One more really important one: Prediction. "What will happen if I do this?"
Another: Recognizing basic feedback. "Why did the mouse pointer just change into a diagonal double-headed arrow?" "Under what circumstances would that arrow instead be horizontal?"
If it were up to me, I'd take this even further and teach a course in "Using Modern GUI Applications". I know how to use a GUI, and as a result I'm perfectly capable of sitting down and using (at a basic level) any application that's followed the style guidelines from any OS vendor for almost 20 years.
I'm pretty sure that this is a skill that can be taught. I'd probably try to cover topics like the following:
Widgets: What is a button? An icon? A menu? What is a form? How do you recognize which controls belong to which form? How is a button labeled "Apply" likely to be similar to a button labeled "Submit"?
The SDI Model: What is a file? An application? What's the connection between a file and an open window? What happens when you say "File -> Open" when you already have a file open in that window?
What are the options in the "Edit" menu? How are "Save" and "Save As..." different?
What is a pane? How do you recognize a resizable pane versus a fixed pane?
Discoverability: Usually experimentation is safe. What are the warning signs for a destructive operation? How do you get your defaults back when you break something? What is undo? What operations does undo apply to?
These are all things that competent computer users know intuitively. They're important, and I think they're worth teaching explicitly to people who won't just pick them up.
Training school kids in the specific software applications of today is a dumb idea to begin with. Trying to argue that they need to be trained specifically in the current version of the exact software that you personally are using at work is even more absurd.
This new version of Microsoft Office doesn't look much like the old version, and that's just one revision. I'd be willing to bet that GUI environments will look pretty familiar in 5 years. I'd say that we'd still have "buttons and menus", but Microsoft even ditched menus in the new Microsoft Office. I'm sure that exposing kids to OpenOffice will give them skills that are just as applicable to the apps of 5 years from now as what they'd get from Microsoft Office.
The very simple fact is that you don't need Word, Access, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel or any clones of them to accomplish any legitimate work. Heavyweight word processors are seriously overkill for most tasks they're used for, and not well equipped for more complex tasks like document processing and desktop publishing. I'm still not sure what the niche for Access is supposed to be; either you're a programmer and need a scripting language and SQLite or you're not and need to hire one. Outlook is sort of bloated for an email client, and I'd probably lean towards webapp for a calendaring / scheduling tool. Powerpoint is neat, but I see it abused far more than it's legitimately used. Excel is the most legitimate app of the bunch - the ability to do light number-crunching as a non-programmer is useful; on the other hand, like Word, Excel trys to stretch beyond that niche and people end up using it with data sets that deserve something a little bit more robust.
In conclusion, most people would be better served by lighter weight or domain specific applications, and it's only the massive marketing push towards "Office Suites" on the 90's that's stuck us with Microsoft Office and Open Office. It'd be nice if people realized that, and it would be even nicer if people stopped getting automatically trained on this crap.
What do you have a for hardware? A Pentium II and 64 megs of RAM?
Any decent computer sold this century (except perhaps some 2001 era Dells with 128 megs of RAM) should run OpenOffice fine. If your computer doesn't, I'd consider a hardware upgrade or a move to a complete resource-optimized OS / Software stack like Xubuntu + Abiword.
Actually, they don't - in fact, they don't come close.
I should have said "Box office ticket sales produce a significant amount of money, which in many cases should be enough to fund production".
My real point is that the music industry is going to have to accept the fact that there has been an economic shift that will result in slightly decreased DVD sales and a more significant decrease in DVD rentals. Rather than trying to fight this shift with DRM - which is more likely to hurt their cause then help it - they should be working on adopting a business model that matches the real world.
There is a gross misperception of live performance...namely that it's so damn easy and lucrative.
I'm not saying that making money off live performances is easy, my point is that it's possible. Live performances and merchandise are the *only* ways I know of for a non-superstar musician to make money (there's also contract performance where you get paid to make a recording for some specific purpose other than selling CDs). When I say "merchandise", that includes "offical" CDs - but those are worth something for the same reason that t-shirts are, as band merchandise, not because they're the only way to get the recorded music.
Furthermore, not all music is designed for live performance.
Not being able to produce vocals in real time didn't stop Ashlee Simpson on Letterman. Even complex electronic compositions can be used to create a good show. Have you seen a Kraftwerk concert? Does it really matter if they're playing the music in realtime?
If you really can't do live performances, you do have one other option: contract performance. If you can get your work somewhat popular through word of mouth, you may be asked to sell rights to a track for a movie or video game. If you're really good, you may be contracted to compose a new track to be used somewhere.
but a lot of people did not get paid for that music.
The world today is such that it's unlikely that an artist will be paid for their recorded music. That's a fact, and one that probably won't change. DRM doesn't change this and probably promotes the general awareness of pirate releases.
This doesn't mean that musicians will cease to exist - it just means that more of them will have to cope with the economic reality that making money isn't easy. A legitimately good artist should still be able to make a living, and marginal artists will still need day jobs. If you had your heart set on living off record sales, sucks to be you... sorry, but that model doesn't work and the world doesn't owe anyone a living.
As an artist who isn't a superstar like Metallica, you're not in good shape. Even if you get a recording contract with a major label, it won't make you any significant amount of money - the contract deal is just too disadvantageous to the artist. This has nothing to do with piracy - the labels just don't make money by making a living for small time artists.
Metallica makes money on record sales - don't worry about it. You hear about people making $10,000 on scratch tickets too but that doesn't mean it's something you should expect. You're not going to make money on CD sales, even if you're good (some would say *especially* if you're good). Treat MP3s as a promotional technique, and you'll get more people at your performances where you can get their money.
As for the costs - they shouldn't be that big a deal. If you can't come up with the couple thousand dollars it takes to record an album, you're not in a position to start a business venture like that anyway. Again: performances. If you can't get people to book you to perform, you're definitely not good enough to make money selling CDs.
Let's bring this down to a personal level. You create something. I tell you that you must allow me to buy it at whatever price *I* set, or I will just use it anyway. Still convinced of the fairness?
If I create a physical object, I'll be somewhat upset if you take it away from me without my consent regardless of price.
If I create some sort of artistic work or develop a computer program (more likely) whether you sell copies or not really doesn't effect me directly - I still get to enjoy my copy. I'd probably be happy that my work is being distributed for others to enjoy. If you were selling copies without a license, I might take legal action as a point of financial strategy, but that's because I'm a greedy bastard rather than because I think I have some special right to your profits.
The fact of the matter is that data can be copied and shared, at no cost, for the benifit of society. If you think that you can stop that you're either confused or evil, because to prevent file copying you'd have to completely eliminate the general purpose computer as we know it today.
The Russian government passed a law setting a fixed royalty for musical work, to be paid to the national royalty collection organization.
Remember that copyright is a government granted monopoly. Regulating the price of copyrighted works just as reasonable as regulating the price of any other monopoly service like cable television or tap water. I'm not sure that the legally fixed royalty model is correct, but it definitely is at least as fair as the "monopoly rights owner sets the price however they want" model.
Give me a better solution than DRM to accomplish this, and I'll gladly listen.
First, and most importantly, DRM does not accomplish your goal at all. In fact, it is counterproductive because it makes pirate copies strictly better than paid copies.
As for paying the people who work on entertainment projects, I'm not really worried about it. Even if copying DVDs and selling them in stores became legal, selling "official" DVDs would still have a profit margin. Smaller, but existent. And people wouldn't stop going to the theater to see movies - box office ticket sales produce more than enough money to fund production.
Basically, this "the lighting technician will starve" stuff is utter bullshit - they are salaried. Once the movie is out, they've gotten all the money they'll ever get for it. That's actually true for almost all the participants, in all but very rare cases. The only people who get a cut of the profits are industry executives and other millionaires, and I'm not going to cry if they can't afford a twenty sixth Lamborghini.
Allofmp3.com and ROMS could 'offer' whatever they choose. The music industry is under no obligation to accept that offer.
But, under Russian law, *making* the offer was the only requirement to sell music.
If you go to a bazaar and haggle, the merchant is under no obligation to sell you a product at a price only you want.
If I go to another merchant and buy the same item at the price I want, the first merchant has no right to complain about it. If you want to say that "the music industry has the right to control the sale of any identical music", then you're admitting that music is different from physical goods. If music is different from physical goods, there's no reason to assume that any comparison between the two different things is meaningful.
They're paying the royalties required under Russian law. The fact that the American music companies don't want to accept those royalties is largely irrelevant. What we hear from the music companies sounds a lot like a conversation I had with a friend a couple of days ago:
Me: Hey Mike, give me $10.
Mike: Why?
Me: Ok, let's compromise. You give me $5.
Mike: Uhh... no.
Now I understand that I was just being an ass and that Mike wasn't going to give me any money no matter how much I was willing to compromise on the amount (actually, I got him to give me $0.25 once to shut me up), but the record companies don't seem to realize that. They think that dropping the deal from $10 to $5 really is a compromise.
Right now, there are two things preventing people from cracking any given DRM implementation wide open - time and the DMCA.
Absolutely, because hardware and software implementations are readily available. If you can view the content, copying it is possible.
The problem for historians will be that with no access to the hardware, even viewing the content will be impossible. The only known way to access a HD-DVD or BluRay video is with the encryption key - every attack is a key recovery attack, there's no other way to get access. If you can't find a player with the player key intact, you sure won't be finding that key.
Again, the issue is even worse with potentially degraded media. If a stone tablet goes through a rainstorm, the data's still there. If a paper book is exposed to sunlight so long the ink dissapears, no problem - we can chemically process the paper to see the writing. If a BluRay disk is damaged even slightly - such that 20 bytes are unreadable - it may be strictly unrecoverable even with the key.
if piracy is still so easy - there will always be pirate copies available.
If that's our best hope, that sure gives pirates the moral high ground.
One way gives them funds, the other gives them an excuse.
Why does them having an excuse matter?
It's very simple - people want music, movies, and TV shows. Various providers offer these things. In the actual free market, an MP3 format album or an XviD encoded movie have a price of "10 minutes, $0, and optionally a twinge of guilt". Ten minutes of someone's time is worth a couple bucks, and MP3/XviD aren't especially good quality. There's space for pay-service competition in the market, but they'll have to actually compete rather than offering absurdly expensive products that are strictly worse than what's already available. AllofMP3.com has a decent business model - the media companies can't survive and fuck their customers with expensive, low quality, DRM-encumbered crap at the same time.
DRM is a more important issue than you seem to think it is, because it makes the archival of our contemporary literature impossible.
From the perspective of archival, digital data storage has two interesting properties: First, it makes it possible to produce an unlimited number of perfect archival-quality copies of the work. Second, it means we're storing the data on fragile media that is extremely prone to degradation over time. Now, these two properties *should* cancel each other out, because the owner of the media can make a perfect copy before the media degrades. Unfortunately, DRM prevents that. Not only does it make it hard to make a copy, but the encryption involved makes it so that if even 20 bytes of the data is lost the whole file may be mathematically impossible to recover.
DRM is presented as a trade off between easily-marginalized consumer rights such as format shifting and the prevention of large scale piracy. That's utterly false - these DRM techniques barely even slow down actual pirates. DRM is all downside - it throws away consumer rights *and* it turns long term personal archival into an utter nightmare. DRM trades away our format shifting rights, and in return society may lose these works entirely in the future. That's the whole deal - DRM barely even slows pirates down.
It amuses me to no end that in 500 years the only copy of "Prison Break" left for historians may be some Pirate's XviDs on a well preserved DVD-R or hard disk.
DRM absolutely *can* be fought. Just tell everyone about the free & superior compeditor to Netflix: The Pirate Bay.
Seriously, this is a simple issue of competiton: Netflix is easy to use, costs money, and provides moderate quality DRM-encumbered files. TPB is slightly more complex, free, and provides decent quality DRM-free files. If Netflix sucked it up and provided high quality DRM-free files, they'd have 2 out of 3 and be compeditive with TPB again.
The only way to fight DRM is to point out one simple fact: DRM *encourages* piracy, because it's hard to get guilt tripped when the pirates are providing a strictly better product.
The whole point of having a store is to get money, and making more money is what they would like to do.
Right, but that's completely unrelated to retiring the penny. If they thought it would be advantageous to raise their prices by 3%, they'd do that right now.
The fact of the matter is, most prices end in.99 - that won't change. For the occasional price that's $3.37, it's that for a reason - moving to $3.40 wouldn't make any extra sense if there was no penny.
And if you think they'll automatically round each item up to the next nickel at the register, they won't - that would be fraud.
I'll reiterate: The most likely way that cash payments would be handled in a penniless world would be a "round the total to the nearest nickel" policy. Another possible policy is "round the total up to the next nickel". For a customer, these policies are *effectively identical*.
Think about it this way: How many *cash* transactions do you make each day? If you lost 4 cents each time, how long would it take to make a dollar? And... since people tend to buy multiple items in their cash transactions, and there's sales tax, it's unlikely that a retailer could set their prices to net more than 1 cent per transaction, much less 4 cents...
Why would they change the prices? The whole idea of rounding is that it can happen automatically at the cash register - sales tax is going to screw up any even 5 cent prices anyway. And, now that I think about it, what costs 12.97 or 12.96 - everything's.99 or.95 to begin with.
Getting rid of the penny will be like instantaneous, one-time 1-2% inflation. Is that significant? Dunno. Seems significant to me.
Totally... if purchases were always for items under $1.
Far more likely is that prices would stay the same and retailers would round up the total... you lose, on average, 2.5 cents on each purchase. For a $20 purchase, that's about a 0.1% difference - I know I don't care.
If the cashier and customer aren't utterly incompetent, the speeds should be like this:
Fastest: Debit card. The customer is done entering their pin and accepting the transaction before the sale is rung in. Cashier just gives them the recipt.
Next: Cash, customer hands over single bill. Cashiers can make change out of a register pretty fast.
Then: Credit card. Signing the slip takes *forever*, and the authentication process can be really slow.
Then: Check. Should be pretty quick, but invariably the customer doesn't even get a pen until the total is available, and doesn't know who to write it out to, then the cashier demands 8 forms of ID.
Slowest: Little old lady counting out her pennies.
All in all, I don't see how using a credit card for everything is a bad idea. It's faster and it gives me free money.
It's a good deal for you, but a bad deal for retailers and the economy. Retailers pay around 2.5% for every transaction - half of that is your 1% bonus, the other half is profit for the credit card company. That's why a lot of places give a 2 or 3% discount for cash purchases.
The awesome tech is pin-based debit cards, which can be free for everyone if the bank involved isn't a douchebag.
Slashdot Mirror
One more really important one: Prediction. "What will happen if I do this?"
Another: Recognizing basic feedback. "Why did the mouse pointer just change into a diagonal double-headed arrow?" "Under what circumstances would that arrow instead be horizontal?"
If it were up to me, I'd take this even further and teach a course in "Using Modern GUI Applications". I know how to use a GUI, and as a result I'm perfectly capable of sitting down and using (at a basic level) any application that's followed the style guidelines from any OS vendor for almost 20 years.
I'm pretty sure that this is a skill that can be taught. I'd probably try to cover topics like the following:
These are all things that competent computer users know intuitively. They're important, and I think they're worth teaching explicitly to people who won't just pick them up.
This is really important!
Training school kids in the specific software applications of today is a dumb idea to begin with. Trying to argue that they need to be trained specifically in the current version of the exact software that you personally are using at work is even more absurd.
This new version of Microsoft Office doesn't look much like the old version, and that's just one revision. I'd be willing to bet that GUI environments will look pretty familiar in 5 years. I'd say that we'd still have "buttons and menus", but Microsoft even ditched menus in the new Microsoft Office. I'm sure that exposing kids to OpenOffice will give them skills that are just as applicable to the apps of 5 years from now as what they'd get from Microsoft Office.
The very simple fact is that you don't need Word, Access, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel or any clones of them to accomplish any legitimate work. Heavyweight word processors are seriously overkill for most tasks they're used for, and not well equipped for more complex tasks like document processing and desktop publishing. I'm still not sure what the niche for Access is supposed to be; either you're a programmer and need a scripting language and SQLite or you're not and need to hire one. Outlook is sort of bloated for an email client, and I'd probably lean towards webapp for a calendaring / scheduling tool. Powerpoint is neat, but I see it abused far more than it's legitimately used. Excel is the most legitimate app of the bunch - the ability to do light number-crunching as a non-programmer is useful; on the other hand, like Word, Excel trys to stretch beyond that niche and people end up using it with data sets that deserve something a little bit more robust.
In conclusion, most people would be better served by lighter weight or domain specific applications, and it's only the massive marketing push towards "Office Suites" on the 90's that's stuck us with Microsoft Office and Open Office. It'd be nice if people realized that, and it would be even nicer if people stopped getting automatically trained on this crap.
What do you have a for hardware? A Pentium II and 64 megs of RAM?
Any decent computer sold this century (except perhaps some 2001 era Dells with 128 megs of RAM) should run OpenOffice fine. If your computer doesn't, I'd consider a hardware upgrade or a move to a complete resource-optimized OS / Software stack like Xubuntu + Abiword.
I should have said "Box office ticket sales produce a significant amount of money, which in many cases should be enough to fund production".
My real point is that the music industry is going to have to accept the fact that there has been an economic shift that will result in slightly decreased DVD sales and a more significant decrease in DVD rentals. Rather than trying to fight this shift with DRM - which is more likely to hurt their cause then help it - they should be working on adopting a business model that matches the real world.
I'm not saying that making money off live performances is easy, my point is that it's possible. Live performances and merchandise are the *only* ways I know of for a non-superstar musician to make money (there's also contract performance where you get paid to make a recording for some specific purpose other than selling CDs). When I say "merchandise", that includes "offical" CDs - but those are worth something for the same reason that t-shirts are, as band merchandise, not because they're the only way to get the recorded music.
Not being able to produce vocals in real time didn't stop Ashlee Simpson on Letterman. Even complex electronic compositions can be used to create a good show. Have you seen a Kraftwerk concert? Does it really matter if they're playing the music in realtime?
If you really can't do live performances, you do have one other option: contract performance. If you can get your work somewhat popular through word of mouth, you may be asked to sell rights to a track for a movie or video game. If you're really good, you may be contracted to compose a new track to be used somewhere.
The world today is such that it's unlikely that an artist will be paid for their recorded music. That's a fact, and one that probably won't change. DRM doesn't change this and probably promotes the general awareness of pirate releases.
This doesn't mean that musicians will cease to exist - it just means that more of them will have to cope with the economic reality that making money isn't easy. A legitimately good artist should still be able to make a living, and marginal artists will still need day jobs. If you had your heart set on living off record sales, sucks to be you... sorry, but that model doesn't work and the world doesn't owe anyone a living.
As an artist who isn't a superstar like Metallica, you're not in good shape. Even if you get a recording contract with a major label, it won't make you any significant amount of money - the contract deal is just too disadvantageous to the artist. This has nothing to do with piracy - the labels just don't make money by making a living for small time artists.
Metallica makes money on record sales - don't worry about it. You hear about people making $10,000 on scratch tickets too but that doesn't mean it's something you should expect. You're not going to make money on CD sales, even if you're good (some would say *especially* if you're good). Treat MP3s as a promotional technique, and you'll get more people at your performances where you can get their money.
As for the costs - they shouldn't be that big a deal. If you can't come up with the couple thousand dollars it takes to record an album, you're not in a position to start a business venture like that anyway. Again: performances. If you can't get people to book you to perform, you're definitely not good enough to make money selling CDs.
False. AllofMP3 has the mandatory license granted to them by Russian law.
And I don't have any special right to prevent them from doing so, since there's a mandatory license law in their country.
If I create a physical object, I'll be somewhat upset if you take it away from me without my consent regardless of price.
If I create some sort of artistic work or develop a computer program (more likely) whether you sell copies or not really doesn't effect me directly - I still get to enjoy my copy. I'd probably be happy that my work is being distributed for others to enjoy. If you were selling copies without a license, I might take legal action as a point of financial strategy, but that's because I'm a greedy bastard rather than because I think I have some special right to your profits.
The fact of the matter is that data can be copied and shared, at no cost, for the benifit of society. If you think that you can stop that you're either confused or evil, because to prevent file copying you'd have to completely eliminate the general purpose computer as we know it today.
Sure. What's wrong with it?
The Russian government passed a law setting a fixed royalty for musical work, to be paid to the national royalty collection organization.
Remember that copyright is a government granted monopoly. Regulating the price of copyrighted works just as reasonable as regulating the price of any other monopoly service like cable television or tap water. I'm not sure that the legally fixed royalty model is correct, but it definitely is at least as fair as the "monopoly rights owner sets the price however they want" model.
First, and most importantly, DRM does not accomplish your goal at all. In fact, it is counterproductive because it makes pirate copies strictly better than paid copies.
As for paying the people who work on entertainment projects, I'm not really worried about it. Even if copying DVDs and selling them in stores became legal, selling "official" DVDs would still have a profit margin. Smaller, but existent. And people wouldn't stop going to the theater to see movies - box office ticket sales produce more than enough money to fund production.
Basically, this "the lighting technician will starve" stuff is utter bullshit - they are salaried. Once the movie is out, they've gotten all the money they'll ever get for it. That's actually true for almost all the participants, in all but very rare cases. The only people who get a cut of the profits are industry executives and other millionaires, and I'm not going to cry if they can't afford a twenty sixth Lamborghini.
But, under Russian law, *making* the offer was the only requirement to sell music.
If I go to another merchant and buy the same item at the price I want, the first merchant has no right to complain about it. If you want to say that "the music industry has the right to control the sale of any identical music", then you're admitting that music is different from physical goods. If music is different from physical goods, there's no reason to assume that any comparison between the two different things is meaningful.
In both the photos, the area is mostly parking lot.
What would the terrorists see if these areas weren't blurred? That there were once cars in a University staff parking lot?
This is especially absurd in the umass case, since walking around on a school campus isn't illegal.
They're paying the royalties required under Russian law. The fact that the American music companies don't want to accept those royalties is largely irrelevant. What we hear from the music companies sounds a lot like a conversation I had with a friend a couple of days ago:
Me: Hey Mike, give me $10.
Mike: Why?
Me: Ok, let's compromise. You give me $5.
Mike: Uhh... no.
Now I understand that I was just being an ass and that Mike wasn't going to give me any money no matter how much I was willing to compromise on the amount (actually, I got him to give me $0.25 once to shut me up), but the record companies don't seem to realize that. They think that dropping the deal from $10 to $5 really is a compromise.
Absolutely, because hardware and software implementations are readily available. If you can view the content, copying it is possible.
The problem for historians will be that with no access to the hardware, even viewing the content will be impossible. The only known way to access a HD-DVD or BluRay video is with the encryption key - every attack is a key recovery attack, there's no other way to get access. If you can't find a player with the player key intact, you sure won't be finding that key.
Again, the issue is even worse with potentially degraded media. If a stone tablet goes through a rainstorm, the data's still there. If a paper book is exposed to sunlight so long the ink dissapears, no problem - we can chemically process the paper to see the writing. If a BluRay disk is damaged even slightly - such that 20 bytes are unreadable - it may be strictly unrecoverable even with the key.
If that's our best hope, that sure gives pirates the moral high ground.
Why does them having an excuse matter?
It's very simple - people want music, movies, and TV shows. Various providers offer these things. In the actual free market, an MP3 format album or an XviD encoded movie have a price of "10 minutes, $0, and optionally a twinge of guilt". Ten minutes of someone's time is worth a couple bucks, and MP3/XviD aren't especially good quality. There's space for pay-service competition in the market, but they'll have to actually compete rather than offering absurdly expensive products that are strictly worse than what's already available. AllofMP3.com has a decent business model - the media companies can't survive and fuck their customers with expensive, low quality, DRM-encumbered crap at the same time.
DRM is a more important issue than you seem to think it is, because it makes the archival of our contemporary literature impossible.
From the perspective of archival, digital data storage has two interesting properties: First, it makes it possible to produce an unlimited number of perfect archival-quality copies of the work. Second, it means we're storing the data on fragile media that is extremely prone to degradation over time. Now, these two properties *should* cancel each other out, because the owner of the media can make a perfect copy before the media degrades. Unfortunately, DRM prevents that. Not only does it make it hard to make a copy, but the encryption involved makes it so that if even 20 bytes of the data is lost the whole file may be mathematically impossible to recover.
DRM is presented as a trade off between easily-marginalized consumer rights such as format shifting and the prevention of large scale piracy. That's utterly false - these DRM techniques barely even slow down actual pirates. DRM is all downside - it throws away consumer rights *and* it turns long term personal archival into an utter nightmare. DRM trades away our format shifting rights, and in return society may lose these works entirely in the future. That's the whole deal - DRM barely even slows pirates down.
It amuses me to no end that in 500 years the only copy of "Prison Break" left for historians may be some Pirate's XviDs on a well preserved DVD-R or hard disk.
DRM absolutely *can* be fought. Just tell everyone about the free & superior compeditor to Netflix: The Pirate Bay.
Seriously, this is a simple issue of competiton: Netflix is easy to use, costs money, and provides moderate quality DRM-encumbered files. TPB is slightly more complex, free, and provides decent quality DRM-free files. If Netflix sucked it up and provided high quality DRM-free files, they'd have 2 out of 3 and be compeditive with TPB again.
The only way to fight DRM is to point out one simple fact: DRM *encourages* piracy, because it's hard to get guilt tripped when the pirates are providing a strictly better product.
Right, but that's completely unrelated to retiring the penny. If they thought it would be advantageous to raise their prices by 3%, they'd do that right now.
The fact of the matter is, most prices end in .99 - that won't change. For the occasional price that's $3.37, it's that for a reason - moving to $3.40 wouldn't make any extra sense if there was no penny.
And if you think they'll automatically round each item up to the next nickel at the register, they won't - that would be fraud.
I'll reiterate: The most likely way that cash payments would be handled in a penniless world would be a "round the total to the nearest nickel" policy. Another possible policy is "round the total up to the next nickel". For a customer, these policies are *effectively identical*.
Think about it this way: How many *cash* transactions do you make each day? If you lost 4 cents each time, how long would it take to make a dollar? And... since people tend to buy multiple items in their cash transactions, and there's sales tax, it's unlikely that a retailer could set their prices to net more than 1 cent per transaction, much less 4 cents...
Why would they change the prices? The whole idea of rounding is that it can happen automatically at the cash register - sales tax is going to screw up any even 5 cent prices anyway. And, now that I think about it, what costs 12.97 or 12.96 - everything's .99 or .95 to begin with.
Totally... if purchases were always for items under $1.
Far more likely is that prices would stay the same and retailers would round up the total... you lose, on average, 2.5 cents on each purchase. For a $20 purchase, that's about a 0.1% difference - I know I don't care.
If the cashier and customer aren't utterly incompetent, the speeds should be like this:
Fastest: Debit card. The customer is done entering their pin and accepting the transaction before the sale is rung in. Cashier just gives them the recipt.
Next: Cash, customer hands over single bill. Cashiers can make change out of a register pretty fast.
Then: Credit card. Signing the slip takes *forever*, and the authentication process can be really slow.
Then: Check. Should be pretty quick, but invariably the customer doesn't even get a pen until the total is available, and doesn't know who to write it out to, then the cashier demands 8 forms of ID.
Slowest: Little old lady counting out her pennies.
It's a good deal for you, but a bad deal for retailers and the economy. Retailers pay around 2.5% for every transaction - half of that is your 1% bonus, the other half is profit for the credit card company. That's why a lot of places give a 2 or 3% discount for cash purchases.
The awesome tech is pin-based debit cards, which can be free for everyone if the bank involved isn't a douchebag.
A store I worked at did that for a while (rounded up to the nickel). Nobody ever noticed.