This was an "on a" patent. Buying things on the internet. GPS in a car. Accelerometer in a phone. They weren't trying to claim an actual invention, as accelerometers in wands and other computer controllers have been around for a long time. They were attempting to patent troll.
We'll have to see how this one turns out. But in general, it seems pretty safe to say that the patent system in this country needs a healthcare-sized overhaul.
So... the Greeks argued that any innate natural instinct was a form of right? By that logic we all have the innate right to:
Pee... and poop. (that's an important one) Hump attractive things. Scratch when it itches. Kill competition for our mates. Eat any food we come across. Water, lots of water. After a certain point, we have an innate right to More Heroin damnit.
Oh, so arguing by reductio ad absurdum isn't viable, you say? The Greeks had provisos, you say? Ok, so add Aristotle's philosophy of "moderate virtue," whereby you have to live yourself and your innate natures to the fullest, by tempering them all and only doing a moderate amount. Add in a healthy dose of societal "don't harm others." Ignore Greece's legendary Cyrenaic hedonism. Add a few touches of 'greatest good' socialism. A few snips and tucks here and there for whims of the time, and what do you get?
Obviously, you get innate rights that came exactly from nature, and not at all from what society at the time believes it means to be human.
That's the fable. Any "right" that comes from society can be taken back, and that means it certainly isn't a right.... Yes, people can violate your rights, but the fact that they don't violate them doesn't mean they are the source.
How do you identify a "right" that can't be taken back, can't be changed by society, but can be violated freely by a society? At that point the concept is so ungrounded from reality that a "right" is anything that you personally identify as a right. When a societal rule conflicts with that identification, it is a violation. When someone else's identified "rights" that you disagree with are changed, it was just a privilege.
At that point, you might as well have declared that you personally have a right to own nuclear weapons and manifest blueberry pancake mix out of thin air.
There is really only 3 basis for beliefs: provable facts of existence, beliefs rooted in societal lore, or beliefs rooted in direct personal experience. As what you're describing has no connection to provable facts or direct personal experience, what you're talking about is societal lore. And before you say 'God', please point to the part of the bible that explicitly states you have the freedom of speech.
I personally fail to see how a national ID card will make recreational drug use any less dangerous. Legitimate peacetime groups will still be spied on by the FBI. "Free speech zones" would be just as enforceable. Overly broad patents would still be issued daily. Censorship organizations will still take hypersensitive views of sexuality. The DMCA will still be squashing legitimate research. I still would have been put on the "search-before-every-flight" list in college, and they still would have sworn it didn't exist.
There would, however, be significant non-infringing uses. Personally, I've been on the receiving end of information database screw-ups so often that I'd be happy if the patchwork of information systems all glued together by the lowest bidder using elmers white and visual basic was a bit more robust. Keeping one license every time I moved would be nice, and never having to bring a passport "just in case" would be great.
And, of course, we'd need a national discussion on how such a system should work, and protections on how records should be kept and used. But honestly? The government is already doing it. They're doing it now. They're doing it poorly. They're screwing it up. I'd much rather we avoided things like the similar-name purges we saw in Florida by having an actually competent system. The alternative is exactly the same as not having a national ID card, except there isn't actually a discussion about safeguards, and anyone could be targeted due to the excessive numbers of mistakes.
Remember that while emergency rooms are required to treat you despite inability to pay, they're also going to bill the hell out of you for it. When my cousin was run off the road at age 28, she had extensive but treatable health problems resulting from it. However, even just going on the emergency room care, she would have been bankrupted and lost her house, the insurance value of her car, and all of her savings. In essence, she would have been sent back to financial square 1, but this time without the ability to get approval on the more advanced financial instruments.
My fiancee had her kidney explode when she was 17. Her parents would have had to sell off their houses to avoid bankruptcy for that one.
Expensive health problems aren't just for the elderly.
Most ID systems in this country accept a notarized birth certificate as proof of who you are. If you can acquire a real or fake birth certificate, you can leverage yourself into state ID cards, credit cards, and passports. As long as that is the basis for identification, a notarized piece of paper that has no uniquely identifying elements, fraud will still be reasonably easy for anyone determined enough.
Considering we already have state-issued drivers licenses, Passports, and those useless Social Security Card things, really the only difference between a state ID and a national ID is competence. I can already get a ticket in Georgia and have it follow me directly to Massachusetts. Considering the hassle of moving a driver's license from one state to another, but the tickets follow you effortlessly, I welcome a national driver's license.
The thing I worry about is "unhackable" and "fraud-proof" ID cards. This from the people who gave you passports invisibly hackable from a distance of 3 feet. Heck, with a name like "fraud-proof ID cards," even I want to hack it.
The iPhone did really well at the beginning because it was a phone that wasn't incredibly painful to use. The app store added features and functionality that nobody else had. The phone became pretty close to a full platform.
These days, multi-touch phone interfaces are pretty well understood. The fashionistas have Droids now. The iPhone is good enough for most people... Everyone has one, and it is easy enough to give to someone's mother. But I doubt it deserves the title "fashion toy."
My favorite is that it competes with something that is already purchased. That means it's not about manipulating purchasing decisions, but controlling the medium.
Apple has made that rule clear, and it's their platform (and they don't have a monopoly) so it's not really evil.
Just because a rule is a rule, doesn't mean it can't be an evil rule. There has been repeated abuses of this rule in the past, including banning apps for duplicating functionality that Apple hadn't yet implemented or told anyone about, and banning apps for duplicating functionality that doesn't exist, etc.
Also, apple is notoriously unreachable about prior approval or feedback in any form. Build the app, submit it, and be approved or not.
In this case Opera already has Opera Mini running on multiple platforms, with the backend handling the heavy lifting. They mostly needed to create an interpreter for their markup language, which their existing back end engine creates. Being the first non-safari browser on the iPhone would be a significant coup. Even then, the publicity of a rejection might be worth significantly more than the cost of creating the interpreter.
There's no need. Disclaimers cannot trump the law.
They can during binding arbitration. Which, of course, everyone agrees to when they install software, use a service, or drink a soda in this damned country.
gctip was registered by Lauren Weinstein on behalf of Vortex Technology, which also appears to be run by Lauren. According to their whois record, they have an office in this building. On her blog, she claims to be self-employed.
They also seem related to pfir.org, though not by whois. What exactly that connection is, besides webdesign, is unclear.
My guess, this is either a well-meaning person who has never run a 100k response survey before, or they're a First Class Grep Wizard.
Full access to for number of responses, csv export, reasonably good visualization tools, matrix responses, direct e-mail invites, and not quite as ugly as sin.
DSL is pretty hit-or-miss, depending on the address or block receiving it. The noisy line can be the line from the company's box to the house. Or it can be wiring within the house. Or the client might just be too far from the nearest station to receive good signal no matter what the conditions. Or, far more than we'd like to admit (at least when I was working on this sort of thing), the line from the center to the company's box can just be noisy. For example, I had a client once where the phone company ran lines under the streets. When it rained, the water would pool on the lines. This wasn't enough to kill the phone service, but it did kill the DSL. When the rain let up, the phone company came out and checked the line, and it all looked fine. I can't tell you the number of times we had to jump through this hoop.
DSL can be a great bargain, but it also seems to be a miss for between 1/4th and 1/2 of the people who try it. It's not a fault of the technology, just differences in real-world implementation of an old wiring system that nobody expected to carry data. If you happen to be one of the "misses," it's probably cheaper just to get cable internet.
Don't forget that a 10mbps session will help with the FDIC's Money Smart education program, as well as other online education programs. Sending webmail does involve kicking around photographs from friends, which can easily be 4MB each. Online gaming can eat a ton of bandwidth, even just accounting for basic titles like World of Warcraft. A single streaming radio stream can eat a full 768k DSL... a house full of kids all streaming Pandora at once? Most of my work has required VPN-ing into the office at some point or another, a process that is extremely painful on slower connections.
And for that matter, 10Mbps isn't just larger sustained chunks of streaming. It's also more responsive network for the basic stuff. Someone used to 768k streaming might not mind waiting 10 seconds for a web page to open, but it is really nice when each page can open in 2 to 3.
I'd say that the people who wouldn't benefit from a 10mbps connection at this point are the same ones who didn't see a need to upgrade past AOL. They're likely to be hanging back, have an established way of doing things, and lack real impetus or need to change. I don't mean that derisively, when things work for people, they work. But grandparent saying that only warez hounds and ISO downloaders could use faster connections sounds like they haven't gotten around to the other uses for faster connections. According to my router, I've used 125 GB of bandwidth, and we've still got a quarter of this month left to go. Not a single GB of that has been warez, iso's, or otherwise illegal.
An access point whose only security element is not broadcasting its SSID is obviously unacceptably vulnerable. But as part of a layered approach, you've made yourself invisible to the most common way of scanning for APs in the vincinity.
The most common tools to hack wireless networks all sniff for packets, rather than broadcasts. Anyone looking to spend the hours to hack into a wireless network is probably stationary, or specifically targeting a location or company. Having an unbroadcast SSID will stop wardrivers who are just interested in finding an open wireless signal. But so would any form of encryption.
Not broadcasting your SSID is like saying that removing the post office numbers from the front of your house is part of a layered approach to keeping people from stealing from you. The possible confusion to thieves looking for your particular house number is minimal, but the annoyance to the Post Office would be severe.
The security you add by not broadcasting your SSID is minimal to none at best. What it does do, however, is screw up people who attempt to figure out which are the overburdened portions of the spectrum in an area and balance properly. As I mentioned, all automated hacking tools sniff for active use packets. Most router configuration software, however, just listen for SSID broadcasts. Neighborhood ad-hoc spectrum utilization is already hard enough to maintain. When half of the networks in a neighborhood are hiding themselves due to a misplaced sense of security, it just means that normal users have even less of a chance of finding proper spectrum to utilize without themselves using hacking tools.
Ok, that's a lie, but I'm not going to post my real SSID here.:)
Is there a reason why? It's not like anyone close enough to use your SSID won't immediately know it.
And I'm sure by now, everyone knows that for proper neighborhood wireless spectrum balancing everyone should be broadcasting their SSID, right? Otherwise, it's basically impossible to manage bandwidth in an area, as everyone secretly camps on top of everyone else, right?
There have been periods where they didn't bother to disable portions from working chips, but instead sent out batches that were simply marked below the capability of what they actually provided. I believe this was frowned upon by OEMs who needed consistency more than unexpected upgrades.
Designing new chips without the part require further development and new fabrications. At that point, you're better off fabbing your best chip twice, and disabling some of them. Would they re-shoot a movie, just so they could sell a second, cheaper DVD without the director's commentary?
For the record, I used to feel that presidents were interchangeable too. Then a particular president who will go unnamed blew that impression out of the water.
It seems like the options in presidents these days are "Bad" or "Holy Heck Godawful." Sure, that means that they are all bad. But there is casually bad, and there is "make-the-country-laughing-stock-of-the-world" bad.
And maybe all of this means that the Office of the President is an outmoded design choice that doesn't really fit the modern operating needs of the country. Is there another structure that might work better for this?
The kinds of people who need help to install an antivirus are exactly the kinds of people who forget to renew every year, then come back with a ton of viruses and other smeg.
I've seen it far too often. The weakest link in a paid AV setup is the moment it disables itself.
We still need the middleman. We just need a different middle man. Steam does a great job of selling video games digitally, showing relative user ratings between them and letting people choose their needs. iTunes / Amazon / eMusic / etc do a great job of presenting new options to purchasers. Hulu / Netflix / iTunes all present different revenue models between the filmmakers and the end users to provide funding for the filmmakers.
And at the other end of middlemen, we still need studios. If you're going to make a movie that requires 30 million in special effects, you need a team of people experienced with managing that kind of scratch. People who can sell overseas distribution, have connections to toy licensing, etc. An all-in-one talent-and-financing congealing shop. In Music, this floor is much lower, and can be entirely in the hand of your band's manager. In movies or games, this still requires a large team of dedicated individuals.
The nature of both of these has changed, and that's a problem for the industry. If the music industry had embraced digitial distribution middlemen in the napster era, piracy wouldn't be nearly as prevalent as it is today. But that doesn't mean we don't need middlemen. We just need new middlemen.
Sure, but a lot of those bands are Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Usher, etc. They're new and incredibly popular, but they're all housed under major labels.
A really popular independent musician can expect to make a hundred dollars a month or so on iTunes. Realistically, though, the money all goes to a few people with concentrated star power, all of whom are on major labels at the moment. Sure, CD sales have nosedived for iTunes, the radio is struggling to keep up with Pandora streaming, and digital home recording has taken over studio rental time. So the medium has changed. And a few bands like OK Go have stayed independent successfully. But OK Go is about as popular as you'll see an indie, compared to superstars like Tay Tay, Beyoncee, etc.
The playfield has changed, and the labels are struggling to make money in the same way / volume. But they still have the upper hand in terms of acts and cultural impact.
I live in the US, and get Comcast residential. It's about 60 a month, for 10 down and 5 up. Having used over 100 GB this month (netflix streaming), there don't seem to be active caps.
So when they won't need you to quarter soldiers, you don't have to. And when they need you to, it has to be in accordance with how they say. That seems... pretty broad. I need to start writing project proposals like that.
"No Engineer shall, in times of successful milestone hitting break from the specifications, without consent of the Client, nor in times of crunch, but in a manner with managerial approval."
Slashdot Mirror
This was an "on a" patent. Buying things on the internet. GPS in a car. Accelerometer in a phone. They weren't trying to claim an actual invention, as accelerometers in wands and other computer controllers have been around for a long time. They were attempting to patent troll.
We'll have to see how this one turns out. But in general, it seems pretty safe to say that the patent system in this country needs a healthcare-sized overhaul.
So... the Greeks argued that any innate natural instinct was a form of right? By that logic we all have the innate right to:
Pee... and poop. (that's an important one)
Hump attractive things.
Scratch when it itches.
Kill competition for our mates.
Eat any food we come across.
Water, lots of water.
After a certain point, we have an innate right to More Heroin damnit.
Oh, so arguing by reductio ad absurdum isn't viable, you say? The Greeks had provisos, you say? Ok, so add Aristotle's philosophy of "moderate virtue," whereby you have to live yourself and your innate natures to the fullest, by tempering them all and only doing a moderate amount. Add in a healthy dose of societal "don't harm others." Ignore Greece's legendary Cyrenaic hedonism. Add a few touches of 'greatest good' socialism. A few snips and tucks here and there for whims of the time, and what do you get?
Obviously, you get innate rights that came exactly from nature, and not at all from what society at the time believes it means to be human.
That's the fable. Any "right" that comes from society can be taken back, and that means it certainly isn't a right.... Yes, people can violate your rights, but the fact that they don't violate them doesn't mean they are the source.
How do you identify a "right" that can't be taken back, can't be changed by society, but can be violated freely by a society? At that point the concept is so ungrounded from reality that a "right" is anything that you personally identify as a right. When a societal rule conflicts with that identification, it is a violation. When someone else's identified "rights" that you disagree with are changed, it was just a privilege.
At that point, you might as well have declared that you personally have a right to own nuclear weapons and manifest blueberry pancake mix out of thin air.
There is really only 3 basis for beliefs: provable facts of existence, beliefs rooted in societal lore, or beliefs rooted in direct personal experience. As what you're describing has no connection to provable facts or direct personal experience, what you're talking about is societal lore. And before you say 'God', please point to the part of the bible that explicitly states you have the freedom of speech.
I personally fail to see how a national ID card will make recreational drug use any less dangerous. Legitimate peacetime groups will still be spied on by the FBI. "Free speech zones" would be just as enforceable. Overly broad patents would still be issued daily. Censorship organizations will still take hypersensitive views of sexuality. The DMCA will still be squashing legitimate research. I still would have been put on the "search-before-every-flight" list in college, and they still would have sworn it didn't exist.
There would, however, be significant non-infringing uses. Personally, I've been on the receiving end of information database screw-ups so often that I'd be happy if the patchwork of information systems all glued together by the lowest bidder using elmers white and visual basic was a bit more robust. Keeping one license every time I moved would be nice, and never having to bring a passport "just in case" would be great.
And, of course, we'd need a national discussion on how such a system should work, and protections on how records should be kept and used. But honestly? The government is already doing it. They're doing it now. They're doing it poorly. They're screwing it up. I'd much rather we avoided things like the similar-name purges we saw in Florida by having an actually competent system. The alternative is exactly the same as not having a national ID card, except there isn't actually a discussion about safeguards, and anyone could be targeted due to the excessive numbers of mistakes.
Remember that while emergency rooms are required to treat you despite inability to pay, they're also going to bill the hell out of you for it. When my cousin was run off the road at age 28, she had extensive but treatable health problems resulting from it. However, even just going on the emergency room care, she would have been bankrupted and lost her house, the insurance value of her car, and all of her savings. In essence, she would have been sent back to financial square 1, but this time without the ability to get approval on the more advanced financial instruments.
My fiancee had her kidney explode when she was 17. Her parents would have had to sell off their houses to avoid bankruptcy for that one.
Expensive health problems aren't just for the elderly.
Most ID systems in this country accept a notarized birth certificate as proof of who you are. If you can acquire a real or fake birth certificate, you can leverage yourself into state ID cards, credit cards, and passports. As long as that is the basis for identification, a notarized piece of paper that has no uniquely identifying elements, fraud will still be reasonably easy for anyone determined enough.
Considering we already have state-issued drivers licenses, Passports, and those useless Social Security Card things, really the only difference between a state ID and a national ID is competence. I can already get a ticket in Georgia and have it follow me directly to Massachusetts. Considering the hassle of moving a driver's license from one state to another, but the tickets follow you effortlessly, I welcome a national driver's license.
The thing I worry about is "unhackable" and "fraud-proof" ID cards. This from the people who gave you passports invisibly hackable from a distance of 3 feet. Heck, with a name like "fraud-proof ID cards," even I want to hack it.
The iPhone did really well at the beginning because it was a phone that wasn't incredibly painful to use. The app store added features and functionality that nobody else had. The phone became pretty close to a full platform.
These days, multi-touch phone interfaces are pretty well understood. The fashionistas have Droids now. The iPhone is good enough for most people... Everyone has one, and it is easy enough to give to someone's mother. But I doubt it deserves the title "fashion toy."
My favorite is that it competes with something that is already purchased. That means it's not about manipulating purchasing decisions, but controlling the medium.
Apple has made that rule clear, and it's their platform (and they don't have a monopoly) so it's not really evil.
Just because a rule is a rule, doesn't mean it can't be an evil rule. There has been repeated abuses of this rule in the past, including banning apps for duplicating functionality that Apple hadn't yet implemented or told anyone about, and banning apps for duplicating functionality that doesn't exist, etc.
Also, apple is notoriously unreachable about prior approval or feedback in any form. Build the app, submit it, and be approved or not.
In this case Opera already has Opera Mini running on multiple platforms, with the backend handling the heavy lifting. They mostly needed to create an interpreter for their markup language, which their existing back end engine creates. Being the first non-safari browser on the iPhone would be a significant coup. Even then, the publicity of a rejection might be worth significantly more than the cost of creating the interpreter.
There's no need. Disclaimers cannot trump the law.
They can during binding arbitration. Which, of course, everyone agrees to when they install software, use a service, or drink a soda in this damned country.
http://www.whois.net/whois/gctip.org
gctip was registered by Lauren Weinstein on behalf of Vortex Technology, which also appears to be run by Lauren. According to their whois record, they have an office in this building. On her blog, she claims to be self-employed.
They also seem related to pfir.org, though not by whois. What exactly that connection is, besides webdesign, is unclear.
My guess, this is either a well-meaning person who has never run a 100k response survey before, or they're a First Class Grep Wizard.
I'm halfway convinced this survey is just a method to harvest e-mail addresses.
My personal free favorite can be found here.
Full access to for number of responses, csv export, reasonably good visualization tools, matrix responses, direct e-mail invites, and not quite as ugly as sin.
DSL is pretty hit-or-miss, depending on the address or block receiving it. The noisy line can be the line from the company's box to the house. Or it can be wiring within the house. Or the client might just be too far from the nearest station to receive good signal no matter what the conditions. Or, far more than we'd like to admit (at least when I was working on this sort of thing), the line from the center to the company's box can just be noisy. For example, I had a client once where the phone company ran lines under the streets. When it rained, the water would pool on the lines. This wasn't enough to kill the phone service, but it did kill the DSL. When the rain let up, the phone company came out and checked the line, and it all looked fine. I can't tell you the number of times we had to jump through this hoop.
DSL can be a great bargain, but it also seems to be a miss for between 1/4th and 1/2 of the people who try it. It's not a fault of the technology, just differences in real-world implementation of an old wiring system that nobody expected to carry data. If you happen to be one of the "misses," it's probably cheaper just to get cable internet.
Don't forget that a 10mbps session will help with the FDIC's Money Smart education program, as well as other online education programs. Sending webmail does involve kicking around photographs from friends, which can easily be 4MB each. Online gaming can eat a ton of bandwidth, even just accounting for basic titles like World of Warcraft. A single streaming radio stream can eat a full 768k DSL... a house full of kids all streaming Pandora at once? Most of my work has required VPN-ing into the office at some point or another, a process that is extremely painful on slower connections.
And for that matter, 10Mbps isn't just larger sustained chunks of streaming. It's also more responsive network for the basic stuff. Someone used to 768k streaming might not mind waiting 10 seconds for a web page to open, but it is really nice when each page can open in 2 to 3.
I'd say that the people who wouldn't benefit from a 10mbps connection at this point are the same ones who didn't see a need to upgrade past AOL. They're likely to be hanging back, have an established way of doing things, and lack real impetus or need to change. I don't mean that derisively, when things work for people, they work. But grandparent saying that only warez hounds and ISO downloaders could use faster connections sounds like they haven't gotten around to the other uses for faster connections. According to my router, I've used 125 GB of bandwidth, and we've still got a quarter of this month left to go. Not a single GB of that has been warez, iso's, or otherwise illegal.
An access point whose only security element is not broadcasting its SSID is obviously unacceptably vulnerable. But as part of a layered approach, you've made yourself invisible to the most common way of scanning for APs in the vincinity.
The most common tools to hack wireless networks all sniff for packets, rather than broadcasts. Anyone looking to spend the hours to hack into a wireless network is probably stationary, or specifically targeting a location or company. Having an unbroadcast SSID will stop wardrivers who are just interested in finding an open wireless signal. But so would any form of encryption.
Not broadcasting your SSID is like saying that removing the post office numbers from the front of your house is part of a layered approach to keeping people from stealing from you. The possible confusion to thieves looking for your particular house number is minimal, but the annoyance to the Post Office would be severe.
The security you add by not broadcasting your SSID is minimal to none at best. What it does do, however, is screw up people who attempt to figure out which are the overburdened portions of the spectrum in an area and balance properly. As I mentioned, all automated hacking tools sniff for active use packets. Most router configuration software, however, just listen for SSID broadcasts. Neighborhood ad-hoc spectrum utilization is already hard enough to maintain. When half of the networks in a neighborhood are hiding themselves due to a misplaced sense of security, it just means that normal users have even less of a chance of finding proper spectrum to utilize without themselves using hacking tools.
Ok, that's a lie, but I'm not going to post my real SSID here. :)
Is there a reason why? It's not like anyone close enough to use your SSID won't immediately know it.
And I'm sure by now, everyone knows that for proper neighborhood wireless spectrum balancing everyone should be broadcasting their SSID, right? Otherwise, it's basically impossible to manage bandwidth in an area, as everyone secretly camps on top of everyone else, right?
Ok, just wanted to make sure of that.
There have been periods where they didn't bother to disable portions from working chips, but instead sent out batches that were simply marked below the capability of what they actually provided. I believe this was frowned upon by OEMs who needed consistency more than unexpected upgrades.
Designing new chips without the part require further development and new fabrications. At that point, you're better off fabbing your best chip twice, and disabling some of them. Would they re-shoot a movie, just so they could sell a second, cheaper DVD without the director's commentary?
For the record, I used to feel that presidents were interchangeable too. Then a particular president who will go unnamed blew that impression out of the water.
It seems like the options in presidents these days are "Bad" or "Holy Heck Godawful." Sure, that means that they are all bad. But there is casually bad, and there is "make-the-country-laughing-stock-of-the-world" bad.
And maybe all of this means that the Office of the President is an outmoded design choice that doesn't really fit the modern operating needs of the country. Is there another structure that might work better for this?
The kinds of people who need help to install an antivirus are exactly the kinds of people who forget to renew every year, then come back with a ton of viruses and other smeg.
I've seen it far too often. The weakest link in a paid AV setup is the moment it disables itself.
We still need the middleman. We just need a different middle man. Steam does a great job of selling video games digitally, showing relative user ratings between them and letting people choose their needs. iTunes / Amazon / eMusic / etc do a great job of presenting new options to purchasers. Hulu / Netflix / iTunes all present different revenue models between the filmmakers and the end users to provide funding for the filmmakers.
And at the other end of middlemen, we still need studios. If you're going to make a movie that requires 30 million in special effects, you need a team of people experienced with managing that kind of scratch. People who can sell overseas distribution, have connections to toy licensing, etc. An all-in-one talent-and-financing congealing shop. In Music, this floor is much lower, and can be entirely in the hand of your band's manager. In movies or games, this still requires a large team of dedicated individuals.
The nature of both of these has changed, and that's a problem for the industry. If the music industry had embraced digitial distribution middlemen in the napster era, piracy wouldn't be nearly as prevalent as it is today. But that doesn't mean we don't need middlemen. We just need new middlemen.
Sure, but a lot of those bands are Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Usher, etc. They're new and incredibly popular, but they're all housed under major labels.
A really popular independent musician can expect to make a hundred dollars a month or so on iTunes. Realistically, though, the money all goes to a few people with concentrated star power, all of whom are on major labels at the moment. Sure, CD sales have nosedived for iTunes, the radio is struggling to keep up with Pandora streaming, and digital home recording has taken over studio rental time. So the medium has changed. And a few bands like OK Go have stayed independent successfully. But OK Go is about as popular as you'll see an indie, compared to superstars like Tay Tay, Beyoncee, etc.
The playfield has changed, and the labels are struggling to make money in the same way / volume. But they still have the upper hand in terms of acts and cultural impact.
I live in the US, and get Comcast residential. It's about 60 a month, for 10 down and 5 up. Having used over 100 GB this month (netflix streaming), there don't seem to be active caps.
No static IP, but I don't host any servers here.
So when they won't need you to quarter soldiers, you don't have to. And when they need you to, it has to be in accordance with how they say. That seems... pretty broad. I need to start writing project proposals like that.
"No Engineer shall, in times of successful milestone hitting break from the specifications, without consent of the Client, nor in times of crunch, but in a manner with managerial approval."