Look, first it was credit card number and the expiration date was the confirmation. Then they went to the CVV2 codes as verification. Now they want yet another additional layer of protection "verified by visa".
The phishers/pirates just have to get more info each time and with each increasing layer it just inconveniences the consumer.
THIS NEEDS TO STOP.
What we need are smart cards. That would solve all these problems once and for all.
Right, power is an example of infrastructure that is a natural monopoly. I agree with you on this point. And a private company isn't any better than the government. As you say, maybe it makes sense to just have the govt do it since they don't want a profit. I'm not disputing anything you said here.
However, talking about companies buying miracle technologies to squash them--sure that may be true (but I doubt it), but even if it did it would only for the lifetime of a patent, which is a short amount of time. And here is where we differ on philosophy, it is not worth loosing the incentive of creation that exists today that creates innovation which becomes free in 20 years to instead monopolize ALL innovation and motivation into the hands of bureaucrats and an ineffective government. Think FEMA has done a good job? The FCC? Think about putting agencies like that in charge of all our drug innovation.
Look, we disagree. I don't think government is the solution to the problem, you do.
Private industry will not necessarily do what's better unless there is healthy competition. Your example of power in California is a poor one because my guess is you don't have a choice to switch to a different power company. That company has a government-backed monopoly and will act just as bad as any monopoly would, government or not. The private sector is only good when there is competition. So going back to the issue of drugs, there is competition among companies to produce, say the best drug to ease athsma, or heart problems, or whatever. There is no justification for government to come compete in this arena, or take away their incentive to innovate. Besides, with your scenario, there is one company controlling all drug innovation. What if they end up being ineffective and the number of new drugs on the market plummets or it is done at a far higher cost?
Yes, we give these companies a monopoly for a short amount of time on the inventions they spend billions to make. But it is limited. By the time the drug comes out they usually only have between 10-15 years before their patent expires. This to me is a much better option than an untested government plan to totally gut the current market and vest all innovative power in the hands of bureaucrats.
"This is what government-owned nonprofit corporations are good at. You turn them loose with a huge chunk of funding."
But that funding always comes with strings attached and priorities of whatever the current administration or congress thinks is important. It is subject to all the constraints and problems that government today faces.
So rather than have different companies competing to make drugs, you would get rid of all incentive to innovate by private interests and instead vest that power in the hands of one large government owned non-profit that would spend the money so much better than private companies and be so much more effective at creating new drugs? Color me skeptical.
In addition, TVA is a poor example. They have spent money in lots of stupid places over the years and wasted plenty of money. Plus how do you know that the private sector couldn't have done a better job given the opportunity? There's no way to tell now.
Why not just have the government run non-profit businesses of all sorts, groceries, banks, etc.? I for one don't want to wake up one day in your socialized, bureaucratically controlled "utopia" where it no longer makes sense to take any risks because there's no reward for it. Sounds like a wonderful world, safe and secure in the hands of my U.S. executive branch and congress.
"Well, maybe it's time to quit playing games and instead start taking the issue seriously. Improving the system isn't rocket science; it just means dumping the whole idea of patents and starting paying just for the actual R&D and letting the marketing and production be handled by the free market. In competition.
"A functional system would get us five times the R&D for the same money we're paying the pharmaceuticals today.
Five times the R&D for the same money? Just how do you propose that? Sure they spend a lot on marketing, but not THAT much.
So let me get this straight, you're proposing getting rid of patents for drugs and paying for all the R&D with government money? Are you so happy with your current government that you're willing to let those decisions rest in the hands of bureaucrats? So the rate of innovation and the amount of money spent is dependent on decisions of bureaucrats? If your a Democrat, do you like the idea of Bush & co running it? If you're a Republican, do you like the idea of Democrats running such a system?
Can you point to any examples of something like what you propose that is working well today in the real world? Because when I think of progress and innovation at a reasonable cost, the first thing that comes into my mind certainly isn't "government".
"If you sell it at an outrageous cost (see: drugs) it's really detrimental to humanity as a whole."
Wouldn't it be more detrimental if the drug is never developed in the first place? Developing a new drug costs anywhere from $800 million to $2 billion dollars, and takes around 12-15 years. Of the drugs that come on the market, only around 30% of them actually make enough revenue to actually pay for all their upfront costs. It's a high risk game and I know people that have put in lots of money into making a medical innovation and ended up burned. They won't be doing that again.
I don't like high drug costs as much as the next guy, but at least the innovation is occurring and after it's 20-year or so patent runs out, we'll all reap the benefits at great savings.
"'Open' markets that are bound by US Patent and Copyright ownership, corporate bail outs [technocrat.net] and other predatory policies designed to make the US "Powerful" instead of Free.
Wealth, influence and power come from freedom and justice not the other way around. Countries that waste their efforts on raw power end up like North Korea."
I know most people on Slashdot think we shouldn't have patents and copyright ownership at all. Yes, they are abused. Yes, copyright probably has been extended far too long. However, the ideas and original works that can be protected with these tools constitute "private property". One of the hallmarks that has made the United States a great country is that our constitution and rights are based on the intellectual heritage of John Locke, who asserted the need for "life, liberty, and private property". We must be free to make our own choices as you say, but that does not mean the government should stand by and allow no redress when someone is deprived of their personal property. The government creates order by allowing for redress when such a wrong is committed. More good is gained by protecting rights through laws and the resultant ordered society than a society were private property rights aren't respected.
Yeah, but the fact that Amazon is threatening to delete everything about you, including digital things you've paid for just shows how nefarious DRM is and how draconian Amazon can be when you do something they don't like. How about just making a business rule in their software that doesn't let you buy more than 3 Wii's instead of letting someone potentially do it with a huge threat over their head. And I'm also mad about the fact that I paid for content that I feel that I don't really own and they can take away from me at any time.
I bought an E-book from Amazon as an experiment, and hated it. I can only read it with Amazon's Online Reader. Today while trying to read the book I purchased I got an error "book temporarily unavailable, try again later". Great thanks. Also, in shopping for a Wii, I came across this policy on Amazon's website:
Wii Purchase Policy
As you may know, the Nintendo Wii is in great demand, and there are shortages of this product across the U.S. In an effort to provide as many customers as possible with the opportunity to purchase a Wii, we are limiting the number of Wiis customers can purchase in a given calendar month. As a result, each household may only purchase up to 3 Nintendo Wii units per calendar month.
Failure to comply with this policy will result in account actions including, but not limited to:
* Cancellation of all outstanding orders, including Wii orders and other orders.
* Closure of the offending customer account and related accounts, including:
* The customer account used for making purchases and selling items on Amazon.com Seller accounts
* Any international accounts at Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, or Amazon.co.jp
* The Your Media Library account area, including any digital products you may have purchased
* Any Amazon.com Associates account or Advantage account attached to the closed account
When an account is closed, access to any Amazon Wish List, Baby or Wedding Registry, or profile pages is lost. Any purchase history, saved gifts in Gift Central, and digital products in Your Media Library will not be accessible. Additionally, any outstanding Amazon.com gift certificate or check funds balance will be unavailable.
Bottom line? So if I accidentally buy too many Wii's from Amazon, they'll shut down my account and remove my access to digital media that I have purchased? Unbelievable.
The implication here is that American software companies need to just suck it up and pay their employees more in the U.S. instead of trying to expand their base where the exact same labor is cheaper. The only problem with this idealized thinking is that if Microsoft doesn't do it, someone else will, and ultimately, you can't compete in a market if there's a Canadian company selling similar software, with costs that are half as much.
You could put a tariff on importing say, Canadian software, but then at best you've just put a temporary bandage on the inevitable and reduced overall American competitiveness. Sure, we could still sell software at the higher price in the U.S., but global demand would fall because someone in England would rather buy from the cheaper, Canadian alternative. There's no loyalty to buy American just because it's American.
This is globalization in play here and the best thing we can do about it is find ways to outdo the competition in other ways, through innovation, for example.
First of all, let me make it clear that we each have our own legal copies of the games and our own Steam accounts. I used to think that although I don't like Steam, I'm willing to live with it because since I've validated my accounts online once, I can always play in offline mode. I was DEAD WRONG. It turns out that this isn't how Steam works at all. We all had validated our accounts long before this incident happened and we've played regularly, usually connecting in through Steam each time we play the game.
When we launched the game to play a LAN on that particular occasion, it detected that we had the Internet so it tried to connect to the Steam servers. The servers were down obviously, and after sitting there for a while it asked for our Steam account usernames and passwords. I thought, that's unusual, normally it just asks me if I want to play in offline mode. So we all re-entered our usernames and passwords, but it wouldn't work. I guess that in some circumstances when it can't contact the servers, it's like the activation token gets disabled. So it wanted us to authenticate from scratch, but we couldn't because the servers were down. We were completely locked out of all of our Steam games, no single player, no multiplayer LAN, nothing. You would think you could play a game you paid for single player anytime you want. That's why Valve and Steam tick me off so much! Thanks a lot Valve.
Valve got the situation under control a few days later and all our accounts started working again right away, but the point is that the supposed "offline play mode" failsafe completely failed us, and I'm ticked off enough about it to consider not being a customer of Valve at all.
The problem is that for some reason you can't always play your games offline. Remember the incident when the Valve's servers went down all weekend? See this story. I had a LAN party planned that weekend and we were unable to play our legally purchased games on a LAN, even when we disconnected from the Internet. The game didn't allow the offline mode for some reason during that time. It's crap like this that Valve does that makes us complain.
One weekend I invited all my friends over to have a LAN and play Counterstrike and HL2 Deathmatch. The Valve servers happened to go down that weekend due to the storm in Washington. No big deal, I thought, we are just playing on a LAN afterall and we can just use offline mode. Turns out that when we tried, the game wouldn't give us an option to play in offline mode. It ticked me off to no end that I couldn't play the game that didn't require any Internet component at all, and it wasn't playable for several days until Valve fixed their servers. This is not acceptable.
OK, Cheney may be easy to dislike, but why is it that so many people still have their facts wrong about Cheney and his financial interest in Haliburton? Everyone who believes this should carefully re-evaluate their news sources and see where biased implications like these are coming from.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania thoroughly researched Cheney's financial ties to Haliburton during the 2004 presidential election and found that "Cheney doesn't gain a penny from Halliburton's contracts". The compensation he received was simply deferred income he had already earned while he worked for Haliburton.
How are we so lucky you might ask? Several cities banded together to create a world-class, 100% fiber optic network that they extend to every home and business in the member cities.
This municipal fiber broadband project is called UTOPIA and you can get it if you are fortunate enough to live in one of these cities that provides it.
So if you're disappointed by the Internet access in your area, see if you can get your cities to setup a network like ours. Be forewarned though, our incumbent telco and cable company fought and lobbied very hard against it. We're lucky that enough of our city council members were forward-thinking enough to go ahead with the project despite significant pressure from the incumbent telecom providers. Now we all reap the benefits.
It says that some companies support it and some don't. We know Google and Ebay support net neutrality, but the article states, "more than 100 companies from the networking and communications sector, including Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and Qualcomm, [said it was] too soon to enact network neutrality legislation."
One of the reasons this issue isn't so cut and dry is because a lot of us in the tech industry fear that by regulating the Internet we could be creating an environment that does has the opposite effect of the positive benefits of requiring neutrality. The argument goes that since corporations have such a large stake in the outcomes of regulatory control, they will over time turn the regulation to their favor through political pressure, lobbyists, and other means. I fear that creating so-called net neutrality through regulation could ultimately turn against us. There is a very good essay I would recommend to get a better idea of the potential dangers of regulating net neutrality:
In summary, there isn't unanimity among techs about whether regulating net neutrality is good or not so it makes sense that it wasn't included as one of the issues.
Here's your chance to let Amazon know you don't appreciate the draconian DRM they have included in their video service. If you log in to your Amazon account, you can send email to customer service. Since you'd be sending an email directly from your account, they will know that you are indeed a loyal customer that has purchased content from them in the past. Let's let them know what we think about this new DRM service. Here's my email to them:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have been a loyal customer of yours for many years. You can verify this since I am sending this from my customer account. Now I see you are offering this new Unbox video service. I am deeply frustrated by the fact that the service is so limited by DRM technology. I am a tech-savvy person. I have built my own media computer attached to my TV to manage all of my media. This computer runs Linux. With your video service, there is absolutely no way I can watch my videos the way I would like to.
I can't even express to you how upset and frustrated I am by you offering this crippled service. I refuse to buy videos from your new download service. At least buying a DVD I can control my own content and play it where I like. I don't have to worry about always being issued a license everytime I want to watch my movies.
I know your contracts with movie companies probably compel you to put these draconian protection measures in. However, are you aware how upsetting it is to your loyal customers that you don't trust us to be able to handle our own content? Many of us feel that the pirates will find a way around these measures anyway. Please don't insult us by taking away our privileges because of the few.
Perhaps you could compromise in the way Apple has with their Itunes service. It contains DRM, yet we can still burn the music to a CD, thus freeing us to be able to do with the content as we please.
Here's your chance to let Amazon know you don't appreciate the draconian DRM they have included in their video service. If you log in to your Amazon account, you can send email to customer service. Since you'd be sending an email directly from your account, they will know that you are indeed a loyal customer that has purchased content from them in the past. Let's let them know what we think about this new DRM service. Here's my email to them:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have been a loyal customer of yours for many years. You can verify this since I am sending this from my customer account. Now I see you are offering this new Unbox video service. I am deeply frustrated by the fact that the service is so limited by DRM technology. I have a tech-savvy person. I have built my own media computer attached to my TV to manage all of my media. This computer runs Linux. With your video service, there is absolutely no way I can watch my videos the way I would like to.
I can't even express to you how upset and frustrated I am by you offering this crippled service. I refuse to buy videos from your new download service. At least buying a DVD I can control my own content and play it where I like. I don't have to worry about always being issued a license everytime I want to watch my movies.
I know your contracts with movie companies probably compel you to put these draconian protection measures in. However, are you aware how upsetting it is to your loyal customers that you don't trust us to be able to handle our own content? Many of us feel that the pirates will find a way around these measures anyway. Please don't insult us by taking away our privileges because of the few.
Perhaps you could compromise in the way Apple has with their Itunes service. It contains DRM, yet we can still burn the music to a CD, thus freeing us to be able to do with the content as we please.
I think the heart of this question comes down to whether or not consumers of copyrighted works have the right to modify the work they have purchased. If I buy a book, is it within my legal right to tear pages out, scratch words out etc? What about a DVD? There's no way to change it at all without making a copy of the DVD. Should I be allowed to make a copy of the DVD so I can edit it as I see fit as long as it's only for personal use?
If you answered yes, then what if these companies that sell edited versions changed their business models a little. Instead of having the consumers purchase their videos directly from Clean Flix, what if they purchased their videos elsewhere and just brought the videos in to Clean Flix where the original would be put in an editing machine and the undesired parts would be edited out manually. The consumer would then receive their new edited version along with their original disc back. This would be a third party service doing the editing for us. Is that OK?
Somehow I think the studios would have an even bigger problem with that "revised" model than the one they are using now. So what's a good solution?
If you answered no, then is there any possible way you could have a business that legally provides an edited version or helps you edit your movies, since most studios seem unwilling to do it?
Some people have suggested the model of having an intelligent DVD player that would read a list of segments to cut out and edit the movie as it is playing. This isn't a good solution because people may want just language toned down, for example, without cutting significant scenes of the movie out. Or perhaps fuzz out certain parts of the screen, etc.
I can't seem to find any good solutions given the legal copyright framework that exists in the U.S. today.
Not bad for 15 Megabit down AND up, eh? Unfortunately, it's only available in a few cities in Utah, and I'm not fortunate enough to be in one of them.
Utopia is a fiber network built with the support of city governments with a goal to provide fiber to every household and business in the city. Revenues go back into the network to keep it running and support future upgrades. The cities have to provide the initial cash outlay, and hopefully, they will get their money back with customer adoption. Any provider (be it for Internet service, phone, or TV) can tap into Utopia and provide their service. They provide the content, Utopia just provides the fiber connection to the customer.
XMission is a great ISP in Utah that provides 15 megabit fiber for the home, or 30 megabit for business. They were one of the major players helping to get Utopia here in Utah, and they are a great statewide ISP with a local feel. We like them out here because they support advanced stuff like shell access.
If anyone else out there is trying to get a municipal broadband project underway, expect a lot of lobbying from your incumbent telecom companies. You will need some strong local support from your city council members, lots of education for the public about the benefits of building it, and forward thinking individuals willing to do what it takes to make it happen.
It was a long battle getting this network built for us in Utah. Qwest and Comcast pushed VERY hard to stop Utopia. We went to several city council meetings where they were voting on whether or not to build this network, at every one Qwest and Comcast representatives were there, along with their employees living in the area pushing the city councils to vote against Utopia. When the dust cleared, only a handful of cities voted to build Utopia; there was tons of money spent in ad campaigns to try to kill Utopia. They were somewhat successful, because we didn't get the support of all the cities we wanted. For example, our state capital Salt Lake City ultimately pulled out of Utopia. The cities that remained are smaller, suburban areas. The first of them are now seeing the fruits of their efforts--fast bandwidth!
I believe that even though Utopia has had a slow start, it will quickly become apparent what a benefit it is to have fiber to your house and what things can be done with it. We are pioneering this effort and hope it will spread across Utah and many other states.
There seems to be very little appreciation anymore for the notion of having a stable business.
Very little appreciation from who? Consumers? When consumers have lots of choices in a marketplace, it creates a competitive business environment that requires business to constantly change or risk losing against the competition. For example, if Microsoft doesn't venture oustide of their "stable" desktop software market, they risk their software becoming irrelevant through the new generation of web services.
There is little appreciation for "stable" companies because we as consumers are always looking for the company that can deliver the better, cheaper, or faster product. Does anyone care that American manufacturing jobs are lost when they buy cheap, foreign-made Walmart wares? Do we care enough to buy the more expensive American products instead? It's a simple law of economics: business is like a competitive sport--companies that aren't always looking to change won't ultimately survive.
"We had a solution to this problem. It is called tariffs. We charge a tax on all goods that are imported into the USA to protect goods manufactured inside the USA."
We don't let China sell $8,000 cars in the USA. We charge the China company a tax for the right to sell in the USA.
I have a friend who is into wines, big time. He has one of those fancy wine dehumidifiers/refrigerators with the glass case. He reads about wine, goes to wine tastings, he knows his wines. Anyways, he went to France last year, and he called me when he got back. He said the same French wine he buys in the USA was less than 1/3rd the price in France. He said he does not buy that wine often because it is so expensive, but he purchased 6 bottles to bring back home. He buys many more wines produced in California than anywhere else. Seems tariffs are working well in that situation."
There are quite a few major problems with tariffs. First, they artificially prop-up industries. This makes the economy less efficient overall and in turn makes so less jobs are created in other sectors. Tariffs also increase the price of goods to consumers. And the biggest problem, in my opinion, is that tariffs severely hamper the ability of the U.S. to sell our exports to other countries. We are not the only consumers of American cars in the world. A tariff in the U.S. on cars would make so automobile manufacturers can breathe a little and can sell more expensive cars in the U.S. because there would be a tax on the Chinese cars. Then we wouldn't have to worry about China flooding our market with cheap goods.
Sounds great in theory... but what about all the other markets in the world where people are currently buying our cars? Does our U.S. tariff stop the Chinese from selling their cheap cars to the other major world economies? No, it wouldn't. A tariff would severely decrease the foreign demand for our U.S. made cars because they are more expensive. It would cause Chinese car companies to outpace us significantly in growth and efficiency because we couldn't remain competitive in the global marketplace.
"I only buy American cars, I have NEVER owned a foriegn made car."
I applaud you for your principles in supporting our American workforce. I'm sure the car companies that spend millions in advertising campaigns to "buy American" would be happy to see their money is paying off for some people. The important question though is what would most Americans do if they could buy an identical product made oversees that was thousands of dollars cheaper? The Chinese don't meet the quality of our cars yet, but most experts today are predicting that by around 2010 they will be there. Look at Wal-mart today--it's full of Asian goods. I think it is reasonably clear that most Americans would rather have cheaper prices than pay more to buy American goods.
"$1400 per employee for health care is nothing compared to the $2,000,000 bonus the CEO got? How many people could that 2 million cover? And that is not touching one penny of the CEOs salary."
Well given that GE has 1.1 million employees, your hypothetical would mean about $2 per employee.
How many people can and want the responsibility of making a multi-billion dollar company perform? If you put the wrong guy at the helm, he can run the ship into the shore. I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to defend what are often times terribly high-salaries, and some CEO's are definately overpaid.
However, look at a company like Merck. It is a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company in trouble. How many people are there out there that can step up to the plate and turn the behemoth into a money-maker again? What if the person fails? Who wants to hire a CEO that failed at his previous company? They need a "star" CEO, one who can really turn the company around. Would it be worth a few million to lure away a CEO from another co
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Look, first it was credit card number and the expiration date was the confirmation. Then they went to the CVV2 codes as verification. Now they want yet another additional layer of protection "verified by visa".
The phishers/pirates just have to get more info each time and with each increasing layer it just inconveniences the consumer.
THIS NEEDS TO STOP.
What we need are smart cards. That would solve all these problems once and for all.
Right, power is an example of infrastructure that is a natural monopoly. I agree with you on this point. And a private company isn't any better than the government. As you say, maybe it makes sense to just have the govt do it since they don't want a profit. I'm not disputing anything you said here.
However, talking about companies buying miracle technologies to squash them--sure that may be true (but I doubt it), but even if it did it would only for the lifetime of a patent, which is a short amount of time. And here is where we differ on philosophy, it is not worth loosing the incentive of creation that exists today that creates innovation which becomes free in 20 years to instead monopolize ALL innovation and motivation into the hands of bureaucrats and an ineffective government. Think FEMA has done a good job? The FCC? Think about putting agencies like that in charge of all our drug innovation.
Look, we disagree. I don't think government is the solution to the problem, you do.
Private industry will not necessarily do what's better unless there is healthy competition. Your example of power in California is a poor one because my guess is you don't have a choice to switch to a different power company. That company has a government-backed monopoly and will act just as bad as any monopoly would, government or not. The private sector is only good when there is competition. So going back to the issue of drugs, there is competition among companies to produce, say the best drug to ease athsma, or heart problems, or whatever. There is no justification for government to come compete in this arena, or take away their incentive to innovate. Besides, with your scenario, there is one company controlling all drug innovation. What if they end up being ineffective and the number of new drugs on the market plummets or it is done at a far higher cost?
Yes, we give these companies a monopoly for a short amount of time on the inventions they spend billions to make. But it is limited. By the time the drug comes out they usually only have between 10-15 years before their patent expires. This to me is a much better option than an untested government plan to totally gut the current market and vest all innovative power in the hands of bureaucrats.
"This is what government-owned nonprofit corporations are good at. You turn them loose with a huge chunk of funding."
But that funding always comes with strings attached and priorities of whatever the current administration or congress thinks is important. It is subject to all the constraints and problems that government today faces.
So rather than have different companies competing to make drugs, you would get rid of all incentive to innovate by private interests and instead vest that power in the hands of one large government owned non-profit that would spend the money so much better than private companies and be so much more effective at creating new drugs? Color me skeptical.
In addition, TVA is a poor example. They have spent money in lots of stupid places over the years and wasted plenty of money. Plus how do you know that the private sector couldn't have done a better job given the opportunity? There's no way to tell now.
Why not just have the government run non-profit businesses of all sorts, groceries, banks, etc.? I for one don't want to wake up one day in your socialized, bureaucratically controlled "utopia" where it no longer makes sense to take any risks because there's no reward for it. Sounds like a wonderful world, safe and secure in the hands of my U.S. executive branch and congress.
"Well, maybe it's time to quit playing games and instead start taking the issue seriously. Improving the system isn't rocket science; it just means dumping the whole idea of patents and starting paying just for the actual R&D and letting the marketing and production be handled by the free market. In competition.
"A functional system would get us five times the R&D for the same money we're paying the pharmaceuticals today.
Five times the R&D for the same money? Just how do you propose that? Sure they spend a lot on marketing, but not THAT much.
So let me get this straight, you're proposing getting rid of patents for drugs and paying for all the R&D with government money? Are you so happy with your current government that you're willing to let those decisions rest in the hands of bureaucrats? So the rate of innovation and the amount of money spent is dependent on decisions of bureaucrats? If your a Democrat, do you like the idea of Bush & co running it? If you're a Republican, do you like the idea of Democrats running such a system?
Can you point to any examples of something like what you propose that is working well today in the real world? Because when I think of progress and innovation at a reasonable cost, the first thing that comes into my mind certainly isn't "government".
"If you sell it at an outrageous cost (see: drugs) it's really detrimental to humanity as a whole."
Wouldn't it be more detrimental if the drug is never developed in the first place? Developing a new drug costs anywhere from $800 million to $2 billion dollars, and takes around 12-15 years. Of the drugs that come on the market, only around 30% of them actually make enough revenue to actually pay for all their upfront costs. It's a high risk game and I know people that have put in lots of money into making a medical innovation and ended up burned. They won't be doing that again.
I don't like high drug costs as much as the next guy, but at least the innovation is occurring and after it's 20-year or so patent runs out, we'll all reap the benefits at great savings.
Wealth, influence and power come from freedom and justice not the other way around. Countries that waste their efforts on raw power end up like North Korea."
I know most people on Slashdot think we shouldn't have patents and copyright ownership at all. Yes, they are abused. Yes, copyright probably has been extended far too long. However, the ideas and original works that can be protected with these tools constitute "private property". One of the hallmarks that has made the United States a great country is that our constitution and rights are based on the intellectual heritage of John Locke, who asserted the need for "life, liberty, and private property". We must be free to make our own choices as you say, but that does not mean the government should stand by and allow no redress when someone is deprived of their personal property. The government creates order by allowing for redress when such a wrong is committed. More good is gained by protecting rights through laws and the resultant ordered society than a society were private property rights aren't respected.
Yeah, but the fact that Amazon is threatening to delete everything about you, including digital things you've paid for just shows how nefarious DRM is and how draconian Amazon can be when you do something they don't like. How about just making a business rule in their software that doesn't let you buy more than 3 Wii's instead of letting someone potentially do it with a huge threat over their head. And I'm also mad about the fact that I paid for content that I feel that I don't really own and they can take away from me at any time.
I bought an E-book from Amazon as an experiment, and hated it. I can only read it with Amazon's Online Reader. Today while trying to read the book I purchased I got an error "book temporarily unavailable, try again later". Great thanks. Also, in shopping for a Wii, I came across this policy on Amazon's website:
Wii Purchase Policy
As you may know, the Nintendo Wii is in great demand, and there are shortages of this product across the U.S. In an effort to provide as many customers as possible with the opportunity to purchase a Wii, we are limiting the number of Wiis customers can purchase in a given calendar month. As a result, each household may only purchase up to 3 Nintendo Wii units per calendar month.
Failure to comply with this policy will result in account actions including, but not limited to:
* Cancellation of all outstanding orders, including Wii orders and other orders.
* Closure of the offending customer account and related accounts, including:
* The customer account used for making purchases and selling items on Amazon.com Seller accounts
* Any international accounts at Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, or Amazon.co.jp
* The Your Media Library account area, including any digital products you may have purchased
* Any Amazon.com Associates account or Advantage account attached to the closed account
When an account is closed, access to any Amazon Wish List, Baby or Wedding Registry, or profile pages is lost. Any purchase history, saved gifts in Gift Central, and digital products in Your Media Library will not be accessible. Additionally, any outstanding Amazon.com gift certificate or check funds balance will be unavailable.
Bottom line? So if I accidentally buy too many Wii's from Amazon, they'll shut down my account and remove my access to digital media that I have purchased? Unbelievable.
"make a 'disk drive on a chip' possible"
Isolinear chips here we come!
The implication here is that American software companies need to just suck it up and pay their employees more in the U.S. instead of trying to expand their base where the exact same labor is cheaper. The only problem with this idealized thinking is that if Microsoft doesn't do it, someone else will, and ultimately, you can't compete in a market if there's a Canadian company selling similar software, with costs that are half as much.
You could put a tariff on importing say, Canadian software, but then at best you've just put a temporary bandage on the inevitable and reduced overall American competitiveness. Sure, we could still sell software at the higher price in the U.S., but global demand would fall because someone in England would rather buy from the cheaper, Canadian alternative. There's no loyalty to buy American just because it's American.
This is globalization in play here and the best thing we can do about it is find ways to outdo the competition in other ways, through innovation, for example.
First of all, let me make it clear that we each have our own legal copies of the games and our own Steam accounts. I used to think that although I don't like Steam, I'm willing to live with it because since I've validated my accounts online once, I can always play in offline mode. I was DEAD WRONG. It turns out that this isn't how Steam works at all. We all had validated our accounts long before this incident happened and we've played regularly, usually connecting in through Steam each time we play the game.
When we launched the game to play a LAN on that particular occasion, it detected that we had the Internet so it tried to connect to the Steam servers. The servers were down obviously, and after sitting there for a while it asked for our Steam account usernames and passwords. I thought, that's unusual, normally it just asks me if I want to play in offline mode. So we all re-entered our usernames and passwords, but it wouldn't work. I guess that in some circumstances when it can't contact the servers, it's like the activation token gets disabled. So it wanted us to authenticate from scratch, but we couldn't because the servers were down. We were completely locked out of all of our Steam games, no single player, no multiplayer LAN, nothing. You would think you could play a game you paid for single player anytime you want. That's why Valve and Steam tick me off so much! Thanks a lot Valve.
Valve got the situation under control a few days later and all our accounts started working again right away, but the point is that the supposed "offline play mode" failsafe completely failed us, and I'm ticked off enough about it to consider not being a customer of Valve at all.
The problem is that for some reason you can't always play your games offline. Remember the incident when the Valve's servers went down all weekend? See this story. I had a LAN party planned that weekend and we were unable to play our legally purchased games on a LAN, even when we disconnected from the Internet. The game didn't allow the offline mode for some reason during that time. It's crap like this that Valve does that makes us complain.
One weekend I invited all my friends over to have a LAN and play Counterstrike and HL2 Deathmatch. The Valve servers happened to go down that weekend due to the storm in Washington. No big deal, I thought, we are just playing on a LAN afterall and we can just use offline mode. Turns out that when we tried, the game wouldn't give us an option to play in offline mode. It ticked me off to no end that I couldn't play the game that didn't require any Internet component at all, and it wasn't playable for several days until Valve fixed their servers. This is not acceptable.
OK, Cheney may be easy to dislike, but why is it that so many people still have their facts wrong about Cheney and his financial interest in Haliburton? Everyone who believes this should carefully re-evaluate their news sources and see where biased implications like these are coming from.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania thoroughly researched Cheney's financial ties to Haliburton during the 2004 presidential election and found that "Cheney doesn't gain a penny from Halliburton's contracts". The compensation he received was simply deferred income he had already earned while he worked for Haliburton.
See this article on factcheck.org for a thorough analysis of Cheney and his alleged financial connection to Haliburton
The company I work for just got a fiber connection from XMission that is 30 Mbps download AND 30 Mbps upload. It costs only $125 per month. For home users, it is only $40 per month for 15 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up.
How are we so lucky you might ask? Several cities banded together to create a world-class, 100% fiber optic network that they extend to every home and business in the member cities.
This municipal fiber broadband project is called UTOPIA and you can get it if you are fortunate enough to live in one of these cities that provides it.
So if you're disappointed by the Internet access in your area, see if you can get your cities to setup a network like ours. Be forewarned though, our incumbent telco and cable company fought and lobbied very hard against it. We're lucky that enough of our city council members were forward-thinking enough to go ahead with the project despite significant pressure from the incumbent telecom providers. Now we all reap the benefits.
The article points out that there isn't agreement in the tech community for net neutrality. See this article:
n st+Net+neutrality/2100-1028_3-6117241.html?tag=nl
t hierer.pdf
"Tech manufacturers rally against Net neutrality"
http://news.com.com/Tech+manufacturers+rally+agai
It says that some companies support it and some don't. We know Google and Ebay support net neutrality, but the article states, "more than 100 companies from the networking and communications sector, including Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and Qualcomm, [said it was] too soon to enact network neutrality legislation."
One of the reasons this issue isn't so cut and dry is because a lot of us in the tech industry fear that by regulating the Internet we could be creating an environment that does has the opposite effect of the positive benefits of requiring neutrality. The argument goes that since corporations have such a large stake in the outcomes of regulatory control, they will over time turn the regulation to their favor through political pressure, lobbyists, and other means. I fear that creating so-called net neutrality through regulation could ultimately turn against us. There is a very good essay I would recommend to get a better idea of the potential dangers of regulating net neutrality:
"Net Neutrality" - Digital Discrimination or Regulatory Gamesmanship in Cyberspace?
http://www.cdt.org/speech/net-neutrality/20040112
In summary, there isn't unanimity among techs about whether regulating net neutrality is good or not so it makes sense that it wasn't included as one of the issues.
Here's your chance to let Amazon know you don't appreciate the draconian DRM they have included in their video service. If you log in to your Amazon account, you can send email to customer service. Since you'd be sending an email directly from your account, they will know that you are indeed a loyal customer that has purchased content from them in the past. Let's let them know what we think about this new DRM service. Here's my email to them:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have been a loyal customer of yours for many years. You can verify this since I am sending this from my customer account. Now I see you are offering this new Unbox video service. I am deeply frustrated by the fact that the service is so limited by DRM technology. I am a tech-savvy person. I have built my own media computer attached to my TV to manage all of my media. This computer runs Linux. With your video service, there is absolutely no way I can watch my videos the way I would like to.
I can't even express to you how upset and frustrated I am by you offering this crippled service. I refuse to buy videos from your new download service. At least buying a DVD I can control my own content and play it where I like. I don't have to worry about always being issued a license everytime I want to watch my movies.
I know your contracts with movie companies probably compel you to put these draconian protection measures in. However, are you aware how upsetting it is to your loyal customers that you don't trust us to be able to handle our own content? Many of us feel that the pirates will find a way around these measures anyway. Please don't insult us by taking away our privileges because of the few.
Perhaps you could compromise in the way Apple has with their Itunes service. It contains DRM, yet we can still burn the music to a CD, thus freeing us to be able to do with the content as we please.
Thank you for your time.
Here's your chance to let Amazon know you don't appreciate the draconian DRM they have included in their video service. If you log in to your Amazon account, you can send email to customer service. Since you'd be sending an email directly from your account, they will know that you are indeed a loyal customer that has purchased content from them in the past. Let's let them know what we think about this new DRM service. Here's my email to them:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have been a loyal customer of yours for many years. You can verify this since I am sending this from my customer account. Now I see you are offering this new Unbox video service. I am deeply frustrated by the fact that the service is so limited by DRM technology. I have a tech-savvy person. I have built my own media computer attached to my TV to manage all of my media. This computer runs Linux. With your video service, there is absolutely no way I can watch my videos the way I would like to.
I can't even express to you how upset and frustrated I am by you offering this crippled service. I refuse to buy videos from your new download service. At least buying a DVD I can control my own content and play it where I like. I don't have to worry about always being issued a license everytime I want to watch my movies.
I know your contracts with movie companies probably compel you to put these draconian protection measures in. However, are you aware how upsetting it is to your loyal customers that you don't trust us to be able to handle our own content? Many of us feel that the pirates will find a way around these measures anyway. Please don't insult us by taking away our privileges because of the few.
Perhaps you could compromise in the way Apple has with their Itunes service. It contains DRM, yet we can still burn the music to a CD, thus freeing us to be able to do with the content as we please.
Thank you for your time.
Should I be able to tear a page out of a book and resell it?
I think the heart of this question comes down to whether or not consumers of copyrighted works have the right to modify the work they have purchased. If I buy a book, is it within my legal right to tear pages out, scratch words out etc? What about a DVD? There's no way to change it at all without making a copy of the DVD. Should I be allowed to make a copy of the DVD so I can edit it as I see fit as long as it's only for personal use?
If you answered yes, then what if these companies that sell edited versions changed their business models a little. Instead of having the consumers purchase their videos directly from Clean Flix, what if they purchased their videos elsewhere and just brought the videos in to Clean Flix where the original would be put in an editing machine and the undesired parts would be edited out manually. The consumer would then receive their new edited version along with their original disc back. This would be a third party service doing the editing for us. Is that OK?
Somehow I think the studios would have an even bigger problem with that "revised" model than the one they are using now. So what's a good solution?
If you answered no, then is there any possible way you could have a business that legally provides an edited version or helps you edit your movies, since most studios seem unwilling to do it?
Some people have suggested the model of having an intelligent DVD player that would read a list of segments to cut out and edit the movie as it is playing. This isn't a good solution because people may want just language toned down, for example, without cutting significant scenes of the movie out. Or perhaps fuzz out certain parts of the screen, etc.
I can't seem to find any good solutions given the legal copyright framework that exists in the U.S. today.
http://www.xmission.com/utopia/index.html
Not bad for 15 Megabit down AND up, eh? Unfortunately, it's only available in a few cities in Utah, and I'm not fortunate enough to be in one of them.
Utopia is a fiber network built with the support of city governments with a goal to provide fiber to every household and business in the city. Revenues go back into the network to keep it running and support future upgrades. The cities have to provide the initial cash outlay, and hopefully, they will get their money back with customer adoption. Any provider (be it for Internet service, phone, or TV) can tap into Utopia and provide their service. They provide the content, Utopia just provides the fiber connection to the customer.
XMission is a great ISP in Utah that provides 15 megabit fiber for the home, or 30 megabit for business. They were one of the major players helping to get Utopia here in Utah, and they are a great statewide ISP with a local feel. We like them out here because they support advanced stuff like shell access.
If anyone else out there is trying to get a municipal broadband project underway, expect a lot of lobbying from your incumbent telecom companies. You will need some strong local support from your city council members, lots of education for the public about the benefits of building it, and forward thinking individuals willing to do what it takes to make it happen.
It was a long battle getting this network built for us in Utah. Qwest and Comcast pushed VERY hard to stop Utopia. We went to several city council meetings where they were voting on whether or not to build this network, at every one Qwest and Comcast representatives were there, along with their employees living in the area pushing the city councils to vote against Utopia. When the dust cleared, only a handful of cities voted to build Utopia; there was tons of money spent in ad campaigns to try to kill Utopia. They were somewhat successful, because we didn't get the support of all the cities we wanted. For example, our state capital Salt Lake City ultimately pulled out of Utopia. The cities that remained are smaller, suburban areas. The first of them are now seeing the fruits of their efforts--fast bandwidth!
I believe that even though Utopia has had a slow start, it will quickly become apparent what a benefit it is to have fiber to your house and what things can be done with it. We are pioneering this effort and hope it will spread across Utah and many other states.
There seems to be very little appreciation anymore for the notion of having a stable business.
Very little appreciation from who? Consumers? When consumers have lots of choices in a marketplace, it creates a competitive business environment that requires business to constantly change or risk losing against the competition. For example, if Microsoft doesn't venture oustide of their "stable" desktop software market, they risk their software becoming irrelevant through the new generation of web services.
There is little appreciation for "stable" companies because we as consumers are always looking for the company that can deliver the better, cheaper, or faster product. Does anyone care that American manufacturing jobs are lost when they buy cheap, foreign-made Walmart wares? Do we care enough to buy the more expensive American products instead? It's a simple law of economics: business is like a competitive sport--companies that aren't always looking to change won't ultimately survive.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/23/222925 5&tid=141&tid=126. html
http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/5393
"We had a solution to this problem. It is called tariffs. We charge a tax on all goods that are imported into the USA to protect goods manufactured inside the USA."
We don't let China sell $8,000 cars in the USA. We charge the China company a tax for the right to sell in the USA.
I have a friend who is into wines, big time. He has one of those fancy wine dehumidifiers/refrigerators with the glass case. He reads about wine, goes to wine tastings, he knows his wines. Anyways, he went to France last year, and he called me when he got back. He said the same French wine he buys in the USA was less than 1/3rd the price in France. He said he does not buy that wine often because it is so expensive, but he purchased 6 bottles to bring back home. He buys many more wines produced in California than anywhere else. Seems tariffs are working well in that situation."
There are quite a few major problems with tariffs. First, they artificially prop-up industries. This makes the economy less efficient overall and in turn makes so less jobs are created in other sectors. Tariffs also increase the price of goods to consumers. And the biggest problem, in my opinion, is that tariffs severely hamper the ability of the U.S. to sell our exports to other countries. We are not the only consumers of American cars in the world. A tariff in the U.S. on cars would make so automobile manufacturers can breathe a little and can sell more expensive cars in the U.S. because there would be a tax on the Chinese cars. Then we wouldn't have to worry about China flooding our market with cheap goods.
Sounds great in theory... but what about all the other markets in the world where people are currently buying our cars? Does our U.S. tariff stop the Chinese from selling their cheap cars to the other major world economies? No, it wouldn't. A tariff would severely decrease the foreign demand for our U.S. made cars because they are more expensive. It would cause Chinese car companies to outpace us significantly in growth and efficiency because we couldn't remain competitive in the global marketplace.
"I only buy American cars, I have NEVER owned a foriegn made car."
I applaud you for your principles in supporting our American workforce. I'm sure the car companies that spend millions in advertising campaigns to "buy American" would be happy to see their money is paying off for some people. The important question though is what would most Americans do if they could buy an identical product made oversees that was thousands of dollars cheaper? The Chinese don't meet the quality of our cars yet, but most experts today are predicting that by around 2010 they will be there. Look at Wal-mart today--it's full of Asian goods. I think it is reasonably clear that most Americans would rather have cheaper prices than pay more to buy American goods.
"$1400 per employee for health care is nothing compared to the $2,000,000 bonus the CEO got? How many people could that 2 million cover? And that is not touching one penny of the CEOs salary."
Well given that GE has 1.1 million employees, your hypothetical would mean about $2 per employee.
How many people can and want the responsibility of making a multi-billion dollar company perform? If you put the wrong guy at the helm, he can run the ship into the shore. I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to defend what are often times terribly high-salaries, and some CEO's are definately overpaid.
However, look at a company like Merck. It is a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company in trouble. How many people are there out there that can step up to the plate and turn the behemoth into a money-maker again? What if the person fails? Who wants to hire a CEO that failed at his previous company? They need a "star" CEO, one who can really turn the company around. Would it be worth a few million to lure away a CEO from another co