I wouldn't necessarily say that, I'm actually thinking about moving *into* MA for tax reasons - I live in New York City now, state/local income taxes here are roughly twice what they would be living in Boston and sales taxes are almost 75% higher than in MA. Some small businesses operating in NYC have it even worse off, since the city doesn't recognize S Corporation status and imposes a hefty tax on profits.
One of the best things about the federal system is that it creates a competitive market between states. If you find living in MA or NY is worth the money, then do so; if not, simply move to NH or DE or another state with no sales tax. But as long as you're enjoying the services provided by the MA government then you're obligated to pay your fair share of the cost. Whining about federal income taxes is a different story, since it's a lot more difficult to change countries, but dodging state taxes is like (ignore the sales tax component of this) ordering a new gadget from amazon.com, buying the same thing at a brick-and-mortar store at a higher price and returning it once the amazon one comes; running that store costs more money than running amazon's warehouse and it's only fair that you pay the extra.
So either live in MA and pay the cost or move to NH and enjoy your tax-free isolation.
Yeah, but there's no accounting for pork-barrel stuff... billions of dollars to construction contractors in the home state of some influential politicians can help almost any big appropriation along. And the Big Dig is quite possibly history's greatest example of this.
Not so with a good brand offering a worldwide warranty; IBM is excellent for this, my ThinkPad broke on a trip to Beijing and they still managed to get me warranty service from a local computer shop.
Yeah, getting a 5 billion dollar appropriation out of Congress in the middle of a deficit crisis for developing alternatives to commercial software that already works perfectly well for most people is no problem at all.
Maybe if you earmarked 4.5 billion of it to go to corporate tax breaks for open source deployment and/or some poorly defined item that really just means "we'll just give it to the NSA" you'd have a shot...
Well it beats the universities' own name choices. Harvard's actually an excellent example, they came very close at one point to naming one of the residential Houses after the university's third president Leonard Hoar, I kid you not.
Kyle actually is pretty well respected, he's certainly had a few slip-ups and release delays in the past but he's been around for a LONG time and I can't imagine he'd do anything like fake a letter from Nintendo to get him out of some minor hot water over release dates.
A more likely explanation is either that Nintendo just found out about this this week and the letter was a just-in-the-nick-of-time type thing, or that they held off on notifying him until the day before release in the hope that it would throw everything into chaos as it seems to have done.
Yeah, but the last thing they wanted is for people to KNOW for certain that they were funding SCO - it makes them look like they can't compete on their own merits, and based on all those banners they've been running on/. lately it seems like a major part of their Linux strategy at the moment is to convince people that Windows' TCO is still lower in most cases (saying it don't make it so, guys...)
Well as of next week you can develop for Palm under Eclipse too, and performance-wise at least on slower Palms you might be better off with a compatibility framework like SHARK. But not knowing what exactly you do I can certainly imagine that for many developers it's easiest to just write once in Java and not have to think about it.
Just to stave off any potential accusations of Mac-bashing: I still love Mac OS, and though my work at this point requires me to use Windows, as soon as I can afford to get another Mac to play around with I will. I just think Apple needs to put a little more effort into quality control.
Performa 475: first Mac of my own (before that it was my parents' LCII). Shipped with I believe some derivative of System 7.5; with only 4MB of RAM included and the system taking up roughly 2.5 of that, half of the included applications wouldn't work, and I immediately had to run out and buy a RAM upgrade. Modem failed after about 6 months.
Power Computing PowerBase 200: a Mac clone, yes, and boy did it suck... after 4 months, refused to turn on one day, sent out an onsite tech with a new graphics card, didn't fix the problem, sent out the same onsite tech the next week with a new motherboard and CPU card, didn't fix the problem, finally realized that this might be power supply related and had me send the thing back. Returned from the factory and STILL broken, eventually persuaded tech support under threat of a lawsuit to refund my original purchase price.
Power Mac 7300/200: logic board failure after 8 months, thankfully the tech actually brought out a logic board and fixed the problem on the first try.
PowerBook G3 266 (revision B): special-ordered DVD drive broke after 6 months, audio port fell off after 8 (though I fixed that with a soldering iron since I didn't want to be computer-less for two weeks).
After this I bought a ThinkPad A20p (with Win2k), which worked without a hitch for 2 years until the lure of OSX drew me back in with:
PowerBook G4 667 (rev B): latch partly broke after about 2 months (the cheap platic thingy that held it in the case partly broke and wouldn't hold the lid down very well), a few months after that the DVD/CD-RW drive failed (wouldn't accept disks anymore) and shortly after that the thing died completely and started Sad Chime'ing whenever I tried to start it.
PowerBook G4 1GHz: bad pixel flurry, 'nuff said.
After this, bought a Toshiba (Sat 5205), which worked great until I decided I needed a RAID and switched to a homebuilt desktop (also works great, but homebuilt systems usually do since you can control the component quality) and a tiny X-series ThinkPad.
Now I do have bad luck with devices in general (my PDA list is almost as depressing), but still, for EVERY SINGLE MAC to do this to me is a little bit crazy. I'm really not that rough on these things, there's no reason they should be failing with such alarming frequency.
I sell a language learning/translation dictionary product, and the current version actually goes for around $49 (with commensurately higher volumes than "a few dozen copies"). The $99 figure was meant more as a general example of how a vertical market product can be a moneymaker with even a very small volume. I am actually working on another product now that in some configurations will run as high as $150, and I have reason to think that some people will actually pay that, but aside from software for the expense account crowd $50-$70 tends to be the limit, and most of the software at that level is either reference content or multiple-application suites like Documents To Go. For a top-tier utility or productivity app a figure like $30 is more reasonable, and games etc are generally in the $10-$20 range.
And I use CodeWarrior; it has a number of annoying idiosyncracies, but far fewer than gcc (which requires you to mangle your code in various ways just to get it running at all), and I'm quite fond of Metrowerks' debugger. But if you're considering buying it, wait two weeks, as it's likely that there'll be a new version announced at the PalmSource conference next month.
I'm definitely making a living; even with health insurance and the sky-high cost of rent in Manhattan I'm still banking $1000/month or so. If you get a successful product the first thing you need to do is establish a savings account - that way if the next product's a bust you can still keep your head above water.
There's some recent discussion of this sort of thing on the Palm OS developer forum here, and a slightly less enthusiastic account from one game developer here - clearly YMMV but there are certainly plenty of folks out there making a living on this.
I started my own company back in college, and thanks to an unexpectedly successful product by graduation time I was making enough money so I didn't even need to look for another job. But even if you're unemployed, depending on your credit history and other factors you may be able to get startup financing, or failing that you can try to find a low-paying low-stress part-time job that'll pay you just enough to keep you going until your first product release.
I design/write/sell software for Palm OS, and for what it's worth, PDA's and embedded devices are a *great* opportunity for small developers now - the size and expectations are low enough so that one programmer in a couple of months can create a top-tier PDA product. The only problem is that the programming tends to be a more frustrating than for Windows - Palm OS in particular can be very perplexing for someone who isn't familiar with event loops and 80's style application coding, and even Pocket PC is fraught with weird compatibility issues. And the development tools for both platforms kind of suck. I'm not exactly a brilliant programmer, though, so it's more a question of patience than anything else, and if you've got the stomach for it it can be quite rewarding.
Really it all boils down to ideas; the key to early success as an independent software developer is making something that's sufficiently innovative/exciting that your customers will basically sell it for you, because even with Google et al big advertising campaigns are still the domain of big companies. One great way to get started is to find a small niche market with few competitors, create a well-polished new product for it with some innovative ideas, and back it up with a friendly attitude and impeccable support - at $99 a pop you can make a perfectly decent living with a few dozen orders a month.
The response to this is very simple: Linux is a largely international effort, without US help Linux would still continue on its merry way, and if we want to stay competitive in the global IT market the only option is for our software firms to embrace this movement that we can't stop anyway.
Or failing that, just point them to IBM and the enormous success they've enjoyed with Linux in spite of the fact that it's free. Microsoft and a couple of patent-mongering UNIX firms may be losing money from this, but everybody else is gaining from it.
Speaking like someone who hasn't seen the new cut of ST:TMP - maybe not as good as 2, 4, 6, or 8, but better than Nemesis. TMP's biggest problem was pacing and the fact it was basically a bad 2001 knockoff, but with the director's cut it's actually a halfway decent 2001 knockoff.
Just to remind everyone who seems to be forgetting this, there is actually one very good argument for why there *shouldn't* be a paper trail for electronic voting: it doesn't just make it possible to audit machines, it makes it possible to audit PEOPLE.
Buying votes may be illegal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and one of the main problems for prospective vote-buyers now is the fact that there's no way to ensure that the people you're paying to vote a certain way are actually doing so.
Then along comes the electronic voting receipt, which by its very nature *has* to be easily readable/auditable and *has* to have a very good system for ensuring it's authentic. Now, you can buy somebody's vote and be sure they actually vote the way you wanted. You can even do it a little more insidiously, perhaps, and in a way that might not necessarily even be quite so illegal, offering somebody some sort of small in-kind gift if they show you their Bush voting receipt, or even just an intangible reward like membership in a club or something.
In areas where people of one political alignment are vastly in the majority, voters who swing the other way sometimes need to keep their political preferences quiet, and this could make it harder for them to do that ("If you're *really* a Bush fan, show us your voting slip.")
Let alone the idiots who'll get the damn things framed to hang up in their house if the guy wins, the people who'll put them in plastic badge holders and wear them around their necks all day, protesters who'll publicly burn them, etc. I don't know, it just seems very wrong to me for there to be any record at all of your vote that can go with you outside of the voting booth.
Now with some paper ballot systems it's expected that after checking your receipt you'll deposit it in a box at the polling station (and not keep a copy for yourself), but even in that case people can pocket them / swap them with fake ones (which won't matter except in the unlikely event of a recount) or give some potential vote-buyer a discreet glance at the thing before turning it in.
The only way to get around these problems is to create a system where a receipt is human-readable but easily counterfeitable so that nobody can verify its authenticity except the elections board; I don't quite know how such a system would work, though, and it seems like it would have a lot of potential for confusing people.
So IMHO receipts are not the solution, open-source is the solution; open things up to public scrutiny and receipts become largely unnecessary. Or better yet, stick to paper ballots but use *good* paper ballots; fill-in-the-bubbles, perhaps, which have been used quite effectively in many places.
I think Ian Holm might be a little too old... I mean yes, they *could* make him look younger with makeup (as they did for the flashback in FotR), but the man's 72 and pulling that look off for the entire movie would be rather difficult. PJ doesn't seem like the sort of director who'd jump through hoops for the sake of preserving a tiny bit of extra consistency with the trilogy.
Andy Serkis, on the other hand... I can't imagine anyone else playing Gollum now. And just think of it, a crowded theater sometime in the winter of 2009, Bilbo in a cave, then a familiar CGI face and the first whisper of "Precious"... think of the beginning of the opening crawl for Episode 1 (when we didn't know how badly it would suck) and multiply it by 10 and that's what you'll get.
And of course we have to have Ian McKellen playing Gandalf too, simply because he loves doing it and there's no one better out there for the role.
And just to make it clear: this would be enforced at a protocol level rather than as a "tax" by some government, so jurisdictional issues don't apply; sending server contacts receiving server, receiving server tells sending server that it's not an approved sender and can only reach this recipient by paying $.01 to account foo on server bar with reference number 123456; sending server pays this, receiving server receives acknowledgement that the payment was received and delivers the message. Yes, this involves a fair amount of overhead, but much less so than all of the extra spam-related traffic they're dealing with now.
You don't even have to deploy this everywhere at once; if a sending server doesn't support the new protocol then the receiving server returns an error message that provides some alternate way for the sender to pay for the message (possibly by completing some sort of i'm-a-human-being test like several anti-spam services have now).
Here's an easy way to get rid of spam, based on some other recent ideas: set up a system where sending someone an e-mail costs you a penny, unless you're on an "approved senders list" that that person has set up. Instead of going to an ISP or some other entity, though, that penny goes to the receiver's account, and then can be used by them to pay more of these penny charges. Accounts are maintained at a website (or possibly several with an interlinked network), which charges some sort of small percentage fee whenever new funds are added to cover server costs, administrative overhead, credit card processing fees, etc. The only messages not subject to the fee would be message delivery errors, which can easily be checked against recent sent messages and made to follow a standard format.
The great thing about this scheme is that since the receiver gets to keep the penny, consumers effectively end up paying nothing for this, since typically we'll receive a lot more of these messages than we send out (as there are plenty of copmanies that are quite happy to pay a penny per message to talk to us, since it's a lot less than postage or telephone charges). ISP's can even provide their customers with a few dollars in credit to get started, or perhaps 20 or 30 cents of it monthly, so that most people will likely never even need to put up any money at all. And yet, by charging a penny per spam this can easily put the spammers right out of business.
Absolutely, in fact this is almost certainly the plan these manufacturers have in mind.
The pirates are always happy to pursue any moneymaking opportunity they can find; within a few months of their introduction, pirated DVD's were already almost as widely available as VCD's, and no doubt once people start buying EVD players the same thing will happen.
Then, once people have EVD players and widely available disks, legitimate movie companies will have no choice but to adopt EVD; otherwise, they'll have a base of millions and millions of consumers who have no choice but to buy pirated EVD's. And considering the pragmatic-to-a-fault attitude of the Chinese courts and legislators towards such matters, I suspect that they'll give the studios a hard time about cracking down on pirated EVD's until legitimate alternatives are available. Yes, since they're not well-protected those EVD's can then be easily pirated as well, but since that's already true about DVD's it hardly makes a difference at this point (and will probably translate to further cost savings since there's less sophisticated decoding hardware required, perhaps even allowing them to use older and cheaper processes for chip fabrication etc).
So this could be a real coup for the Chinese - single-handedly force the studios to adopt a poorly-secured, proprietary video format just to stay in the market.
Don't look for these to show up in the US, though; DVD players are already way too common, so they'll never show up officially, and considering eBay's sheer and utter spinelessness towards MPAA legal threats it's doubtful we'll see them show up there either.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't necessarily say that, I'm actually thinking about moving *into* MA for tax reasons - I live in New York City now, state/local income taxes here are roughly twice what they would be living in Boston and sales taxes are almost 75% higher than in MA. Some small businesses operating in NYC have it even worse off, since the city doesn't recognize S Corporation status and imposes a hefty tax on profits.
One of the best things about the federal system is that it creates a competitive market between states. If you find living in MA or NY is worth the money, then do so; if not, simply move to NH or DE or another state with no sales tax. But as long as you're enjoying the services provided by the MA government then you're obligated to pay your fair share of the cost. Whining about federal income taxes is a different story, since it's a lot more difficult to change countries, but dodging state taxes is like (ignore the sales tax component of this) ordering a new gadget from amazon.com, buying the same thing at a brick-and-mortar store at a higher price and returning it once the amazon one comes; running that store costs more money than running amazon's warehouse and it's only fair that you pay the extra.
So either live in MA and pay the cost or move to NH and enjoy your tax-free isolation.
Yeah, but there's no accounting for pork-barrel stuff... billions of dollars to construction contractors in the home state of some influential politicians can help almost any big appropriation along. And the Big Dig is quite possibly history's greatest example of this.
Not so with a good brand offering a worldwide warranty; IBM is excellent for this, my ThinkPad broke on a trip to Beijing and they still managed to get me warranty service from a local computer shop.
Actually the CS majors call it that too, except for the ones who have offices in there. (but we all hate them anyway)
Yeah, getting a 5 billion dollar appropriation out of Congress in the middle of a deficit crisis for developing alternatives to commercial software that already works perfectly well for most people is no problem at all.
Maybe if you earmarked 4.5 billion of it to go to corporate tax breaks for open source deployment and/or some poorly defined item that really just means "we'll just give it to the NSA" you'd have a shot...
Well it beats the universities' own name choices. Harvard's actually an excellent example, they came very close at one point to naming one of the residential Houses after the university's third president Leonard Hoar, I kid you not.
See this page for a real-world example of this.
Oops, that doesn't work... try this link.
See http://www.emuboards.com/invision/index.php?showto pic=10979&st=30 - looks like they're going ahead with it anyway.
Kyle actually is pretty well respected, he's certainly had a few slip-ups and release delays in the past but he's been around for a LONG time and I can't imagine he'd do anything like fake a letter from Nintendo to get him out of some minor hot water over release dates.
A more likely explanation is either that Nintendo just found out about this this week and the letter was a just-in-the-nick-of-time type thing, or that they held off on notifying him until the day before release in the hope that it would throw everything into chaos as it seems to have done.
Yeah, but the last thing they wanted is for people to KNOW for certain that they were funding SCO - it makes them look like they can't compete on their own merits, and based on all those banners they've been running on /. lately it seems like a major part of their Linux strategy at the moment is to convince people that Windows' TCO is still lower in most cases (saying it don't make it so, guys...)
Well yes, but since Sony still owns a substantial chunk of Rockstar I suspect the deal will either get renewed or otherwise continued.
Well as of next week you can develop for Palm under Eclipse too, and performance-wise at least on slower Palms you might be better off with a compatibility framework like SHARK. But not knowing what exactly you do I can certainly imagine that for many developers it's easiest to just write once in Java and not have to think about it.
Just to stave off any potential accusations of Mac-bashing: I still love Mac OS, and though my work at this point requires me to use Windows, as soon as I can afford to get another Mac to play around with I will. I just think Apple needs to put a little more effort into quality control.
A timeline:
Performa 475: first Mac of my own (before that it was my parents' LCII). Shipped with I believe some derivative of System 7.5; with only 4MB of RAM included and the system taking up roughly 2.5 of that, half of the included applications wouldn't work, and I immediately had to run out and buy a RAM upgrade. Modem failed after about 6 months.
Power Computing PowerBase 200: a Mac clone, yes, and boy did it suck... after 4 months, refused to turn on one day, sent out an onsite tech with a new graphics card, didn't fix the problem, sent out the same onsite tech the next week with a new motherboard and CPU card, didn't fix the problem, finally realized that this might be power supply related and had me send the thing back. Returned from the factory and STILL broken, eventually persuaded tech support under threat of a lawsuit to refund my original purchase price.
Power Mac 7300/200: logic board failure after 8 months, thankfully the tech actually brought out a logic board and fixed the problem on the first try.
PowerBook G3 266 (revision B): special-ordered DVD drive broke after 6 months, audio port fell off after 8 (though I fixed that with a soldering iron since I didn't want to be computer-less for two weeks).
After this I bought a ThinkPad A20p (with Win2k), which worked without a hitch for 2 years until the lure of OSX drew me back in with:
PowerBook G4 667 (rev B): latch partly broke after about 2 months (the cheap platic thingy that held it in the case partly broke and wouldn't hold the lid down very well), a few months after that the DVD/CD-RW drive failed (wouldn't accept disks anymore) and shortly after that the thing died completely and started Sad Chime'ing whenever I tried to start it.
PowerBook G4 1GHz: bad pixel flurry, 'nuff said.
After this, bought a Toshiba (Sat 5205), which worked great until I decided I needed a RAID and switched to a homebuilt desktop (also works great, but homebuilt systems usually do since you can control the component quality) and a tiny X-series ThinkPad.
Now I do have bad luck with devices in general (my PDA list is almost as depressing), but still, for EVERY SINGLE MAC to do this to me is a little bit crazy. I'm really not that rough on these things, there's no reason they should be failing with such alarming frequency.
I sell a language learning/translation dictionary product, and the current version actually goes for around $49 (with commensurately higher volumes than "a few dozen copies"). The $99 figure was meant more as a general example of how a vertical market product can be a moneymaker with even a very small volume. I am actually working on another product now that in some configurations will run as high as $150, and I have reason to think that some people will actually pay that, but aside from software for the expense account crowd $50-$70 tends to be the limit, and most of the software at that level is either reference content or multiple-application suites like Documents To Go. For a top-tier utility or productivity app a figure like $30 is more reasonable, and games etc are generally in the $10-$20 range.
And I use CodeWarrior; it has a number of annoying idiosyncracies, but far fewer than gcc (which requires you to mangle your code in various ways just to get it running at all), and I'm quite fond of Metrowerks' debugger. But if you're considering buying it, wait two weeks, as it's likely that there'll be a new version announced at the PalmSource conference next month.
I'm definitely making a living; even with health insurance and the sky-high cost of rent in Manhattan I'm still banking $1000/month or so. If you get a successful product the first thing you need to do is establish a savings account - that way if the next product's a bust you can still keep your head above water.
There's some recent discussion of this sort of thing on the Palm OS developer forum here,
and a slightly less enthusiastic account from one game developer here - clearly YMMV but there are certainly plenty of folks out there making a living on this.
I started my own company back in college, and thanks to an unexpectedly successful product by graduation time I was making enough money so I didn't even need to look for another job. But even if you're unemployed, depending on your credit history and other factors you may be able to get startup financing, or failing that you can try to find a low-paying low-stress part-time job that'll pay you just enough to keep you going until your first product release.
I design/write/sell software for Palm OS, and for what it's worth, PDA's and embedded devices are a *great* opportunity for small developers now - the size and expectations are low enough so that one programmer in a couple of months can create a top-tier PDA product. The only problem is that the programming tends to be a more frustrating than for Windows - Palm OS in particular can be very perplexing for someone who isn't familiar with event loops and 80's style application coding, and even Pocket PC is fraught with weird compatibility issues. And the development tools for both platforms kind of suck. I'm not exactly a brilliant programmer, though, so it's more a question of patience than anything else, and if you've got the stomach for it it can be quite rewarding.
Really it all boils down to ideas; the key to early success as an independent software developer is making something that's sufficiently innovative/exciting that your customers will basically sell it for you, because even with Google et al big advertising campaigns are still the domain of big companies. One great way to get started is to find a small niche market with few competitors, create a well-polished new product for it with some innovative ideas, and back it up with a friendly attitude and impeccable support - at $99 a pop you can make a perfectly decent living with a few dozen orders a month.
The response to this is very simple: Linux is a largely international effort, without US help Linux would still continue on its merry way, and if we want to stay competitive in the global IT market the only option is for our software firms to embrace this movement that we can't stop anyway.
Or failing that, just point them to IBM and the enormous success they've enjoyed with Linux in spite of the fact that it's free. Microsoft and a couple of patent-mongering UNIX firms may be losing money from this, but everybody else is gaining from it.
Speaking like someone who hasn't seen the new cut of ST:TMP - maybe not as good as 2, 4, 6, or 8, but better than Nemesis. TMP's biggest problem was pacing and the fact it was basically a bad 2001 knockoff, but with the director's cut it's actually a halfway decent 2001 knockoff.
Just to remind everyone who seems to be forgetting this, there is actually one very good argument for why there *shouldn't* be a paper trail for electronic voting: it doesn't just make it possible to audit machines, it makes it possible to audit PEOPLE.
Buying votes may be illegal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and one of the main problems for prospective vote-buyers now is the fact that there's no way to ensure that the people you're paying to vote a certain way are actually doing so.
Then along comes the electronic voting receipt, which by its very nature *has* to be easily readable/auditable and *has* to have a very good system for ensuring it's authentic. Now, you can buy somebody's vote and be sure they actually vote the way you wanted. You can even do it a little more insidiously, perhaps, and in a way that might not necessarily even be quite so illegal, offering somebody some sort of small in-kind gift if they show you their Bush voting receipt, or even just an intangible reward like membership in a club or something.
In areas where people of one political alignment are vastly in the majority, voters who swing the other way sometimes need to keep their political preferences quiet, and this could make it harder for them to do that ("If you're *really* a Bush fan, show us your voting slip.")
Let alone the idiots who'll get the damn things framed to hang up in their house if the guy wins, the people who'll put them in plastic badge holders and wear them around their necks all day, protesters who'll publicly burn them, etc. I don't know, it just seems very wrong to me for there to be any record at all of your vote that can go with you outside of the voting booth.
Now with some paper ballot systems it's expected that after checking your receipt you'll deposit it in a box at the polling station (and not keep a copy for yourself), but even in that case people can pocket them / swap them with fake ones (which won't matter except in the unlikely event of a recount) or give some potential vote-buyer a discreet glance at the thing before turning it in.
The only way to get around these problems is to create a system where a receipt is human-readable but easily counterfeitable so that nobody can verify its authenticity except the elections board; I don't quite know how such a system would work, though, and it seems like it would have a lot of potential for confusing people.
So IMHO receipts are not the solution, open-source is the solution; open things up to public scrutiny and receipts become largely unnecessary. Or better yet, stick to paper ballots but use *good* paper ballots; fill-in-the-bubbles, perhaps, which have been used quite effectively in many places.
I think Ian Holm might be a little too old... I mean yes, they *could* make him look younger with makeup (as they did for the flashback in FotR), but the man's 72 and pulling that look off for the entire movie would be rather difficult. PJ doesn't seem like the sort of director who'd jump through hoops for the sake of preserving a tiny bit of extra consistency with the trilogy.
Andy Serkis, on the other hand... I can't imagine anyone else playing Gollum now. And just think of it, a crowded theater sometime in the winter of 2009, Bilbo in a cave, then a familiar CGI face and the first whisper of "Precious"... think of the beginning of the opening crawl for Episode 1 (when we didn't know how badly it would suck) and multiply it by 10 and that's what you'll get.
And of course we have to have Ian McKellen playing Gandalf too, simply because he loves doing it and there's no one better out there for the role.
And just to make it clear: this would be enforced at a protocol level rather than as a "tax" by some government, so jurisdictional issues don't apply; sending server contacts receiving server, receiving server tells sending server that it's not an approved sender and can only reach this recipient by paying $.01 to account foo on server bar with reference number 123456; sending server pays this, receiving server receives acknowledgement that the payment was received and delivers the message. Yes, this involves a fair amount of overhead, but much less so than all of the extra spam-related traffic they're dealing with now.
You don't even have to deploy this everywhere at once; if a sending server doesn't support the new protocol then the receiving server returns an error message that provides some alternate way for the sender to pay for the message (possibly by completing some sort of i'm-a-human-being test like several anti-spam services have now).
Here's an easy way to get rid of spam, based on some other recent ideas: set up a system where sending someone an e-mail costs you a penny, unless you're on an "approved senders list" that that person has set up. Instead of going to an ISP or some other entity, though, that penny goes to the receiver's account, and then can be used by them to pay more of these penny charges. Accounts are maintained at a website (or possibly several with an interlinked network), which charges some sort of small percentage fee whenever new funds are added to cover server costs, administrative overhead, credit card processing fees, etc. The only messages not subject to the fee would be message delivery errors, which can easily be checked against recent sent messages and made to follow a standard format.
The great thing about this scheme is that since the receiver gets to keep the penny, consumers effectively end up paying nothing for this, since typically we'll receive a lot more of these messages than we send out (as there are plenty of copmanies that are quite happy to pay a penny per message to talk to us, since it's a lot less than postage or telephone charges). ISP's can even provide their customers with a few dollars in credit to get started, or perhaps 20 or 30 cents of it monthly, so that most people will likely never even need to put up any money at all. And yet, by charging a penny per spam this can easily put the spammers right out of business.
Absolutely, in fact this is almost certainly the plan these manufacturers have in mind.
The pirates are always happy to pursue any moneymaking opportunity they can find; within a few months of their introduction, pirated DVD's were already almost as widely available as VCD's, and no doubt once people start buying EVD players the same thing will happen.
Then, once people have EVD players and widely available disks, legitimate movie companies will have no choice but to adopt EVD; otherwise, they'll have a base of millions and millions of consumers who have no choice but to buy pirated EVD's. And considering the pragmatic-to-a-fault attitude of the Chinese courts and legislators towards such matters, I suspect that they'll give the studios a hard time about cracking down on pirated EVD's until legitimate alternatives are available. Yes, since they're not well-protected those EVD's can then be easily pirated as well, but since that's already true about DVD's it hardly makes a difference at this point (and will probably translate to further cost savings since there's less sophisticated decoding hardware required, perhaps even allowing them to use older and cheaper processes for chip fabrication etc).
So this could be a real coup for the Chinese - single-handedly force the studios to adopt a poorly-secured, proprietary video format just to stay in the market.
Don't look for these to show up in the US, though; DVD players are already way too common, so they'll never show up officially, and considering eBay's sheer and utter spinelessness towards MPAA legal threats it's doubtful we'll see them show up there either.