Your intended point is invalid as well - the market holds no guarantees or protections for the investor, nor should it, unless fraud is involved, or other obvious bits that have bugger-all to do with copyright. Don't like it? Take it to civil court, where such matters belong.
Caveat Investor, home-boy. If you invest in the wrong market and the market in particular loses profit (not due to theft or fraud, mind), then that's your problem, and you shouldn't rely on the government to help idiot-proof things for you, or kiss your boo-boo and make you feel better by locking up some random schmuck. If you lose profit because Joe Cheeto-Shirt can make perfect copies of your goods in his basement, then take him to civil court and try your luck there.
You do not get to lock him up in prison, as he has not deprived you of your goods.
Problem is, you too-easily confuse copying with theft. Whether your doing that is out of ignorance or malicious design? I will leave to you and/or the reader.
Downloading, in the music industry's case, is when I make an exact duplicate of everything in that shopkeeper's store for my own use. Doing so in the real world means that the shopkeeper can't do jack about it. He has lost nothing, as all of his goods are still in the store, untouched and unchanged. So if he bitches and whines to the cops that the value of the goods in his store is essentially zero because everyone else is busy making perfect copies of the store's contents w/o removing anything from his store, then yeah, that is just his tough luck.
Personal Opinion? As long as no hardware is touched and no rights are abridged, I would love (no, seriously, love) to see the MPAA/RIAA get stupid and lock down every movie, song, and show with unbreakable DRM. Then maybe folks would get a hint, dump the cartels, and find other ways to get entertained. Then the RIAA/MPAA can die a slow and much-deserved death.
If you make a market unviable by doing nothing to prevent infringement, piracy, etc etc, you are in effect giving the finger to people in that market segment.
The people in that market segment can always get a different career - any career. Markets die off all the time anyway due to evolution of markets as a whole - just ask the TV/radio repair industry.
Some poor slob who is locked-up in prison for downloading a song doesn't have any options for a couple of years, and all of his future options narrow down to menial/low-end labor after that.
So, maybe you can point out where the justice is in such a scenario?
...laugh all you want, but how many people shell out real money for WoW -based virtual goodies, or worse, pay shitloads of money to Zynga so that their crops grow faster, or some other similar bullshit? And yeah, folks actually blow money on Second-Life virtual crap as well (and were are a ton of dumbasses as late as two years ago promoting it.
I guess if it makes 'em happy, it makes 'em happy. Fool and his(her?) money, etc.
All that said, if you catch the right trend, and are creative enough in how you sell those virtual goods, you can stand to make a few bucks off of the deal.
PS: about the other bad assumptions you made, to wit:
My favorite part about this phenomenon is the people who leave usually re-incorporate outside the city so they don't have to pay taxes, often relying on government services (education, housing, etc) while they got 'bootstrapped' enough to move to a suburb just outside the reach of the taxes they relied on.
I live 85 miles away from the nearest metro area (Portland). I sincerely doubt that PDX or its bedroom communities are going to grow over the Coastal Range and reach all the way out here. I pay taxes into and rely on the services provided by my wee town and by Tillamook County - not Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, or whatever. The towns out here were incorporated back in the late 19th-early 20th century.
Trust me - no one lives out here to leech off of Portland's gov't services; the tourist dollars that flow from it are quite sufficient.;)
To sum it all up? Maybe you should, like, you know... ask before making assumptions next time?
But maybe subby doesn't have $300k lying around for a nice new house by the coast.
Neither did I. I live on the Oregon Coast, which is nothing like an east-coast cost-of-living, let alone the likes of Martha's Vineyard or Palm Beach. The houses I'm looking at purchasing cost an average of $85k-$150k, and yet are within blocks of the surf. Unless you count summer tourists, the town I live in has a population of less than 1200.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Guess I must've adapted myself then. I solved the whole city noise problem by, err, moving out of the city apartment and into a home in a small coastal town. The only noises I hear most days here are those of nature and the sound of the ocean easily carries to the porch (I live 1/4 mile from the beach).
OTOH, for the longest time I found myself unable to sleep due to the lack of noises that I had gotten used to in the city (traffic, the occasional stereo thump, fire engine, conversation and thumps from a now-missing adjacent apartment, etc.)
No, the VA is in worse shape because it's run by a lot of government employees. While there are some folks in there who really do their best to provide decent care (and some have managed to pull of miracles), the reason the VA falls down a lot? Because of the '7:30-4:30' mentality. Most of the employees there are just marking time (while getting one hell of a paycheck for doing so), and resent any/all intrusions into their day or their processes (like, you know, patients who need care?) More often than not, the process and attendant bureaucratic attitude is the biggest hindrance.
How do I know? My missus is a disabled veteran. Watching her fight with the pharmacy because they botched an delivery date for the umpteenth time is no fun (we're talking insulin and high-octane pain prescriptions here, not aspirin), and that's just the tip of one very ugly iceberg.
Having seen fully-US-government-run healthcare up close and personal? Let's just say that no matter how good Canada or the UK does it, I know full well that here in the US, we'll just fuck it up, and to the detriment of anyone who will have to suffer under it.
For what it's worth: The company was paying her tuition, which is why she's still there. As for the jobs situation, I decided to hang around until I found something better due to having massive bills to pay - but for awhile, better wasn't forthcoming, as most folks in the area thought that 'bad economy=lowball', and once you get up around the six-figure range in this area (PDX Metro), you need to be real picky. I remember getting calls a year later as the same prospective employers discovered to their horror what an employee willing to take less is capable of doing.
I recall seeing that happen once at a previous job. Four of us, and one gent who acted as leader/purchaser/fill-in-admin/etc, basically built an entire IT infrastructure from the ground up. Then the PTB hired this reject VP from a huge F500 corp as the new IT Director. Everything immediately goes to shit as he starts slinging around acronyms and demands that were workable for huge orgs like the one he just left, but were impossible for a tiny IT department to implement properly in the deadlines he wanted. To top that off, he whips out the microscope, looking for something - anything - to hold over each of our heads as a threat and as a consolidation of power. It just got uglier from there. It took a development admin suffering a stroke, and a sysadmin getting a heart attack before this jackass would get a clue and hire some help to fulfill his ever-increasing list of demands. Given the economy at the time, other jobs were impossible to find, so we were stuck for awhile.
There's only one person out of the original crew left, and she's likely to be gone once her degree is complete. The rest of us said 'fuck it' and pulled the D-Ring on his ass at the first graceful opportunity (and some even sooner). Last I heard their expenses went way up since most of us left (having to hire consultants all the time to fix even minor breaks is a bitch, I guess).
Eventually shit hits the fan for such people. OTOH, even if it doesn't, no skin offa mine - the job I left them for came with a huge raise, a mere 30% of the workload, and telecommuting. First 3 months felt like an effing vacation to me.
But yeah, the corp was shifting from start-up (of sorts) to full-blown. Thing is, unless someone takes control of the situation, it'll eventually crash - either figuratively (budget) or literally (as systems crap out).
Yup - I fully expect the price to literally double. On the other hand, even if it does, I'm paying the same for 30mbps as I did for 3.5mbps with CenturyLink (they advertise up to 6mbps, but you're lucky to get even half that most times).
I did the Comcast thing before I left PDX. You have my sympathies.:)
LOL - It's Charter. They saw what CenturyLink was offering in the area for DSL (hint: it sucked, the customer service was crap, etc), and decided to come in to provide some competition. I think at least half the county swapped over almost immediately.
We see a ton of tourists (being a coastal area), which likely explains the reason we have decent Internet out here. Every {Tom|Dick|Harry} who owned a business wanted to put in wifi, so...
Well, I live in the sticks ( >70 miles outside of a major metro area), and in spite of a county population density of around 22 per sq. mile, I get 30mbps at $30/mo. (more often than not it drifts above 40, especially in winter when the tourists all stay home).
I could probably count on one hand, with all 5 fingers to spare, the number of "one percenters" who live out here.
It isn't fiber-to-the-doorstep, but given the low population and the alternatives in most other rural areas, it ain't half bad. *shrug*
Yes and no (on the USPS). The reason I say that is due to one question: how much of a break in taxation, fuel, and other costs does the USPS get? I'm willing to wager that they don't have to pay any FAA-associated fees for aircraft certification, and are usually exempt from state vehicle taxation, fuel taxes, property taxes on post offices, vehicle insurance premiums (the gov't handles that), etc. There's also the fact that the USPS doesn't have to pay taxes on income, and has no shareholders to please. FedEx, UPS, DHL... they all have to pay all of that and more.
I bet it's enough to have an artificially-reduced bottom-line - far, far smaller than the likes of FedEx or UPS. This in turn artificially lowers the entire overhead costs per entity once you count in HR/salary costs.
I don't hate the post office or anything, but before pointing to them as a shining example? At least remember that unlike their competition, the USPS gets to start the race quite a few strides ahead of the competition.
Err, let me guess - natural lambskin condoms?...not sure if that's plumbing the depths of gross, or the idea for one hell of a new haute cuisine dish for 'Bizarre Foods'.
Demographics would be swaths of folks based on generalities like age, income, or (at most) gender. It gets dangerous when you start compiling lists of folks based on characteristics that can be actively discriminated against by future governments (e.g. LGBT, conservative/progressive, Jewish/Muslim/Catholic, hispanic/black/white/whatever, etc.)
Depends - give MSFT's stack-ranking system, I suspect it goes like this:
If it's a coworker's flaw? You broadcast it to raise your own rankings and screw the other guy over. If it's your flaw and you discover it way too late in the process to fix w/o raising eyebrows? You shut up and pray like hell no one finds it.
Slashdot Mirror
First, this legislation doesn't wreck anyone's life.
...because going to prison and all the attendant peril/damage/loss-of-freedom that comes with it is just a minor inconvenience, right?
Tell you what - next speeding ticket you get, how about we chuck you into prison for two years? After all, it won't wreck your life or anything.
Your intended point is invalid as well - the market holds no guarantees or protections for the investor, nor should it, unless fraud is involved, or other obvious bits that have bugger-all to do with copyright. Don't like it? Take it to civil court, where such matters belong.
Caveat Investor, home-boy. If you invest in the wrong market and the market in particular loses profit (not due to theft or fraud, mind), then that's your problem, and you shouldn't rely on the government to help idiot-proof things for you, or kiss your boo-boo and make you feel better by locking up some random schmuck. If you lose profit because Joe Cheeto-Shirt can make perfect copies of your goods in his basement, then take him to civil court and try your luck there.
You do not get to lock him up in prison, as he has not deprived you of your goods.
Problem is, you too-easily confuse copying with theft. Whether your doing that is out of ignorance or malicious design? I will leave to you and/or the reader.
Downloading, in the music industry's case, is when I make an exact duplicate of everything in that shopkeeper's store for my own use. Doing so in the real world means that the shopkeeper can't do jack about it. He has lost nothing, as all of his goods are still in the store, untouched and unchanged. So if he bitches and whines to the cops that the value of the goods in his store is essentially zero because everyone else is busy making perfect copies of the store's contents w/o removing anything from his store, then yeah, that is just his tough luck.
Personal Opinion? As long as no hardware is touched and no rights are abridged, I would love (no, seriously, love) to see the MPAA/RIAA get stupid and lock down every movie, song, and show with unbreakable DRM. Then maybe folks would get a hint, dump the cartels, and find other ways to get entertained. Then the RIAA/MPAA can die a slow and much-deserved death.
Well, there is the niggling fact that if the label is distributing it, then it cannot then sue folks for receiving the thing.
Same reason I can't toss my car keys at some shady-looking guy and then have him charged with auto theft.
If you make a market unviable by doing nothing to prevent infringement, piracy, etc etc, you are in effect giving the finger to people in that market segment.
The people in that market segment can always get a different career - any career. Markets die off all the time anyway due to evolution of markets as a whole - just ask the TV/radio repair industry.
Some poor slob who is locked-up in prison for downloading a song doesn't have any options for a couple of years, and all of his future options narrow down to menial/low-end labor after that.
So, maybe you can point out where the justice is in such a scenario?
...laugh all you want, but how many people shell out real money for WoW -based virtual goodies, or worse, pay shitloads of money to Zynga so that their crops grow faster, or some other similar bullshit? And yeah, folks actually blow money on Second-Life virtual crap as well (and were are a ton of dumbasses as late as two years ago promoting it.
I guess if it makes 'em happy, it makes 'em happy. Fool and his(her?) money, etc.
All that said, if you catch the right trend, and are creative enough in how you sell those virtual goods, you can stand to make a few bucks off of the deal.
Where was your doctor educated?
Not by the PDX city government, dumbass.
PS: about the other bad assumptions you made, to wit:
My favorite part about this phenomenon is the people who leave usually re-incorporate outside the city so they don't have to pay taxes, often relying on government services (education, housing, etc) while they got 'bootstrapped' enough to move to a suburb just outside the reach of the taxes they relied on.
I live 85 miles away from the nearest metro area (Portland). I sincerely doubt that PDX or its bedroom communities are going to grow over the Coastal Range and reach all the way out here. I pay taxes into and rely on the services provided by my wee town and by Tillamook County - not Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, or whatever. The towns out here were incorporated back in the late 19th-early 20th century.
Trust me - no one lives out here to leech off of Portland's gov't services; the tourist dollars that flow from it are quite sufficient. ;)
To sum it all up? Maybe you should, like, you know... ask before making assumptions next time?
But maybe subby doesn't have $300k lying around for a nice new house by the coast.
Neither did I. I live on the Oregon Coast, which is nothing like an east-coast cost-of-living, let alone the likes of Martha's Vineyard or Palm Beach. The houses I'm looking at purchasing cost an average of $85k-$150k, and yet are within blocks of the surf. Unless you count summer tourists, the town I live in has a population of less than 1200.
Sorry if you got confused *shrug*.
More like 1.818 Furlongs. We're in London, after all.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Guess I must've adapted myself then. I solved the whole city noise problem by, err, moving out of the city apartment and into a home in a small coastal town. The only noises I hear most days here are those of nature and the sound of the ocean easily carries to the porch (I live 1/4 mile from the beach).
OTOH, for the longest time I found myself unable to sleep due to the lack of noises that I had gotten used to in the city (traffic, the occasional stereo thump, fire engine, conversation and thumps from a now-missing adjacent apartment, etc.)
No, the VA is in worse shape because it's run by a lot of government employees. While there are some folks in there who really do their best to provide decent care (and some have managed to pull of miracles), the reason the VA falls down a lot? Because of the '7:30-4:30' mentality. Most of the employees there are just marking time (while getting one hell of a paycheck for doing so), and resent any/all intrusions into their day or their processes (like, you know, patients who need care?) More often than not, the process and attendant bureaucratic attitude is the biggest hindrance.
How do I know? My missus is a disabled veteran. Watching her fight with the pharmacy because they botched an delivery date for the umpteenth time is no fun (we're talking insulin and high-octane pain prescriptions here, not aspirin), and that's just the tip of one very ugly iceberg.
Having seen fully-US-government-run healthcare up close and personal? Let's just say that no matter how good Canada or the UK does it, I know full well that here in the US, we'll just fuck it up, and to the detriment of anyone who will have to suffer under it.
For what it's worth: The company was paying her tuition, which is why she's still there. As for the jobs situation, I decided to hang around until I found something better due to having massive bills to pay - but for awhile, better wasn't forthcoming, as most folks in the area thought that 'bad economy=lowball', and once you get up around the six-figure range in this area (PDX Metro), you need to be real picky. I remember getting calls a year later as the same prospective employers discovered to their horror what an employee willing to take less is capable of doing.
I recall seeing that happen once at a previous job. Four of us, and one gent who acted as leader/purchaser/fill-in-admin/etc, basically built an entire IT infrastructure from the ground up. Then the PTB hired this reject VP from a huge F500 corp as the new IT Director. Everything immediately goes to shit as he starts slinging around acronyms and demands that were workable for huge orgs like the one he just left, but were impossible for a tiny IT department to implement properly in the deadlines he wanted. To top that off, he whips out the microscope, looking for something - anything - to hold over each of our heads as a threat and as a consolidation of power. It just got uglier from there. It took a development admin suffering a stroke, and a sysadmin getting a heart attack before this jackass would get a clue and hire some help to fulfill his ever-increasing list of demands. Given the economy at the time, other jobs were impossible to find, so we were stuck for awhile.
There's only one person out of the original crew left, and she's likely to be gone once her degree is complete. The rest of us said 'fuck it' and pulled the D-Ring on his ass at the first graceful opportunity (and some even sooner). Last I heard their expenses went way up since most of us left (having to hire consultants all the time to fix even minor breaks is a bitch, I guess).
Eventually shit hits the fan for such people. OTOH, even if it doesn't, no skin offa mine - the job I left them for came with a huge raise, a mere 30% of the workload, and telecommuting. First 3 months felt like an effing vacation to me.
But yeah, the corp was shifting from start-up (of sorts) to full-blown. Thing is, unless someone takes control of the situation, it'll eventually crash - either figuratively (budget) or literally (as systems crap out).
Yup - I fully expect the price to literally double. On the other hand, even if it does, I'm paying the same for 30mbps as I did for 3.5mbps with CenturyLink (they advertise up to 6mbps, but you're lucky to get even half that most times).
I did the Comcast thing before I left PDX. You have my sympathies. :)
LOL - It's Charter. They saw what CenturyLink was offering in the area for DSL (hint: it sucked, the customer service was crap, etc), and decided to come in to provide some competition. I think at least half the county swapped over almost immediately.
We see a ton of tourists (being a coastal area), which likely explains the reason we have decent Internet out here. Every {Tom|Dick|Harry} who owned a business wanted to put in wifi, so...
So Tilamook has great internet and great cheese? Cool! Curious to know how that happened. The internet, not the cheese.
May have something to do with this... - the US landing comes out of the ocean a bit north of here, near Cannon Beach.
The Cheese? That just happened by Divine Writ.
But the "1%" nonsense is getting old. Hey, I'm no TP worshiper of the free market, but blaming everything on the superrich is childish.
I agree, hence the quotes around the term. ;)
Well, I live in the sticks ( >70 miles outside of a major metro area), and in spite of a county population density of around 22 per sq. mile, I get 30mbps at $30/mo. (more often than not it drifts above 40, especially in winter when the tourists all stay home).
I could probably count on one hand, with all 5 fingers to spare, the number of "one percenters" who live out here.
It isn't fiber-to-the-doorstep, but given the low population and the alternatives in most other rural areas, it ain't half bad. *shrug*
Yes and no (on the USPS). The reason I say that is due to one question: how much of a break in taxation, fuel, and other costs does the USPS get? I'm willing to wager that they don't have to pay any FAA-associated fees for aircraft certification, and are usually exempt from state vehicle taxation, fuel taxes, property taxes on post offices, vehicle insurance premiums (the gov't handles that), etc. There's also the fact that the USPS doesn't have to pay taxes on income, and has no shareholders to please. FedEx, UPS, DHL... they all have to pay all of that and more.
I bet it's enough to have an artificially-reduced bottom-line - far, far smaller than the likes of FedEx or UPS. This in turn artificially lowers the entire overhead costs per entity once you count in HR/salary costs.
I don't hate the post office or anything, but before pointing to them as a shining example? At least remember that unlike their competition, the USPS gets to start the race quite a few strides ahead of the competition.
...at the Sri Lanka Sex Hotel, no doubt.
TBH, it is disturbing.
Then again, bacon has been going up in price pretty drastically over recent years.
Err, let me guess - natural lambskin condoms? ...not sure if that's plumbing the depths of gross, or the idea for one hell of a new haute cuisine dish for 'Bizarre Foods'.
Demographics would be swaths of folks based on generalities like age, income, or (at most) gender. It gets dangerous when you start compiling lists of folks based on characteristics that can be actively discriminated against by future governments (e.g. LGBT, conservative/progressive, Jewish/Muslim/Catholic, hispanic/black/white/whatever, etc.)
You're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park...
(...never thought I'd see someone quote The Dead Milkmen on /. Rather refreshing to see :) )
Depends - give MSFT's stack-ranking system, I suspect it goes like this:
If it's a coworker's flaw? You broadcast it to raise your own rankings and screw the other guy over.
If it's your flaw and you discover it way too late in the process to fix w/o raising eyebrows? You shut up and pray like hell no one finds it.