I think you're stretching a little bit on the idea that a file needs to belong to something. While you are correct at a UI level (you have to map the file to a viewer), my thought processes focus around "Documents," "Spreadsheets," "Pictures," "Song" and so on. Some of these are more interchangeable than others: I can't just generically save a document from Word and then open it up in, say, WordPerfect, and have it look and act just the same. So, instead, I have "MS Word Documents." (And pretty soon, I'll have Word '07 Documents which I can't read in Word '03.)
Music (at least mp3s) and Pictures (jpgs) do not really need to be associated with any particular application. Even when I'm on a friend's computer, for example, I know that clicking on a picture will pull it up, even if it may not be in the same viewer that I'm used to. I would assert that this is the best model -- the fact that you need a program to look at your document, your spreadsheet or your (e-)mail should really be invisible.
Unfortunately, this would make viewers just commodity items. But, software manufacturers sell products by differentiating them from the competition. The end result is that computers are confusing to users in part because software companies have a vested interest in keeping them confusing.
Bzzt. Try again. There was an early "estate" tax in 1797, but it was basically a stamp tax -- every will or estate had to pay a flat fee. It was instituted for a much more practical purpose than what you suggest: paying to rearm the Navy. When the Navy was rearmed, it was canceled.
Until the early 1900's, that's exactly how the estate tax was used -- as an occasional source of revenue to support the military. No fine theory of destroying aristocracy, just "We need the money. here's a convenient way to get it." (Remember that the income tax was unconstitutional.)
HA! Well, if posting it on a bittorrent site is distribution, then they are certainly allowed to distribute their own work. So, there's no infringement if they make it available for you to download and you do.
I suspect, though, that they're using that to find people who are sharing other infringing files.
You can apply to register a trademark with the intention of using it in commerce. If I recall correctly, you can put off using it for 3 years after your application. Doing so basically reserves the mark.
Of course, if the mark was already identified with somebody else before you used it, the registration doesn't help much.
So, here's a possible scenario: Cisco registers 10 years ago, doesn't use it. 6 years after their registration, Apple comes along and claims the 'i' abbreviation. Now, the mark is Apple's despite the registration. Cisco comes along, creates an 'iPhone,' claiming priority based on its earlier registration. But, it's too late: they lost it by not using the mark within 3 years of the original registration.
(Not saying that I have the facts right on that. It's just a possible theory under which Apple could win.)
Well, the problem is that you don't need a minimum wage to accomplish what you're suggesting. If there were no minimum wage, somebody working $3.00 per hour could quit and retrain if that turned out to be the best use of their time. In the presence of a minimum wage, however, they don't have the option. In addition, there's nothing forcing them to retrain -- they could just be home killing brain cells with Oprah and Dr. Phil.
In any case, consider the people we're talking about -- it's people, such as the severely disabled, who have a couple of strikes against them. Such people do not really have the option to retrain. As a result, the minimum wage keeps them from having jobs. And, in fact, since they cannot get their first job, they are prevented from getting any second better-paying job.
Here's an example: I was in Wilmington, NC last month, where I met a woman in a wheelchair with no arms who made flowers out of ribbon with her feet and then sold them on the street. Each flower took her 45 minutes to make and sold for $5. Considering the time she spent making them and the time she spent selling them, she was making considerably less than $5.15 per hour. Luckily, because she was doing this herself, she was able to avoid the minimum wage law, which would have forced her out of business.
The DRM component is dictated by a maze of legal agreements among the HD patent holders, the content industry and the consumer electronics industry. Vista's limitations are, in part, dictated by such agreements -- without them, you would not be able to buy a blue-ray or HD-DVD drive for your computer.
The problem, though, is that this situation did not need to be this way -- Microsoft could have teamed up with the electronics industry to say, effectively, "go to H*ll" to the content producers. The content producers would then have had to choose between (A) not releasing HD content or (B) releasing a non-DRM'd version. Their claim is that they would choose (A). But, they're full of crap -- doing so would deny them a new revenue stream in the face of increased competitive pressures. If the market didn't force them to switch, their stockholders would have.
You really have to watch out here, because we often substitute the language of death and destruction for the language of defeat: "I'm going to kill him this November," for example, has two completely different meanings depending on context. Politicians and pundits often "target" each other, so using words like "bullseye" can have similar double meanings. Both staunch conservatives and staunch liberals engage in this sort of rhetoric, which is often followed by the other side claiming that the rhetoric was intended to incite violence and then the first side basically says "don't be an idiot."
A non-political example (well, sort of): after getting home from the now infamous Duke lacrosse party, one of the (unindicted) players sent an email to a few others, venting some anger at the strippers and saying that he'd like to skin them alive. In the media feeding-frenzy that erupted shortly after the party, this e-mail was seen in a completely different light -- people took him literally, and he was suspended from the school. In 20/20 hindsight, it seem smuch more likely that he was using the expression figuratively -- "If you come home drunk one more time, I'm going to skin you alive." If you think a rape occurred, it's really inflammatory; if you don't, it's just an expression.
The stuff on the YouTube video doesn't have a whole lot of surrounding context, so it's hard to tell exactly what was going on. The torture description sounds like what a bunch of Americans were thinking on 9/12. Like it or not, a lot of people do not object to torturing terrorists, especially in the hypothetical situation where torture might prevent another terrorist act.
However, even though I suspect that this blogger is probably as much of a left-wing reactionary as the people he's complaining about are right-wing, this is the prototype of fair use. Were he to fight it, he would probably win. Copyright lawsuits are one of the few places where a defendant can recover his attorney's fees from the other side. *if* this case is as it appears, the blogger has a pretty good case.
Nearly any economist will tell you that the result of the minimum wage is that a bunch of people who are available to work 40 hours a week earn $0 (since they are unemployed) and others earn $10712. All those people earning $0 may be able to find jobs that pay, say $3/hour if there were no minimum wage. But, since the minimum wage exists, they can't find those jobs. It isn't that the jobs instead pay $5.15 -- it's that such jobs don't exist because employers aren't going to pay somebody $5.15 to do a job that's only worth $3.00.
If the minimum wage actually boosted wages, then why not set them at $30 and hour and put everybody above the poverty line?
So, without the minimum wage, poor people in the US would be as poor as they are in Ethiopia? That's absurd. The main thing the minimum wage does is ensure that nobody gets paid to do those jobs which are worth less than the minimum wage. As a result, people who would do those jobs are paid no wage at all. As a result, you see high unemployment among the mentally retarded and teenagers in urban areas.
High poverty in many third world countries results from anti-competitive government policies (most commonly institutionalized corruption).
You didn't really address my point about dry cleaners, which was that by putting up unnecessary barriers to entry, the government is acting anti-competitively, which ends up hurting consumers. Here's another example: in North Carolina (any many other states), an existing franchisee of a a car manufacturer is allowed, BY LAW, to object to a new franchisee setting up shop. In addition, manufacturers are not allowed to open their own stores. It's a perfect example of regulation aimed at protecting exiting players against competition -- Prices go up and service goes down.
There are certainly some times that regulation is required because of a market failure. But, those examples are few.
Phooey. There are, of course, examples where some form of regulation is needed to correct market failures -- you've named two of them: natural monopoly and failing to account for externalities. These, however, are the exception rather than the norm. There are certainly significant natural barriers to entry in some markets (I don't consider cost alone to be a barrier to entry), but they are relatively few. But, in fact, the bigger problem is often barriers imposed by regulation.
Consider, for example, dry-cleaners: in many states, you have to be licensed in order to be a dry-cleaner. Now, this makes sense if you're worried about cleaners dumping chemicals into the drain. But, in several states, parts of the licensing exam ask stuff like "how do you clean a tophat?" Clearly this is just a gratuitous barrier that would be better imposed by the market. (Somebody who does a poor job of cleaning tophats would not clean many or would charge at a price-point where tophat purchasers don't care.) Similarly, look at the drug market -- the complexity of dealing with FDA regulations is one reason that the market is as concentrated as it is. Again, some regulation is necessary -- you want to make sure that the drugs are safe, because the cost of a market response (ie dead people) is too great. But, you don't need the same scutiny for effectiveness.
There are tons of places where regulation hurts the market: winter Florida tomatoes, real estate agents, television, milk price controls and so on....
Poverty does not result from capitalism. It's funny that you should even mention it in a thread that starts with Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on earth and without good functioning markets. A poor person in the US would live like a king in Ethiopia. Capitalism creates a middle class, which is a huge stabilizing force -- it's the non-capitalistic, overregulated countries that have all the problems with revolutions.
So, we have a disagreement over the bolded part of your post. I understand how the DRM stuff is intended to work: the owners of the hi-def patents claim that they will only license them to people who implement the full DRM suite. Content owners enter into agreements with the patent owners that require the patent owners to enforce those restrictions. So, for example, if anybody comes along with, say, a blue-ray player that allows the content to be copied, the owners of the blue-ray patents will sue the manufacturer either for patent infringement or breach of contract. (The content owners have a DMCA circumvention claim as well.)
The point, though, is that the bargain does not need to be made. If Microsoft had effectively said "Go to H*ll. We're not accepting that deal because it's not what our customers want," the content owners would have been forced to back down from their "my way or the highway" position and would have accepted a somewhat less restrictive position. After all, they need platforms so they can sell their HD content.
As far as your second point--if I don't see a purpose for Vista, I don't need to buy it--I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I will be forced to buy it at some point as MS will just stop supporting XP and I'll be at risk for the next IE-hack that comes along.
Well, that's a chicken and egg problem. Let me re-cast it for you to make it more apparent: (1) MS implements restrictions on content duplication and display that, for example, prevent people from using their current widescreen monitors to view hi-def content (no HDMI means deliberately degraded video). (2) Content companies come out with content intended to be used with Microsoft's DRM technology. (3) You say Microsoft is giving customers what they want because their OS allows their customers to watch DRM'd content. You seem to have bought into the content industry line that "We won't distribute our content without these restrictions." That's a bunch of nonsense, about equivalent to "We will shoot ourselves in the head unless you agree to our demands." (I recognize that I'm fudging some details here.)
As to your second point -- exactly what contemporaries are you comparing Vista to? I compare the recommended requirements for Vista with those of XP, then look at the "improvements" Vista gives and wonder what the point is. It's as if MS wants me to buy a new Vista-capable PC so I can do about the same things as I do with my current PC, but with the added "benefit" of DRM.
Recognize that it's $150,000 per work infringed, not per infringement. So, if 10,000 people downloaded Weird Al's "Amish Paradise," that's only one work infringed.
The poster who talked about "Diversity Jurisdiction" misunderstands how jurisdiction works. In general, a court has to have two kinds of jurisdiction: (1) subject matter jurisdiction and (2) personal jurisdiction. The first, subject matter jurisdiction, just asks "is this the right court to hear this sort of a claim?." If the claim comes out of a federal law, like copyright law, then a federal court has subject matter jurisdiction. The second, personal jurisdiction, just asks "Can this court reach out and grab this defendant?" So, for example, if a defendant lives in California, never set foot in Florida and didn't affect Florida in any way, that defendant cannot be sued in Florida. The Wikipedia article on Personal Jurisdiction explains this pretty well.
"In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000." 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(2). 504(c)(1) says that this is available "with respect to any one work." Infringe 11 million works and that's $1.65T.
Of course, they won't GET this -- the minimum damage award is $750 per work, or about $8B. (It drops to $200 if allofmp3.com proves that it had to reason to know it was infringing.) Even more, though, "all the parts of a compilation . . . constitute one work." This could be interpreted to mean that the per-infringement damages are *per album*, not *per track*.
The interesting thing in the case is whether a US court can acquire personal jurisdiction over the company that would allow them to even HEAR the suit.
Well, that's a pretty expansive view of DRM, one that covers traditional computer security and encryption. Let me point out the Achilles' heel: you said "If implemented correctly" -- exactly how much work is involved in this correct implementation? How many people need to be trained how to protect information? This is the user population that doesn't understand Word's "Fast Save" feature, yet you are expecting them to understand stuff like user keys? The much more likely scenario is that this DRM will get in the way of what people want to do and they will quickly discover how to create unprotected documents.
You claim that businesses would be idiots not to jump at the opportunity. There must be a lot of idiots out there -- all the press I'm reading says that business isn't exactly jumping at the chance to move to Vista.
One of the great lessons of history is that companies fail when they focus on their own desires instead of those of their customers. MS has done this twice: (1) adding obscenely restrictive multimedia DRM when the very large majority of their customers do not want it; and (2) staying in bed with the hardware manufacturers by failing to control OS-bloat, which forces new computer purchases. It may be that Window's dominant market position is enough to drive this through, for now. Or, it may be that Vista starts a shift to Macintoshes. It's just a matter of time -- no company survives forever by not giving customers what they want.
Well, that's a funny take on it. Freedom of contract is a central guarantee in the Constitution, and that's basically all restrictive covenants are. Shouldn't my neighbors and I have the freedom to get together say "We like how our neighborhood looks without farm animals, so let's all agree not to keep farm animals. And, since we want that look to keep up if somebody sells their house, let's all agree not to sell our houses to somebody unless they also agree not to keep farm animals."? (You can replace "farm animals" with clotheslines or whatever.) Sure, I've given up my right to keep farm animals that I had, but I got something more valuable in return -- nobody else in the neighborhood is allowed to have farm animals, either.
[Note: There are limits -- courts won't enforce covenants which are against public policy -- stuff like "I will only sell to Caucasians."]
There are plenty of neighborhoods in the US that do not have restrictive covenants and, among those that do, the restrictions can vary a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood. This gives people choices about where they want to live -- people who like clotheslines, purple houses or farm animals can buy property where such things are allowed, and people who don't can buy property where such things are disallowed.
If you and your neighbors just don't like a restrictive covenant, you can change it -- just get all the affected property owners to agree. (It's a little more complicated than that, but not much....)
My point is that the ability to have restrictive covenants IS freedom. Who wants to live in a county where people can't get together to arrange their own lives?
You're absolutely right about the uneven playing field -- as I understand the decision, once the current franchise agreements run out, the cable operators won't have to go after them.
As to your second point, you're missing how monopolies distort the market: they only go after the opportunities that maximize their total profit, whereas competitive firms will go after a market opportunity so long as its cost of providing that service isn't higher than the price it can receive. (These two things may appear to be the same thing, but they're not. The reasoning takes more economic explanation than I'm willing to write now. Much easier with graphs....)
Plus, your second point assumes that Company B is going to run wires. Company B may be putting a big antenna on a pole. Or, they may be going over existing wires.
There are a lot of people complaining about this like it's a bad thing. A prime reason that the franchising regulations started was the fear of monopolization. The idea was that if you had a single company providing cable TV service, they would do things like limit service and cherry-pick deployment areas for the purpose of maximizing their profits. Franchising gives the local government power to force the cable TV company to offer services and pricing that would not have done if left to its own devices. But, it's not a perfect solution since (1) the government has its own interests separate from that of the community (which is why you always see a few horribly used public access channels), and (2) the government often doesn't really know what the citizens want.
That landscape changes dramatically when you have multiple players -- instead of the cable company dictating what the market will get, the market dictates what the cable company will provide. (If company A doesn't give you what you want, you will switch to company B.) Franchising authorities are no longer needed.
Competition also gives incentives to build-out to rural customers. Sure, they may have to pay more than city-dwellers, but why should somebody in the city subsidize internet access for somebody in the country? There are lots of things that are more expensive in the country -- why should internet service be kept artificially cheap. Besides, wireless technologies have already made reaching rural areas much less expensive. If you force wired technologies to deliver service to rural areas, you will supplant the more efficient wireless services.
O'Melveny & Myers (the law firm where that author used to practice as an attorney) will be interested to hear that he knows nothing about the law.
The woman's burns were caused mainly by prolonged contact to the coffee, not by the inherent temperature of the coffee. I regularly buy coffee which could severely burn me if I let it sit on sensitive tissue and get into my vagina (if I had one). If you've ever bought coffee at Starbucks, you have too. We just both have the good sense to be careful with it.
What regulation? I'm unaware of any government agency that regulates the temperature at which restaurants can serve coffee. The National Coffee Ass'n of the USA suggests serving coffee at 180-195 degrees.
Exactly how hot do you think this coffee was? You can pour boiling water over your arm and it won't cause 3rd degree burns in well under a second. A person can drink 180 degree coffee 'fairly soon' (within about 5-10 minutes) of being served it, as long as they don't put it into a thermos or anything.
I don't expect that. Nearly every time I get coffee, I have to wait for a few minutes before drinking it. In fact, the coffee counsel recommends keeping coffee at around 185 degrees. McDonald's was serving coffee that's just about as hot as Starbuck's, and Caribou's and Dunkin' Donuts' and....
Many people get coffee from fast-food restaurants because it will be just cool enough for them to drink when they get to where they are going (think construction workers.)
The coffee itself did not cause immediate 3rd degree burns -- that came from prolonged contact because the coffee was absorbed into her clothes. If you make yourself a cup of coffee at home and then poured it into your lap, you'd have a similar problem. Had she not been using her crotch as a cup holder, the whole thing never would have happened.
They're going to be COPYING stuff from websites into their index so they can perform paid searches on it. Why isn't that copyright infringement all by itself?
If somebody were to sue them, they would have to claim that theirs is a fair use. But, many large copyright holders (i.e. their potential customers) would vehemently disagree with such a position. That's an interesting position to be in.
My example was just trying to point out that it's possible for a person's relative wealth to diminish, but his real wealth to increase. I am suggesting that we should care about real wealth and ignore relative wealth, and that in the world at large, nearly everybody's real wealth has increased, even while their relative wealth might have decreased. I generally abhor the view that somebody is doing poorly because somebody else is doing well.
How do you define "Really Rich"? Are you suggesting that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet get together to plan famines? Is the Getty family behind the war in Iraq? Does the star chamber really exist? Are corporations really trying to take over the world and enslave people like they're always portrayed in movies? That sounds like a paranoid fantasy world.
In reality, the large majority of the wealth is with the middle-class in the US, Europe & Japan. To be in the top 1%, you only needs asset of $500,000 or so -- that's a modest retirement portfolio, some home equity and a houseful of furniture.
I was trying to illustrate, rather than prove, my argument, which is that although some people are much, much better off, nearly everybody is better off to some extent.
Here's another example: The US is so wealthy that before a big game (NCAA Final Four, Superbowl, World series, etc....), T-Shirt Manufacturers will print two different T-shirts, each declaring a different team the winner. At the end of the game, the correct T-shirts go on sale to fans exiting the stadium -- the others are donated to organizations that ship them to third-world countries, so extremely poor people have clothes to wear. These same people benefit from improvements in agriculture and medicine developed in the first world. As a whole, and in nearly all individual cases, they're better off than they were, say, 20 years ago.
Look at poor people in the US -- what are the diseases that afflict them? Often, it's stuff like obesity and diabetes; it is extremely rare that you ever hear of anybody dying of starvation (other than at the hands of another). If you go back even 150 years, I think you'd find the situation was reversed.
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I think you're stretching a little bit on the idea that a file needs to belong to something. While you are correct at a UI level (you have to map the file to a viewer), my thought processes focus around "Documents," "Spreadsheets," "Pictures," "Song" and so on. Some of these are more interchangeable than others: I can't just generically save a document from Word and then open it up in, say, WordPerfect, and have it look and act just the same. So, instead, I have "MS Word Documents." (And pretty soon, I'll have Word '07 Documents which I can't read in Word '03.)
Music (at least mp3s) and Pictures (jpgs) do not really need to be associated with any particular application. Even when I'm on a friend's computer, for example, I know that clicking on a picture will pull it up, even if it may not be in the same viewer that I'm used to. I would assert that this is the best model -- the fact that you need a program to look at your document, your spreadsheet or your (e-)mail should really be invisible.
Unfortunately, this would make viewers just commodity items. But, software manufacturers sell products by differentiating them from the competition. The end result is that computers are confusing to users in part because software companies have a vested interest in keeping them confusing.
Bzzt. Try again. There was an early "estate" tax in 1797, but it was basically a stamp tax -- every will or estate had to pay a flat fee. It was instituted for a much more practical purpose than what you suggest: paying to rearm the Navy. When the Navy was rearmed, it was canceled.
Until the early 1900's, that's exactly how the estate tax was used -- as an occasional source of revenue to support the military. No fine theory of destroying aristocracy, just "We need the money. here's a convenient way to get it." (Remember that the income tax was unconstitutional.)
HA! Well, if posting it on a bittorrent site is distribution, then they are certainly allowed to distribute their own work. So, there's no infringement if they make it available for you to download and you do.
I suspect, though, that they're using that to find people who are sharing other infringing files.
You can apply to register a trademark with the intention of using it in commerce. If I recall correctly, you can put off using it for 3 years after your application. Doing so basically reserves the mark.
Of course, if the mark was already identified with somebody else before you used it, the registration doesn't help much.
So, here's a possible scenario: Cisco registers 10 years ago, doesn't use it. 6 years after their registration, Apple comes along and claims the 'i' abbreviation. Now, the mark is Apple's despite the registration. Cisco comes along, creates an 'iPhone,' claiming priority based on its earlier registration. But, it's too late: they lost it by not using the mark within 3 years of the original registration.
(Not saying that I have the facts right on that. It's just a possible theory under which Apple could win.)
Well, the problem is that you don't need a minimum wage to accomplish what you're suggesting. If there were no minimum wage, somebody working $3.00 per hour could quit and retrain if that turned out to be the best use of their time. In the presence of a minimum wage, however, they don't have the option. In addition, there's nothing forcing them to retrain -- they could just be home killing brain cells with Oprah and Dr. Phil.
In any case, consider the people we're talking about -- it's people, such as the severely disabled, who have a couple of strikes against them. Such people do not really have the option to retrain. As a result, the minimum wage keeps them from having jobs. And, in fact, since they cannot get their first job, they are prevented from getting any second better-paying job.
Here's an example: I was in Wilmington, NC last month, where I met a woman in a wheelchair with no arms who made flowers out of ribbon with her feet and then sold them on the street. Each flower took her 45 minutes to make and sold for $5. Considering the time she spent making them and the time she spent selling them, she was making considerably less than $5.15 per hour. Luckily, because she was doing this herself, she was able to avoid the minimum wage law, which would have forced her out of business.
The DRM component is dictated by a maze of legal agreements among the HD patent holders, the content industry and the consumer electronics industry. Vista's limitations are, in part, dictated by such agreements -- without them, you would not be able to buy a blue-ray or HD-DVD drive for your computer.
The problem, though, is that this situation did not need to be this way -- Microsoft could have teamed up with the electronics industry to say, effectively, "go to H*ll" to the content producers. The content producers would then have had to choose between (A) not releasing HD content or (B) releasing a non-DRM'd version. Their claim is that they would choose (A). But, they're full of crap -- doing so would deny them a new revenue stream in the face of increased competitive pressures. If the market didn't force them to switch, their stockholders would have.
[Note one problem: Sony is in both camps.]
You really have to watch out here, because we often substitute the language of death and destruction for the language of defeat: "I'm going to kill him this November," for example, has two completely different meanings depending on context. Politicians and pundits often "target" each other, so using words like "bullseye" can have similar double meanings. Both staunch conservatives and staunch liberals engage in this sort of rhetoric, which is often followed by the other side claiming that the rhetoric was intended to incite violence and then the first side basically says "don't be an idiot."
A non-political example (well, sort of): after getting home from the now infamous Duke lacrosse party, one of the (unindicted) players sent an email to a few others, venting some anger at the strippers and saying that he'd like to skin them alive. In the media feeding-frenzy that erupted shortly after the party, this e-mail was seen in a completely different light -- people took him literally, and he was suspended from the school. In 20/20 hindsight, it seem smuch more likely that he was using the expression figuratively -- "If you come home drunk one more time, I'm going to skin you alive." If you think a rape occurred, it's really inflammatory; if you don't, it's just an expression.
The stuff on the YouTube video doesn't have a whole lot of surrounding context, so it's hard to tell exactly what was going on. The torture description sounds like what a bunch of Americans were thinking on 9/12. Like it or not, a lot of people do not object to torturing terrorists, especially in the hypothetical situation where torture might prevent another terrorist act.
However, even though I suspect that this blogger is probably as much of a left-wing reactionary as the people he's complaining about are right-wing, this is the prototype of fair use. Were he to fight it, he would probably win. Copyright lawsuits are one of the few places where a defendant can recover his attorney's fees from the other side. *if* this case is as it appears, the blogger has a pretty good case.
Nearly any economist will tell you that the result of the minimum wage is that a bunch of people who are available to work 40 hours a week earn $0 (since they are unemployed) and others earn $10712. All those people earning $0 may be able to find jobs that pay, say $3/hour if there were no minimum wage. But, since the minimum wage exists, they can't find those jobs. It isn't that the jobs instead pay $5.15 -- it's that such jobs don't exist because employers aren't going to pay somebody $5.15 to do a job that's only worth $3.00.
If the minimum wage actually boosted wages, then why not set them at $30 and hour and put everybody above the poverty line?
So, without the minimum wage, poor people in the US would be as poor as they are in Ethiopia? That's absurd. The main thing the minimum wage does is ensure that nobody gets paid to do those jobs which are worth less than the minimum wage. As a result, people who would do those jobs are paid no wage at all. As a result, you see high unemployment among the mentally retarded and teenagers in urban areas.
High poverty in many third world countries results from anti-competitive government policies (most commonly institutionalized corruption).
You didn't really address my point about dry cleaners, which was that by putting up unnecessary barriers to entry, the government is acting anti-competitively, which ends up hurting consumers. Here's another example: in North Carolina (any many other states), an existing franchisee of a a car manufacturer is allowed, BY LAW, to object to a new franchisee setting up shop. In addition, manufacturers are not allowed to open their own stores. It's a perfect example of regulation aimed at protecting exiting players against competition -- Prices go up and service goes down.
There are certainly some times that regulation is required because of a market failure. But, those examples are few.
Phooey. There are, of course, examples where some form of regulation is needed to correct market failures -- you've named two of them: natural monopoly and failing to account for externalities. These, however, are the exception rather than the norm. There are certainly significant natural barriers to entry in some markets (I don't consider cost alone to be a barrier to entry), but they are relatively few. But, in fact, the bigger problem is often barriers imposed by regulation.
Consider, for example, dry-cleaners: in many states, you have to be licensed in order to be a dry-cleaner. Now, this makes sense if you're worried about cleaners dumping chemicals into the drain. But, in several states, parts of the licensing exam ask stuff like "how do you clean a tophat?" Clearly this is just a gratuitous barrier that would be better imposed by the market. (Somebody who does a poor job of cleaning tophats would not clean many or would charge at a price-point where tophat purchasers don't care.) Similarly, look at the drug market -- the complexity of dealing with FDA regulations is one reason that the market is as concentrated as it is. Again, some regulation is necessary -- you want to make sure that the drugs are safe, because the cost of a market response (ie dead people) is too great. But, you don't need the same scutiny for effectiveness.
There are tons of places where regulation hurts the market: winter Florida tomatoes, real estate agents, television, milk price controls and so on....
Poverty does not result from capitalism. It's funny that you should even mention it in a thread that starts with Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on earth and without good functioning markets. A poor person in the US would live like a king in Ethiopia. Capitalism creates a middle class, which is a huge stabilizing force -- it's the non-capitalistic, overregulated countries that have all the problems with revolutions.
So, we have a disagreement over the bolded part of your post. I understand how the DRM stuff is intended to work: the owners of the hi-def patents claim that they will only license them to people who implement the full DRM suite. Content owners enter into agreements with the patent owners that require the patent owners to enforce those restrictions. So, for example, if anybody comes along with, say, a blue-ray player that allows the content to be copied, the owners of the blue-ray patents will sue the manufacturer either for patent infringement or breach of contract. (The content owners have a DMCA circumvention claim as well.)
The point, though, is that the bargain does not need to be made. If Microsoft had effectively said "Go to H*ll. We're not accepting that deal because it's not what our customers want," the content owners would have been forced to back down from their "my way or the highway" position and would have accepted a somewhat less restrictive position. After all, they need platforms so they can sell their HD content.
As far as your second point--if I don't see a purpose for Vista, I don't need to buy it--I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I will be forced to buy it at some point as MS will just stop supporting XP and I'll be at risk for the next IE-hack that comes along.
Well, that's a chicken and egg problem. Let me re-cast it for you to make it more apparent: (1) MS implements restrictions on content duplication and display that, for example, prevent people from using their current widescreen monitors to view hi-def content (no HDMI means deliberately degraded video). (2) Content companies come out with content intended to be used with Microsoft's DRM technology. (3) You say Microsoft is giving customers what they want because their OS allows their customers to watch DRM'd content. You seem to have bought into the content industry line that "We won't distribute our content without these restrictions." That's a bunch of nonsense, about equivalent to "We will shoot ourselves in the head unless you agree to our demands." (I recognize that I'm fudging some details here.)
As to your second point -- exactly what contemporaries are you comparing Vista to? I compare the recommended requirements for Vista with those of XP, then look at the "improvements" Vista gives and wonder what the point is. It's as if MS wants me to buy a new Vista-capable PC so I can do about the same things as I do with my current PC, but with the added "benefit" of DRM.
Recognize that it's $150,000 per work infringed, not per infringement. So, if 10,000 people downloaded Weird Al's "Amish Paradise," that's only one work infringed.
The poster who talked about "Diversity Jurisdiction" misunderstands how jurisdiction works. In general, a court has to have two kinds of jurisdiction: (1) subject matter jurisdiction and (2) personal jurisdiction. The first, subject matter jurisdiction, just asks "is this the right court to hear this sort of a claim?." If the claim comes out of a federal law, like copyright law, then a federal court has subject matter jurisdiction. The second, personal jurisdiction, just asks "Can this court reach out and grab this defendant?" So, for example, if a defendant lives in California, never set foot in Florida and didn't affect Florida in any way, that defendant cannot be sued in Florida. The Wikipedia article on Personal Jurisdiction explains this pretty well.
"In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000." 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(2). 504(c)(1) says that this is available "with respect to any one work." Infringe 11 million works and that's $1.65T.
Of course, they won't GET this -- the minimum damage award is $750 per work, or about $8B. (It drops to $200 if allofmp3.com proves that it had to reason to know it was infringing.) Even more, though, "all the parts of a compilation . . . constitute one work." This could be interpreted to mean that the per-infringement damages are *per album*, not *per track*.
The interesting thing in the case is whether a US court can acquire personal jurisdiction over the company that would allow them to even HEAR the suit.
Well, that's a pretty expansive view of DRM, one that covers traditional computer security and encryption. Let me point out the Achilles' heel: you said "If implemented correctly" -- exactly how much work is involved in this correct implementation? How many people need to be trained how to protect information? This is the user population that doesn't understand Word's "Fast Save" feature, yet you are expecting them to understand stuff like user keys? The much more likely scenario is that this DRM will get in the way of what people want to do and they will quickly discover how to create unprotected documents.
You claim that businesses would be idiots not to jump at the opportunity. There must be a lot of idiots out there -- all the press I'm reading says that business isn't exactly jumping at the chance to move to Vista.
One of the great lessons of history is that companies fail when they focus on their own desires instead of those of their customers. MS has done this twice: (1) adding obscenely restrictive multimedia DRM when the very large majority of their customers do not want it; and (2) staying in bed with the hardware manufacturers by failing to control OS-bloat, which forces new computer purchases. It may be that Window's dominant market position is enough to drive this through, for now. Or, it may be that Vista starts a shift to Macintoshes. It's just a matter of time -- no company survives forever by not giving customers what they want.
Well, that's a funny take on it. Freedom of contract is a central guarantee in the Constitution, and that's basically all restrictive covenants are. Shouldn't my neighbors and I have the freedom to get together say "We like how our neighborhood looks without farm animals, so let's all agree not to keep farm animals. And, since we want that look to keep up if somebody sells their house, let's all agree not to sell our houses to somebody unless they also agree not to keep farm animals."? (You can replace "farm animals" with clotheslines or whatever.) Sure, I've given up my right to keep farm animals that I had, but I got something more valuable in return -- nobody else in the neighborhood is allowed to have farm animals, either.
[Note: There are limits -- courts won't enforce covenants which are against public policy -- stuff like "I will only sell to Caucasians."]
There are plenty of neighborhoods in the US that do not have restrictive covenants and, among those that do, the restrictions can vary a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood. This gives people choices about where they want to live -- people who like clotheslines, purple houses or farm animals can buy property where such things are allowed, and people who don't can buy property where such things are disallowed.
If you and your neighbors just don't like a restrictive covenant, you can change it -- just get all the affected property owners to agree. (It's a little more complicated than that, but not much....)
My point is that the ability to have restrictive covenants IS freedom. Who wants to live in a county where people can't get together to arrange their own lives?
You're absolutely right about the uneven playing field -- as I understand the decision, once the current franchise agreements run out, the cable operators won't have to go after them.
As to your second point, you're missing how monopolies distort the market: they only go after the opportunities that maximize their total profit, whereas competitive firms will go after a market opportunity so long as its cost of providing that service isn't higher than the price it can receive. (These two things may appear to be the same thing, but they're not. The reasoning takes more economic explanation than I'm willing to write now. Much easier with graphs....)
Plus, your second point assumes that Company B is going to run wires. Company B may be putting a big antenna on a pole. Or, they may be going over existing wires.
There are a lot of people complaining about this like it's a bad thing. A prime reason that the franchising regulations started was the fear of monopolization. The idea was that if you had a single company providing cable TV service, they would do things like limit service and cherry-pick deployment areas for the purpose of maximizing their profits. Franchising gives the local government power to force the cable TV company to offer services and pricing that would not have done if left to its own devices. But, it's not a perfect solution since (1) the government has its own interests separate from that of the community (which is why you always see a few horribly used public access channels), and (2) the government often doesn't really know what the citizens want.
That landscape changes dramatically when you have multiple players -- instead of the cable company dictating what the market will get, the market dictates what the cable company will provide. (If company A doesn't give you what you want, you will switch to company B.) Franchising authorities are no longer needed.
Competition also gives incentives to build-out to rural customers. Sure, they may have to pay more than city-dwellers, but why should somebody in the city subsidize internet access for somebody in the country? There are lots of things that are more expensive in the country -- why should internet service be kept artificially cheap. Besides, wireless technologies have already made reaching rural areas much less expensive. If you force wired technologies to deliver service to rural areas, you will supplant the more efficient wireless services.
O'Melveny & Myers (the law firm where that author used to practice as an attorney) will be interested to hear that he knows nothing about the law.
The woman's burns were caused mainly by prolonged contact to the coffee, not by the inherent temperature of the coffee. I regularly buy coffee which could severely burn me if I let it sit on sensitive tissue and get into my vagina (if I had one). If you've ever bought coffee at Starbucks, you have too. We just both have the good sense to be careful with it.
What regulation? I'm unaware of any government agency that regulates the temperature at which restaurants can serve coffee. The National Coffee Ass'n of the USA suggests serving coffee at 180-195 degrees.
_ and_stella_liebe.html
Exactly how hot do you think this coffee was? You can pour boiling water over your arm and it won't cause 3rd degree burns in well under a second. A person can drink 180 degree coffee 'fairly soon' (within about 5-10 minutes) of being served it, as long as they don't put it into a thermos or anything.
There's an article debunking your view here:
http://www.overlawyered.com/2005/10/urban_legends
You've also obviously never burned the roof of your mouth on a pizza.
I don't expect that. Nearly every time I get coffee, I have to wait for a few minutes before drinking it. In fact, the coffee counsel recommends keeping coffee at around 185 degrees. McDonald's was serving coffee that's just about as hot as Starbuck's, and Caribou's and Dunkin' Donuts' and....
Many people get coffee from fast-food restaurants because it will be just cool enough for them to drink when they get to where they are going (think construction workers.)
The coffee itself did not cause immediate 3rd degree burns -- that came from prolonged contact because the coffee was absorbed into her clothes. If you make yourself a cup of coffee at home and then poured it into your lap, you'd have a similar problem. Had she not been using her crotch as a cup holder, the whole thing never would have happened.
They're going to be COPYING stuff from websites into their index so they can perform paid searches on it. Why isn't that copyright infringement all by itself?
If somebody were to sue them, they would have to claim that theirs is a fair use. But, many large copyright holders (i.e. their potential customers) would vehemently disagree with such a position. That's an interesting position to be in.
My example was just trying to point out that it's possible for a person's relative wealth to diminish, but his real wealth to increase. I am suggesting that we should care about real wealth and ignore relative wealth, and that in the world at large, nearly everybody's real wealth has increased, even while their relative wealth might have decreased. I generally abhor the view that somebody is doing poorly because somebody else is doing well.
How do you define "Really Rich"? Are you suggesting that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet get together to plan famines? Is the Getty family behind the war in Iraq? Does the star chamber really exist? Are corporations really trying to take over the world and enslave people like they're always portrayed in movies? That sounds like a paranoid fantasy world.
In reality, the large majority of the wealth is with the middle-class in the US, Europe & Japan. To be in the top 1%, you only needs asset of $500,000 or so -- that's a modest retirement portfolio, some home equity and a houseful of furniture.
I was trying to illustrate, rather than prove, my argument, which is that although some people are much, much better off, nearly everybody is better off to some extent.
Here's another example: The US is so wealthy that before a big game (NCAA Final Four, Superbowl, World series, etc....), T-Shirt Manufacturers will print two different T-shirts, each declaring a different team the winner. At the end of the game, the correct T-shirts go on sale to fans exiting the stadium -- the others are donated to organizations that ship them to third-world countries, so extremely poor people have clothes to wear. These same people benefit from improvements in agriculture and medicine developed in the first world. As a whole, and in nearly all individual cases, they're better off than they were, say, 20 years ago.
Look at poor people in the US -- what are the diseases that afflict them? Often, it's stuff like obesity and diabetes; it is extremely rare that you ever hear of anybody dying of starvation (other than at the hands of another). If you go back even 150 years, I think you'd find the situation was reversed.