There may be things wrong with the way the movie people do business, but thin margins are not one of them. "somehow the expenses almost exactly match the costs" also happens in your neighborhood grocery store. A box of cornflakes marked $0.99 costs the store about $0.98 for the product, the shipping, heat and light in the shop, and labor to put it on the shelf. In a competitive market (which is so popular here on/.) margins are driven toward zero.
The comic publisher could have priced Spiderman books at a million dollars each and shared fabulous profits with the artist, *except* who would pay a million for a comic book when there's one quite like it on the same shelf for ten cents?
But that's immaterial to this discussion. Paying for fact-checking is not optional when making legal claims, because you may have to go to court and demonstrate some facts bearing out your assertions. Ask SCO.
I dunno about "defamatory". It would be hard to prove that they intentionally misinterpreted the name of a file just to bug you. I think that "negligent" would be a more productive concept to explore. Maybe there's something in the public-nuisance laws that would apply?:-}
What would I do? Well, naturally I'd hand it to the cabbie, hoping he'd be honest enough to turn it in at the company's lost-and-found desk so the owner can reclaim it.
The good old desk phone handset was designed to fit the human hand and head. The contemporary cell phone is designed to be as small as they can make it, to win cool-points. But engineering will eventually triumph over decoration when people settle down and *use* these artifacts. I think that more people are beginning to realize that machines should first of all be fit for their function.
Some of the new stuff is much better than the old. I would never willingly go back to the old LC FM tuners now that I've used PLL types. But I want a radio that's big enough for my hands to operate, no matter what is inside. The use of pinheads masquerading as switch buttons is the opposite of engineering.
Take another look. A free market not only involves human intervention, it is composed solely and completely of human intervention. It's an emergent property of billions of individual human decisions; there is nothing else involved.
Consider also that the goal of a free market is to maximize *everybody's* profit. That includes yours. And it's a narrow view which says that profit is measured only in money. If your expectation of an early death from continued operation of Corporation X is worth more to you than the money you save because Corporation X offers the lowest price, continuing to do business with Corporation X would be irrational. If the difference is big enough, it becomes rational to make your own stuff and sell your excess capacity to like-minded people, cutting further into X' sales and reducing their impact on the world.
OTOH I do believe in intelligent regulation to add a few necessary constraints to the optimization problem and approach optimal solutions more quickly and cheaply.
Of course, then we have to keep an eye on the regulators too. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If all of the choices are unpleasant, then there's room for a less-offensive new competitor. The new guys will have an awful time at first, but if they accept that this is so and prepare for it, they can survive and they'll quickly win the loyalty of lots of the people who care about such things. Sometimes the bad guys take over a market, but they can't keep it forever.
But my point was not that "let the market handle its own evil players" is the *best* way to run an economy, only that it *can* be made to work. I don't think we'll actually see things done this way. As you point out, some centralization and specialization is a more effective use of our collective brainpower.
BTW, public sentiment has no power at *any* time, never had it and never will. Public *choices* are the power center of the masses. Wave signs and chant all you want, and the fat cats will just go on counting their money. But let the count come up less than last month, and suddenly you get noticed.
The free market does alright. Its weakness is that it requires lots of information to work well. The *necessary* function of government in such cases is that it has the power to compel the disgorgement of hidden information and to come in and sift through everything until it is found.
We all assume that, having discovered something wrong, "the government" should go on and make it right, but it doesn't have to be that way. Given enough information, the market can simply shun bad boys out of business, and if we expected to have to do that to make the system work, it would get done. If we knew that the FTC (e.g.) would simply dig out the information and post it on a page somewhere, and that we have to do the enforcement, we could do it and we could tailor our enforcement to our own (or our employers') ideas of what sort of punishment fits the crime.
Imagine that you pulled some shady deal, and now wherever you go, buyers are saying, "waitaminute, you have Sparkle Farkel on your board -- wasn't she in charge of Scamco when they cheated all those people? no thanks, I'll buy from someone else." Imagine that *billions* of potential customers are doing this because they know that (a) you did it, but (b) nobody else is going to punish you on their behalf.
It's complicated and unwieldy but it could work if enough people cared. That's a mighty big "if", though. And you still need the power to pry out the information.
Hey, I own a piece of several corporations, and I like dividends as much as the next investor, but I'm not altogether pleased with the way a couple of boards are treating my companies or my customers, and if they looked at my votes they know it. I'll take a somewhat smaller ROI if that's necessary to enable civilized behavior. The short-term advantages gained by sleazy practices tend to be canceled out over 20-30 years, and if I was only concerned with the next quarter I'd put the money in a CD.
"A few" investors can make a difference only if they are BIG investors, which generally means pension plans and insurance companies. It takes quite a lot of grandmothers to make the same difference.
"Oops, he just opened a message in outlook with a virus, and now I have it too."
This, at least, does not have to happen on MS Windows XP (or any other version of NT). Unless you are running XP Toy^WHome, you have a filesystem with real access control, so use it. You nor your co-worker should be running with administrator priv.s, so his mistakes should hit a wall when they try to spread to your work. Neither of you should be able to infect the shared software.
Reminds me of the new facility we built many years ago. Someone had the bright idea of setting up pairs of cubicles with a work surface between 'em, and putting a single terminal on that surface on a lazy-Susan deal so we could share it. When the programmers saw it, we didn't know whether to laugh or scream, but the plan got changed.
(Changed: they put two terminals on the shared surface. Uhhuh. A couple of years later we scrounged some spare cube parts and replaced those tables with walls. Eventually we even got to buy some shelving and chalkboards to hang on the added wall panels. By then they were becoming fairly well-laid-out cubes.)
Yeah, it's been fun watching Microsoft carefully remove all of the multiple-concurrent-user stuff from VMS to make NT, then slowly add it back in (with major help, or at least a kick in the pants, from Citrix along the way) over the years.
It's a lot older than the PC. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when General Electric made mainframes, and you'll be getting close to the origins of this idea.
The problem is that you don't get a choice about the pension fund. You sign up for the pension plan automagically when you take the job, and they don't ask what YOU think they ought to be buying for you.
For example, I have a choice between a statewide public employee retirement plan where I have no way of knowing *what* they buy, or several extremely traditional mutual funds. I can't just take the money (MY money!) to my own broker and have him buy socially responsible companies for me. The only possibility of my having a say in this is to rally a lot of fellow employees and keep yelling at HR until they add a plan more to our liking, and I don't recall ever hearing of that happening.
(Sound bite: lots of options doesn't mean you really have a choice.)
'I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "wider interests".'
Stuff other than the fatness of your pension. Ozone, sweatshops, monoculture, ethics, community, etc. Are they investing in a company you're protesting?
Back in the 60s or so, one of the more important issues was that it had become possible to build affordable telecom equipment and services *that customers could not use*, because the One True Telco were uninterested in selling it and refused to permit the customer to install his own. The only provider in town had a fixed vision of telecom services from which the subscribers' vision had sharply diverged, and they weren't interested in changing.
Well, why is your company selling service to resellers for less than it's worth? What's wrong with taking on partners to handle a portion of the fiddly, nickel-dime individual-subscriber scutwork?
Slashdot Mirror
There may be things wrong with the way the movie people do business, but thin margins are not one of them. "somehow the expenses almost exactly match the costs" also happens in your neighborhood grocery store. A box of cornflakes marked $0.99 costs the store about $0.98 for the product, the shipping, heat and light in the shop, and labor to put it on the shelf. In a competitive market (which is so popular here on /.) margins are driven toward zero.
The comic publisher could have priced Spiderman books at a million dollars each and shared fabulous profits with the artist, *except* who would pay a million for a comic book when there's one quite like it on the same shelf for ten cents?
But that's immaterial to this discussion. Paying for fact-checking is not optional when making legal claims, because you may have to go to court and demonstrate some facts bearing out your assertions. Ask SCO.
"unwarranted harassment"
This must be some new meaning of "harassment", if it is possible for some cases to be warranted.
My understanding of the word is as follows:
1. A contacts B in some fashion that B finds unwelcome.
2. B informs A that his contact is unwelcome and asks that he cease contact.
3. A contacts B again.
(1) is not harassment, even if it happens a hundred times. (3) is harassment even if it happens only once. The difference is obviously (2).
I dunno about "defamatory". It would be hard to prove that they intentionally misinterpreted the name of a file just to bug you. I think that "negligent" would be a more productive concept to explore. Maybe there's something in the public-nuisance laws that would apply? :-}
Whoop-de-do, we've been using SafeWord cards just about forever around here. Nice to see at least one ISP dragging itself into the '90s.
What would I do? Well, naturally I'd hand it to the cabbie, hoping he'd be honest enough to turn it in at the company's lost-and-found desk so the owner can reclaim it.
What a question!
The good old desk phone handset was designed to fit the human hand and head. The contemporary cell phone is designed to be as small as they can make it, to win cool-points. But engineering will eventually triumph over decoration when people settle down and *use* these artifacts. I think that more people are beginning to realize that machines should first of all be fit for their function.
Some of the new stuff is much better than the old. I would never willingly go back to the old LC FM tuners now that I've used PLL types. But I want a radio that's big enough for my hands to operate, no matter what is inside. The use of pinheads masquerading as switch buttons is the opposite of engineering.
Just kidding....
...it's the control, stupid! When MS Windows WILL NOT LET ME DO WHAT I NEED TO DO MY JOB and Linux will, guess which I will specify.
"Wrong. Its to maximize your own profit."
For *every* value of "you". You are looking at it from your perspective; I'm looking at it from society's perspective.
Take another look. A free market not only involves human intervention, it is composed solely and completely of human intervention. It's an emergent property of billions of individual human decisions; there is nothing else involved.
Consider also that the goal of a free market is to maximize *everybody's* profit. That includes yours. And it's a narrow view which says that profit is measured only in money. If your expectation of an early death from continued operation of Corporation X is worth more to you than the money you save because Corporation X offers the lowest price, continuing to do business with Corporation X would be irrational. If the difference is big enough, it becomes rational to make your own stuff and sell your excess capacity to like-minded people, cutting further into X' sales and reducing their impact on the world.
OTOH I do believe in intelligent regulation to add a few necessary constraints to the optimization problem and approach optimal solutions more quickly and cheaply.
Of course, then we have to keep an eye on the regulators too. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If all of the choices are unpleasant, then there's room for a less-offensive new competitor. The new guys will have an awful time at first, but if they accept that this is so and prepare for it, they can survive and they'll quickly win the loyalty of lots of the people who care about such things. Sometimes the bad guys take over a market, but they can't keep it forever.
But my point was not that "let the market handle its own evil players" is the *best* way to run an economy, only that it *can* be made to work. I don't think we'll actually see things done this way. As you point out, some centralization and specialization is a more effective use of our collective brainpower.
BTW, public sentiment has no power at *any* time, never had it and never will. Public *choices* are the power center of the masses. Wave signs and chant all you want, and the fat cats will just go on counting their money. But let the count come up less than last month, and suddenly you get noticed.
Um, isn't Crucial a Micron label? :-/
Point to something that is perfect.
The free market does alright. Its weakness is that it requires lots of information to work well. The *necessary* function of government in such cases is that it has the power to compel the disgorgement of hidden information and to come in and sift through everything until it is found.
We all assume that, having discovered something wrong, "the government" should go on and make it right, but it doesn't have to be that way. Given enough information, the market can simply shun bad boys out of business, and if we expected to have to do that to make the system work, it would get done. If we knew that the FTC (e.g.) would simply dig out the information and post it on a page somewhere, and that we have to do the enforcement, we could do it and we could tailor our enforcement to our own (or our employers') ideas of what sort of punishment fits the crime.
Imagine that you pulled some shady deal, and now wherever you go, buyers are saying, "waitaminute, you have Sparkle Farkel on your board -- wasn't she in charge of Scamco when they cheated all those people? no thanks, I'll buy from someone else." Imagine that *billions* of potential customers are doing this because they know that (a) you did it, but (b) nobody else is going to punish you on their behalf.
It's complicated and unwieldy but it could work if enough people cared. That's a mighty big "if", though. And you still need the power to pry out the information.
Hey, I own a piece of several corporations, and I like dividends as much as the next investor, but I'm not altogether pleased with the way a couple of boards are treating my companies or my customers, and if they looked at my votes they know it. I'll take a somewhat smaller ROI if that's necessary to enable civilized behavior. The short-term advantages gained by sleazy practices tend to be canceled out over 20-30 years, and if I was only concerned with the next quarter I'd put the money in a CD.
"A few" investors can make a difference only if they are BIG investors, which generally means pension plans and insurance companies. It takes quite a lot of grandmothers to make the same difference.
No point. As soon as SCO vs. IBM is finished, IBM vs. SCO begins. There is no escape; they have to fight the giant.
"Oops, he just opened a message in outlook with a virus, and now I have it too."
This, at least, does not have to happen on MS Windows XP (or any other version of NT). Unless you are running XP Toy^WHome, you have a filesystem with real access control, so use it. You nor your co-worker should be running with administrator priv.s, so his mistakes should hit a wall when they try to spread to your work. Neither of you should be able to infect the shared software.
Reminds me of the new facility we built many years ago. Someone had the bright idea of setting up pairs of cubicles with a work surface between 'em, and putting a single terminal on that surface on a lazy-Susan deal so we could share it. When the programmers saw it, we didn't know whether to laugh or scream, but the plan got changed.
(Changed: they put two terminals on the shared surface. Uhhuh. A couple of years later we scrounged some spare cube parts and replaced those tables with walls. Eventually we even got to buy some shelving and chalkboards to hang on the added wall panels. By then they were becoming fairly well-laid-out cubes.)
Yeah, it's been fun watching Microsoft carefully remove all of the multiple-concurrent-user stuff from VMS to make NT, then slowly add it back in (with major help, or at least a kick in the pants, from Citrix along the way) over the years.
It's a lot older than the PC. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when General Electric made mainframes, and you'll be getting close to the origins of this idea.
Someone must have told them about the brilliant new idea called "timesharing". This principle, introduced less than fifty years ago....
The problem is that you don't get a choice about the pension fund. You sign up for the pension plan automagically when you take the job, and they don't ask what YOU think they ought to be buying for you.
For example, I have a choice between a statewide public employee retirement plan where I have no way of knowing *what* they buy, or several extremely traditional mutual funds. I can't just take the money (MY money!) to my own broker and have him buy socially responsible companies for me. The only possibility of my having a say in this is to rally a lot of fellow employees and keep yelling at HR until they add a plan more to our liking, and I don't recall ever hearing of that happening.
(Sound bite: lots of options doesn't mean you really have a choice.)
'I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "wider interests".'
Stuff other than the fatness of your pension. Ozone, sweatshops, monoculture, ethics, community, etc. Are they investing in a company you're protesting?
It's not always about price.
Back in the 60s or so, one of the more important issues was that it had become possible to build affordable telecom equipment and services *that customers could not use*, because the One True Telco were uninterested in selling it and refused to permit the customer to install his own. The only provider in town had a fixed vision of telecom services from which the subscribers' vision had sharply diverged, and they weren't interested in changing.
Well, why is your company selling service to resellers for less than it's worth? What's wrong with taking on partners to handle a portion of the fiddly, nickel-dime individual-subscriber scutwork?
The national telcos and cable operators, on the other hand, enjoy economies of scale beyond the wildest dreams of a community group.