayed relatively level.
It's remarkably convenient to talk about how violent computer games are training the hundreds of violent criminals on our streets and certainly gets your columns attention... yet it ignores the simple fact the numbers of violent criminals on our streets have actually had a massive downturn since videogames became available as a healthier focus for people's frustrations.
Now, I won't claim videogames deserve all of the credit. A period of relative prosperity and the greater social equality of a more centerist government, along with plenty of other factors, may have had much more to do with it...
Still, it is utterly falacious to look at what causes the terrible violent crime wave we're under when, in fact, we're experiencing vastly less of it than any time in the 35 years the records go back.
In both cases, a company is completely happy building a niche product, that does its job exceptionally well, that they can be truly proud of, and that they can turn a profit on every single one.
Apple themselves said they were only going after 1% of the market. 1% of 1.3 billion is still 13 million. If they can turn $50 profit on each and every one of those, they walk away with an extra $650m on their bottom line next year. Not a bad kick in the teeth for the indignity of having to be exactly the market you went for.
Microsoft has a totally different model. They want global dominance in cell phones because it'll help prop up their model of making the entire world have to use your stuff if they want compatibility and then you can extort money on things like office suites. They'll happily give away their mobile O.S. if it means propping up that model.
Neither one is particularly wrong per se. They're just two totally different models that, evidently, are successful for both companies. Microsoft turns a profit, Apple turns a profit, yay for both of them.
But knocking one model for failing to succeed based on the metrics of your model... while totally succeeding on their own model's metrics and turning a profit... that's a little cheap.
What is interesting is that Apple's own figures were they were aiming for 1% market saturation but Balmer's already referencing 2-3% before it comes out. I'm curious as to whether that's a case of his not getting numbers straight, of Microsoft expecting more success for Apple than Apple's actually banking on, or whether they're just trying to raise the bar now so they can say Apple failed to meet numbers Apple never went for later.
Could someone convert those numbers in to candles per hundred-weight of coal for us Americans still using imperial measurements?
A user activatable but then non-reversible lock that requires your iPod to check in with Apple every time it syncs to ensure its serial number isn't on a list of stolen ones. Then provide a means to access any/all serial numbers you have registered to you and lock them down.
If you don't want your iPod tied to to needing a net connection to sync, don't enable the feature. If you want to know that anyone who mugs you for it gets a worthless lump of metal and plastic - and you're fine with the trade off - turn it on.
It doesn't even need to be that universally used to take a bite out of crime. If people quickly learn the $50 iPods guys in the pub offer them (which, let's face it, they know are stolen but think they're getting a great deal and so don't care) may well not work, they're not going to hand over the $50. You don't have to disable every last stolen one to make buying a stolen one enough of a gamble that people stop doing it and thus they stop being desirable to steal.
Yes, it would become a potential pain for retailers who accept returns but a simple app could let retailers check the iPod hadn't been locked down before accepting returns. Given Apple "authorizes" retailers, this would give them a finite list of people to distribute it to and increase the value of being an authorized retailer.
Forgive my asking but where exactly does it say MSNBC are the only ones allowed to record this?
Rather than assuming they are, how about we go with the assumption they're not? At that point:
If you want to record your own damn footage, go ahead.
MSNBC are being helpful and sharing the footage they paid for a camera crew to go to, they paid for the equipment to record, they paid to make available. All they're saying is, "If you want to use the footage that we went to all of this expense for, please credit us and don't broadcast it against the slot we intend to use to make that money back and hopefully, in an entirely American way, make a profit from too."
Is it really wrong to ask for credit for something you put money in to the creation of?
Is it really wrong to say, "Hey, you're welcome to share - just not at the one time we're hoping to leverage our investment."?
Is it really wrong to say, "Please take the original stream rather than post compression or rebroadcast in a way that might interfere with those rebroadcasters' policies."?
If you get over the assumption that they have some kind of monopoly - and it appears to just be an assumption - the company giving away their work with minimal practical restrictions, whilst letting you still record your own version if you don't like them, is hardly the most heinous crime known to man.
Of course it's always more fun to assume the worst. But then you know what they say about "assume"
Since its well known that DRM does not prevent piracy then the only purpose DRM can possibly have is restricting customers. The point of the purest concept of DRM is, "To constrict users to their legal uses."
Admittedly, every implementation so far has been a poor one, overstepping from constricting to legal rights in to outright diminishing those rights. But just because every implementation so far has been bad, that doesn't mean the core concept is exclusively bad.
Take moulds. Prior to the 1920s, most people would have said, "It is well known mould does nothing for us. The only purpose mould can possibly have is making us sick." Then along comes Fleming who shows the right mould can be used to kill all kinds of bacteria. The same has been said of viruses - which we're learning to harness now, and even bacteria.
Even more ironically, the MPAA and RIAA were some of the first to condemn P2P because "Its well known that P2P does not promote legal fair use. The only purpose P2P can possibly have is piracy." We laugh at them for their narrowmindedness on Slashdot, we lament how they can attempt to destroy a technology simply because many or most of its users do bad things with it, we scoff at how they don't really understand the full picture, then we turn around and do exactly the same thing.
What college do I have to go to in order to learn how to stuff 8,000 consumers in to a single BRA? I'm not sure how you do it but it sounds like an awesome experience anyway.
A compact camera or cheap DSLR will run a sharpening algorithm over the picture before storing it.
For the mass market, this makes the picture look really sharp and therefore somehow "better".
For anyone serious about taking images, this is a cheap gimmick they can do in PhotoShop, with a lot more fine control, later whereas trying to undo it once it's been applied takes you even further away from the source image. Print the image out at a high resolution and you'll also start seeing strange color effects as edges get exaggerated and any noise being increased too.
You can artificially increase saturation too. It's another quick process in a graphics package that can be added later but is a pain to undo and retain anything close to the original image.
It also goes for brightness. Any idiot can brighten an image but you're doing it at the ultimate expense of the number of shades you're left with. Here's a simple example:
See how you now have color bands?
Finally, the same goes for TVs. More or less any TV you buy from somewhere like BestBuy desperately needs calibrating. Sure, the picture looks stunningly vivid and bright. Calibrate it and most people will think it looks washed out and slightly soft. Watch it for a while though and you'll start seeing fine detail you could never have seen on the original settings. What people think looks great and what actually gives them the best picture are often totally different.
TV manufacturers know that most people want to be blown away by oversaturation, overexposure and overcontrast, thinking that'll give them a better picture. They also know that anyone who really knows what they're doing will run a calibration DVD or have a pro come out anyway. So they set their default settings to god awful levels to look good in store, knowing it'll be fixed for those for whom it matters to.
In the same way, camera manufacturers know that the cheaper the price point, the more exagerated the default settings the user expects. Thus a cell phone will be massively exagerated, a compact will be pretty exagerated, a cheap DSLR will be somewhat exagerated, a mid range DSLR will err slightly on the side of exageration but be close and a high end DSLR will do every last thing it can to match the "truth".
Those who know nothing about that, the target market for cell phone cameras and cheap compacts, will keep thinking they're getting a great deal - and that's fine for them. It's just a shame when someone like CNet, portraying themselves as experts, tries to portray that as a source of truth to people who've come to them hoping to learn more.
The industry chiefs finally realized that you get what you pay for. Amazing.
That statement is true only in a perfect equilibrium.
Most equilibriums have a degree of lag. Supply increases in one area, demand takes a while to catch up so costs are low. Demand increases in an area, supply takes a while to catch up, so costs are high.
Businesses are profitable by moving faster than that equilibrium shift and exploiting it. Businesses lose profitability the closer they are to an established equilibrium and they outright lose money when they fall behind it.
India is a great example:
There were a lot of very highly skilled engineers with minimal to no demand for their talents and thus would work for next to nothing. Smart businesses identified this and exploited them. Those businesses could now get high skill levels for very low cost.
Everyone else saw these profits, Newsweek wrote articles on it, everyone moved in to the sector. As demand increased towards supply, profitability decreased. As demand exceeded supply with many dumb U.S. businesses working on articles and quotes from three or four years earlier, costs increased rapidly, the supply of skilled engineered diminished, many poor engineers saturated the market looking for the now great wages, it became a lousy area for U.S. businesses to exploit.
The same has gone for big screen TVs. A few years ago, Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. were making a killing on every high end unit they sold. About a year ago, Walmart finally woke up, realized there was money to be made, slashed the margins so it could insert itself and killed their business model. For a long time, demand for TVs was greater than the number of stores supplying, profits were high. Once Walmart and Target realized there was money there, supply increased, profits decreased.
It happened in the U.S. with the dotcom bubble and it's happened more recently with housing. For a while, a given market is massively exploitable. Over time, everyone thinks it's exploitable, everyone moves in to doing it, the margins decrease, it loses its exploitability.
So, your statement is only partially true...
Over time, yes, you get what you pay for (you may even get less if you're on the wrong side of the wave).
BUT, if you're smart enough to identify the trends and get there ahead of others, you really can get far more than you pay for.
For those that bitch about high executive salaries, that's what they're often really getting paid for: They're people who've established they're good at staying ahead of the wave, surfing its leading edge and keeping their companies hugely profitable. If your ability can keep your company on the leading edge of the equilibrium wave, making $500m more a year than a company that rode the top of the wave, isn't it worth paying you $50m for that edge?
Samsung BD-P1000 $664.99 in store at Best Buy.
The same player for $699.99 at CompUSA
Sony 2x2x2 Blu-ray BD-RE, internal ATA drive $699.99 at CompUSA
The Samsung again for $699 at Circuit City
Or the newer Samsung BD-P1200 for $799.99 at Circuit City
Then there's the Lite-On Blu Ray Burner for $399.99 at Fry's
And the Philips BDP9000 player for $799.99 also at Fry's
Man, I can't wait for next year when they finally drop below $1000 at places other than every single major retailer.
That said, the original poster also misquoted the actual article. There was no mention of Blu Ray players as a whole not dropping below $1,000 until next year - simply that Sony themselves aren't planning on dropping prices on their own models until then.
Yes, a hypothetical glut of HD-DVD players at $200, if WalMart aren't trying to use the low cost to generate large per-unit profits, could have an interesting effect. Still, we're talking 2 million players total... The XBox360 already has a $199 player and a greater than 5m units capable of adding it - yet the format war's hardly been won or even taken a lead.
That we're looking at a Christmas with next generation DVD players hitting the $200-300 mark is interesting if nothing much more than people were expecting. Overhyping it by misreading, misinterpreting and misstating everything around it, to try to elevate the drama of it however is kind of a shame.
The example was ~200 DVDs...
Discs vary from ~4-8 GB. A 200 disc collection is probably in the range of just under 1.5 TB if you decide to keep all of the different files from the disc (often, most of them are things like the subtitled version or the spanish language version).
500GB runs about $120 at the moment. 1.5TB costs $360. Assuming you already have a PC that can take the drives, that's not a bad price for getting every movie at your fingertips.
On top of that, speaking as a married guy, my wife initially thought I was nuts for buying a 400 disc changer and then, as soon as every disc went in to it and the cases stopped filling her living room, she fell in love with it. With a regular player, you either get scratched disks, have to deal with wallet systems, or have to keep hundreds of DVD cases at hand. With a bulk storage system, all of that goes away.
That's 25% market share. Except, using the entirely unscientific polling of just myself, that's zero percent of homes that have absolutely no ability to open IE.
I don't doubt Linux has a growing home user market share. I don't doubt that Apple continues to get around 5% of the home market. About half the Apple users and just about every Linux user I know also has at least one Windows box too.
The point was that far greater than the 75% of users with a Windows PC and IE as their primary choice of browser have the option. 100% of (to use your figures) 93% with windows PCs have IE installed. Of the other 7%, half the Apple group and almost all of the Linux group have a windows PC in their home. 93%+2.5%+2% = 97.5% (using hugely inaccurate numbers) of users have the option, even if they don't like doing it.
I don't dispute it's bad practice to force it. It does make an interesting point when you compare the 25% of people normally quoted as being "unable" to access an IE site to the 2.5% who truly have no means to. That's a full factor of ten difference.
There's no caste system that holds people to a given role by dint of birth. With minimal exceptions for those who have the money to actually start the companies, the wealth of the family you're born in to doesn't seem to preclude management.
If there's no external force keeping people in roles, supply and demand based equilibrium takes over. If the rewards of management minus the costs of getting there and staying there are really that much better than the onerous existence of the poor, slavish techs, why the hell aren't the techs ditching it for the relatively easily accessible easy life?
Even if we accept the hypothesis that you're a masochistic martyr, determined to stay on and suffer, no matter how unjust, if one set of benefits clearly outweighed the other, wouldn't we see a massive shift of people from IT to management?
We saw it in to IT when the dotcom bubble made it hugely profitable. We saw it out of IT when the bubble burst. If equilibrium works every other time, it's curious it doesn't work this time.
Or, as an alternative hypothesis: Management has some rewards, some costs. Non managerial tech jobs have some rewards, some costs. The rewards are different: Managers get to go to golf courses, techs don't have to suck up to people they don't like as much, don't have to worry about ensuring people get to keep their jobs, avoid overtime exemption (if the law's applied correctly), etc. That people aren't surging from one to the other as the equilibrium rights itself implies that, while different, it is actually fair.
Of course, it's still human nature to bitch. Everyone else is always a worse driver, other people always take more advantage at work... It's amazing how 95% of individuals are a better person than 95% of other individuals.