Suppose you own a property that is on the other side of someone else's property. You can't get to your property because his is in the way. You could buy from him a stretch of land sufficient to build an access road to your property. Or you could buy what is called an easement. This is when you buy from someone not the entire land, but the right to a specific use, such as the right to travel through that land to get to a point on the other side. Most of the rights remain with the original owner, with the exception of this one right of keeping you off his property. Of course, you expect to pay a lot less for an easement than you would to buy the entire land.
Now, if you've beared with me this far, I'll get to how this applies to DRM.
With DRM, IP owners are trying to sell us a very restricted set of rights, but they're not willing to sell them to us at a reduced price. If a completely copiable CD is worth $10, I will absolutely refuse to pay that amount for a CD that I cannot copy. I might consider paying a lot less -- say, $1. In other words, if you want to sell me less than what you're selling me now, you also have to charge me a lot less.
I bet there would be a whole lot less bitching about DRM if it was part of a fair bargain: you accept some restrictions, in exchange for a suitable price discount. But no, content owners want to have their cake and eat it too: charge full price AND impose restrictions. Why should anyone but them think this is a good deal?
I would agree that Apple is lacking a good entry-level desktop machine right now ($3K for a monster dual that can support 8-16 GB RAM is a good price, as are most of the PowerBooks... but there is no ideal $1K single processor desktop [the single proc G5s are really expensive in terms of bang for the buck]).
Entry-level single processor desktop systems for about $1,000? Hmmm... we... let's see... There's the eMac ($700-$1,700 depending on config). Entry-level, check. Single-processor, check. Desktop, check. About $1,000, check. And for just a little more, there's the iMac ($1,300 and up). And you can find both for less (or with bundled add-ons) without looking very hard.
The spammers can and do try to remain anonymous, but their very purpose is to make people buy something, which means that at some point there has to be a way for customers to reach the vendor paying for the spam to be sent. And that's what should be targeted. Fine those who pay to have spam sent, and they'll stop doing it. There need to be some safeguards, of course, so that a competitor does not maliciously have spam sent in another's name, to get their competitor fined, but that should be something that can be addressed.
What I'd like to see is a convenient way to download pix from a digital camera directly to an iPod, from where I could then transfer them to a laptop or desktop. There needn't be a way to actually see the pix on the iPod, just a way to get them in and out so that I can clear (or back up) the pix on a CF card while travelling without having to have a laptop with me at all times.
Most of what you ask for is decided by airlines, not aircraft manufacturers. Leg room is a function of spacing between seats. And that's something the airline decides, not the manufacturer. The manufacturer affects the width of the seats, because that's constrained by the width of the fuselage tube (the reason that seats on Boeing's narrowbodies like the 737 and 757 are an inch narrower than on Airbus narrowbodies like the A320 is that the 737 fuselage is still based on that designed for the 707 in the late 1960s, when the reference ass width was narrower than it is now). But leg room depends on how many seats the airlines choose to squeeze in, up to a maximum set by certification limits (which depend on the number of exits etc). So if your legroom is limited, complain to the airlines, not Boeing or Airbus. Note, for example, that American has adopted a marketing strategy of offering "more space in coach" by setting seat pitch (the distance between seats) an inch more than that of its competitors.
So if this is how things work, then the solution is easy, as long as you have a friend who is also a member and lives nearby. One month, you place all your orders (yours + hers) through your account; hers is idle. Next month, your availability stinks, hers is great. So you place all your orders through her account, and leave yours idle. The following month, her availability will stink, but yours will be great. Repeat ad infinitum.
A few years ago I had the following exchange with Paul Kunz of Stanford University, in an effort to determine who could claim to have been the first in North America to have used the web. Bottom line: probably him, but I was probably second. Paul did a rather extensive search through the rather small but tightly-knit NeXT community, and found no earlier claims.
> Well, I can claim to having HAD a browser earlier than you, though > I'm not sure about USING it. Here's the story: I got my NeXT slab in > March 1991. This was NeXT's entry-level 8/108 25MHz slab. Like many > other people, I soon found the 108MB HD to be very tight, given > NeXTSTEP's requirements. Later that spring, my father (Emilio > Pagiola of CERN, whom you know) visited me at Stanford, and he > brought me a 200MB HD. Since my father was also a NeXT user, he had > loaded the disk with a variety of available software for NeXTSTEP, > and since he was an early user of the web, this software included > Tim's browser. So I had a browser sometime in late spring 1991 -- I > can check my old datebooks for the exact dates, if you like.
PK: Well seems you had a web brower on your machine at a time when the PK: Web wasn't made public outside of CERN yet.
> Our offices were wired in the fall of 91, IIRC. At some point soon > thereafter, I did try out the www browser. There was very little if > anything to browse, of course. Basically CERN's seminar schedule > and the like. And so, since I needed the disk space, I deleted the > browser.
PK: I demonstrated the web browser at SLAC before the end of PK: September. Not sure of the exact date, but it was immediately on PK: my return from CERN.
> I only started using the web permanently when the first omniweb > browsers started coming out in 1993 or so.
PK: The president of the Omni company worked for me one summer on PK: HippoDraw just before his senior year at U Washington.
> So, I seem to have HAD a browser before you, but may or may not have > USED one before you.
PK: Seems I used the browser before you, but you had one on your PK: machine. I didn't pay any attention to the Web, even after public PK: announcement until I saw a demo on that trip.
Actually, the 747 typically cruises at Mach 0.85. It is in fact quite a bit faster than other subsonic aircraft in service, most of which have been optimized for economy rather than speed.
The Douglas DC-3: the first airliner design that could actually make money just carrying passengers, and still in service some 65 years after it's first flight.
I'm as big of a Mac Zealot as you can get, but I think this too is doomed to failure. $.99 a song? Ripoff. This means that the average CD will still cost $10-$12 to download, and you don't get a CD, a jewel case, or liner notes. Legal music swapping will not catch on until it is significantly cheaper, like around $.25 or less.
Doomed to failure? Just because a service doesn't address every conceivable situation doesn't mean it's "doomed to failure". Consider:
1. Want all the songs on the CD? Then you buy the CD. You pay your $12, and get case, liner notes, etc.
2. More to the point: don't want the whole CD? You buy the 1-2 songs you want. You pay your $0.99 per song, and admittedly don't have the liner notes -- but are liner notes worth $10 to you? $0.99 per song does not sound unreasonable (though I certainly would not object if it were less:-)
I'm quite ready to bet that there are many many CDs for which at least a portion of the buyers is only interested in one-two songs, max. For those buyers, paying $0.99 for each song is preferable to paying $12 for the entire CD. That's all Apple needs. Those who do want all the songs are in no way obligated to buy them all individually through this service.
of the story of the programming team asked to create realistic scenery software for a helicopter simulator to be demo'd in Australia. They decided it would be cute to have herds of kangaroos that would scatter if the helicopter flew low over them, as in all those National Geographic documentaries. So they found some code from an infantry war game that already had the desired scattering behavior and re-used it, replacing the soldier images with kangaroo images. And sure enough, the kangaroos scattered on cue when the helicopter flew over -- and then the 'roos ducked behind a hill and fired shoulder-mounted missiles back at the helicopter!
The latest version of the BCC story says talks between MS and the states continue, even though the deadline set by the judge has passed. Latest count given is 9 states for, 9 against.
Everyone seems to be comparing digital photos to negatives. And yes, if you shoot negatives, you're likely to keep the entire roll, even if only 1 or 2 frames appear to be useful. But in reality, most news is shot on slides, not negatives. And slides come in these very convenient mounts, one at a time. And it's the easiest thing in the world to throw out the slides you don't think you'll need, and just keep the 1 or 2 "keepers".
'Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS,' which they say has an 80% chance of happening by the end of next year."
As I read their article, what they're saying is that there's an 80% of this NOT happening before the end of the year. That's a pretty significant difference.
Apparently you've never heard of jury nullification. You most certainly *do* have the right to decide if a law is legal when you are on a jury.
No, a jury has the ABILITY to go against what the law says. That's what nullification is. Juries do not have the RIGHT to do so. If they already did have such a right, why would Missouri need to pass a law that said they did (which is what the URL you provided says? The author may believe that this is a right "rooted in the constitution" -- and maybe he's correct -- but it's not recognized under current law.
Kudos? Having effectively broken the legs of their only major competitor, they now graciously consent to a foot race with it. The fact that they've agreed to a level playing field doesn't change the fact that their competitor's legs remain broken.
Regarding charging for a tallied payment, I must say that sounds suspiciously like a subscription fee, and not at all a micropayment fee
There's a BIG difference between a micropayment scheme in which you only get billed once you reach a certain level and a subscription. In the former, you only pay for what you use (and typically, the relevant unit is smaller, eg a particular story). In the latter, you pay for every issue, whether you read it or not. That difference is important. Even if, in the end, the two might look similar on your credit card bill, how they got there will be fundamentally different.
Credit card companies simply won't work with small-transaction systems. Further, it would be a disaster for a company. Let's say/. charges $0.001 / story. I load the front page and get 10 stories, which costs me $0.01. They charge my credit card $0.01. There's a $0.25 transaction fee from CyberCash, a 3% take from the credit card company and, likely, a $0.25 - $0.50 transaction fee from the credit card company, too.
There's no reason it should work that way./. could simply keep track of how much you're spending and only send you a bill once you reach a designated threshold, say $10. That way the transaction fee is only a small % of the total bill.
It's not perfect, of course. If you stop reading/. once you reach $9.999, you get everything you've read so far for free. Or you could re-register under a new name at that point, with the same result. But that's a hassle, and only the truly desperate starving students will likely go to the trouble. You can make the threshold smaller to reduce this problem, but that makes the transaction fee loom larger as a % of the total bill.
These systems already exist. I know of one specialized auction site, for example, which only issues you a bill for the 5% commission fee on transactions once the total bill goes over $5.
And this is just one example of how you can minimize the impact of transaction costs on a micropayment system. There are others. Where people both pay and receive payments at different times, for example, one can imagine a clearinghouse mechanism where outstanding credits and debits are cancelled against each other, and only the outstanding balance is charged/paid.
Markets do respond to problems. There's no need to imagine that things can ONLY work the way they work now.
These changes have made meatpacking -- once a highly skilled, well-paid trade -- into the most dangerous job in the U.S., performed by legions of poor, transient immigrants whose rapidly rising rate of injuries attract little publicity or government attention.
And when was this? Try reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (it's public domain, and available here: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Sinclair/Th eJungle/) for some very detailed descriptions of what meat packing was like at the turn of the century. "the most dangerous job in the U.S., performed by legions of poor, transient immigrants with rapidly rising rate of injuries" would not be a bad summary.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you own a property that is on the other side of someone else's property. You can't get to your property because his is in the way. You could buy from him a stretch of land sufficient to build an access road to your property. Or you could buy what is called an easement. This is when you buy from someone not the entire land, but the right to a specific use, such as the right to travel through that land to get to a point on the other side. Most of the rights remain with the original owner, with the exception of this one right of keeping you off his property. Of course, you expect to pay a lot less for an easement than you would to buy the entire land.
Now, if you've beared with me this far, I'll get to how this applies to DRM.
With DRM, IP owners are trying to sell us a very restricted set of rights, but they're not willing to sell them to us at a reduced price. If a completely copiable CD is worth $10, I will absolutely refuse to pay that amount for a CD that I cannot copy. I might consider paying a lot less -- say, $1. In other words, if you want to sell me less than what you're selling me now, you also have to charge me a lot less.
I bet there would be a whole lot less bitching about DRM if it was part of a fair bargain: you accept some restrictions, in exchange for a suitable price discount. But no, content owners want to have their cake and eat it too: charge full price AND impose restrictions. Why should anyone but them think this is a good deal?
I would agree that Apple is lacking a good entry-level desktop machine right now ($3K for a monster dual that can support 8-16 GB RAM is a good price, as are most of the PowerBooks... but there is no ideal $1K single processor desktop [the single proc G5s are really expensive in terms of bang for the buck]).
Entry-level single processor desktop systems for about $1,000?
Hmmm... we... let's see...
There's the eMac ($700-$1,700 depending on config).
Entry-level, check. Single-processor, check. Desktop, check. About $1,000, check.
And for just a little more, there's the iMac ($1,300 and up).
And you can find both for less (or with bundled add-ons) without looking very hard.
The spammers can and do try to remain anonymous, but their very purpose is to make people buy something, which means that at some point there has to be a way for customers to reach the vendor paying for the spam to be sent. And that's what should be targeted. Fine those who pay to have spam sent, and they'll stop doing it. There need to be some safeguards, of course, so that a competitor does not maliciously have spam sent in another's name, to get their competitor fined, but that should be something that can be addressed.
What I'd like to see is a convenient way to download pix from a digital camera directly to an iPod, from where I could then transfer them to a laptop or desktop. There needn't be a way to actually see the pix on the iPod, just a way to get them in and out so that I can clear (or back up) the pix on a CF card while travelling without having to have a laptop with me at all times.
According to the specs available here, the G5s have
So, since they have two ports which are stated as being 1.1, I presume the ones listed as "2.0" are really 2.0, not just 2.0-in-name.
Most of what you ask for is decided by airlines, not aircraft manufacturers. Leg room is a function of spacing between seats. And that's something the airline decides, not the manufacturer. The manufacturer affects the width of the seats, because that's constrained by the width of the fuselage tube (the reason that seats on Boeing's narrowbodies like the 737 and 757 are an inch narrower than on Airbus narrowbodies like the A320 is that the 737 fuselage is still based on that designed for the 707 in the late 1960s, when the reference ass width was narrower than it is now). But leg room depends on how many seats the airlines choose to squeeze in, up to a maximum set by certification limits (which depend on the number of exits etc). So if your legroom is limited, complain to the airlines, not Boeing or Airbus. Note, for example, that American has adopted a marketing strategy of offering "more space in coach" by setting seat pitch (the distance between seats) an inch more than that of its competitors.
So if this is how things work, then the solution is easy, as long as you have a friend who is also a member and lives nearby. One month, you place all your orders (yours + hers) through your account; hers is idle. Next month, your availability stinks, hers is great. So you place all your orders through her account, and leave yours idle. The following month, her availability will stink, but yours will be great. Repeat ad infinitum.
Before Mosaic there was Tim Berner-Lee's WWW browser, available for NeXT workstations.
A few years ago I had the following exchange with Paul Kunz of Stanford University, in an effort to determine who could claim to have been the first in North America to have used the web. Bottom line: probably him, but I was probably second. Paul did a rather extensive search through the rather small but tightly-knit NeXT community, and found no earlier claims.
> Well, I can claim to having HAD a browser earlier than you, though
> I'm not sure about USING it. Here's the story: I got my NeXT slab in
> March 1991. This was NeXT's entry-level 8/108 25MHz slab. Like many
> other people, I soon found the 108MB HD to be very tight, given
> NeXTSTEP's requirements. Later that spring, my father (Emilio
> Pagiola of CERN, whom you know) visited me at Stanford, and he
> brought me a 200MB HD. Since my father was also a NeXT user, he had
> loaded the disk with a variety of available software for NeXTSTEP,
> and since he was an early user of the web, this software included
> Tim's browser. So I had a browser sometime in late spring 1991 -- I
> can check my old datebooks for the exact dates, if you like.
PK: Well seems you had a web brower on your machine at a time when the
PK: Web wasn't made public outside of CERN yet.
> Our offices were wired in the fall of 91, IIRC. At some point soon
> thereafter, I did try out the www browser. There was very little if
> anything to browse, of course. Basically CERN's seminar schedule
> and the like. And so, since I needed the disk space, I deleted the
> browser.
PK: I demonstrated the web browser at SLAC before the end of
PK: September. Not sure of the exact date, but it was immediately on
PK: my return from CERN.
> I only started using the web permanently when the first omniweb
> browsers started coming out in 1993 or so.
PK: The president of the Omni company worked for me one summer on
PK: HippoDraw just before his senior year at U Washington.
> So, I seem to have HAD a browser before you, but may or may not have
> USED one before you.
PK: Seems I used the browser before you, but you had one on your
PK: machine. I didn't pay any attention to the Web, even after public
PK: announcement until I saw a demo on that trip.
Actually, the 747 typically cruises at Mach 0.85. It is in fact quite a bit faster than other subsonic aircraft in service, most of which have been optimized for economy rather than speed.
The Douglas DC-3: the first airliner design that could actually make money just carrying passengers, and still in service some 65 years after it's first flight.
Some recent pics of examples still in service: in Alaska, South Africa, Puerto Rico, Florida, England, and here's a military example from Guatemala.
Doomed to failure? Just because a service doesn't address every conceivable situation doesn't mean it's "doomed to failure". Consider:
1. Want all the songs on the CD? Then you buy the CD. You pay your $12, and get case, liner notes, etc.
2. More to the point: don't want the whole CD? You buy the 1-2 songs you want. You pay your $0.99 per song, and admittedly don't have the liner notes -- but are liner notes worth $10 to you? $0.99 per song does not sound unreasonable (though I certainly would not object if it were less
I'm quite ready to bet that there are many many CDs for which at least a portion of the buyers is only interested in one-two songs, max. For those buyers, paying $0.99 for each song is preferable to paying $12 for the entire CD. That's all Apple needs. Those who do want all the songs are in no way obligated to buy them all individually through this service.
of the story of the programming team asked to create realistic scenery software for a helicopter simulator to be demo'd in Australia. They decided it would be cute to have herds of kangaroos that would scatter if the helicopter flew low over them, as in all those National Geographic documentaries. So they found some code from an infantry war game that already had the desired scattering behavior and re-used it, replacing the soldier images with kangaroo images. And sure enough, the kangaroos scattered on cue when the helicopter flew over -- and then the 'roos ducked behind a hill and fired shoulder-mounted missiles back at the helicopter!
and
IANAL, but wouldn't this logic mean the DMCA is equally un-constitutional?
The latest version of the BCC story says talks between MS and the states continue, even though the deadline set by the judge has passed. Latest count given is 9 states for, 9 against.
Everyone seems to be comparing digital photos to negatives. And yes, if you shoot negatives, you're likely to keep the entire roll, even if only 1 or 2 frames appear to be useful. But in reality, most news is shot on slides, not negatives. And slides come in these very convenient mounts, one at a time. And it's the easiest thing in the world to throw out the slides you don't think you'll need, and just keep the 1 or 2 "keepers".
As I read their article, what they're saying is that there's an 80% of this NOT happening before the end of the year. That's a pretty significant difference.
That spike at roughly 1830Z doesn't inspire much confidence in these data.
Kudos? Having effectively broken the legs of their only major competitor, they now graciously consent to a foot race with it. The fact that they've agreed to a level playing field doesn't change the fact that their competitor's legs remain broken.
There's a BIG difference between a micropayment scheme in which you only get billed once you reach a certain level and a subscription. In the former, you only pay for what you use (and typically, the relevant unit is smaller, eg a particular story). In the latter, you pay for every issue, whether you read it or not. That difference is important. Even if, in the end, the two might look similar on your credit card bill, how they got there will be fundamentally different.
There's no reason it should work that way. /. could simply keep track of how much you're spending and only send you a bill once you reach a designated threshold, say $10. That way the transaction fee is only a small % of the total bill.
It's not perfect, of course. If you stop reading /. once you reach $9.999, you get everything you've read so far for free. Or you could re-register under a new name at that point, with the same result. But that's a hassle, and only the truly desperate starving students will likely go to the trouble. You can make the threshold smaller to reduce this problem, but that makes the transaction fee loom larger as a % of the total bill.
These systems already exist. I know of one specialized auction site, for example, which only issues you a bill for the 5% commission fee on transactions once the total bill goes over $5.
And this is just one example of how you can minimize the impact of transaction costs on a micropayment system. There are others. Where people both pay and receive payments at different times, for example, one can imagine a clearinghouse mechanism where outstanding credits and debits are cancelled against each other, and only the outstanding balance is charged/paid.
Markets do respond to problems. There's no need to imagine that things can ONLY work the way they work now.