Macy's can't legally detain you in that holding cell against your will. However, loss prevention personnel will do everything they can to convince a suspected shoplifter that they can.
Obviously SCOX picked a company that they thought would do anything to avoid bad press or litigation. In the sensitive time before an IPO, this is the last thing they need. So, yes.. it's basically extortion.
This is not extortion. It is unlikely that anyone at SCO has any faith that they will receive any sort of compensation from Google. It is even more unlikely that anyone at Google would even begin to consider compensating SCO for their frivolous claims, regardless of Google's impending IPO. SCO, in an effort to manipulate their own stock price, is simply trying to ride the coattails of Google's good press and perceived value. I doubt that anyone at SCO really expects any of their legal pursuits to be successful. Their obvious intention is to get their stock price and then sell at a profit, which they've already done successfully. This current item is just further proof that they're going to milk this opportunity for all it's worth.
I'm not an old-timer and I would hate to see the loss of the code requirement for HF. The primary reason that amateur radio exists is for the public benefit. Amateur radio operators are expected to provide emergency communications service when needed. The most basic and easy to implement of all modulation schemes is CW. Having the code requirement guarantees that that any amateur radio operator on HF will have the ability to copy and transmit this most basic modulation scheme. Up until the inception of PSK31 there has been no other modulation scheme as efficient as CW in terms of spectrum usage. PSK31 would certainly make a fine replacement, but it's not as reliable or as widely implemented, not to mention the fact that it requires additional equipment.
I also challenge your contention that the hobby isn't growing because of the code requirement. The hobby isn't growing (much) because there are many other outlets for a young person's interest. Amateur radio by contrast, just isn't all that interesting to most kids regardless of the code requirement.
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. One should treat wireless like any other Internet connection and assume that the packets are going to be in the clear for everyone to see. This is why there are other encryption methods on top of IP. If I'm using a wireless access point and I need to access the corporate network, I fire up a vpn. If I need to check my email, I SSH into the email server. If I want to buy some pr0n, I use an https connection. If I want to view some pr0n, I leave it unencrypted for everyone else to see, because I'm just a nice guy.
The encoding traditionally used by telcos (but *not* VOIP) is 64kbps ADPCM for each call. There are compression and silence-suppression technologies that can get this down to around 8kbps per call, however compression isn't something really considered for "carrier-grade" voice service. For a sense of scale, an OC-192 will handle 150,000 voice calls. I know that this isn't the first US carrier to move all of it's long-distance traffic over IP, though it may be the first to publicly do so. It's not too far-fetched really as long as the carriers that do it have their own IP backbones, it's just another form of switching.
If a DDoS attack cripples my site, and you expect me to pay for that, you're sorely mistaken.
I am involved in a pretty large hosting operation. If a customer attracts a DDoS attack, we absolutely expect them to pay for it. If they complain and go away, we're generally happier for it. Nobody wants DDoS targets as customers. Obviously, there are mitigating factors, and we're pretty lenient with the policy, but that's still the policy.
All this is bullshit. It is entirely possible to get high quality results for less money. Yes, you should spend atleast a grand or more on a good vocal mic, if you plan to have good vocals. Henry Rollins still records with an SM58 ($90 please). But do you need to use those same tube microphones for the drums? Last time I checked, most people were using $100-$200 dynamics for drums. Room treatment can certainly be expensive, but a vocal booth and a drum booth can be assembled for a couple grand, those and some acoustic panels are all you really need. I'm sure a $5k monitoring setup sounds nice, but one can also get by with a grand worth of near-fields, a decent amp, and a decent set of headphones.
If one has the budget and wants to achieve the best possible sound quality then I suppose a thousand dollar compressor is necessary. However, I still hear crap on major label, professionally produced recordings that could benefit from the budget setup that I've described. It is possible to achieve high quality results on a budget. It certainly takes more than a PC with a sound card, but not as much as you describe. More than anything I think it takes a talented engineer with a good ear.
This problem ranks right up there along with eBay auctions and the fact that they "close" at a given point in time. In the real world, an auction continues as long as people are making bids. eBay should extend an auction by 5 minutes or an hour or a day each time someone bids on an item. That'd get rid of "last minute bid services". (I'd suggest a 5 minute extension - because then there's a natural time for everyone interested in an item to "gather" together and do the final bidding.)
Ebay doesn't host real-time auctions, they host auctions where one bids by proxy. In these sort of auctions it's a very common thing to end the auction a a given time. To properly bid on an auction of this sort, one simply bids the maximum amount one is willing to pay for an item and the software does the rest. Unfortunately, since it isn't a sealed bid system, many fools seem to think that it is a real-time auction and bid it as such. This behavior only encouraging bidding wars which inevitably raise the price of an item. The only wise thing to do, given this sort of behavior is to bid at the last possible moment. If a person correctly uses the proxy bidding process and bids more than an individual using a sniping service then that person will win the auction. Extending auctions by five minutes would solve no real problem, but it would very likely cause winning bids to increase relative to the actual value of the item sold. Based on personal experience, this is already the case the majority of the time and the situation doesn't need to be exacerbated, as it can only drive away buyers.
Why would you be against a law prohibiting theft -- which is what spam is? Laws aren't bad. The anti junk fax law that I pointed out is an example of a perfectly good law that hasn't hurt anyone (other than junk faxers).
There are already laws prohibiting theft, we don't need more.
But will the quality be the same? Aren't the more expensive parts expensive just because they are designed for outer space use?
Well, Radio Shack electronic components have a reputation for being the very poorest quality. It is possible to acquire much higher quality components for similar or better prices at places like Digi-Key or Mouser Electronics.
Even if they did use the very highest quality electronic components available there wouldn't be much relative cost difference. If a resistor at Radio Shack is $0.10ea and a much better resistor is available from a real electronics supplier for $0.20ea then there's not going to be much of a difference when you need a dozen of them.
Yes, SCO is indeed ancient, but the version of unix that they are releasing is probably one of the truest versions of UNIX that is still being actively developed., if that can be said about any version of UNIX. If you check out Éric Lévénez' UNIX History page he has a diagram in PDF and postscript format that shows the evolution of unix over the years. You'll notice that this product is a direct descendent of UNIX System III which was a product developed within AT&T in 1981 and derived directly from Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's work at Bell Labs.
The fact remains that you shouldn't connect an insecure system to the Internet. It will get cracked in less time than you think. I used to send an email to abuse@* for every attempted connect to my webserver on port 111 (rpc). It got so tiresome, that I stopped bothering. I did get to hear some interesting stories though. A guy in Israel left his laptop on over the weekend, etc. Most of the compromised boxes were default redhat installs on a dedicated connection, i.e. ethernet in a dorm room, dsl or cable. Here's one of my favorites, I received this from a security admin that works at a very prestigious school with a really good CS program with some really bright students, whom you would think are better than this, somewhere in the silicon valley, in the vicinity of Palo Alto;).
You are receiving this in reply to your message last week alerting us
to a port 111 scan originating from as system in our residential dorm
network, *.*.*.* (hostname.domain.edu). Our investigation
indicates that the system had been compromised by an outside intruder
within hours of being installed through a port scan similar to the
one subsequently launched from that system. The system has been
removed from the network and is being reinstalled with a more secure
configuration. We will be attempting to trace the intruder and may
contact you again if successful.
So here's a hint, learn how to use your OS before you put it on the Internet. If you're a linux fan, figure out IPTables and implement it. If you're into BSD or Solaris, use IPF and really learn it. Download the security updates for your system and apply them before you put it on the Internet. Air gap security is the best time. When you're done with your box, you should only be running a late version of (Open)SSH and whatever services you explicitly want people to connect to. Inetd should be turned off, for the most part. Unfortunately, system security is not easy. This is why it pays to be a script kiddie. They don't have to know how something works, they just need to use a script against as many boxes as possible until they find a weak one.
Ok, I suck at math, so I may have some errors here, but your 848GB seems wrong to me. Even if the platter had magnetic material all the way across, it would end up being something like:
150(2(pi((1.8)/2)^2) i.e. 150GB/in2 * 2 (both sides of the platter) * (pi(r^2)) (the area of a circle). My answer gives something like 764GB. The fact is that a significant portion of the platter is not magnetic media. A more realistic area for a 1.8 inch disk is something like 2in2 as opposed to 2.5in2 (figure that the media is about 1/2in across) which means that they could probably scale this up to around 600GB per platter. Then again, if you scale this up to 4 platters like a modern notebook hard drive might have, then you end up with 2.4TB of data in your laptop. With this in mind, that 150GB/in2 limit doesn't really seem like that big of a deal.
Additionally, California hasn't had a stage 3 power alert, indicating that rolling blackouts are imminent, since May 8. Also, what most non-Californians don't realize is that there are ~16 outage blocks and only one of those outage blocks may suffer a rolling blackout during a stage 3 power emergency and not all stage 3 emergencies will require an outage. What this means is that I (and the average Californian) have seen only one outage this year as a result of a lack of supply. This outage lasted less than 2 hours, and I wasn't around to witness it. I've also experienced one supply-related outage at my place of business this year, which is in a different power block.
Incidentally, RedHat retains the services of Alan Cox to work on the kernel. They also retain the services of dozens (hundreds?) of other Linux programmers to do work on various pieces of the distro and then release the results of that hard work under the GPL.
They're adding value to customers who want a DB with support. This is open source, they can do this, and I bet $20 that the Postgre team is happy to be part of the package, since this will expand their market and get more people interested in postgre...
The article seems to support your conclusion:
Bruce Momjian, a Great Bridge employee and one of the six core PostgreSQL developers, also was optimistic. Red Hat's help with the PostgreSQL effort would mean "they're going to put some major resources into PostgreSQL development," he said.
When I get around to buying a house and can setup a decent listening environment I'll probably go to a decent 5-digit hi-fi setup.
Err, that should be, "decent 4-digit hi-fi setup". I.e. less than $10k. I would consider that a reasonable budget for a listening room in a $400k house.
What burns me is the amount of money that high-end stereo stores try to get you to spend on things that don't make a difference, especially cables. We're not just talking about multi-thousand-dollar speaker cables. We're talking about multi-hundred-dollar digital interconnect cables. Hello? Do you understand the concept of digital transmission? I thought not.
I run a mid-fi Sony 5.1 setup that works pretty well for watching DVDs and listening to music. Currently, the level of fidelity is acceptable. When I get around to buying a house and can setup a decent listening environment I'll probably go to a decent 5-digit hi-fi setup.
When acquiring this hi-fi equipment I purchased mostly the lower end Monster cables. The quality on the cables is good, and the price isn't too outrageous for the low-end line. I couldn't find a toslink (optical) cable on the rack so I asked a salesman. He actually tried to sell me on a high-end optic cable telling me that some people say they can hear the difference between that and the lower-end cable. I explained to him that if my components had SC or even ST connectors that I wouldn't even be there in the first place and that I knew more about optical fiber then he would ever hope to know and that no, I wasn't going to pay over $100 for a plastic optical fiber cable when a $20 cable would work just as well. I also asked him to lay off the crack.
Also, does anyone know of a good mid-fi record player? I can't seem to find anything between the ~$125 cheapo units and >$1,000 high end units.
So you say I should unwillingly subsidize those films I never went to see, and you call that a free market?
I'm not saying that at all. My point is just that there is a cost component that people don't seem to realize. I personally abhor the MPAA and the RIAA for a few very explicit reasons but that doesn't change the facts as they are.
There's a good reason for it and the Slashdot crowd that gets all music for free from Napster / Limewire / Gnutella / whatever and pirates movies with DivX is a good example of why the zones are there.
I don't have any facts to back this up, but I suspect that the slashdot contingent are very significant consumers of DVDs and CDs considering the demographic of the site.
"Piracy" is the act of robbery on the high seas. What you are referring to is copyright infringement, which is what occurs when someone makes a copy of a copyrighted work and distributes that copy. Isn't it interesting how our state-of-mind gets co-opted by the media such that we actually begin to believe that the simple act of copying someone's intellectual property is actually theft or piracy?
This is very different with medias. Be it software, music or motion pictures. Once you payed for the production and/or development costs, the cost of a copy is marginal.
I wanted to put this in the thread and figured this was as good a place as any. Several people thus far have mentioned the cost of DVDs as well as CDs. The upfront costs for production and development are indeed significant and the actual cost of the media is nominal. It should be noted that each work is not a profit center unto itself. What this means is that if a film company has a solid hit and makes millions in profit off of a particular film, that does not make the film company profitable. They still have to recoup the cost of films that didn't make money. This works for CDs and for books as well, where the most profitable items subsidize the cost of the less profitable items.
Well, actually, I'm not sure that's the case. The author lists two references for that one particular sentence:
TIMOTHY PARKER, TEACH YOURSELF TCP/IP IN 14 DAYS Page 1-50 (2nd ed. 1996); Jason Yanowitz, Under the hood of the Internet
An overview of the TCP/IP Protocol Suite at http://info.acm.org/crossroads/xrds1-1/tcpjpy.html (modified Jan. 20, 2000).
Though I would rather he read the Stevens book as opposed to some "teach yourself something in 14 days" the fact remains that he is right. Though separating the process of communications into layers is an academic exercise and not a technical one. The TCP/IP model and the DOD model both have 4 layers. The OSI model has 7 layers, much like that burrito from taco bell.
Check out this link for differences between the three.
I have a certain obligation, not to sit down and type it, word for word, into the computer. This is possible, but difficult. In the same category are things like building your own car (from scratch, not a kit), and so forth.
You have no obligation to abstain from typing your book word for word into your computer. As a matter of fact, you can copy your book all day long without violating any laws. It's when you go to redistribute those copies is when you have a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Macy's can't legally detain you in that holding cell against your will. However, loss prevention personnel will do everything they can to convince a suspected shoplifter that they can.
Obviously SCOX picked a company that they thought would do anything to avoid bad press or litigation. In the sensitive time before an IPO, this is the last thing they need. So, yes.. it's basically extortion.
This is not extortion. It is unlikely that anyone at SCO has any faith that they will receive any sort of compensation from Google. It is even more unlikely that anyone at Google would even begin to consider compensating SCO for their frivolous claims, regardless of Google's impending IPO. SCO, in an effort to manipulate their own stock price, is simply trying to ride the coattails of Google's good press and perceived value. I doubt that anyone at SCO really expects any of their legal pursuits to be successful. Their obvious intention is to get their stock price and then sell at a profit, which they've already done successfully. This current item is just further proof that they're going to milk this opportunity for all it's worth.
I'm not an old-timer and I would hate to see the loss of the code requirement for HF. The primary reason that amateur radio exists is for the public benefit. Amateur radio operators are expected to provide emergency communications service when needed. The most basic and easy to implement of all modulation schemes is CW. Having the code requirement guarantees that that any amateur radio operator on HF will have the ability to copy and transmit this most basic modulation scheme. Up until the inception of PSK31 there has been no other modulation scheme as efficient as CW in terms of spectrum usage. PSK31 would certainly make a fine replacement, but it's not as reliable or as widely implemented, not to mention the fact that it requires additional equipment.
I also challenge your contention that the hobby isn't growing because of the code requirement. The hobby isn't growing (much) because there are many other outlets for a young person's interest. Amateur radio by contrast, just isn't all that interesting to most kids regardless of the code requirement.
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. One should treat wireless like any other Internet connection and assume that the packets are going to be in the clear for everyone to see. This is why there are other encryption methods on top of IP. If I'm using a wireless access point and I need to access the corporate network, I fire up a vpn. If I need to check my email, I SSH into the email server. If I want to buy some pr0n, I use an https connection. If I want to view some pr0n, I leave it unencrypted for everyone else to see, because I'm just a nice guy.
The encoding traditionally used by telcos (but *not* VOIP) is 64kbps ADPCM for each call. There are compression and silence-suppression technologies that can get this down to around 8kbps per call, however compression isn't something really considered for "carrier-grade" voice service. For a sense of scale, an OC-192 will handle 150,000 voice calls. I know that this isn't the first US carrier to move all of it's long-distance traffic over IP, though it may be the first to publicly do so. It's not too far-fetched really as long as the carriers that do it have their own IP backbones, it's just another form of switching.
If a DDoS attack cripples my site, and you expect me to pay for that, you're sorely mistaken.
I am involved in a pretty large hosting operation. If a customer attracts a DDoS attack, we absolutely expect them to pay for it. If they complain and go away, we're generally happier for it. Nobody wants DDoS targets as customers. Obviously, there are mitigating factors, and we're pretty lenient with the policy, but that's still the policy.
All this is bullshit. It is entirely possible to get high quality results for less money. Yes, you should spend atleast a grand or more on a good vocal mic, if you plan to have good vocals. Henry Rollins still records with an SM58 ($90 please). But do you need to use those same tube microphones for the drums? Last time I checked, most people were using $100-$200 dynamics for drums. Room treatment can certainly be expensive, but a vocal booth and a drum booth can be assembled for a couple grand, those and some acoustic panels are all you really need. I'm sure a $5k monitoring setup sounds nice, but one can also get by with a grand worth of near-fields, a decent amp, and a decent set of headphones.
If one has the budget and wants to achieve the best possible sound quality then I suppose a thousand dollar compressor is necessary. However, I still hear crap on major label, professionally produced recordings that could benefit from the budget setup that I've described. It is possible to achieve high quality results on a budget. It certainly takes more than a PC with a sound card, but not as much as you describe. More than anything I think it takes a talented engineer with a good ear.
This problem ranks right up there along with eBay auctions and the fact that they "close" at a given point in time. In the real world, an auction continues as long as people are making bids. eBay should extend an auction by 5 minutes or an hour or a day each time someone bids on an item. That'd get rid of "last minute bid services". (I'd suggest a 5 minute extension - because then there's a natural time for everyone interested in an item to "gather" together and do the final bidding.)
Ebay doesn't host real-time auctions, they host auctions where one bids by proxy. In these sort of auctions it's a very common thing to end the auction a a given time. To properly bid on an auction of this sort, one simply bids the maximum amount one is willing to pay for an item and the software does the rest. Unfortunately, since it isn't a sealed bid system, many fools seem to think that it is a real-time auction and bid it as such. This behavior only encouraging bidding wars which inevitably raise the price of an item. The only wise thing to do, given this sort of behavior is to bid at the last possible moment. If a person correctly uses the proxy bidding process and bids more than an individual using a sniping service then that person will win the auction. Extending auctions by five minutes would solve no real problem, but it would very likely cause winning bids to increase relative to the actual value of the item sold. Based on personal experience, this is already the case the majority of the time and the situation doesn't need to be exacerbated, as it can only drive away buyers.
Why would you be against a law prohibiting theft -- which is what spam is? Laws aren't bad. The anti junk fax law that I pointed out is an example of a perfectly good law that hasn't hurt anyone (other than junk faxers).
There are already laws prohibiting theft, we don't need more.
But will the quality be the same? Aren't the more expensive parts expensive just because they are designed for outer space use?
Well, Radio Shack electronic components have a reputation for being the very poorest quality. It is possible to acquire much higher quality components for similar or better prices at places like Digi-Key or Mouser Electronics.
Even if they did use the very highest quality electronic components available there wouldn't be much relative cost difference. If a resistor at Radio Shack is $0.10ea and a much better resistor is available from a real electronics supplier for $0.20ea then there's not going to be much of a difference when you need a dozen of them.
Yes, SCO is indeed ancient, but the version of unix that they are releasing is probably one of the truest versions of UNIX that is still being actively developed., if that can be said about any version of UNIX. If you check out Éric Lévénez' UNIX History page he has a diagram in PDF and postscript format that shows the evolution of unix over the years. You'll notice that this product is a direct descendent of UNIX System III which was a product developed within AT&T in 1981 and derived directly from Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's work at Bell Labs.
You live in Canada? Then you are American, you fool. So are Mexicans, Brazilians, Colombians, and Argentinans. Which continent do you live on?
So here's a hint, learn how to use your OS before you put it on the Internet. If you're a linux fan, figure out IPTables and implement it. If you're into BSD or Solaris, use IPF and really learn it. Download the security updates for your system and apply them before you put it on the Internet. Air gap security is the best time. When you're done with your box, you should only be running a late version of (Open)SSH and whatever services you explicitly want people to connect to. Inetd should be turned off, for the most part. Unfortunately, system security is not easy. This is why it pays to be a script kiddie. They don't have to know how something works, they just need to use a script against as many boxes as possible until they find a weak one.
Ok, I suck at math, so I may have some errors here, but your 848GB seems wrong to me. Even if the platter had magnetic material all the way across, it would end up being something like:
150(2(pi((1.8)/2)^2) i.e. 150GB/in2 * 2 (both sides of the platter) * (pi(r^2)) (the area of a circle). My answer gives something like 764GB. The fact is that a significant portion of the platter is not magnetic media. A more realistic area for a 1.8 inch disk is something like 2in2 as opposed to 2.5in2 (figure that the media is about 1/2in across) which means that they could probably scale this up to around 600GB per platter. Then again, if you scale this up to 4 platters like a modern notebook hard drive might have, then you end up with 2.4TB of data in your laptop. With this in mind, that 150GB/in2 limit doesn't really seem like that big of a deal.
Additionally, California hasn't had a stage 3 power alert, indicating that rolling blackouts are imminent, since May 8. Also, what most non-Californians don't realize is that there are ~16 outage blocks and only one of those outage blocks may suffer a rolling blackout during a stage 3 power emergency and not all stage 3 emergencies will require an outage. What this means is that I (and the average Californian) have seen only one outage this year as a result of a lack of supply. This outage lasted less than 2 hours, and I wasn't around to witness it. I've also experienced one supply-related outage at my place of business this year, which is in a different power block.
AMD has full access to use all of Intel's patents. Intel has full access to the use of AMD's patents. Details are here.
Incidentally, RedHat retains the services of Alan Cox to work on the kernel. They also retain the services of dozens (hundreds?) of other Linux programmers to do work on various pieces of the distro and then release the results of that hard work under the GPL.
...
They're adding value to customers who want a DB with support. This is open source, they can do this, and I bet $20 that the Postgre team is happy to be part of the package, since this will expand their market and get more people interested in postgre
The article seems to support your conclusion:
Bruce Momjian, a Great Bridge employee and one of the six core PostgreSQL developers, also was optimistic. Red Hat's help with the PostgreSQL effort would mean "they're going to put some major resources into PostgreSQL development," he said.
Really?!? Wow!?! It's about fucking time.
When I get around to buying a house and can setup a decent listening environment I'll probably go to a decent 5-digit hi-fi setup.
Err, that should be, "decent 4-digit hi-fi setup". I.e. less than $10k. I would consider that a reasonable budget for a listening room in a $400k house.
What burns me is the amount of money that high-end stereo stores try to get you to spend on things that don't make a difference, especially cables. We're not just talking about multi-thousand-dollar speaker cables. We're talking about multi-hundred-dollar digital interconnect cables. Hello? Do you understand the concept of digital transmission? I thought not.
I run a mid-fi Sony 5.1 setup that works pretty well for watching DVDs and listening to music. Currently, the level of fidelity is acceptable. When I get around to buying a house and can setup a decent listening environment I'll probably go to a decent 5-digit hi-fi setup.
When acquiring this hi-fi equipment I purchased mostly the lower end Monster cables. The quality on the cables is good, and the price isn't too outrageous for the low-end line. I couldn't find a toslink (optical) cable on the rack so I asked a salesman. He actually tried to sell me on a high-end optic cable telling me that some people say they can hear the difference between that and the lower-end cable. I explained to him that if my components had SC or even ST connectors that I wouldn't even be there in the first place and that I knew more about optical fiber then he would ever hope to know and that no, I wasn't going to pay over $100 for a plastic optical fiber cable when a $20 cable would work just as well. I also asked him to lay off the crack.
Also, does anyone know of a good mid-fi record player? I can't seem to find anything between the ~$125 cheapo units and >$1,000 high end units.
So you say I should unwillingly subsidize those films I never went to see, and you call that a free market?
I'm not saying that at all. My point is just that there is a cost component that people don't seem to realize. I personally abhor the MPAA and the RIAA for a few very explicit reasons but that doesn't change the facts as they are.
It's quite simple really and I don't see what there is to whine about it.
How about price fixing?
There's a good reason for it and the Slashdot crowd that gets all music for free from Napster / Limewire / Gnutella / whatever and pirates movies with DivX is a good example of why the zones are there.
I don't have any facts to back this up, but I suspect that the slashdot contingent are very significant consumers of DVDs and CDs considering the demographic of the site.
"Piracy" is the act of robbery on the high seas. What you are referring to is copyright infringement, which is what occurs when someone makes a copy of a copyrighted work and distributes that copy. Isn't it interesting how our state-of-mind gets co-opted by the media such that we actually begin to believe that the simple act of copying someone's intellectual property is actually theft or piracy?
This is very different with medias. Be it software, music or motion pictures. Once you payed for the production and/or development costs, the cost of a copy is marginal.
I wanted to put this in the thread and figured this was as good a place as any. Several people thus far have mentioned the cost of DVDs as well as CDs. The upfront costs for production and development are indeed significant and the actual cost of the media is nominal. It should be noted that each work is not a profit center unto itself. What this means is that if a film company has a solid hit and makes millions in profit off of a particular film, that does not make the film company profitable. They still have to recoup the cost of films that didn't make money. This works for CDs and for books as well, where the most profitable items subsidize the cost of the less profitable items.
Well, actually, I'm not sure that's the case. The author lists two references for that one particular sentence:
l (modified Jan. 20, 2000).
TIMOTHY PARKER, TEACH YOURSELF TCP/IP IN 14 DAYS Page 1-50 (2nd ed. 1996); Jason Yanowitz, Under the hood of the Internet
An overview of the TCP/IP Protocol Suite at http://info.acm.org/crossroads/xrds1-1/tcpjpy.htm
Though I would rather he read the Stevens book as opposed to some "teach yourself something in 14 days" the fact remains that he is right. Though separating the process of communications into layers is an academic exercise and not a technical one. The TCP/IP model and the DOD model both have 4 layers. The OSI model has 7 layers, much like that burrito from taco bell.
Check out this link for differences between the three.
I have a certain obligation, not to sit down and type it, word for word, into the computer. This is possible, but difficult. In the same category are things like building your own car (from scratch, not a kit), and so forth.
You have no obligation to abstain from typing your book word for word into your computer. As a matter of fact, you can copy your book all day long without violating any laws. It's when you go to redistribute those copies is when you have a problem.