"it reduces the work that your heat pump would otherwise have had to do"
Not as efficiently.
"and the light bulb does it "for free""
Not when you factor in changing to CFL's, which do the lighting job without as much waste heat.
Lets take a look at the math:
1 watt into the heat pump gives 2 watts heat.
1 watt into the light bulb gives 0.8 watts heat. That means you have to run the heating to generate the 1.2 watts difference, and if you had a heat pump that would cost 0.6 watt, totalling 1.4 watt.
And the light gotten from 1 watt in a lightbulb you get from 0.2 watt cfl (of which a certain amount is heat too), so in the end you get both the light and the heat for less total power consumption.
Of course, the calculation depends on having a heat system which gets 'free' heat from somewhere (like the ground), so you get more watts heat out than you put electrical watts in. With direct electric heating it'd be a tossup anyway (unless you had good enough insulation not to actually need the heat).
"But it agreed with broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, which said earlier this month that the iPlayer could have a "negative effect" on commercial rivals."
So. What? Since when has competition 'having a negative effect' on the competititors been a problem in a free market?
Personally, I'd like to set up a very expensive monopoly selling bottled air, and I demand that the government deal with this everpresent free air! How am I supposed to charge for air when it's free to breathe all around? How many employment opportunities are lost because I cant charge as much for the air as I'd like to?
"Chris Woolard, head of finance, economics and strategy"
Perhaps Mr. Woolard should take some care to be more concerned with what is in the interest of the taxpayers and the wealth of the nation, rather than what is the interest of some commercial entities.
"In this situation there is really no gain in switching light bulbs"
Well, you could always do it for the same reasons I did (because energy efficiency wasnt really on the top of the list). Primary reason was I simply got damn tired of changing lightbulbs.
Secondary reason was to vastly increase light levels as I got damn tired of the dark (basically, I have about the same energy consumption, but five times more light now:).
"but it certainly is not waste if it is doing something useful - like heating your house!"
Many heating solutions like ground source heat pumps, ventilation heat exchangers, etc, give more heat energy per electrical watt put into the system than lightbulbs. IE, heating your house with waste heat from lightbulbs might take twice as much electricity as running a heat pump. So even if the heat gets used, it's comparative waste.
"it rarely gets warm enough for it not to be in use."
Errr, sounds like you need to update your building code too over there. A properly insulated house can, with current state-of-the-art energy efficiency design, support normal indoors living temperatures with zero heat input beyond humans and ordinary applicances far further north than the UK. Of course, that's the extreme, but with a properly insulated building you should definitely not have to run heating all the time at UK temperatures.
Personally, I rsync from a mirror and have a local repository, so I have a whole bunch of machines that dont get counted. Stuff like that will result in the numbers being a bit off.
"so I'm too afraid to switch from Core 3 to 6."
If you upgrade that rarely, I'd suggest you take a look at CentOS. CentOS 4 will be a far smaller leap (RHEL4 is close to FC3/FC4), and you'd be on a maintained platform again.
"but this government is keener on improved turnout"
Dubious really. Low voter turnout is endemic to winner takes all systems (and who can blame the voters, in a whole lot of cases there isnt even any point for some voters to vote). If they really wanted improved turnout they'd reform towards proportional representation so people would actually get a chance to vote for someone they wanted.
Then again, maybe the whole point is to make it easier to manipulate elections. It's not like that would be far out of character from the current crop of UK politicians.
The point of the whole discussion was that it is entirely possible to watch all the material, so it's perfectly reasonable to do cost calculations against actual transmitted material rather than against what an average person watches the average day.
"I wonder sometimes whether people really do want the advertising."
Perhaps. Or perhaps they just want their costs hidden.
There's no fundamental difference between, say, financing TV off a $0.50 VAT on various products, or $0.50 off the products paying for advertising, which in turn pays for the TV. Yet somehow it seems preferable to hide the costs so no cost/benefit analysis on the subject can be calculated within the economy, and you dont have to think about the reason why various products cost more than they should.
Still, some level of advertising serves a purpose. It's just that these days it's probably more efficiently done through market engines like pricerunner or ebay.
"Sorry to break it to you but you are never going to watch tv 24/7 even with added help, it just aint possible."
You're assuming a linear following of the schedule, again tied to the non-digital paradigms.
A datadump is a datadump is a datadump. Twelve channels multiplexed means I have linear-time times twelve real-time datastreams, watchable in twelve times the time, assuming I store them. I can record one year and watch for a dozen years. Get it? There's no difference any more between broadcast and fixed-medium data, it's all the same, you're not tied to real-time scheduling for either, and cable becomes just yet another (impractical and badly designed) transmission medium.
Ironically, you've always paid for advertising. So now you're both paying for the advertising (if you buy the product), and then you get to pay to watch the advertising (on TV).
So basically you're paying to watch something you dont want to watch, which you yourself paid to get produced, just so you can watch something else you didnt pay to get produced (well, except you did pay to get it produced when you paid for the advertising by buying the advertised product...).
Somehow I suspect that this may not be the most optimal method of funding the things you do want to watch... (which might be a tangent to the articles point...)
"Of course, if you watched TV 24/7 you could only watch 720 hours worth, assuming, of course, you never slept, went to the bathroom, etc.."
I have yet to see my MythTV infrastructure sleep, go to the bathroom, etc. And, in fact, it has no trouble 'watching' half a dozen channels at the same time. Or more, should I want it to.
Get into the digital age. There is no longer any real difference between broadcast, streamed or stored material. It's all just various incarnations of transmission bandwidth, multiplexing, caching and storage.
Cable can be viewed as simply a linearly transmitted archive.
So the original article is entirely reasonable in counting all available programming; what he's getting is access to that number of terabytes of archive data. Wether he views any particular amount of it or not, he's perfectly able to store, and later view, it all.
"These companies seemed to think it was worth exchanging real-world money (up to $8.00/hour!) for a particularly tedious and inefficient database update."
Now imagine the database company said you had to use an UI that ensured that any single number entry would take you at least 8 hours and that you got paid by the number of entries you entered.
Would you not consider it better for the economy as a whole, were you allowed to use another client that took five seconds per entry to update that database?
mp3's, sure, artificial scarcity does not serve its intended economic purpose in that case. Which is why we're having this huge discussion about copyright reform, in case you hadn't noticed.:)
Money is artificially limited, and that limitation is strictly controlled, as money serves a specific purpose as a means of trade, and needs a specific valuation.
Virtual property could very well be made to serve the same purpose as money, but again, I doubt you'd want that, because then you could forget about Orcs dropping gold, or foraging turning up trade skill materials. Orcs would drop what they got off looting the shopkeepers, and all money in the mmorpg would ultimately be derived from the mmorpg mint, which would trickle through the economy through various exchanges with in-game banks and game to game or real world trade. Basically, end result, your in-game avatar would have to get an in-game job doing outsourced tech-support for real-world companies to finance his adventuring. Woohoo.
"Virtual property is valuable because of the time required to get it"
Current virtual property has no actual value at all. It is priced as a function of desireability and scarcity, and transactions take place at the intersection of that price and the value of the particular (and arbitrary) time it takes someone to obtain the item.
"That's left to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand."
Adam Smith's invisible hand requires a free market to work. An mmorpg isnt a free market economy.
"Desirable is desirable. Opening up the database so that anybody could have anything at any time would eliminate all desire and the entire market."
It wouldnt eliminate *desire*, it would eliminate *exclusivity*.
The cost to produce the item in this case is zero, while the actual price is entirely based on the controlled scarcity.
Take an example from the real world; we could create an artificial scarcity on, say, wheat, by saying that only one specific farmer would be allowed to create wheat, and only on his little plot of land. Now, the price on wheat would go through the roof, making (the now exclusive) wheat extremely desireable (and the cost to produce and the end price would diverge wildly). However, as a whole, the population would become much poorer, because the artificial scarcity imposed doesnt fulfill the very fundamental idea of free market economy; to make sure as much as possible is produced to allow as many as possible to have their desire for the produced items fulfilled.
See, the whole point of a functioning economy is to eliminate exclusivity.
As a society, we dont want exclusivity, we want overabundance. (Of course, certain people may want exclusivity, as it is both very profitable (when artificial) and it can make them feel 'special'.)
"I think you're missing the point that the thread starter essentially made: what is valuable in this situation is time."
Oh, I understand the point, it's just that it is only valid within the rules of the game, and the rules of the game do not apply to the real world economy, and vice versa. It's not impossible to create a merged system, it's just not desireable, as the goal of the rules of the game is completely incompatible with the goal of the rules of a real economy.
"Paying somebody else to play the boring parts of the game for you is very much like cheating, especially when the gameplay itself is designed to be essentially boring."
Not only that, it removes the incentive from the game designers to fix the boring parts, which even further damages the 'real' value of the game in the real economy.
Practicing with shitty bands isnt an artificially scarce product.
"freeing up the spender to do other actual work in the economy."
The goods in question are _artificially_ scarce. _Neither_ needs to spend time as the items are _only a database update_. In the 'real world' it takes neither time nor resources to produce the in-game items; at a 'real world' market valuation, they could both (and, in fact, everyone in the game) have the particular item at zero cost, freeing them _both_ up to productive work.
That's the whole point of the real-world free market economy; to maximize the production of wealth in society by creating incentives for the most efficient production possible. To accomplish this goal within the mmorpg realm the solution is simple; enforce open databases, with the immediate result that anyone can have anything whenever they want.
Of course, this is quite probably rather undesireable for the actual mmorpg. Which rather reinforces the point; the real-world economy and the fantasy of games are quite incompatible and should not be mixed, as the systems are at odds at their very foundation; one is intented to minimize wasted time, the other to maximize wasted time.
Of course, one can question the wisdom in allowing real-world money to be exchanged for what is essentially a particularly tedious and inefficient database update.
In fact, should this type of exchange become prevalent in the economy I'd suggest anti-monopoly regulators come down on the MMORPG businesses like a ton of bricks and force them to allow many companies access to the database tables to update them so we can get a real free market evaluation of the 'goods' in question (ie, approaching zero).
You see, someone making their living off producing strictly artificially scarce items is someone not employed producing real scarce items; ie, it is a net loss to the economy as a whole, which means we _all_ get poorer by allowing such abberations to continue.
"In short, they need to make themselves cost competitive with P2P. How do you make yourself cost competitive with something that is free?"
That's the rub; the entire industry is built upon monopoly control, it is _not_ cost competetive. Allofmp3, eMusic, last.fm, etc have proven there are a multitude of models around convenience that work fine for music distribution (even for uncopyrighted classical music), but _only_ if you have a cost structure that supports the model.
That means no more media blitzes. No huge launches. No payola. No hundreds of thousands of free cd's sent to dj's and radio stations. No half a million dollar videos for MTV. No coke parties.
But without those things, they cant control the market anymore, they wont be able to shove their particular artists down the listeners throats and push the independents to the side. They need the huge per-artist revenue and expenditures to minimize the variability and risk in the market, and that entails a high level of control and a high unit price to recoup the expenses.
"The cryptographic keys are only valid for 30 seconds and, more importantly, only for a specific transaction."
Short time keys make the interception slightly more difficult, but essentially the intercept software would just have to immediately use the collected keys in the alternate transaction, rather than save them for later use. Same with SMS, or anything else; as long as the customers PC is compromised, there's no way to guarantee that what the customer sees is what the bank sends, or that what the customer enters is what gets sent to the bank. An SMS confirmation code going to the customer phone would just verify the forged transaction, rather than the one the customer thought he was entering.
Possibly you could make it safer by actually sending all of the transaction data over an alternate channel like SMS or fax (with a checksummed validation code), or have an external box which you'd have to enter the transaction details onto to generate a checksummed specific transaction, but then you'd probably be better off using a phone service instead anyway.
"The choices are you paying for the drug, or the drug not existing."
No. Most of the money spent by pharmaceuticals goes to marketing, administration and inefficient production. Not even 20% of the revenue goes to R&D.
The actual choice is between MegaChemCorp spending $1 billion developing a drug while wasting $4 billion, and you paying the $5 billion for all of it, or you paying only the $1 billion for the actual drug development, and fewer golf camps and pharmaceutical dinners for health-care execs.
"Profit guarantees have proven pretty effective at this."
Profit guarantees are good for one thing; to ensure that costs rise to meet them. Nothing breeds waste as good as protection from competition.
"If people were driven to invent for the betterment of the human race rather than their personal financial gain, these artificial restrictions on a basic human right wouldn't exist."
Except IP rights were originally not created as an innovation incentive, they were originally a intended to enrich the friends of the crown in exchange for their support (salt monopolies, stationers guild, etc); ie, an alternative taxation system.
Those monopolies were scaled back, but through propaganda campaigns (claiming how 'necessary' they were for 'innovation', or how 'authors' needed to be 'protected') the monopolists managed to at least partially retain their priviliges.
Creative people are driven to invent for the betterment of the human race. Merchants, on the other hand, tend to be driven to find ways to evade competition. Avoiding competition is what the whole IP is, and always has been, about.
Of course they will eventually become the way to cast ones ballot; it's become obvious that certain interests want electronic voting systems and are going to implement them, no matter what.
"which of course are less than infallible"
Certainly, traditional voting methods are fallible, but tell me this: can you devise a paper based system wherein less than a dozen people need to be involved to tailor the result of a particular election to their wishes? That would be trivial with electronic voting.
That's the big difference. You can manipulate votes in either system, but with a paperbased system, to massively modify a result, you need the cooperation of such a large number of people that it becomes almost impossible to keep it secret.
(Of course, abberant voting systems like winner-takes-all elections are easy to manipulate even if you can only modify a few votes, regardless of the ballot form, but that's a built in deficiency in the system itself)
"So long as DRM is not dictated to be necessary by government"
Anti-circumvention laws are such a dictate.
"It takes control away from the user and in most cases puts it in the control of the works publisher."
Essentially, it's approximately the same as other forms of taxation, taking away part of owners rights to their property and giving them to someone else (in this case the economic value of being able to reproduce the item).
Wether taxes are good or bad is certainly debatable, but personally, I'd say taxing the population and appropriating their rights to their property for the purpose of funding particularly ineffective corporations at best falls within the 'bad idea' realm, if not actually in the 'evil' camp.
Doubtful. The current comparative increase in notebook sales is something I'd put up to the price, at last, falling into an acceptable range, which means a lot of the money reserved for computer purchasing in the end-user channels will be going towards filling this previously unfilled need.
However, the useability areas of notebooks dont quite overlap the desktop; performance and component flexibility will remain behind.
Most people I know get one notebook, then have enough of them and remain on the desktop. The notebook is practical when you're travelling, or have a computer you use both at home and at work, but it's always slower, lacks memory, lacks disk, doesnt support enough monitors, etc, so you still end up with a desktop for a lot of use.
"if they would come up with modular notebook design,"
Yep, it would be nice, but there's probably still too much margin in the proprietary approach. I mean, heck, they cant even standardize on batteries, so I'm not holding my breath.
Slashdot Mirror
"it reduces the work that your heat pump would otherwise have had to do"
Not as efficiently.
"and the light bulb does it "for free""
Not when you factor in changing to CFL's, which do the lighting job without as much waste heat.
Lets take a look at the math:
1 watt into the heat pump gives 2 watts heat.
1 watt into the light bulb gives 0.8 watts heat. That means you have to run the heating to generate the 1.2 watts difference, and if you had a heat pump that would cost 0.6 watt, totalling 1.4 watt.
And the light gotten from 1 watt in a lightbulb you get from 0.2 watt cfl (of which a certain amount is heat too), so in the end you get both the light and the heat for less total power consumption.
Of course, the calculation depends on having a heat system which gets 'free' heat from somewhere (like the ground), so you get more watts heat out than you put electrical watts in. With direct electric heating it'd be a tossup anyway (unless you had good enough insulation not to actually need the heat).
"But it agreed with broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, which said earlier this month that the iPlayer could have a "negative effect" on commercial rivals."
So. What? Since when has competition 'having a negative effect' on the competititors been a problem in a free market?
Personally, I'd like to set up a very expensive monopoly selling bottled air, and I demand that the government deal with this everpresent free air! How am I supposed to charge for air when it's free to breathe all around? How many employment opportunities are lost because I cant charge as much for the air as I'd like to?
"Chris Woolard, head of finance, economics and strategy"
Perhaps Mr. Woolard should take some care to be more concerned with what is in the interest of the taxpayers and the wealth of the nation, rather than what is the interest of some commercial entities.
"In this situation there is really no gain in switching light bulbs"
:).
Well, you could always do it for the same reasons I did (because energy efficiency wasnt really on the top of the list). Primary reason was I simply got damn tired of changing lightbulbs.
Secondary reason was to vastly increase light levels as I got damn tired of the dark (basically, I have about the same energy consumption, but five times more light now
"but it certainly is not waste if it is doing something useful - like heating your house!"
Many heating solutions like ground source heat pumps, ventilation heat exchangers, etc, give more heat energy per electrical watt put into the system than lightbulbs. IE, heating your house with waste heat from lightbulbs might take twice as much electricity as running a heat pump. So even if the heat gets used, it's comparative waste.
"it rarely gets warm enough for it not to be in use."
Errr, sounds like you need to update your building code too over there. A properly insulated house can, with current state-of-the-art energy efficiency design, support normal indoors living temperatures with zero heat input beyond humans and ordinary applicances far further north than the UK. Of course, that's the extreme, but with a properly insulated building you should definitely not have to run heating all the time at UK temperatures.
A google search for dimmable cfl will turn up several bulbs which can be dimmed. Apparently they've gotten that working these days.
Personally, I rsync from a mirror and have a local repository, so I have a whole bunch of machines that dont get counted. Stuff like that will result in the numbers being a bit off.
"so I'm too afraid to switch from Core 3 to 6."
If you upgrade that rarely, I'd suggest you take a look at CentOS. CentOS 4 will be a far smaller leap (RHEL4 is close to FC3/FC4), and you'd be on a maintained platform again.
"but this government is keener on improved turnout"
Dubious really. Low voter turnout is endemic to winner takes all systems (and who can blame the voters, in a whole lot of cases there isnt even any point for some voters to vote). If they really wanted improved turnout they'd reform towards proportional representation so people would actually get a chance to vote for someone they wanted.
Then again, maybe the whole point is to make it easier to manipulate elections. It's not like that would be far out of character from the current crop of UK politicians.
Depends on what it is, of course. :)
The point of the whole discussion was that it is entirely possible to watch all the material, so it's perfectly reasonable to do cost calculations against actual transmitted material rather than against what an average person watches the average day.
"Unless, of course, you participate"
Yep, there are several more optimal approaches.
"I wonder sometimes whether people really do want the advertising."
Perhaps. Or perhaps they just want their costs hidden.
There's no fundamental difference between, say, financing TV off a $0.50 VAT on various products, or $0.50 off the products paying for advertising, which in turn pays for the TV. Yet somehow it seems preferable to hide the costs so no cost/benefit analysis on the subject can be calculated within the economy, and you dont have to think about the reason why various products cost more than they should.
Still, some level of advertising serves a purpose. It's just that these days it's probably more efficiently done through market engines like pricerunner or ebay.
"Sorry to break it to you but you are never going to watch tv 24/7 even with added help, it just aint possible."
You're assuming a linear following of the schedule, again tied to the non-digital paradigms.
A datadump is a datadump is a datadump. Twelve channels multiplexed means I have linear-time times twelve real-time datastreams, watchable in twelve times the time, assuming I store them. I can record one year and watch for a dozen years. Get it? There's no difference any more between broadcast and fixed-medium data, it's all the same, you're not tied to real-time scheduling for either, and cable becomes just yet another (impractical and badly designed) transmission medium.
"when did we start paying for advertising?"
Ironically, you've always paid for advertising. So now you're both paying for the advertising (if you buy the product), and then you get to pay to watch the advertising (on TV).
So basically you're paying to watch something you dont want to watch, which you yourself paid to get produced, just so you can watch something else you didnt pay to get produced (well, except you did pay to get it produced when you paid for the advertising by buying the advertised product...).
Somehow I suspect that this may not be the most optimal method of funding the things you do want to watch... (which might be a tangent to the articles point...)
"Of course, if you watched TV 24/7 you could only watch 720 hours worth, assuming, of course, you never slept, went to the bathroom, etc.."
I have yet to see my MythTV infrastructure sleep, go to the bathroom, etc. And, in fact, it has no trouble 'watching' half a dozen channels at the same time. Or more, should I want it to.
Get into the digital age. There is no longer any real difference between broadcast, streamed or stored material. It's all just various incarnations of transmission bandwidth, multiplexing, caching and storage.
Cable can be viewed as simply a linearly transmitted archive.
So the original article is entirely reasonable in counting all available programming; what he's getting is access to that number of terabytes of archive data. Wether he views any particular amount of it or not, he's perfectly able to store, and later view, it all.
"These companies seemed to think it was worth exchanging real-world money (up to $8.00/hour!) for a particularly tedious and inefficient database update."
Now imagine the database company said you had to use an UI that ensured that any single number entry would take you at least 8 hours and that you got paid by the number of entries you entered.
Would you not consider it better for the economy as a whole, were you allowed to use another client that took five seconds per entry to update that database?
"Just look at mp3's and money."
:)
mp3's, sure, artificial scarcity does not serve its intended economic purpose in that case. Which is why we're having this huge discussion about copyright reform, in case you hadn't noticed.
Money is artificially limited, and that limitation is strictly controlled, as money serves a specific purpose as a means of trade, and needs a specific valuation.
Virtual property could very well be made to serve the same purpose as money, but again, I doubt you'd want that, because then you could forget about Orcs dropping gold, or foraging turning up trade skill materials. Orcs would drop what they got off looting the shopkeepers, and all money in the mmorpg would ultimately be derived from the mmorpg mint, which would trickle through the economy through various exchanges with in-game banks and game to game or real world trade. Basically, end result, your in-game avatar would have to get an in-game job doing outsourced tech-support for real-world companies to finance his adventuring. Woohoo.
"Virtual property is valuable because of the time required to get it"
Current virtual property has no actual value at all. It is priced as a function of desireability and scarcity, and transactions take place at the intersection of that price and the value of the particular (and arbitrary) time it takes someone to obtain the item.
"That's left to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand."
Adam Smith's invisible hand requires a free market to work. An mmorpg isnt a free market economy.
"Desirable is desirable. Opening up the database so that anybody could have anything at any time would eliminate all desire and the entire market."
It wouldnt eliminate *desire*, it would eliminate *exclusivity*.
The cost to produce the item in this case is zero, while the actual price is entirely based on the controlled scarcity.
Take an example from the real world; we could create an artificial scarcity on, say, wheat, by saying that only one specific farmer would be allowed to create wheat, and only on his little plot of land. Now, the price on wheat would go through the roof, making (the now exclusive) wheat extremely desireable (and the cost to produce and the end price would diverge wildly). However, as a whole, the population would become much poorer, because the artificial scarcity imposed doesnt fulfill the very fundamental idea of free market economy; to make sure as much as possible is produced to allow as many as possible to have their desire for the produced items fulfilled.
See, the whole point of a functioning economy is to eliminate exclusivity.
As a society, we dont want exclusivity, we want overabundance. (Of course, certain people may want exclusivity, as it is both very profitable (when artificial) and it can make them feel 'special'.)
"I think you're missing the point that the thread starter essentially made: what is valuable in this situation is time."
Oh, I understand the point, it's just that it is only valid within the rules of the game, and the rules of the game do not apply to the real world economy, and vice versa. It's not impossible to create a merged system, it's just not desireable, as the goal of the rules of the game is completely incompatible with the goal of the rules of a real economy.
"Paying somebody else to play the boring parts of the game for you is very much like cheating, especially when the gameplay itself is designed to be essentially boring."
Not only that, it removes the incentive from the game designers to fix the boring parts, which even further damages the 'real' value of the game in the real economy.
"practice with their shitty bands"
Practicing with shitty bands isnt an artificially scarce product.
"freeing up the spender to do other actual work in the economy."
The goods in question are _artificially_ scarce. _Neither_ needs to spend time as the items are _only a database update_. In the 'real world' it takes neither time nor resources to produce the in-game items; at a 'real world' market valuation, they could both (and, in fact, everyone in the game) have the particular item at zero cost, freeing them _both_ up to productive work.
That's the whole point of the real-world free market economy; to maximize the production of wealth in society by creating incentives for the most efficient production possible. To accomplish this goal within the mmorpg realm the solution is simple; enforce open databases, with the immediate result that anyone can have anything whenever they want.
Of course, this is quite probably rather undesireable for the actual mmorpg. Which rather reinforces the point; the real-world economy and the fantasy of games are quite incompatible and should not be mixed, as the systems are at odds at their very foundation; one is intented to minimize wasted time, the other to maximize wasted time.
Of course, one can question the wisdom in allowing real-world money to be exchanged for what is essentially a particularly tedious and inefficient database update.
In fact, should this type of exchange become prevalent in the economy I'd suggest anti-monopoly regulators come down on the MMORPG businesses like a ton of bricks and force them to allow many companies access to the database tables to update them so we can get a real free market evaluation of the 'goods' in question (ie, approaching zero).
You see, someone making their living off producing strictly artificially scarce items is someone not employed producing real scarce items; ie, it is a net loss to the economy as a whole, which means we _all_ get poorer by allowing such abberations to continue.
"They should rip the tongues out of anyone who makes baseless accusations."
Well, that would certainly shut the current US administration up...
"In short, they need to make themselves cost competitive with P2P. How do you make yourself cost competitive with something that is free?"
That's the rub; the entire industry is built upon monopoly control, it is _not_ cost competetive. Allofmp3, eMusic, last.fm, etc have proven there are a multitude of models around convenience that work fine for music distribution (even for uncopyrighted classical music), but _only_ if you have a cost structure that supports the model.
That means no more media blitzes. No huge launches. No payola. No hundreds of thousands of free cd's sent to dj's and radio stations. No half a million dollar videos for MTV. No coke parties.
But without those things, they cant control the market anymore, they wont be able to shove their particular artists down the listeners throats and push the independents to the side. They need the huge per-artist revenue and expenditures to minimize the variability and risk in the market, and that entails a high level of control and a high unit price to recoup the expenses.
"The cryptographic keys are only valid for 30 seconds and, more importantly, only for a specific transaction."
Short time keys make the interception slightly more difficult, but essentially the intercept software would just have to immediately use the collected keys in the alternate transaction, rather than save them for later use. Same with SMS, or anything else; as long as the customers PC is compromised, there's no way to guarantee that what the customer sees is what the bank sends, or that what the customer enters is what gets sent to the bank. An SMS confirmation code going to the customer phone would just verify the forged transaction, rather than the one the customer thought he was entering.
Possibly you could make it safer by actually sending all of the transaction data over an alternate channel like SMS or fax (with a checksummed validation code), or have an external box which you'd have to enter the transaction details onto to generate a checksummed specific transaction, but then you'd probably be better off using a phone service instead anyway.
"The choices are you paying for the drug, or the drug not existing."
No. Most of the money spent by pharmaceuticals goes to marketing, administration and inefficient production. Not even 20% of the revenue goes to R&D.
The actual choice is between MegaChemCorp spending $1 billion developing a drug while wasting $4 billion, and you paying the $5 billion for all of it, or you paying only the $1 billion for the actual drug development, and fewer golf camps and pharmaceutical dinners for health-care execs.
"Profit guarantees have proven pretty effective at this."
Profit guarantees are good for one thing; to ensure that costs rise to meet them. Nothing breeds waste as good as protection from competition.
"If people were driven to invent for the betterment of the human race rather than their personal financial gain, these artificial restrictions on a basic human right wouldn't exist."
Except IP rights were originally not created as an innovation incentive, they were originally a intended to enrich the friends of the crown in exchange for their support (salt monopolies, stationers guild, etc); ie, an alternative taxation system.
Those monopolies were scaled back, but through propaganda campaigns (claiming how 'necessary' they were for 'innovation', or how 'authors' needed to be 'protected') the monopolists managed to at least partially retain their priviliges.
Creative people are driven to invent for the betterment of the human race. Merchants, on the other hand, tend to be driven to find ways to evade competition. Avoiding competition is what the whole IP is, and always has been, about.
"and become they way to cast one's ballot."
Of course they will eventually become the way to cast ones ballot; it's become obvious that certain interests want electronic voting systems and are going to implement them, no matter what.
"which of course are less than infallible"
Certainly, traditional voting methods are fallible, but tell me this: can you devise a paper based system wherein less than a dozen people need to be involved to tailor the result of a particular election to their wishes? That would be trivial with electronic voting.
That's the big difference. You can manipulate votes in either system, but with a paperbased system, to massively modify a result, you need the cooperation of such a large number of people that it becomes almost impossible to keep it secret.
(Of course, abberant voting systems like winner-takes-all elections are easy to manipulate even if you can only modify a few votes, regardless of the ballot form, but that's a built in deficiency in the system itself)
"So long as DRM is not dictated to be necessary by government"
Anti-circumvention laws are such a dictate.
"It takes control away from the user and in most cases puts it in the control of the works publisher."
Essentially, it's approximately the same as other forms of taxation, taking away part of owners rights to their property and giving them to someone else (in this case the economic value of being able to reproduce the item).
Wether taxes are good or bad is certainly debatable, but personally, I'd say taxing the population and appropriating their rights to their property for the purpose of funding particularly ineffective corporations at best falls within the 'bad idea' realm, if not actually in the 'evil' camp.
"Notebooks and rack servers have won."
Doubtful. The current comparative increase in notebook sales is something I'd put up to the price, at last, falling into an acceptable range, which means a lot of the money reserved for computer purchasing in the end-user channels will be going towards filling this previously unfilled need.
However, the useability areas of notebooks dont quite overlap the desktop; performance and component flexibility will remain behind.
Most people I know get one notebook, then have enough of them and remain on the desktop. The notebook is practical when you're travelling, or have a computer you use both at home and at work, but it's always slower, lacks memory, lacks disk, doesnt support enough monitors, etc, so you still end up with a desktop for a lot of use.
"if they would come up with modular notebook design,"
Yep, it would be nice, but there's probably still too much margin in the proprietary approach. I mean, heck, they cant even standardize on batteries, so I'm not holding my breath.