It still bugs me that the HDTV decoders in the US are still so expensive. You can get it on board a video card for $50, but a full box is still around $150 at least. Since the rest of the computer is serving primarily as a power supply, that seems kinda pricey.
Well, anecdotally I can tell you that when my group theory prof was talking, one got the very strong impression that he was never going to shut up. Which leads me to think that there's an infinite number of things to say about group theory. Or at the very least, you can say the same things over and over again.
Partly, it's about resolution; HDTV has more pixels, which makes for a nicer picture. And screen shape: the new digital TV supports wide-screen, which will make for better movie-viewing without having to compromise on full-screen vs. widescreen.
It's also a lot about bandwidth. The new digital signals are more efficient than the analog ones, so you can cram more channels into the spectrum. (Which means you don't always get higher resolution; they can cram 4 old-resolution channels into the space for one high-def signal. And a station can choose.)
And there's even more flexibility: a digital signal makes it easier to encode other kinds of signal: foreign languages, hypertext, etc.
But mostly it's about freeing up a certain set of frequencies so that they can be sold off for cell phones, wifi, etc. That's very valuable bandwidth at a frequency which can be better taken advantage of by small, hand-held devices. Some of it is allocated to emergency channels.
I don't know the details of the situation, but there are plenty of things an exploit can do even without root: delete or read your files, open up a spam relay, perhaps even log your keystrokes. Is there something special about the nature of this flaw that it can't be exploited at all without root access?
Well, you got it partly right: there are an infinite number of books on group theory, but they're countably infinite, because each is of finite length, so you can assign an integer value to each (say, the ASCII coding of the book). And they're a subset of the countably infinite set of all books.
Of course, only some of them have actually been written and sold, and that's a small and finite number. The books on group theory which have yet to be written are all out there, but it's left as an exercise to the writer.
(Eh, it was a good joke when I started writing it.)
Actually, I think that "security via NAT" is kind of a scary hack. Yeah, I too am comforted by the fact that my computers are nicely hidden from port scanners by a blue box from Linksys.
But my TiVo and printer shouldn't need to be protected by that. If they only need to listen on a single port, then they should only open that one and not need the NAT box to protect them. If they're vulernable to buffer overflows on that port, then NAT won't protect them anyway. And if for some reason I had two TiVos, it would be a hassle to set up port forwarding separately for each of them, and maintaining that.
(I speak hypothetically; I don't even own a single TiVo.)
So I think that when IPv6 does come there will be a few new opportunities that come from the wide-open address space. It'll also impose more stringent security requirements, but those should be mandatory anyway. NAT for security is as much a hack as NAT for addressing. Yeah, I depend on it, but it's still a hack.
But that doesn't mean that the guy in the article isn't an idiot. He's clearly just trying to get you to replace your router.
Q: Besides the obvious thing about address space, what other advantages does it have?
A: Penetration! Because we don't have everybody connected yet!
Q: And how does IPv6 increase penetration? Does it build wires to people's houses or make provide satellite dishes to third-world countries?
A: No, but it does make sure we have enough addresses once they have some money to buy the actual hardware stuff!
Look, I know that eventually we're going to have to transition off IPv4 because of the address space issues, and that we might as well start now, but articles like this make it more like a marketing stunt to sell new hardware RIGHT NOW.
We should also dump domain name registration. Just because that nerd Bezos pays a bunch of jerks eleven bucks a year, what gives him the right to the name Amazon? He gets the name amazon.com as his intellectual property, and I get squat. He should open it up to competition.
The reason people complained before is that the record company exec was insisting that Apple raise prices but not lower any prices, which is just foolish. You can let the market help you set pricing to maximize profit, but you can't have it both ways. If you just raise prices that's not letting the market decide, and you'll lose money from people who would pay $.49 for a less popular song but not $.99.
It makes sense to me that the one good song on an album would go for more than the rest. The record companies are ticked that they're losing revenue that they used to get; it used to be you had to buy an entire $12-$16 album to get the one non-sucky song. Perhaps $.99 is too low for that song, if people are willing to pay more, as evidenced by the fact that they used to spend MUCH more.
There will be the inevitable replies to this about how you can get it all for free on P2P, but Apple has demonstrated that people will pay for music if it's convenient. Now they get to fine-tune the pricing model.
Personally, I look forward to it. If the latest top 40 goes up, and the older and obscure stuff that I want goes down, I win, at the expense of the rubes paying $2.49 for whatever is hot today.
There is occasionally actual news in a blog. That's "occasionally" and "in some blog, somewhere, among the millions of them". Most famously it was the case of the Bush deferral letter, where the first ones to post that the letter looked suspicious were bloggers, which was later picked up by the blog-aggregators, and finally by the wire services.
But most blogs are just commentaries on the news. Read some if you find a commentator that makes sense to you, but treat it as your primary news source and you're going to be late, not early. News stories that start in blogs happen far, far less often than news gathered by wire services.
In a way the wire services are the ultimate blog aggregators. They take reports from a zillion stringers all over the planet, so they get to be there first. Once in a while some blog will beat them to the punch, but it's the exception, not the rule, and I expect it to remain that way.
Wow. Your teacher sure was an idiot. It's not like the allegory for communism was hidden or anything. It's the whole point of the book. I'd love to know what your teacher thought you were supposed to get out of the book besides that.
And I refuse to buy any CDs that won't fit in my tape deck!
I suppose it's interesting that a former Apple guy should be taking a stance against Apple's current policy, but this isn't a particularly well-reasoned article. He's basically fed up with format change, and he's ticked off that there are things he thinks he ought to be able to do with the new format (copy it freely to every digital device) that he can't do.
There's nothing new in this article. He's trotting out the usual complaints about DRM without addressing the usual responses. The usual responses may or may not be adequate, but the article is less "Here's a new argument against DRM from a guy who knows" and more "Yet another guy is pissed off."
The difference is that the interstate highways aren't advertised for the purpose of doing illegal things, and they take at least some preemptive measures to ensure that they're not used that way.
Grokster might have had an easier case if they had made at least a cursory effort to prevent illegal file sharing. As it is they made it clear that they expected and encouraged you to trade files illegally, and that was going to cause them headaches in court.
Wish I had mod points for ya, but instead I'll just elaborate.
Your argument that open sourced DRM won't work is pretty convincing. From DRM to work 100% it has to involve an inviolable, probably hardware, black box, and a black box which runs all the way from the display medium (speakers, screen) back to the encrypted data stream. So you could in theory have a black-box hardware DRM player, and open source the front-end downloading of the stream, but that's it. The black box can't be open source; otherwise, it wouldn't be black.
You couldn't even make the black box a decrypter only, because then the open source would have access to the decrypted stream.
However, I'm not sure I agree with the grandparent post anyway that DRM is holding open source back. It may be holding back certain things, notably places where the content is critical (e.g. legal pay-for movie and music download sites)
But unless you're talking about preventing illegal copies of the software itself, DRM isn't applicable. And if it's open source then protecting the software ins't applicable either; it's supposed to be freely copyable.
So, if the bubble is going to burst, it's when people realize that it's difficult to make money giving things away. The remarkable thing is that it's not impossible.
Basically, ID boils down to "Evolution can't explain everything."
And there's nothing wrong with that. Me, I'm all for talking about the flagellum and the clotting cascade and all that, in schools. It's just that you need to call them "research areas" rather than dumping them off on an "intelligent designer", which is just damn foolishness.
Heck, they can even go ahead and mention that if you can manage to prove that one of these absolutely could not have evolved then the entire theory of evolution collapses like a house of cards. That's logical. But to claim that such proof already exists is a complete misunderstanding of the logic and suggests that one has absolutely no business saying anything at all on the subject.
Intelligent Design contradicts evolution on the variability between and among species. ID says that at least some of the variability between species arises from the intervention of a designer; evolution says there's no. So the argument isn't really about the origin of life, but the origin of species.
Actually, YHWH already has some letters struck out, specifically the vowels. In Hebrew it's spelled yod-hay-vav-hay; YHWH is a rough English transliteration. Since the vowels are missing nobody can say how it's pronounced. In fact it's usually pronounced "Adonai", which is a different name entirely.
I've never known any observant Jews to drop a letter from YHWH, but observant Jews of my acquantiance usually write it as G-d when they write it in English.
Just for the record, I didn't wish to justify what was going on; I wished to explain it. The original poster had asked what was different, why we were taking a very close look at individuals now compared to a much more dangerous enemy in the past. Whether the particular approach they've taken is the Right Thing or not I leave to other posters, but the situation is different and acknowledging that is the first step towards figuring out what the Right Thing is.
Because then we expected death to come in the form of bombs on ICBMs, or perhaps as armies marching across Europe. Nobody figured that an individual would do much damage.
Not that an individual couldn't do some damage, but it wouldn't particularly advance the USSR's goals to kill a few people at a time (or even a few thousand). And if they did piss us off by, say, flying planes into a few buildings, we knew right where the USSR was and could drop a few bombs of our own on it.
The war we're engaged in now is one of individuals doing a little bit of damage at a time. It can't bring down the US the way a full-on war with the Soviets could, but it is very demoralizing to be subject to terror attacks and it does lousy things to the economy. And when it happens, there's no place to bomb in retaliation (at least not without filling the media with pictures of civilians killed in the process.)
The old enemy wore uniforms, so you can't even tell which of those dead civilians really were planning to kill you.
So they check the individuals a lot more closely, both on entry and in the country. Illegally closely, perhaps, but that's not my point. You can, perhaps, feel safer knowing that the odds of you being wiped out along with the entire rest of the country in a nuclear holocaust are far, far lower than they were two decades ago. But it'll still kinda piss you off if you happen to be in the vicinity of a dirty bomb, suicide bomber, or whatever nasty trick they come up with next.
Sometimes you have to wait for a few older scientists to die. But major scientific revolutions have happened several times in the past couple of centuries, and most of them have been accepted very quickly. It didn't take long for Einstein or Watson&Crick to revolutionize their fields. Not everybody accepts it, but a good theory opens up new avenues of discovery, and people jump on them. They quickly crowd out the people making only the slow, dull, plodding progress that characterized most of science, especially when they're pursuing a theory that has run its course.
Scientists have an attachment to progress. You're not a researcher if all you're doing is defending the status quo; there's simply no money in it. Present a new theory that actually works and you've opened up a thousand new PhD theses.
Of course for every genuine revolutionary there are a thousand people claiming that their own genuine revolution is being repressed by the orthodoxy. Could all of them be wrong?
by Sterling D. Allan Open Source Energy News -- Exclusive Interview
I suppose occasionally major scientific advances are announced in press releases, but since 99.999% of the time it's somebody jumping the gun, I think I'll let it go.
I do find it interesting that the article describes him as an "inventor" rather than a "physicist". Somehow when proposing a radically different model of the universe, the former always rings of "I was puttering around and I found something I didn't understand, therefore it must be both correct and completely novel."
None of this is proof that he's wrong, but the crank-o-meter is pushing towards the red zone. Which is too bad, because apparently he's an extremely smart man with a lot of valid research to his name.
Actually, an hour-long TV show is usually only 42 minutes long. A standard movie runs close to two hours. So we can throw in a factor of 1/3 to 1/2, raising your $8 to $10-$12.
Which, given that you're not getting any DVD extras, seems not unreasonable, and that's the price I arrived at in a different reply. (Not all DVDs have extras, but then again, they seem to charge about the same for DVDs whether it's a must-have blockbuster or direct-to-video crud, to it's hard to say exactly what they're thinking when they charge the full $20 for a DVD with no extras.)
Since the product isn't physical, and they don't actually deplete their stock of content by letting me download it, it isn't about how much 1 movie should be worth -- it is about what price will maximize the total amount that I spend.
That's actually true for any sale: the price is always determined by what the customer will spend rather than what it costs to make. When there's competition, that price will tend to be pushed down close to the manufacturing price, but a movie is unique: you can only get it from one source. (Ultimately, that is; immediately, you can get it from a lot of different sources, but all of them ultimately buy it from the studio). So they can charge whatever the market will bear.
Which seems, in general, to be twenty bucks. I don't know where they get that number from, nor why a big hit should be roughly the same price as a direct-to-video monstrosity, but I assume that the executives at the studios know what they're doing to maximize their own profits. (That's a very dubious assumption, but I'm going to stick with it for the moment.)
It sounds like they wouldn't maximize their profits by playing to you. You don't want to own movies; you want to rent them. And there's a model for that. And even now they can convince you to cough up $20 for a movie occasionally. You probably wouldn't buy significantly more of them at $15 or even at $10, so the price sits at $20 for those people who do like to buy their movies. And there are a number of them among my friends.
Me, I'm in your boat: I subscribe to Netflix for exactly the same reasons, and I own a half-dozen truly outstanding movies. I assume that there's some marketer out there measuring how many of you there are, and how many movie-buyers there are, and planning to set the price accordingly. I'm pretty sure it'll be more than $5, but $12 wouldn't surprise me.
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It still bugs me that the HDTV decoders in the US are still so expensive. You can get it on board a video card for $50, but a full box is still around $150 at least. Since the rest of the computer is serving primarily as a power supply, that seems kinda pricey.
Well, anecdotally I can tell you that when my group theory prof was talking, one got the very strong impression that he was never going to shut up. Which leads me to think that there's an infinite number of things to say about group theory. Or at the very least, you can say the same things over and over again.
(Just kidding; he was actually a fine lecturer.)
Partly, it's about resolution; HDTV has more pixels, which makes for a nicer picture. And screen shape: the new digital TV supports wide-screen, which will make for better movie-viewing without having to compromise on full-screen vs. widescreen.
It's also a lot about bandwidth. The new digital signals are more efficient than the analog ones, so you can cram more channels into the spectrum. (Which means you don't always get higher resolution; they can cram 4 old-resolution channels into the space for one high-def signal. And a station can choose.)
And there's even more flexibility: a digital signal makes it easier to encode other kinds of signal: foreign languages, hypertext, etc.
But mostly it's about freeing up a certain set of frequencies so that they can be sold off for cell phones, wifi, etc. That's very valuable bandwidth at a frequency which can be better taken advantage of by small, hand-held devices. Some of it is allocated to emergency channels.
I don't know the details of the situation, but there are plenty of things an exploit can do even without root: delete or read your files, open up a spam relay, perhaps even log your keystrokes. Is there something special about the nature of this flaw that it can't be exploited at all without root access?
Well, you got it partly right: there are an infinite number of books on group theory, but they're countably infinite, because each is of finite length, so you can assign an integer value to each (say, the ASCII coding of the book). And they're a subset of the countably infinite set of all books.
Of course, only some of them have actually been written and sold, and that's a small and finite number. The books on group theory which have yet to be written are all out there, but it's left as an exercise to the writer.
(Eh, it was a good joke when I started writing it.)
Actually, I think that "security via NAT" is kind of a scary hack. Yeah, I too am comforted by the fact that my computers are nicely hidden from port scanners by a blue box from Linksys.
But my TiVo and printer shouldn't need to be protected by that. If they only need to listen on a single port, then they should only open that one and not need the NAT box to protect them. If they're vulernable to buffer overflows on that port, then NAT won't protect them anyway. And if for some reason I had two TiVos, it would be a hassle to set up port forwarding separately for each of them, and maintaining that.
(I speak hypothetically; I don't even own a single TiVo.)
So I think that when IPv6 does come there will be a few new opportunities that come from the wide-open address space. It'll also impose more stringent security requirements, but those should be mandatory anyway. NAT for security is as much a hack as NAT for addressing. Yeah, I depend on it, but it's still a hack.
But that doesn't mean that the guy in the article isn't an idiot. He's clearly just trying to get you to replace your router.
Q: Besides the obvious thing about address space, what other advantages does it have?
A: Penetration! Because we don't have everybody connected yet!
Q: And how does IPv6 increase penetration? Does it build wires to people's houses or make provide satellite dishes to third-world countries?
A: No, but it does make sure we have enough addresses once they have some money to buy the actual hardware stuff!
Look, I know that eventually we're going to have to transition off IPv4 because of the address space issues, and that we might as well start now, but articles like this make it more like a marketing stunt to sell new hardware RIGHT NOW.
We should also dump domain name registration. Just because that nerd Bezos pays a bunch of jerks eleven bucks a year, what gives him the right to the name Amazon? He gets the name amazon.com as his intellectual property, and I get squat. He should open it up to competition.
The reason people complained before is that the record company exec was insisting that Apple raise prices but not lower any prices, which is just foolish. You can let the market help you set pricing to maximize profit, but you can't have it both ways. If you just raise prices that's not letting the market decide, and you'll lose money from people who would pay $.49 for a less popular song but not $.99.
It makes sense to me that the one good song on an album would go for more than the rest. The record companies are ticked that they're losing revenue that they used to get; it used to be you had to buy an entire $12-$16 album to get the one non-sucky song. Perhaps $.99 is too low for that song, if people are willing to pay more, as evidenced by the fact that they used to spend MUCH more.
There will be the inevitable replies to this about how you can get it all for free on P2P, but Apple has demonstrated that people will pay for music if it's convenient. Now they get to fine-tune the pricing model.
Personally, I look forward to it. If the latest top 40 goes up, and the older and obscure stuff that I want goes down, I win, at the expense of the rubes paying $2.49 for whatever is hot today.
There is occasionally actual news in a blog. That's "occasionally" and "in some blog, somewhere, among the millions of them". Most famously it was the case of the Bush deferral letter, where the first ones to post that the letter looked suspicious were bloggers, which was later picked up by the blog-aggregators, and finally by the wire services.
But most blogs are just commentaries on the news. Read some if you find a commentator that makes sense to you, but treat it as your primary news source and you're going to be late, not early. News stories that start in blogs happen far, far less often than news gathered by wire services.
In a way the wire services are the ultimate blog aggregators. They take reports from a zillion stringers all over the planet, so they get to be there first. Once in a while some blog will beat them to the punch, but it's the exception, not the rule, and I expect it to remain that way.
Wow. Your teacher sure was an idiot. It's not like the allegory for communism was hidden or anything. It's the whole point of the book. I'd love to know what your teacher thought you were supposed to get out of the book besides that.
I heard a rumor that if war should break out, England would secretly move Greenwich in order to throw everybody's clocks off except theirs.
And I refuse to buy any CDs that won't fit in my tape deck!
I suppose it's interesting that a former Apple guy should be taking a stance against Apple's current policy, but this isn't a particularly well-reasoned article. He's basically fed up with format change, and he's ticked off that there are things he thinks he ought to be able to do with the new format (copy it freely to every digital device) that he can't do.
There's nothing new in this article. He's trotting out the usual complaints about DRM without addressing the usual responses. The usual responses may or may not be adequate, but the article is less "Here's a new argument against DRM from a guy who knows" and more "Yet another guy is pissed off."
The difference is that the interstate highways aren't advertised for the purpose of doing illegal things, and they take at least some preemptive measures to ensure that they're not used that way.
Grokster might have had an easier case if they had made at least a cursory effort to prevent illegal file sharing. As it is they made it clear that they expected and encouraged you to trade files illegally, and that was going to cause them headaches in court.
Wish I had mod points for ya, but instead I'll just elaborate.
Your argument that open sourced DRM won't work is pretty convincing. From DRM to work 100% it has to involve an inviolable, probably hardware, black box, and a black box which runs all the way from the display medium (speakers, screen) back to the encrypted data stream. So you could in theory have a black-box hardware DRM player, and open source the front-end downloading of the stream, but that's it. The black box can't be open source; otherwise, it wouldn't be black.
You couldn't even make the black box a decrypter only, because then the open source would have access to the decrypted stream.
However, I'm not sure I agree with the grandparent post anyway that DRM is holding open source back. It may be holding back certain things, notably places where the content is critical (e.g. legal pay-for movie and music download sites)
But unless you're talking about preventing illegal copies of the software itself, DRM isn't applicable. And if it's open source then protecting the software ins't applicable either; it's supposed to be freely copyable.
So, if the bubble is going to burst, it's when people realize that it's difficult to make money giving things away. The remarkable thing is that it's not impossible.
Basically, ID boils down to "Evolution can't explain everything."
And there's nothing wrong with that. Me, I'm all for talking about the flagellum and the clotting cascade and all that, in schools. It's just that you need to call them "research areas" rather than dumping them off on an "intelligent designer", which is just damn foolishness.
Heck, they can even go ahead and mention that if you can manage to prove that one of these absolutely could not have evolved then the entire theory of evolution collapses like a house of cards. That's logical. But to claim that such proof already exists is a complete misunderstanding of the logic and suggests that one has absolutely no business saying anything at all on the subject.
Intelligent Design contradicts evolution on the variability between and among species. ID says that at least some of the variability between species arises from the intervention of a designer; evolution says there's no. So the argument isn't really about the origin of life, but the origin of species.
Actually, YHWH already has some letters struck out, specifically the vowels. In Hebrew it's spelled yod-hay-vav-hay; YHWH is a rough English transliteration. Since the vowels are missing nobody can say how it's pronounced. In fact it's usually pronounced "Adonai", which is a different name entirely.
I've never known any observant Jews to drop a letter from YHWH, but observant Jews of my acquantiance usually write it as G-d when they write it in English.
Just for the record, I didn't wish to justify what was going on; I wished to explain it. The original poster had asked what was different, why we were taking a very close look at individuals now compared to a much more dangerous enemy in the past. Whether the particular approach they've taken is the Right Thing or not I leave to other posters, but the situation is different and acknowledging that is the first step towards figuring out what the Right Thing is.
Because then we expected death to come in the form of bombs on ICBMs, or perhaps as armies marching across Europe. Nobody figured that an individual would do much damage.
Not that an individual couldn't do some damage, but it wouldn't particularly advance the USSR's goals to kill a few people at a time (or even a few thousand). And if they did piss us off by, say, flying planes into a few buildings, we knew right where the USSR was and could drop a few bombs of our own on it.
The war we're engaged in now is one of individuals doing a little bit of damage at a time. It can't bring down the US the way a full-on war with the Soviets could, but it is very demoralizing to be subject to terror attacks and it does lousy things to the economy. And when it happens, there's no place to bomb in retaliation (at least not without filling the media with pictures of civilians killed in the process.)
The old enemy wore uniforms, so you can't even tell which of those dead civilians really were planning to kill you.
So they check the individuals a lot more closely, both on entry and in the country. Illegally closely, perhaps, but that's not my point. You can, perhaps, feel safer knowing that the odds of you being wiped out along with the entire rest of the country in a nuclear holocaust are far, far lower than they were two decades ago. But it'll still kinda piss you off if you happen to be in the vicinity of a dirty bomb, suicide bomber, or whatever nasty trick they come up with next.
Sometimes you have to wait for a few older scientists to die. But major scientific revolutions have happened several times in the past couple of centuries, and most of them have been accepted very quickly. It didn't take long for Einstein or Watson&Crick to revolutionize their fields. Not everybody accepts it, but a good theory opens up new avenues of discovery, and people jump on them. They quickly crowd out the people making only the slow, dull, plodding progress that characterized most of science, especially when they're pursuing a theory that has run its course.
Scientists have an attachment to progress. You're not a researcher if all you're doing is defending the status quo; there's simply no money in it. Present a new theory that actually works and you've opened up a thousand new PhD theses.
Of course for every genuine revolutionary there are a thousand people claiming that their own genuine revolution is being repressed by the orthodoxy. Could all of them be wrong?
Well, yeah. They can.
by Sterling D. Allan
Open Source Energy News -- Exclusive Interview
I suppose occasionally major scientific advances are announced in press releases, but since 99.999% of the time it's somebody jumping the gun, I think I'll let it go.
I do find it interesting that the article describes him as an "inventor" rather than a "physicist". Somehow when proposing a radically different model of the universe, the former always rings of "I was puttering around and I found something I didn't understand, therefore it must be both correct and completely novel."
None of this is proof that he's wrong, but the crank-o-meter is pushing towards the red zone. Which is too bad, because apparently he's an extremely smart man with a lot of valid research to his name.
Actually, an hour-long TV show is usually only 42 minutes long. A standard movie runs close to two hours. So we can throw in a factor of 1/3 to 1/2, raising your $8 to $10-$12.
Which, given that you're not getting any DVD extras, seems not unreasonable, and that's the price I arrived at in a different reply. (Not all DVDs have extras, but then again, they seem to charge about the same for DVDs whether it's a must-have blockbuster or direct-to-video crud, to it's hard to say exactly what they're thinking when they charge the full $20 for a DVD with no extras.)
Since the product isn't physical, and they don't actually deplete their stock of content by letting me download it, it isn't about how much 1 movie should be worth -- it is about what price will maximize the total amount that I spend.
That's actually true for any sale: the price is always determined by what the customer will spend rather than what it costs to make. When there's competition, that price will tend to be pushed down close to the manufacturing price, but a movie is unique: you can only get it from one source. (Ultimately, that is; immediately, you can get it from a lot of different sources, but all of them ultimately buy it from the studio). So they can charge whatever the market will bear.
Which seems, in general, to be twenty bucks. I don't know where they get that number from, nor why a big hit should be roughly the same price as a direct-to-video monstrosity, but I assume that the executives at the studios know what they're doing to maximize their own profits. (That's a very dubious assumption, but I'm going to stick with it for the moment.)
It sounds like they wouldn't maximize their profits by playing to you. You don't want to own movies; you want to rent them. And there's a model for that. And even now they can convince you to cough up $20 for a movie occasionally. You probably wouldn't buy significantly more of them at $15 or even at $10, so the price sits at $20 for those people who do like to buy their movies. And there are a number of them among my friends.
Me, I'm in your boat: I subscribe to Netflix for exactly the same reasons, and I own a half-dozen truly outstanding movies. I assume that there's some marketer out there measuring how many of you there are, and how many movie-buyers there are, and planning to set the price accordingly. I'm pretty sure it'll be more than $5, but $12 wouldn't surprise me.
It could work, though it's an awful lot of work to get a slow computer.