Plus it opens up digital distribution to those out in the sticks through kiosks at the local Walmart/Gamestop/Whatever. Store the images on hard drives in the machine (which can be updated via the store's internet connection), fill it with generic Microsoft flash drives, customer comes up, picks their game, it dumps the image to a flash drive, prints a label and sticks it on, dumps it out the slot, and there you go.
They can offset the costs to the consumer by charging more for the physical copies than they do for the downloaded one, while getting around the whole "what about people that don't have a fast internet connection?" limitation that keeps them from eschewing physical copies entirely. Plus, instead of the 20 games that Walmart keeps on hand to choose from, the customer would be able to buy any game, at any time, via the kiosk. No more shelf space taken up with 50 facings of Dudebro: My Shit Is Fucked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II: It's Straight-Up Dawg Time, and 3 months later when they're sitting on 187 unsold copies, no more shipping them back to the distributor to end up buried in the Arizona desert under dark of night.
Seems to me like it would be the most efficient way to go.
They should dump the optical drive entirely and move to a cartridge-like system using encrypted flash drives. For the majority of people with a solid internet connection they can just buy and download directly to their console from their living room, but for those with crappy/capped bandwidth, the physical flash drive is there for them if they want it.
Hell, they don't even need to really produce pre-made flash drives with the games on them, they could just switch to a kiosk method of distribution. You go down to your local Walmart, go up to the Microsoft kiosk, pick which 'Xbox 720' game you want, it copies that to a generic, proprietary Microsoft flash drive right in the machine, prints a label on it, and shits it out the slot on the bottom, ready to go. The cost of producing that physical copy could easily be offset to the consumer while at the same time giving incentive to people to switch to direct download by allowing for cheaper prices there
No more discs to press on their end, no more discs to get scratched up by the consumer, and it goes a long way towards moving the digital distribution method out of the city and out into the sticks. The games are always up to date (the kiosk can just keep the disc images updated) and not only that, but they can literally offer every single game they produce at every kiosk. A few TB hard drives in the unit and a web connection and you've got access to everything. Hell, they could even combine the unit with a demo machine like the 360 ones and let people play the games before they buy right there in the store!
Seems like it would work well for both them and consumers. Which is probably why it won't happen.
After reading about HBGary Federal's own work in Astroturfing software when they were hacked by Anonymous earlier this year I figured that everyone would be getting in on that action. Now that mainstream media doesn't have their death grip on the spread of information (or disinformation), the G-men in black suits standing off camera need to come up with other ways to cloud things.
Trying to cut off the internet completely would just result in the population going apeshit, so now they're utilizing shadier methods that are harder to detect. In reading some of the comments on news stories here in the states over the last year or so, I'm sure there are people doing this here as well. You can only see so many "NOBAMA 2012!!!" posts by people with names like Chuck17359 before you start to wonder if there is actually a human being on the other side.
I think you'd find that there are a lot of U.S. citizens that are pretty disgusted with the way our country is behaving right now, both domestically and globally, if you actually asked any of us about it. Do you think that we're all over here cheering this crap on or something? There's people protesting in almost every major city in this country right now.
My mom is still using a Mitsubishi television she bought in 1983.
Yeah really, my grandmother used the same damn toaster she bought in the early 60's almost every single day up until the day she died 5 years ago. Her Mr. Coffee was at least 25 years old as well, and her microwave, despite being so old as to have oven style knob controls, worked even better than any microwave I've ever bought.
Today you need to order commercial-grade appliances from European master craftsmen for thousands of dollars to get the same level of quality my grandmother got on sale at Sears 30+ years ago on her husband's truck driver salary. Pretty sad...
They'd be far more likely to buy a $700 iPod if they had a job that afforded them that kind of disposable income.
The whole "we can't afford to manufacture in the United States" idea is completely contrary to our own history. For decades we made most of our shit here, and consequently there were decent paying jobs to be had by most anyone with any skill level. Those jobs afforded those employees to buy the shit they were making, which is the fundamental problem we have today...wages have completely stagnated. People can't afford to buy the shit, even when it's made in China for pennies on the dollar. The race to the bottom has finally trickled up to the point where they're killing off their own customers.
Back in then 60's, my grandfather drove a truck for a living and supported himself, his wife, their four children, paid off a modest home for them to live in, had a new car in the driveway every few years, had enough scratch to pile the kids into said car every year to take them around the country on vacation, as well as put money aside for retirement and the kids college fund. The man barely had a high school education due to running off to fight in Korea and do his duty like those that had just a few years earlier in World War II.
This was possible because he wasn't competing with people on the other side of the world living in 3rd world conditions for his job. This was also possible because his boss was also a vet, as were all of his co-workers, and they would not tolerate one of their own being fucked over that way. He brought the boss home for dinner, the boss came to visit him when he was in the hospital. Point is, they actually gave a shit about each other beyond their ability to profit off of the labors of each other.
That $700 iPod isn't scary to someone that has a decent job. Paying the guys on the factory floor a decent wage allows them to buy the shit they're making, which leads to more demand for the product, which leads to more decent-paying jobs. This leads to a stronger economy, which increases the value of a dollar, which leads to lower prices. What it doesn't lead to, though, is ridiculous lopsided bonuses and salaries for the handful of people running things at the top.
In our grandfather's day, if their employer had brought in illegals or foreigners to work their line, paying them less in order to pad their own paychecks, there would have been a shit storm. They would have been shunned in the community, their products boycotted, and they likely would have had investigations into their business practices. But more importantly, most of those employers wouldn't have done it anyway, because they cared just as much about their country as their employees. That's something we lost in the drive for globalization and ever increasing profit margins.
The fallacy of trickle-down economics is why our country is sitting on the edge of a cliff right now. It took 30 years to fully flower, but we're finally hitting the point where even making shit in China isn't cheap enough due to inflation and the ridiculously stagnated wages we've been suffering under since this voodoo economics bullshit started. When less and less of us are able to justify the expense of an iPod at any price, where does that leave Apple (or any other manufacturer)?
I used to bring in those Ghirardelli squares but I had to stop because a people literally started stealing handfuls out of the jar when I wasn't around and it was costing me a fortune.
Now I grab the mix bags of the same stuff you do. Still popular, but it's not costing me $20 a week refilling the jar, at least.
Credit is very nice, but at the end of the day it is getting the job done that matters.
Oh, I assure you, 95% of the time, getting the job done doesn't matter at all, it's who's dick your sucking that really matters. Metaphorically speaking, of course (although I've found it to be quite literal at times).
I'm pissed about the ending of Running Man, if only because it means there will never be a faithful adaptation of that story and it deserves one. Certainly not one for a while, anyway...
I mean, they would probably want to ban a Chinese game that allowed the player to kill American citizens and destroy American landmarks.
Not saying it's right, but it's probably what would happen. Personally, I'd love to play a game about the United States from a Chinese perspective. It would probably be hysterical...
The argument is that enough buses to carry 10,000 people require fewer mechanics than enough cars to carry 10,000 people.
True, but other jobs will open up around those extra buses. I'm sure farriers were decrying the loss of jobs shoeing horses when the automobile started catching on, but for every farrier losing a job an auto mechanic gained one. Extra buses means more people needed to clean them and remove graffiti, more ad-space to sell leading to more jobs in marketing, new and larger facilities for the buses and trains that need to be built and maintained in their own right, which leads to increased demand on the grid leading to more jobs required there, increased administrative roles to supervise all these new employees, etc.
Obviously being a farrier at the dawn of the automobile was a pretty bleak prospect, but they transitioned into other jobs. I expect it will be no different with these lost jobs, although, like I said, we need to direct people into jobs that allow one to actually support themselves. This is why I think we should pull an FDR and dust off the alphabet soup agencies again, rather than build more Walmarts and McDonalds...at least people would earn a real income that would allow them to consume shit.
So, basically, this is going to be good for all those situations where I could just hard line but don't feel like getting off my ass to do it? Yeah, that's helpful. Why hard line and get gigabit when I can go THz wireless and not?
We're still going to need omnidirectional for all of our mobile devices, which are the real problem; there are too many fucking devices on the network. This doesn't alleviate that problem at all, so the benefit is what? It saves you from having to run an ethernet cable around your room, and all for the low price of degraded service? Awesome!
In my experience, a learner's permit is simply a permit that allows you to operate a motor vehicle provided there is a licensed driver with you to supervise (the requirements obviously vary from state to state). Everywhere I've ever lived, if you don't have a learner's permit, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever you are allowed to be sitting in that driver's seat regardless of how many licensed driver's there are in the car. Also, there is an age requirement; a 12 year old is not allowed to get a learner's permit.
In some states you are even required to take a certified Driver's Ed course if you want to get a license under the age of 18 (usually given through school although ), and everywhere I've ever lived required a road test when you got your first license regardless. The learner's permit was necessary was to give you legal right to sit in the driver's seat and actually learn how to drive; other than that, it doesn't count for shit (well, except possibly for insurance purposes; I'm sure the second that someone in the household gets their permit the car insurance companies want to know about it so they can jack your rates up but I haven't experienced that yet.)
The time requirement I'm not really sure about. I'm sure that varies from state to state as well, but there's never been any time requirement in learning to drive that I've known of. It was up to the applicant to demonstrate that they knew how to drive on the road test, the instructor couldn't care less if you learned in a few days or a few years.
By the by, my road test was a complete joke. I literally pulled out of the parking lot at the DMV, made 4 right's around the block, pulled in, and backed into a parking spot. I didn't even have to wait at a light, I just had to demonstrate that I recognized that I was allowed to turn on red and that sometimes I would not be allowed to turn on red. Then again the written test is a joke, too. Maybe the problem is that the requirements aren't stringent enough?
What about the increased demand for mechanics to work on the dramatically increased number of buses and trains required due to everyone riding them instead of their own vehicles?
Jobs don't disappear so much as transition. You can invent a robot to put together a car, but you still need someone to maintain the robot, and someone has to design it, and someone has to sell it and market it, and someone has to work on improving it, someone has to physically move these robots around and get them from where they're built to where they're installed, someone has to do the books for the company that builds the robots, someone has to supply that company with the raw materials to build them, etc...
I realize you were being a little facetious (it seems that way, although my internet sarcasm detector goes haywire sometimes) but I felt like mentioning it. The real problem is stopping well-paying jobs from transitioning to lower paying ones, i.e., keep the auto mechanics from ending up working at Walmart for $8.50 an hour. Unfortunately, that seems to be the big problem right now; we're caught in a positive feedback loop where decreased supply of good paying jobs is leading to an overabundance of demand for those low paying jobs which do not afford people the extra money to purchase the goods made by the people with the well-paying jobs leading to less demand for their product leading to layoffs and more people at Walmart leading to even less demand and on and on and on...
The Cloud still needs to be maintained, and the more demand there is on the cloud the more it will grow and the more maintenance will be required.
It still doesn't solve the problem. It may currently help, but eventually it's going to have the same problems of saturation no matter how directional it is.
Finding new bands to saturate is not going to help the problem. We need a much wider band with many more discrete channels and smarter routers that are able to cooperate among themselves and share the bands in the most effective, efficient ways possible. That in itself would go a long way towards solving these saturation problems and there would be plenty of space available for everyone.
Yes, and our roads will be awesome when any asshole can just hop into a car and put the pedal on the floor....
Please, explain how the free market regulates people that don't know how to drive without causing millions of people to lose their lives in accidents. I would love to hear it.
I swear, some of these anti-regulation people must just be closet anarchists. It seems more and more like they just want to live in the Old West where the only rule of law is the one that comes out of the end of a gun...
Of course I do, and I haven't done so in over a decade. However, the more the government clamps-down, the more lucrative it becomes. It's hard to justify the risk when there is little reward, but the more they do nonsense like this, the easier it is for people like me to be rewarded for it.
The odds of getting caught are already infinitesimal and that's with all the deep packet inspection bullshit going on. Sneakernet is going to be completely untraceable short of the United States becoming a full on police state, and by the time that day comes to pass people trading HD movies with portable hard drives will be the least of our concerns.
Hell, my circle of friends already limits our exposure through cooperative downloading and sharing. Every time one of us visits another we're bringing our TB hdd's with us and swapping shit back and forth, and we've naturally kinda specialized on our own. I'm the music guy, one friend is the movie guy, another is the game guy, another is the 'expensive' software guy, another is the Mac guy...and we're all trading purely via sneakernet.
It's never going to stop. We're not talking about containers of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, it's a bunch of 1's and 0's on a hard drive. They can either come up with a new business model or expend all of their current profits trying to secure future profits. It really makes no difference to me. People will be creating art and software just the same as they did before, it'll just be far less likely to have a huge WARNER BROTHERS or SONY label on it. It's hard to see how that's necessarily a bad thing...
I understand that, so what happens when there's 15 cones propagating right next to each other? You know, kinda like how traditional wifi has exploded to the point where every goddamn thing in the world is a hotspot now?
Great, when there's one transmitter focused at one receiver. What happens when there's 20 transmitters sending to 20 receivers all within close proximity to each other? Wifi worked just fine for me 5 years ago when there was only as handful of people using it in my complex, now that everyone has wifi the service has become so degraded it's practically unusable for anyone that is trying to do more than surf the internet (and even that is a chore, requiring many page reloads sometimes to get the full page to load). Trying to transfer files, forget it, you might as well.rar it into a hundred pieces and email it.
The fact that we're making every damn thing wifi capable these days is only going to exacerbate the problem. Simply switching to a new band isn't going to solve the problem, it just creates a new saturation point. Similar to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, we need to come up with a solution that allows for a much, much wider frequency range with dozens of new 'channels' to handle all the traffic, along with routers that can actually talk to each other and negotiate. Rather than having 15 routers all chasing each other up and down the spectrum all day, we need routers that say "Okay, router A, you can have channel 1, router B can have channel 2..." rather than "ZOMG CHANNEL 1 IS CLEAN EVERYBODY RUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!!"
People want to test drive before they buy. The people that download and don't buy were never going to buy in the first place, there is not a single lost sale there.
Maybe the hardcore pirates. That's not what companies care about, they care about the general public.
Then the general public will just go to the hardcore pirates to get their shit for them, and sneakernet will return as the dominant form of file sharing once again.
Back in the early Napster days, I made a pretty good amount of spending money just downloading music for people and making mix discs for them. When nobody knew how to download music or burn CD's I was able to get $5-10 a piece for them, and with our cable connection (most everyone else was still on dial-up) I was downloading hundreds of songs at a time, they would be finishing faster than I could add new songs to the list. And it wasn't limited to us pesky kids, either; parents and teachers were actually my biggest customers.
It was seriously like the movie Blow, I was pretty much the go-to guy for anyone that didn't want to spend $20 buying a CD at Tower Records. Until the war on Napster started ramping up and people started having to name songs all sorts of weird shit to get around the filters they put on towards the end due to Metallica's lawsuit, I was cleaning up. Once it started becoming more of a pain in the ass to find the right files without digging (greatly increasing the time it took to assemble a mix disc) I stopped doing it, plus I was getting ready to graduate so I just didn't have time for it anymore.
Still, it was pretty lucrative for a while there, and the harder they make it for laypeople to download, the more lucrative they make it for us again. Hell, I'll make even more money, due to not needing to buy spindles of CD's anymore.
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Plus it opens up digital distribution to those out in the sticks through kiosks at the local Walmart/Gamestop/Whatever. Store the images on hard drives in the machine (which can be updated via the store's internet connection), fill it with generic Microsoft flash drives, customer comes up, picks their game, it dumps the image to a flash drive, prints a label and sticks it on, dumps it out the slot, and there you go.
They can offset the costs to the consumer by charging more for the physical copies than they do for the downloaded one, while getting around the whole "what about people that don't have a fast internet connection?" limitation that keeps them from eschewing physical copies entirely. Plus, instead of the 20 games that Walmart keeps on hand to choose from, the customer would be able to buy any game, at any time, via the kiosk. No more shelf space taken up with 50 facings of Dudebro: My Shit Is Fucked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II: It's Straight-Up Dawg Time, and 3 months later when they're sitting on 187 unsold copies, no more shipping them back to the distributor to end up buried in the Arizona desert under dark of night.
Seems to me like it would be the most efficient way to go.
They should dump the optical drive entirely and move to a cartridge-like system using encrypted flash drives. For the majority of people with a solid internet connection they can just buy and download directly to their console from their living room, but for those with crappy/capped bandwidth, the physical flash drive is there for them if they want it.
Hell, they don't even need to really produce pre-made flash drives with the games on them, they could just switch to a kiosk method of distribution. You go down to your local Walmart, go up to the Microsoft kiosk, pick which 'Xbox 720' game you want, it copies that to a generic, proprietary Microsoft flash drive right in the machine, prints a label on it, and shits it out the slot on the bottom, ready to go. The cost of producing that physical copy could easily be offset to the consumer while at the same time giving incentive to people to switch to direct download by allowing for cheaper prices there
No more discs to press on their end, no more discs to get scratched up by the consumer, and it goes a long way towards moving the digital distribution method out of the city and out into the sticks. The games are always up to date (the kiosk can just keep the disc images updated) and not only that, but they can literally offer every single game they produce at every kiosk. A few TB hard drives in the unit and a web connection and you've got access to everything. Hell, they could even combine the unit with a demo machine like the 360 ones and let people play the games before they buy right there in the store!
Seems like it would work well for both them and consumers. Which is probably why it won't happen.
After reading about HBGary Federal's own work in Astroturfing software when they were hacked by Anonymous earlier this year I figured that everyone would be getting in on that action. Now that mainstream media doesn't have their death grip on the spread of information (or disinformation), the G-men in black suits standing off camera need to come up with other ways to cloud things.
Trying to cut off the internet completely would just result in the population going apeshit, so now they're utilizing shadier methods that are harder to detect. In reading some of the comments on news stories here in the states over the last year or so, I'm sure there are people doing this here as well. You can only see so many "NOBAMA 2012!!!" posts by people with names like Chuck17359 before you start to wonder if there is actually a human being on the other side.
I think you'd find that there are a lot of U.S. citizens that are pretty disgusted with the way our country is behaving right now, both domestically and globally, if you actually asked any of us about it. Do you think that we're all over here cheering this crap on or something? There's people protesting in almost every major city in this country right now.
My mom is still using a Mitsubishi television she bought in 1983.
Yeah really, my grandmother used the same damn toaster she bought in the early 60's almost every single day up until the day she died 5 years ago. Her Mr. Coffee was at least 25 years old as well, and her microwave, despite being so old as to have oven style knob controls, worked even better than any microwave I've ever bought.
Today you need to order commercial-grade appliances from European master craftsmen for thousands of dollars to get the same level of quality my grandmother got on sale at Sears 30+ years ago on her husband's truck driver salary. Pretty sad...
They'd be far more likely to buy a $700 iPod if they had a job that afforded them that kind of disposable income.
The whole "we can't afford to manufacture in the United States" idea is completely contrary to our own history. For decades we made most of our shit here, and consequently there were decent paying jobs to be had by most anyone with any skill level. Those jobs afforded those employees to buy the shit they were making, which is the fundamental problem we have today...wages have completely stagnated. People can't afford to buy the shit, even when it's made in China for pennies on the dollar. The race to the bottom has finally trickled up to the point where they're killing off their own customers.
Back in then 60's, my grandfather drove a truck for a living and supported himself, his wife, their four children, paid off a modest home for them to live in, had a new car in the driveway every few years, had enough scratch to pile the kids into said car every year to take them around the country on vacation, as well as put money aside for retirement and the kids college fund. The man barely had a high school education due to running off to fight in Korea and do his duty like those that had just a few years earlier in World War II.
This was possible because he wasn't competing with people on the other side of the world living in 3rd world conditions for his job. This was also possible because his boss was also a vet, as were all of his co-workers, and they would not tolerate one of their own being fucked over that way. He brought the boss home for dinner, the boss came to visit him when he was in the hospital. Point is, they actually gave a shit about each other beyond their ability to profit off of the labors of each other.
That $700 iPod isn't scary to someone that has a decent job. Paying the guys on the factory floor a decent wage allows them to buy the shit they're making, which leads to more demand for the product, which leads to more decent-paying jobs. This leads to a stronger economy, which increases the value of a dollar, which leads to lower prices. What it doesn't lead to, though, is ridiculous lopsided bonuses and salaries for the handful of people running things at the top.
In our grandfather's day, if their employer had brought in illegals or foreigners to work their line, paying them less in order to pad their own paychecks, there would have been a shit storm. They would have been shunned in the community, their products boycotted, and they likely would have had investigations into their business practices. But more importantly, most of those employers wouldn't have done it anyway, because they cared just as much about their country as their employees. That's something we lost in the drive for globalization and ever increasing profit margins.
The fallacy of trickle-down economics is why our country is sitting on the edge of a cliff right now. It took 30 years to fully flower, but we're finally hitting the point where even making shit in China isn't cheap enough due to inflation and the ridiculously stagnated wages we've been suffering under since this voodoo economics bullshit started. When less and less of us are able to justify the expense of an iPod at any price, where does that leave Apple (or any other manufacturer)?
I used to bring in those Ghirardelli squares but I had to stop because a people literally started stealing handfuls out of the jar when I wasn't around and it was costing me a fortune.
Now I grab the mix bags of the same stuff you do. Still popular, but it's not costing me $20 a week refilling the jar, at least.
Credit is very nice, but at the end of the day it is getting the job done that matters.
Oh, I assure you, 95% of the time, getting the job done doesn't matter at all, it's who's dick your sucking that really matters. Metaphorically speaking, of course (although I've found it to be quite literal at times).
The candy jar is a time honored dispute avoidance technique. I'm surprised more people don't utilize it.
Bonus points if you bring in the really good stuff. Fucking 50 DKP Minus if you bring in the 5 cent shit-tier suckers that nobody likes.
I bet you also swear to drunk you're not god :-P
I resemble that remark!
I'm pissed about the ending of Running Man, if only because it means there will never be a faithful adaptation of that story and it deserves one. Certainly not one for a while, anyway...
I'm just pissed cuz I'd probably end up in Vegas :(
You obviously haven't seen the spin off, Duty Calls. It's AMAZING!
I mean, they would probably want to ban a Chinese game that allowed the player to kill American citizens and destroy American landmarks.
Not saying it's right, but it's probably what would happen. Personally, I'd love to play a game about the United States from a Chinese perspective. It would probably be hysterical...
The argument is that enough buses to carry 10,000 people require fewer mechanics than enough cars to carry 10,000 people.
True, but other jobs will open up around those extra buses. I'm sure farriers were decrying the loss of jobs shoeing horses when the automobile started catching on, but for every farrier losing a job an auto mechanic gained one. Extra buses means more people needed to clean them and remove graffiti, more ad-space to sell leading to more jobs in marketing, new and larger facilities for the buses and trains that need to be built and maintained in their own right, which leads to increased demand on the grid leading to more jobs required there, increased administrative roles to supervise all these new employees, etc.
Obviously being a farrier at the dawn of the automobile was a pretty bleak prospect, but they transitioned into other jobs. I expect it will be no different with these lost jobs, although, like I said, we need to direct people into jobs that allow one to actually support themselves. This is why I think we should pull an FDR and dust off the alphabet soup agencies again, rather than build more Walmarts and McDonalds...at least people would earn a real income that would allow them to consume shit.
So, basically, this is going to be good for all those situations where I could just hard line but don't feel like getting off my ass to do it? Yeah, that's helpful. Why hard line and get gigabit when I can go THz wireless and not?
We're still going to need omnidirectional for all of our mobile devices, which are the real problem; there are too many fucking devices on the network. This doesn't alleviate that problem at all, so the benefit is what? It saves you from having to run an ethernet cable around your room, and all for the low price of degraded service? Awesome!
In my experience, a learner's permit is simply a permit that allows you to operate a motor vehicle provided there is a licensed driver with you to supervise (the requirements obviously vary from state to state). Everywhere I've ever lived, if you don't have a learner's permit, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever you are allowed to be sitting in that driver's seat regardless of how many licensed driver's there are in the car. Also, there is an age requirement; a 12 year old is not allowed to get a learner's permit.
In some states you are even required to take a certified Driver's Ed course if you want to get a license under the age of 18 (usually given through school although ), and everywhere I've ever lived required a road test when you got your first license regardless. The learner's permit was necessary was to give you legal right to sit in the driver's seat and actually learn how to drive; other than that, it doesn't count for shit (well, except possibly for insurance purposes; I'm sure the second that someone in the household gets their permit the car insurance companies want to know about it so they can jack your rates up but I haven't experienced that yet.)
The time requirement I'm not really sure about. I'm sure that varies from state to state as well, but there's never been any time requirement in learning to drive that I've known of. It was up to the applicant to demonstrate that they knew how to drive on the road test, the instructor couldn't care less if you learned in a few days or a few years.
By the by, my road test was a complete joke. I literally pulled out of the parking lot at the DMV, made 4 right's around the block, pulled in, and backed into a parking spot. I didn't even have to wait at a light, I just had to demonstrate that I recognized that I was allowed to turn on red and that sometimes I would not be allowed to turn on red. Then again the written test is a joke, too. Maybe the problem is that the requirements aren't stringent enough?
What about the increased demand for mechanics to work on the dramatically increased number of buses and trains required due to everyone riding them instead of their own vehicles?
Jobs don't disappear so much as transition. You can invent a robot to put together a car, but you still need someone to maintain the robot, and someone has to design it, and someone has to sell it and market it, and someone has to work on improving it, someone has to physically move these robots around and get them from where they're built to where they're installed, someone has to do the books for the company that builds the robots, someone has to supply that company with the raw materials to build them, etc...
I realize you were being a little facetious (it seems that way, although my internet sarcasm detector goes haywire sometimes) but I felt like mentioning it. The real problem is stopping well-paying jobs from transitioning to lower paying ones, i.e., keep the auto mechanics from ending up working at Walmart for $8.50 an hour. Unfortunately, that seems to be the big problem right now; we're caught in a positive feedback loop where decreased supply of good paying jobs is leading to an overabundance of demand for those low paying jobs which do not afford people the extra money to purchase the goods made by the people with the well-paying jobs leading to less demand for their product leading to layoffs and more people at Walmart leading to even less demand and on and on and on...
The Cloud still needs to be maintained, and the more demand there is on the cloud the more it will grow and the more maintenance will be required.
It still doesn't solve the problem. It may currently help, but eventually it's going to have the same problems of saturation no matter how directional it is.
Finding new bands to saturate is not going to help the problem. We need a much wider band with many more discrete channels and smarter routers that are able to cooperate among themselves and share the bands in the most effective, efficient ways possible. That in itself would go a long way towards solving these saturation problems and there would be plenty of space available for everyone.
Yes, and our roads will be awesome when any asshole can just hop into a car and put the pedal on the floor....
Please, explain how the free market regulates people that don't know how to drive without causing millions of people to lose their lives in accidents. I would love to hear it.
I swear, some of these anti-regulation people must just be closet anarchists. It seems more and more like they just want to live in the Old West where the only rule of law is the one that comes out of the end of a gun...
Of course I do, and I haven't done so in over a decade. However, the more the government clamps-down, the more lucrative it becomes. It's hard to justify the risk when there is little reward, but the more they do nonsense like this, the easier it is for people like me to be rewarded for it.
The odds of getting caught are already infinitesimal and that's with all the deep packet inspection bullshit going on. Sneakernet is going to be completely untraceable short of the United States becoming a full on police state, and by the time that day comes to pass people trading HD movies with portable hard drives will be the least of our concerns.
Hell, my circle of friends already limits our exposure through cooperative downloading and sharing. Every time one of us visits another we're bringing our TB hdd's with us and swapping shit back and forth, and we've naturally kinda specialized on our own. I'm the music guy, one friend is the movie guy, another is the game guy, another is the 'expensive' software guy, another is the Mac guy...and we're all trading purely via sneakernet.
It's never going to stop. We're not talking about containers of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, it's a bunch of 1's and 0's on a hard drive. They can either come up with a new business model or expend all of their current profits trying to secure future profits. It really makes no difference to me. People will be creating art and software just the same as they did before, it'll just be far less likely to have a huge WARNER BROTHERS or SONY label on it. It's hard to see how that's necessarily a bad thing...
I understand that, so what happens when there's 15 cones propagating right next to each other? You know, kinda like how traditional wifi has exploded to the point where every goddamn thing in the world is a hotspot now?
Great, when there's one transmitter focused at one receiver. What happens when there's 20 transmitters sending to 20 receivers all within close proximity to each other? Wifi worked just fine for me 5 years ago when there was only as handful of people using it in my complex, now that everyone has wifi the service has become so degraded it's practically unusable for anyone that is trying to do more than surf the internet (and even that is a chore, requiring many page reloads sometimes to get the full page to load). Trying to transfer files, forget it, you might as well .rar it into a hundred pieces and email it.
The fact that we're making every damn thing wifi capable these days is only going to exacerbate the problem. Simply switching to a new band isn't going to solve the problem, it just creates a new saturation point. Similar to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, we need to come up with a solution that allows for a much, much wider frequency range with dozens of new 'channels' to handle all the traffic, along with routers that can actually talk to each other and negotiate. Rather than having 15 routers all chasing each other up and down the spectrum all day, we need routers that say "Okay, router A, you can have channel 1, router B can have channel 2..." rather than "ZOMG CHANNEL 1 IS CLEAN EVERYBODY RUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!!"
People want to test drive before they buy. The people that download and don't buy were never going to buy in the first place, there is not a single lost sale there.
Maybe the hardcore pirates. That's not what companies care about, they care about the general public.
Then the general public will just go to the hardcore pirates to get their shit for them, and sneakernet will return as the dominant form of file sharing once again.
Back in the early Napster days, I made a pretty good amount of spending money just downloading music for people and making mix discs for them. When nobody knew how to download music or burn CD's I was able to get $5-10 a piece for them, and with our cable connection (most everyone else was still on dial-up) I was downloading hundreds of songs at a time, they would be finishing faster than I could add new songs to the list. And it wasn't limited to us pesky kids, either; parents and teachers were actually my biggest customers.
It was seriously like the movie Blow, I was pretty much the go-to guy for anyone that didn't want to spend $20 buying a CD at Tower Records. Until the war on Napster started ramping up and people started having to name songs all sorts of weird shit to get around the filters they put on towards the end due to Metallica's lawsuit, I was cleaning up. Once it started becoming more of a pain in the ass to find the right files without digging (greatly increasing the time it took to assemble a mix disc) I stopped doing it, plus I was getting ready to graduate so I just didn't have time for it anymore.
Still, it was pretty lucrative for a while there, and the harder they make it for laypeople to download, the more lucrative they make it for us again. Hell, I'll make even more money, due to not needing to buy spindles of CD's anymore.