I don't want the Federal money. I want the Federal to *stop taking* so much money in the first place. Let the State and local governments deal with their internal issues. I don't want the regulation OR the taking of the money. If you don't have the regulation, then you don't need to spend the money on enforcing it. See how that works?
With the FDIC, it is doubtful that they could provide the protection for even *one* large bank. The FDIC tends to prop up large banks with the insurance funds, rather than protecting the individual account holders. This just pushes the problem off a few years, and doesn't fix the bank.
The GI Bill can be trivially shown to have been one of the major causes of the college tuition issues. Once the Federal started guaranteeing loans, doing the GI Bill, etc, etc, the average tuition cost went up over 300%. Only the rich can afford college now without loans. The poor can "afford" college through Federal charity (grants and similar). The middle class has to take out crippling loans and spend 10 years paying them off.
Private charities do get corrupt, however, you aren't forced to pay for them. You have absolutely no choice when it's a government program.
Yes, you're right. I saw 128 to the north and 1 to the south and didn't look closely enough. The town is about 15 miles north-east of Boston.
Cape Wind is a better idea. It doesn't take anyone's land, and it doesn't devalue the regions real estate. I think the opposition to that project is misguided, at best. Marblehead doesn't want turbines in their town, and other communities do, so put these sorts of things where people want them. Using force is a poor choice.
A lot of municipalities in MA own their infrastructure and buy power from generator stations that are owned by a group of towns. There aren't that many that have generation just for their own community; it's much more efficient to pool use.
As for the Federal land, wind power is private use, too. Fix the contracts and such to allow turbines on the same land as other use, and you have many more locations.
Just in case you weren't being funny about that list... you were the GP poster, fater all.
The Interstate system, that the Federal mandates the maintanance of, but then will revoke the aid for if you don't do exactly what they tell you. Which leaves the State still required to maintain the road, but without the money to do it. Such Federal edicts have been the old 55mph speed limit (state wide), and the drinking age at 21 (state wide).
The FDIC, which in the case of another depression, would fail due to lack of funds. This, of course, makes the existence of it pointless.
The Marshall Plan, a policy of the US in regards to another *continent*, which the US did not administer, but only funded. Also, one of the reasons for the cold war with the USSR, and the poverty of eastern Europe. It very much strengthened the Soviet hold over that part of Europe. It was probably quite good for the rest of Europe, though.
The GI Bill, which has made college educations impossible to pay for without massive loans, for those that are even able to get them. Now many people join the military simply to afford to go to college.
Then you have the WIC, which used to be handled privately by charity. Another Federal program that does something that was already being done, just less efficiently, with more corruption, and a much larger price tag. It's easily the most benign and sucessfull without poor side-effects of your list, though.
If you want something like that to be a complete failure, then what you need is Federal interference. Your way would result in total failure to accomplish your goals. Any time the Federal gets involved in something, that something fails, but brings with it a dozen unwanted, and unrelated, things. We could, however, get rid of two of your bullet items by reducing the Federal to a sane size.
Next, mandates don't work. You can encourage a sector to do something, but as soon as you mandate, you are requiring without funding. For a private company, it is often less expensive to simply ignore these mandates. That's why it took 10-15 years for many factories to get scrubbers on their smoke stacks. If you simply state "all vehicles will be 40mpg or better", what you have is bankrupt auto companies, and a very pissed off populace.
First, you want to avoid the common solar panels, which are previous generation solar panels. The harm they do for the environment during production is not recouped by energy production during their lifetime.
Maybe some day people like you will bother to look at a picture larger than your own house. Decentralizing energy production results in *more* wasted energy, *more* pollution from production, and a *less* efficient infrastructure. If things run on electricity, then you need to make the central generation equipment better. Throwing a solar panel on everything just means you shift the pollution to the production of panels.
If you want to aid cities in their projects, then the Federal needs to stop taking all their base tax monies. Cities can't afford to operate without Federal aid, because the Federal requires so much money for all their bloat and inefficiency. Cities would *have* good roads and public transit systems if they could keep the money where the applicable citizens live.
You don't need tax breaks or to massage anything. If you simply got the Federal out of it, the problem would tend to itself. Make the Federal stop fighting wars for the oil companies, and stop subsidizing other aspects of the oil industry, and prices will go up dramatically. That means gas will be more expensive, and people will demand more efficient vehicles. It means that research into alternative fuels will spike. All of what you seem to want, with none of the Federal meddling.
BTW, wind mills don't work, not the way you seem to think. They especially don't work in places with highly variable wind, like Massachusetts. You need *reliable* and high density energy production. Wind power is a supplementary energy source. It augments the grid and allows other, more reliable, energy production methods to scale back operations when conditions allow. What we actually need is more efficient, reliable, primary methods of power production. If you want to minimize pollution, that means fission.
Oh, and Marblehead is a roughly 3 sq mi town just south of Boston, on a small peninsula into the Atlantic. Try putting something like wind turbines in places where people don't currently have their house. There's a lot of places where you could locate something like this. If people wouldn't choose sites that "coincidentally" happened to be where the highest land values are, then you wouldn't get much opposition. You don't hear about a bunch of rich people complaining that a wind farm is going up in Kansas, do you? Do you think such things aren't being built? If you do, then you should stop keeping your eyes closed. I'd be pretty pissed if someone wanted to devalue my land, or take part of my land, and you'd bet that I'd be trying to find another location for it. The same is true of just about everyone else. I hear the Federal owns a ridiculous potion of the US; how about we use *that* land?
If you have to use eminent domain, then you've *FAILED*. You're basically stealing a person's land by doing that. You need a damned good reason, and windmills isn't one of them. If you wanted to put up a real generation station, that would produce respectable amou
You *really* must have meant 1.6 *TB* instead of GB. Then your numbers would make sense.
1.6 GB * 8 * 1024 = 131107.2 Mb - megabits in 1.6 gigabytes 131107.2 Mb / 20 Mbps = 655.36 s - seconds to read at 20 megabit per second 655.36 s / 60 s = 10.92 min - convert to minutes
At 20Mbps, it would take you 4.855 days to read a terabyte, which is pitiful for local storage. (1.6TB would be 7.77 days, or the almost 8 days in the parent post.) Even at 20MBps, that is still 14.56 hours for 1 TB, which is far too slow.
This might work as a backup medium for archiving, as long as it was suposed to be 20 megabyte/s instead of megabit. Many tape systems are right around the 20MBps mark, however there are solutions out there that archive over 100MBps.
It's just the way that people expect it to work, I imagine. I know that I hadn't wanted my education stretched out over many years, but that's how it happened. I wanted to learn, but I also didn't want to spend so much of my life in formal education. It doesn't help that most employers out there don't want to look at you if you don't have a degree, and fewer are willing to hire you when your degree is in progress.
As for the school, no it isn't a trade school. WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) is an engineering school. They structure their classes in an "interesting" way, is all. A class that normally would take a full semester is compressed into half a semester, but maintains the same content. You take three classes simultaneously, rather than the five that's typical for most other schools. Most professors expect you to put in three times the class time on your own time. It's nice to have classes progress that quickly, but if anything happens, you can easily fall very far behind.
The school that I went to did three classes for seven weeks. Most classes consisted of two or three lectures per week, conference time, and often lab time. You spent the same amount time in a class, just compressed into seven weeks.
A full-time class load at a typical school tends to be five classes that are a semester long. They also don't tend to meet in nice contiguous blocks of time. It can make time management rather difficult!
If you need to work your way through college (paying living expenses plus tuition), you need to do more than work on weekends, unfortunately. Either you work on the verge of burn-out all the time, or you spend 6-10 years in college.
I agree that those grad students are being ridiculous, though. That's just not healthy.
Just a note, but 24 hours, less 8 hours sleep, 1.5 hour for food prep/eating, 0.5 getting ready, 0.5 hour generic chores, and you end up with 13.5 hours. Now, you add in three 1.5 hour classes (being conservative), and that drops you 4.5 hours, down to 9 hours. Now, you add in a part time job, let's say, of 4 hours, which drops you to 5 hours, less the time to get to work. I will neglect that time. If each class expects two hours, you now have insufficient time to complete the work without in some way endangering your well being. This leaves -1 hours for any form of relaxation, relationship, or recreation, which is unhealthy.
Just because the professor does it does not make it right, sane, or proper. 1:2 devotions of time are ridiculous for any full-time student, and cannot be reasonably met. You place such burden on students that you are basically requiring cheating. The students will find a way, and spending 12+ hours a day on school work is not highly likely to be that way.
Not every school has classes meet so infrequently as once or twice a week.
I consider Graphic Designer a toy because nobody really is using it. That might change, but it isn't the case *now*. People doing graphic design use Photoshop. It's what they know, it's what has all the extensions and plugins. It has serious support in the industry. People will need a better reason than "MS says it's good" to switch away from Photoshop.
As for the managerial decisions... maybe they'll get their way, and maybe not. At the least, it would be years before a large banking.NET application hit production. Java applications are still coming into use that have been under test and dev since before there *was* a.NET.
Switching around things to entirely different platforms needs serious consideration. If a company was a huge Java shop, and some manager up and decides to switch things to.NET, they obsolete their workforce *and* cause their Java investments to be flushed. That is a stupid decision, and one that will bite them. You need a real and good reason to do a change that large.
Excuse me... but Windows patches *do* break thing regularly. There's a reason that MS has had to pull so many of their service packs. In both my experience, and in the experience of many admins responsible for Windows servers, it is often dangerous to apply Windows hotfixes, too. Even with all the precautions of test environments, and staged updates... all too often the patch breaks everything anyway. It can takes weeks to figure out *why* this happened, since MS doesn't exactly tell you what they changed in more than vagueries.
You also demonstrated that different operating systems do things differently. I don't see DirectX available on anything other than some versions of Windows. A Windows application doesn't run on Solaris, or MacOS, or anything else. What's your point? There is far more standards following and compatability across various UNIX implementations than there is between Windows and *anything* else. So sound doesn't always work... so what, it's only sound. Mission critical applications don't even use that. As for UI things... Xlib and POSIX will take you quite far. There are other options, such as all of those the GP mentioned.
My point about the MS APIs were that they were the "way it will be done" according to MS. Then they were abandoned in favor of new toys to do the same thing. MS suffers horribly from the lack of foresight. It is obvious through all of their APIs and products. They are a marketing company, not a software one, and it shows.
You also seem to assume that UNIX = Linux. That is incorrect. Also, you need to learn to read. I didn't post the GP that you were critisizing so heavily for contradicting my last post. For what it's worth, I don't have that much love for Linux. I think the community around it loves to come up with a lot of great ideas, and then don't bother to finish them before moving on. That bothers me a whole lot, and it's one of the reasons that I tend towards BSD and Solaris.
Yes, MS has parts of Office on.NET, and one version of their new UI uses DirectX. That's one product, and a UI that is under heavy criticism. Hell, even the new version of Office has a whole lot of people very upset, although not for their.NET use. They certainly didn't port the whole of Office to the.NET CLR, if that is what you're implying.
Obviously, Vista is real; I've seen betas of it, too. SQL Server is *finally* getting to a point where it is at least comparable to things like DB2. I suppose you could say that's delivering on it. You can't say that they delivered on.NET, either. It's being picked up by random devs, and some places are using it for larger apps. It's still MS specific, and has a lot of problems. Expression hasn't gone anywhere, yet, and the dev tools don't matter without the platform. MS has done these things before, and then dismanteled them. What's your point -- that maybe they won't screw up again, this time?
How can you honestly make this statements as if they were truth without anything to show for it? Expression is meaningless right now, and is practically of toy status. XAML lacks a platform for deployment, Vista isn't on the market. Server-side things are steadily moving off of Windows. Hell, one of the biggest reasons that new Windows servers come into existence is because someone decided to play with all the MS toys, and only has a MS centered solution.
I didn't say that Vista hasn't had a lot of internal changes, just that they don't matter in that way. They don't enable new applications or technologies; they fix shortcoming in the previous implementation.
I'm not as much talking about vendors as technologies. MS comes up with their own versions of things, pushes everyone to use them, and then they drop it from something shinier. The non-MS part of the world has been using things called "standards", and they have been doing so far longer than Windows has existed, let alone been used.
We have POSIX as an API standard, and that's been around for a long time. MS has had no less than six APIs that I can think of, just off the top of my head. They tried to have their own networking protocols, their own email formats, APIs, and on and on. They have all been problematic, and largely dropped for the standards that were already there. In that regard, yes, I can think of "vendors" that it doesn't apply to.
Perhaps you just haven't been around long enough to have seen MS in action, but we've heard that before. Actually, before MS released the first version of NT. It was called "Cairo" and MS has had fifteen years to finish it, and they've failed. They borrowed things and hacked things together, but in fifteen years, they still haven't managed to do what others had done.
Copy and paste from Wikipedia:
* DCE RPC
* An object-oriented User Interface
* X.500 Directory
* X.400 Messaging
* Content Indexing
* Object-based file system (see WinFS)
Those are what Cairo was supposed to be, as announed in 1991. It was even demoed in 1993, but not in an even slightly usable form. They managed to accomplish the directory by taking LDAP and writing a custom schema and tools. Messaging was accomplished by their email system (Exchange), which used previously established standards. They do half-assed indexing. There has been over 10 years of security problems with their RPC implementation, and it's still not fixed. They have nothing resembling the object FS, and cancelled the attempt, as we all know.
NT3.x brought the DCE RPC, NT4 brough the UI and messaging. Win2000 brought the directory, and eventually the indexing. XP/2003 brought nothing more than revisions to those existing components, and Vista is no different. The things that *mattered* have been cut from the platform.
Do you really believe that Vista, something that realistically amounts to security fixes, a new and more annoying UI, and a few toolkits that exist elsewhere, is a bigger release than W2K? I hope not, because that's asinine. I can confidently say that AD was far more important than *ANYTHING* new in Vista. XAML/WPF is another MS copy of existing technology, and one that doesn't even really exist yet. Even if it doesn't suck, it would certainly be many years before it mattered. People like being able to use their computers without requiring internet access, and the entire concept would not allow that.
Anyway, you need to think through things more, and look at past performance. You can't trust anything that MS says until you see it yourself. Every "revolutionary" technology that was so heavily pushed by MS propoganda has been dropped eventually. The current ones are DirectX and.NET. Just in their wakes are large version incompatibilities, and lack of support. When you get into something like.NET or MFC, etc, you see that MS barely uses it, and eventually drops it for their newest shiny toy that will sell more copies of new version of all their products.
Here's a thought... if you know that you won't parent your children, then don't have any. If you refuse to devote the time and make the sacrifices to actually educate, protect, and watch your children, then do the world a favor and let someone who will actually be there for them adopt them.
No, it's not easy to raise a child "decently", as you put it, but it *is* easy to actually try. You just do it and deal with the changes that it requires. You can't expect to just have children and not have your lifestyle change drastically. You can't expect to have two working parents with full-time jobs, to be able to go out to bars every night, constantly see movies in a cinema, etc.
The point is that if you can't watch your kids for significant portions of the day, then you have failed at being a parent. Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about your children. You took on the responsibility, so now it's time for *YOU* to deal with it. No one else made your decision to have children, and nobody forced you to be inept at parenting, likewise, no one else should be forced to suffer as a result.
I'll bite... ebooks simply don't offer much by way of benefit over paper books. The only real advantage an ebook has is that it is easily searchable. There is a minor advantage in that they take up less space, but that's not really a big deal. The disadvantages are many, though. The devices are cumbersome to move around: heavier and larger if you want equivalent sized viewing area compared to even a small paperback. They require electricity to work, and are less pleasant to look at. The current ebook offerings also make it exceedingly difficult to use in the same way as a book. Moving it around, lending it out, etc.
Computers are great for accessing information for reference, but I don't think it's the ever going to be the right way to read for pleasure. Perhaps the electronic paper concept will change that, for what it's worth.
You need to go learn how the GPL works. First, it protects the code, not the content. Second, someone certainly could hack code into Xvid that would do DRM against a TCPM chip or whatnot for a key. They would have to make that code available, but that won't really help you to get around it, because they wouldn't have to make the keys available.
More important, as the other poster said, you could always simply use a different container, that included DRM, and drop Xvid and AC3 into it. You can embed Xvid into a Matroska container, or an MPEG4 container, etc... why not something proprietary? Now you have DRM, you've used Xvid, and you don't have to release anything to anyone.
I actually thought of that, but decided it wouldn't work as well. The population left will still attempt to industrialize, and then you're back at the original problem. The part that is already industrialized will likely develop more efficient methods, but the total use isn't likely to drastically increase over the current levels. Well, unless something big is developed that I haven't thought of.:) The process of becoming industrialized will cause much more pollution, because the early methods are inefficient and dirty.
It makes perfect sense, actually. The only way that conservation will every be more than a stopgap is to severly limit population and industry. If either increases, then conservation fails.
You do have to get fuel from somewhere... what's your point. Geothermal vents aren't that common, places to do highly effective hydro are limited, some countries lack enough coastline for tidal, etc. All resources are limited resources eventually. It is currently *much* less of a problem to get sufficient uranium than to get sufficient petroleum. Perhaps you noticed a fairly large war that is currently being fought, basically over oil? It isn't the first time, and it certainly isn't going to be the last.
It looks to me that all of the new problems that you brought up are entirely political problems. That can change very quickly, should it become a topic of focus.
And wind farms are no different than mines for "sacred" land. They rip up the surface so that the turbine can be secured to the ground. They take up the land, and make it unusable for anything else. You act as though it's okay to carpet land in solar farms or wind farms, or to dam up rivers, because those are obviously just fine and nobody will complain about them, but it isn't true. The only place solar farms have been allowed are deserts, and any time a wind farm has been proposed, it's been shot down by people that live in the area. You simply *can't* keep damming up rivers; you'll cause massive geological instability, not to mention making hundreds of square miles of land useless.
Of the renewable methods, the *only* method that's currently producing substantial power is hydroelectric. It's also one of the most limited in terms of useable locations. You don't think there would be wars over rivers and damming rights if that because our only viable form of power generation? Don't be so naive.
The reason that your way doesn't work as a result of world trends is easy. First, you can't depend on unreliable power generation. That means that wind and solar are out; they are supplementary only. Geothermal is of very limited output and location. Hydro is very effective, but of very limited location. Tidal is still outputting insufficient power. That leaves hydrocarbons and nuclear. The way to not *require* nuclear is to either build more conventional plants, or cut usage. The only way to keep usage constant is to keep industry and population at current levels.
That ORNL report is somewhat dangerous to quote. There has been considerable debate over the methods used, and, in some cases, disproof of the claims. I don't have the references handy, but a few people got into quite an argument with me over that report a while ago. You can definitely find a few counter-claims with a Google jaunt.
You're right, and the most "practical" way to keep that energy use down is to have a mass genocide and remove 1/4 of the world's population that is quickly coming into massive industrialization. However, that would be a completely assinine and horrific way to deal with the problem. *Conservation is a stopgap measure.* When will this ill-founded concept finally die out? Conservation is a component of a much larger stragety, and one that necessarily includes methods that don't use hydrocarbon fuels.
Wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear are the only viable methods that don't produce massive amounts of waste while in operation. Solar involves very nasty manufacturing waste. Wind and hydro only work in limited areas. Nuclear works anywhere and anytime. It is the most viable option for replacing the energy production of the world.
Wind power takes a few orders of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant would generate. It also produces *unrealiable* power, since the wind does not always blow. It is a supplementary production method, not a primary method.
You have to dispose of the waste from any hydrocarbon burning plant, too. There is less waste from a nuclear plant, and that waste can be largely reprocessed. Since you're suddenly looking worried about the desecration of land.... how about we put wind turbines on that land? I'm sure that isn't "desecrating" anything.
As far as weapons, anything can be a weapon. If someone really wants to destroy a city, they can come up with a way that doesn't involve a fission bomb. I can think of a few just sitting here typing this reply. Your excuse is ridiculous. You simply don't locate power production in the middle of a city, regardless.
Nuclear isn't the magic bullet, but all of your alternatives are non-functional. They require the world to magically have zero population growth and zero increase in industry.
At standard non-volume rates, it comes to approximately $0.25 per CD. When you factor in that they are shipping huge volumes, and very likely using their own trucks for parts of this, it gets much less expensive. Nobody shipping volume ever pays the rate from the UPS web site. Anyone shipping thousands of pieces at standard rates through a third party agent is just an idiot. Do you honestly think that every Wal*Mart, FYE, HMV, etc, gets their own individual shipments of each CD? Everything goes in massive lots to distribution centers and then is shipped out en mass to each store.
The rest of my numbers come from contract terms with RIAA members. 2-3% of retail goes to the producer, sometimes as much as 12% goes to the artist. $15,000-25,000 for the studio work for the CD. Advertising, reproduction, and distribution is figured into a payback schedule that goes against the artist's royalties until fully recovered. The artist doesn't see anything from royalties until the label's costs are recovered. Most contracts will give up-front money to the artist, but it's often more akin to a loan against their projected success.
The RIAA has been convicted of price fixing in the past, and of other forms of collusion. There have been multiple anti-trust suits where they were convicted in Federal court. It is also easily verifiable that stores don't make much in profit from individual CD sales, but they do move a very large volume and make good profit as a result. Physical costs of a CD are cents on the sale, as are distribution costs. The RIAA affiliates have a huge cash cow, and for some reason you feel the need to try to defend their illegal actions.
By your "calculation", that means that basically NOTHING could cost less than $10 retail. Last I checked, I can buy some things that are considerably larger than a CD, for under $10, and these things have much higher production costs (ie: furniture).
1) Labels do not charge themselves for studio work of any type. They have people on salary for this stuff. They charge the *band* for these things, and put the band into debt from the start. This is part of their contract practices that ensures that the band is reliant on the label.
2) It costs significantly less than $0.25 to ship a CD, as in around a tenth of that.
3) It costs less than $0.25 for them to manufacture a CD. Again, they don't pay themselves, they just bill the band as part of the contract. I'll keep the $0.25 because it's close enough, and would include the shipping cost.
--- So, we're up to $0.25 for a CD. ---
4) These people do not make $0.25 per unit sold. The band makes a percentage of the sale price, less massive deductions that go back to the label. Most CDs *never* make the band any royalties; it's all eaten up by the label. In your 100,000 copy sale run, the artist makes nothing. The producer takes about $0.25, though. The artist cut still comes out, but they don't get it, so it has to count. We'll use 7% of retail for this, and retail is about $15, so I'll say $1.00.
--- We're up to $1.50 now ---
5) Now we have to subtract the payback to the label from this cost, which brings it down to $1.25. This leaves just the real costs in the CD price.
You do have costs, such as marketing, but they are actually taken care of by the artist owning the label. The artist might start getting 10% of the retail as a royalty, but under 250,000 pieces or so, they get nothing; it all goes back to the label to cover all of their costs. By that quarter million sold mark, the label has made back their investment, and it only costs shipping and duplication.
So, it costs $1.25 to have that CD on its way to a wholesaler. Using what the GP said, a CD should retail for $10, and that's assuming that there is a seperate distributer and that the retail outlet marks up the price considerably. In reality, neither is true, but $10 is still a lot less than typical retail. That's even less than someone like Amazon.
You're most of the way there. "cmd" is a native win32 program running native CLI commands, and is not DOS in anything more than having implementations of many of the DOS commands, and the ability to run batch scripts. "command" is still there, and that is an emulation of the MS-DOS environment. In that respect, Win2k/XP still has a DOS environment.
I don't disagree with you that this solution is not the necessarily the best possible way. You have to consider what solutions are available, and which of those solutions are possible to enforce. The best way really would be to have an abusive company, such as Microsoft, stop abusing their position. However, is there a way to force that to happen?
What you suggest as the necessary fix, and the one that you are probably correct in, is really a social problem. The people running the company are willing to do what we are considering to be "the wrong thing". To have them stop doing the wrong thing would require those people to change their minds. That isn't something you can cause to happen with law, or with government force.
This leaves less than ideal methods of dealing with the problem. Much like sending someone to prison doesn't fix the crime, or necessary cause them to not commit a later crime, to impose a fine, or similar, may not necessary cause the company to begin to "behave". So, these governments have attempted to find a way to deal with the situation that they can actually impose.
Microsoft broke the rules in these countries, and that carries a penalty. The governments of these countries decided that penalty is to force Microsoft to alter their products in an attempt to correct for their predatory practices. Unfortunately, the threat of this action hasn't caused Microsoft to behave itself in the slightest. They continually attempt to go around government sanctions as if they were meaningless. Now they are being hit hard because of their repeated actions.
Apple may be brought up on charges at some point for illegally leveraging a monopoly on downloadable music. At this point, I can't see that happening... there are many other ways, and ITMS is still not the dominant method that people use to obtain music. They do not have a monopoly on music, just one form of music distribution. Having an antitrust styled case against Apple for this would be difficult, anyway. Being able to carry around music on a little portable player just isn't important. These governments aren't exactly likely to want to bother to bring a case against Apple for this, unless they get bored, or Apple attempts to start tying other important products into it.
No; where do people get this ridiculous stuff? MS and Windows is singled out because MS is *violating law*. Apple, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc, are *not violating law*. There is no double standard, and there is no government conspiracy against MS or Windows. As I said, MS keeps getting sued and punished because they continue to ignore the laws of the majority of the countries they are doing business in.
Distributions do not produce Linux. They also don't usually produce the software that they're shipping as part of that distribution. They do not benefit because more people use GNOME or Amarok or Firefox. They ship the versions of software that they want to, and they can change what software they ship at will. They tend to make the defaults be the most popular, or most capable, applications.
Likewise, you can choose which software you use. You could run a business that sells computers, and you can install, say, Ubuntu on those machines, and you could change the applications that are on the system before you deliver it. You can decide that the default web browser will be Lynx, and that you won't ship Firefox. You can decide that the kernel will no include Fibre Channel drivers. Hell, you can decide that you won't ship X-Window at all! You can swap around things however you want, and then sell machines with that on it.
MS' licensing for OEMs stipulates that they *may not* remove default Windows components, or install software that competes with those components. If you bothered to read up on the topic, you would see that this is a requirement that MS forces, but no other OS company does. As MS has a monopoly on the market, and they are outright preventing competing software from being delivered on machines using their OS, they get to be in the unique position of illegally abusing their monopoly, and subject to many fines and sanctions. They are doing something that *nobody* else is doing, and they are being punished, in accordance with the laws of several countries.
MS doesn't compete on an even playing field. Where do you get the idea that they do? They have a *monopoly*, part of that outright means that *everyone else* is not on a level playing field with them; everyone else is at a disadvantage, no matter the quality or price of their products.
To quote you: "By all means, punish MS for its anti-competitive behavior and practices. Punish it for forcing OEMs to exclude competing apps from their products."
That is precisely what these countries are doing. MS' bundling of applications on the monopoly OS, and subsequent flooding of the markets of those applications, destroys the ability for others to compete, and so is anti-competitive. Should MS decide, at some point, to compete fairly, they will stop getting regularly sued by multiple countries for violating their monopoly, fair trade, and business practice laws.
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I don't want the Federal money. I want the Federal to *stop taking* so much money in the first place. Let the State and local governments deal with their internal issues. I don't want the regulation OR the taking of the money. If you don't have the regulation, then you don't need to spend the money on enforcing it. See how that works?
With the FDIC, it is doubtful that they could provide the protection for even *one* large bank. The FDIC tends to prop up large banks with the insurance funds, rather than protecting the individual account holders. This just pushes the problem off a few years, and doesn't fix the bank.
The GI Bill can be trivially shown to have been one of the major causes of the college tuition issues. Once the Federal started guaranteeing loans, doing the GI Bill, etc, etc, the average tuition cost went up over 300%. Only the rich can afford college now without loans. The poor can "afford" college through Federal charity (grants and similar). The middle class has to take out crippling loans and spend 10 years paying them off.
Private charities do get corrupt, however, you aren't forced to pay for them. You have absolutely no choice when it's a government program.
Yes, you're right. I saw 128 to the north and 1 to the south and didn't look closely enough. The town is about 15 miles north-east of Boston.
Cape Wind is a better idea. It doesn't take anyone's land, and it doesn't devalue the regions real estate. I think the opposition to that project is misguided, at best. Marblehead doesn't want turbines in their town, and other communities do, so put these sorts of things where people want them. Using force is a poor choice.
A lot of municipalities in MA own their infrastructure and buy power from generator stations that are owned by a group of towns. There aren't that many that have generation just for their own community; it's much more efficient to pool use.
As for the Federal land, wind power is private use, too. Fix the contracts and such to allow turbines on the same land as other use, and you have many more locations.
Just in case you weren't being funny about that list... you were the GP poster, fater all.
The Interstate system, that the Federal mandates the maintanance of, but then will revoke the aid for if you don't do exactly what they tell you. Which leaves the State still required to maintain the road, but without the money to do it. Such Federal edicts have been the old 55mph speed limit (state wide), and the drinking age at 21 (state wide).
The FDIC, which in the case of another depression, would fail due to lack of funds. This, of course, makes the existence of it pointless.
The Marshall Plan, a policy of the US in regards to another *continent*, which the US did not administer, but only funded. Also, one of the reasons for the cold war with the USSR, and the poverty of eastern Europe. It very much strengthened the Soviet hold over that part of Europe. It was probably quite good for the rest of Europe, though.
The GI Bill, which has made college educations impossible to pay for without massive loans, for those that are even able to get them. Now many people join the military simply to afford to go to college.
Then you have the WIC, which used to be handled privately by charity. Another Federal program that does something that was already being done, just less efficiently, with more corruption, and a much larger price tag. It's easily the most benign and sucessfull without poor side-effects of your list, though.
If you want something like that to be a complete failure, then what you need is Federal interference. Your way would result in total failure to accomplish your goals. Any time the Federal gets involved in something, that something fails, but brings with it a dozen unwanted, and unrelated, things. We could, however, get rid of two of your bullet items by reducing the Federal to a sane size.
Next, mandates don't work. You can encourage a sector to do something, but as soon as you mandate, you are requiring without funding. For a private company, it is often less expensive to simply ignore these mandates. That's why it took 10-15 years for many factories to get scrubbers on their smoke stacks. If you simply state "all vehicles will be 40mpg or better", what you have is bankrupt auto companies, and a very pissed off populace.
First, you want to avoid the common solar panels, which are previous generation solar panels. The harm they do for the environment during production is not recouped by energy production during their lifetime.
Maybe some day people like you will bother to look at a picture larger than your own house. Decentralizing energy production results in *more* wasted energy, *more* pollution from production, and a *less* efficient infrastructure. If things run on electricity, then you need to make the central generation equipment better. Throwing a solar panel on everything just means you shift the pollution to the production of panels.
If you want to aid cities in their projects, then the Federal needs to stop taking all their base tax monies. Cities can't afford to operate without Federal aid, because the Federal requires so much money for all their bloat and inefficiency. Cities would *have* good roads and public transit systems if they could keep the money where the applicable citizens live.
You don't need tax breaks or to massage anything. If you simply got the Federal out of it, the problem would tend to itself. Make the Federal stop fighting wars for the oil companies, and stop subsidizing other aspects of the oil industry, and prices will go up dramatically. That means gas will be more expensive, and people will demand more efficient vehicles. It means that research into alternative fuels will spike. All of what you seem to want, with none of the Federal meddling.
BTW, wind mills don't work, not the way you seem to think. They especially don't work in places with highly variable wind, like Massachusetts. You need *reliable* and high density energy production. Wind power is a supplementary energy source. It augments the grid and allows other, more reliable, energy production methods to scale back operations when conditions allow. What we actually need is more efficient, reliable, primary methods of power production. If you want to minimize pollution, that means fission.
Oh, and Marblehead is a roughly 3 sq mi town just south of Boston, on a small peninsula into the Atlantic. Try putting something like wind turbines in places where people don't currently have their house. There's a lot of places where you could locate something like this. If people wouldn't choose sites that "coincidentally" happened to be where the highest land values are, then you wouldn't get much opposition. You don't hear about a bunch of rich people complaining that a wind farm is going up in Kansas, do you? Do you think such things aren't being built? If you do, then you should stop keeping your eyes closed. I'd be pretty pissed if someone wanted to devalue my land, or take part of my land, and you'd bet that I'd be trying to find another location for it. The same is true of just about everyone else. I hear the Federal owns a ridiculous potion of the US; how about we use *that* land?
If you have to use eminent domain, then you've *FAILED*. You're basically stealing a person's land by doing that. You need a damned good reason, and windmills isn't one of them. If you wanted to put up a real generation station, that would produce respectable amou
You *really* must have meant 1.6 *TB* instead of GB. Then your numbers would make sense.
1.6 GB * 8 * 1024 = 131107.2 Mb - megabits in 1.6 gigabytes
131107.2 Mb / 20 Mbps = 655.36 s - seconds to read at 20 megabit per second
655.36 s / 60 s = 10.92 min - convert to minutes
At 20Mbps, it would take you 4.855 days to read a terabyte, which is pitiful for local storage. (1.6TB would be 7.77 days, or the almost 8 days in the parent post.) Even at 20MBps, that is still 14.56 hours for 1 TB, which is far too slow.
This might work as a backup medium for archiving, as long as it was suposed to be 20 megabyte/s instead of megabit. Many tape systems are right around the 20MBps mark, however there are solutions out there that archive over 100MBps.
It's just the way that people expect it to work, I imagine. I know that I hadn't wanted my education stretched out over many years, but that's how it happened. I wanted to learn, but I also didn't want to spend so much of my life in formal education. It doesn't help that most employers out there don't want to look at you if you don't have a degree, and fewer are willing to hire you when your degree is in progress.
As for the school, no it isn't a trade school. WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) is an engineering school. They structure their classes in an "interesting" way, is all. A class that normally would take a full semester is compressed into half a semester, but maintains the same content. You take three classes simultaneously, rather than the five that's typical for most other schools. Most professors expect you to put in three times the class time on your own time. It's nice to have classes progress that quickly, but if anything happens, you can easily fall very far behind.
The school that I went to did three classes for seven weeks. Most classes consisted of two or three lectures per week, conference time, and often lab time. You spent the same amount time in a class, just compressed into seven weeks.
A full-time class load at a typical school tends to be five classes that are a semester long. They also don't tend to meet in nice contiguous blocks of time. It can make time management rather difficult!
If you need to work your way through college (paying living expenses plus tuition), you need to do more than work on weekends, unfortunately. Either you work on the verge of burn-out all the time, or you spend 6-10 years in college.
I agree that those grad students are being ridiculous, though. That's just not healthy.
Just a note, but 24 hours, less 8 hours sleep, 1.5 hour for food prep/eating, 0.5 getting ready, 0.5 hour generic chores, and you end up with 13.5 hours. Now, you add in three 1.5 hour classes (being conservative), and that drops you 4.5 hours, down to 9 hours. Now, you add in a part time job, let's say, of 4 hours, which drops you to 5 hours, less the time to get to work. I will neglect that time. If each class expects two hours, you now have insufficient time to complete the work without in some way endangering your well being. This leaves -1 hours for any form of relaxation, relationship, or recreation, which is unhealthy.
Just because the professor does it does not make it right, sane, or proper. 1:2 devotions of time are ridiculous for any full-time student, and cannot be reasonably met. You place such burden on students that you are basically requiring cheating. The students will find a way, and spending 12+ hours a day on school work is not highly likely to be that way.
Not every school has classes meet so infrequently as once or twice a week.
I consider Graphic Designer a toy because nobody really is using it. That might change, but it isn't the case *now*. People doing graphic design use Photoshop. It's what they know, it's what has all the extensions and plugins. It has serious support in the industry. People will need a better reason than "MS says it's good" to switch away from Photoshop.
.NET application hit production. Java applications are still coming into use that have been under test and dev since before there *was* a .NET.
.NET, they obsolete their workforce *and* cause their Java investments to be flushed. That is a stupid decision, and one that will bite them. You need a real and good reason to do a change that large.
As for the managerial decisions... maybe they'll get their way, and maybe not. At the least, it would be years before a large banking
Switching around things to entirely different platforms needs serious consideration. If a company was a huge Java shop, and some manager up and decides to switch things to
Excuse me... but Windows patches *do* break thing regularly. There's a reason that MS has had to pull so many of their service packs. In both my experience, and in the experience of many admins responsible for Windows servers, it is often dangerous to apply Windows hotfixes, too. Even with all the precautions of test environments, and staged updates... all too often the patch breaks everything anyway. It can takes weeks to figure out *why* this happened, since MS doesn't exactly tell you what they changed in more than vagueries.
You also demonstrated that different operating systems do things differently. I don't see DirectX available on anything other than some versions of Windows. A Windows application doesn't run on Solaris, or MacOS, or anything else. What's your point? There is far more standards following and compatability across various UNIX implementations than there is between Windows and *anything* else. So sound doesn't always work... so what, it's only sound. Mission critical applications don't even use that. As for UI things... Xlib and POSIX will take you quite far. There are other options, such as all of those the GP mentioned.
My point about the MS APIs were that they were the "way it will be done" according to MS. Then they were abandoned in favor of new toys to do the same thing. MS suffers horribly from the lack of foresight. It is obvious through all of their APIs and products. They are a marketing company, not a software one, and it shows.
You also seem to assume that UNIX = Linux. That is incorrect. Also, you need to learn to read. I didn't post the GP that you were critisizing so heavily for contradicting my last post. For what it's worth, I don't have that much love for Linux. I think the community around it loves to come up with a lot of great ideas, and then don't bother to finish them before moving on. That bothers me a whole lot, and it's one of the reasons that I tend towards BSD and Solaris.
Yes, MS has parts of Office on .NET, and one version of their new UI uses DirectX. That's one product, and a UI that is under heavy criticism. Hell, even the new version of Office has a whole lot of people very upset, although not for their .NET use. They certainly didn't port the whole of Office to the .NET CLR, if that is what you're implying.
.NET, either. It's being picked up by random devs, and some places are using it for larger apps. It's still MS specific, and has a lot of problems. Expression hasn't gone anywhere, yet, and the dev tools don't matter without the platform. MS has done these things before, and then dismanteled them. What's your point -- that maybe they won't screw up again, this time?
Obviously, Vista is real; I've seen betas of it, too. SQL Server is *finally* getting to a point where it is at least comparable to things like DB2. I suppose you could say that's delivering on it. You can't say that they delivered on
How can you honestly make this statements as if they were truth without anything to show for it? Expression is meaningless right now, and is practically of toy status. XAML lacks a platform for deployment, Vista isn't on the market. Server-side things are steadily moving off of Windows. Hell, one of the biggest reasons that new Windows servers come into existence is because someone decided to play with all the MS toys, and only has a MS centered solution.
I didn't say that Vista hasn't had a lot of internal changes, just that they don't matter in that way. They don't enable new applications or technologies; they fix shortcoming in the previous implementation.
I'm not as much talking about vendors as technologies. MS comes up with their own versions of things, pushes everyone to use them, and then they drop it from something shinier. The non-MS part of the world has been using things called "standards", and they have been doing so far longer than Windows has existed, let alone been used.
We have POSIX as an API standard, and that's been around for a long time. MS has had no less than six APIs that I can think of, just off the top of my head. They tried to have their own networking protocols, their own email formats, APIs, and on and on. They have all been problematic, and largely dropped for the standards that were already there. In that regard, yes, I can think of "vendors" that it doesn't apply to.
Perhaps you just haven't been around long enough to have seen MS in action, but we've heard that before. Actually, before MS released the first version of NT. It was called "Cairo" and MS has had fifteen years to finish it, and they've failed. They borrowed things and hacked things together, but in fifteen years, they still haven't managed to do what others had done.
.NET. Just in their wakes are large version incompatibilities, and lack of support. When you get into something like .NET or MFC, etc, you see that MS barely uses it, and eventually drops it for their newest shiny toy that will sell more copies of new version of all their products.
Copy and paste from Wikipedia:
* DCE RPC
* An object-oriented User Interface
* X.500 Directory
* X.400 Messaging
* Content Indexing
* Object-based file system (see WinFS)
Those are what Cairo was supposed to be, as announed in 1991. It was even demoed in 1993, but not in an even slightly usable form. They managed to accomplish the directory by taking LDAP and writing a custom schema and tools. Messaging was accomplished by their email system (Exchange), which used previously established standards. They do half-assed indexing. There has been over 10 years of security problems with their RPC implementation, and it's still not fixed. They have nothing resembling the object FS, and cancelled the attempt, as we all know.
NT3.x brought the DCE RPC, NT4 brough the UI and messaging. Win2000 brought the directory, and eventually the indexing. XP/2003 brought nothing more than revisions to those existing components, and Vista is no different. The things that *mattered* have been cut from the platform.
Do you really believe that Vista, something that realistically amounts to security fixes, a new and more annoying UI, and a few toolkits that exist elsewhere, is a bigger release than W2K? I hope not, because that's asinine. I can confidently say that AD was far more important than *ANYTHING* new in Vista. XAML/WPF is another MS copy of existing technology, and one that doesn't even really exist yet. Even if it doesn't suck, it would certainly be many years before it mattered. People like being able to use their computers without requiring internet access, and the entire concept would not allow that.
Anyway, you need to think through things more, and look at past performance. You can't trust anything that MS says until you see it yourself. Every "revolutionary" technology that was so heavily pushed by MS propoganda has been dropped eventually. The current ones are DirectX and
Here's a thought... if you know that you won't parent your children, then don't have any. If you refuse to devote the time and make the sacrifices to actually educate, protect, and watch your children, then do the world a favor and let someone who will actually be there for them adopt them.
No, it's not easy to raise a child "decently", as you put it, but it *is* easy to actually try. You just do it and deal with the changes that it requires. You can't expect to just have children and not have your lifestyle change drastically. You can't expect to have two working parents with full-time jobs, to be able to go out to bars every night, constantly see movies in a cinema, etc.
The point is that if you can't watch your kids for significant portions of the day, then you have failed at being a parent. Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about your children. You took on the responsibility, so now it's time for *YOU* to deal with it. No one else made your decision to have children, and nobody forced you to be inept at parenting, likewise, no one else should be forced to suffer as a result.
I'll bite... ebooks simply don't offer much by way of benefit over paper books. The only real advantage an ebook has is that it is easily searchable. There is a minor advantage in that they take up less space, but that's not really a big deal. The disadvantages are many, though. The devices are cumbersome to move around: heavier and larger if you want equivalent sized viewing area compared to even a small paperback. They require electricity to work, and are less pleasant to look at. The current ebook offerings also make it exceedingly difficult to use in the same way as a book. Moving it around, lending it out, etc.
Computers are great for accessing information for reference, but I don't think it's the ever going to be the right way to read for pleasure. Perhaps the electronic paper concept will change that, for what it's worth.
You need to go learn how the GPL works. First, it protects the code, not the content. Second, someone certainly could hack code into Xvid that would do DRM against a TCPM chip or whatnot for a key. They would have to make that code available, but that won't really help you to get around it, because they wouldn't have to make the keys available.
More important, as the other poster said, you could always simply use a different container, that included DRM, and drop Xvid and AC3 into it. You can embed Xvid into a Matroska container, or an MPEG4 container, etc... why not something proprietary? Now you have DRM, you've used Xvid, and you don't have to release anything to anyone.
I actually thought of that, but decided it wouldn't work as well. The population left will still attempt to industrialize, and then you're back at the original problem. The part that is already industrialized will likely develop more efficient methods, but the total use isn't likely to drastically increase over the current levels. Well, unless something big is developed that I haven't thought of. :) The process of becoming industrialized will cause much more pollution, because the early methods are inefficient and dirty.
It makes perfect sense, actually. The only way that conservation will every be more than a stopgap is to severly limit population and industry. If either increases, then conservation fails.
You do have to get fuel from somewhere... what's your point. Geothermal vents aren't that common, places to do highly effective hydro are limited, some countries lack enough coastline for tidal, etc. All resources are limited resources eventually. It is currently *much* less of a problem to get sufficient uranium than to get sufficient petroleum. Perhaps you noticed a fairly large war that is currently being fought, basically over oil? It isn't the first time, and it certainly isn't going to be the last.
It looks to me that all of the new problems that you brought up are entirely political problems. That can change very quickly, should it become a topic of focus.
And wind farms are no different than mines for "sacred" land. They rip up the surface so that the turbine can be secured to the ground. They take up the land, and make it unusable for anything else. You act as though it's okay to carpet land in solar farms or wind farms, or to dam up rivers, because those are obviously just fine and nobody will complain about them, but it isn't true. The only place solar farms have been allowed are deserts, and any time a wind farm has been proposed, it's been shot down by people that live in the area. You simply *can't* keep damming up rivers; you'll cause massive geological instability, not to mention making hundreds of square miles of land useless.
Of the renewable methods, the *only* method that's currently producing substantial power is hydroelectric. It's also one of the most limited in terms of useable locations. You don't think there would be wars over rivers and damming rights if that because our only viable form of power generation? Don't be so naive.
The reason that your way doesn't work as a result of world trends is easy. First, you can't depend on unreliable power generation. That means that wind and solar are out; they are supplementary only. Geothermal is of very limited output and location. Hydro is very effective, but of very limited location. Tidal is still outputting insufficient power. That leaves hydrocarbons and nuclear. The way to not *require* nuclear is to either build more conventional plants, or cut usage. The only way to keep usage constant is to keep industry and population at current levels.
That ORNL report is somewhat dangerous to quote. There has been considerable debate over the methods used, and, in some cases, disproof of the claims. I don't have the references handy, but a few people got into quite an argument with me over that report a while ago. You can definitely find a few counter-claims with a Google jaunt.
You're right, and the most "practical" way to keep that energy use down is to have a mass genocide and remove 1/4 of the world's population that is quickly coming into massive industrialization. However, that would be a completely assinine and horrific way to deal with the problem. *Conservation is a stopgap measure.* When will this ill-founded concept finally die out? Conservation is a component of a much larger stragety, and one that necessarily includes methods that don't use hydrocarbon fuels.
Wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear are the only viable methods that don't produce massive amounts of waste while in operation. Solar involves very nasty manufacturing waste. Wind and hydro only work in limited areas. Nuclear works anywhere and anytime. It is the most viable option for replacing the energy production of the world.
Wind power takes a few orders of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant would generate. It also produces *unrealiable* power, since the wind does not always blow. It is a supplementary production method, not a primary method.
You have to dispose of the waste from any hydrocarbon burning plant, too. There is less waste from a nuclear plant, and that waste can be largely reprocessed. Since you're suddenly looking worried about the desecration of land.... how about we put wind turbines on that land? I'm sure that isn't "desecrating" anything.
As far as weapons, anything can be a weapon. If someone really wants to destroy a city, they can come up with a way that doesn't involve a fission bomb. I can think of a few just sitting here typing this reply. Your excuse is ridiculous. You simply don't locate power production in the middle of a city, regardless.
Nuclear isn't the magic bullet, but all of your alternatives are non-functional. They require the world to magically have zero population growth and zero increase in industry.
At standard non-volume rates, it comes to approximately $0.25 per CD. When you factor in that they are shipping huge volumes, and very likely using their own trucks for parts of this, it gets much less expensive. Nobody shipping volume ever pays the rate from the UPS web site. Anyone shipping thousands of pieces at standard rates through a third party agent is just an idiot. Do you honestly think that every Wal*Mart, FYE, HMV, etc, gets their own individual shipments of each CD? Everything goes in massive lots to distribution centers and then is shipped out en mass to each store.
The rest of my numbers come from contract terms with RIAA members. 2-3% of retail goes to the producer, sometimes as much as 12% goes to the artist. $15,000-25,000 for the studio work for the CD. Advertising, reproduction, and distribution is figured into a payback schedule that goes against the artist's royalties until fully recovered. The artist doesn't see anything from royalties until the label's costs are recovered. Most contracts will give up-front money to the artist, but it's often more akin to a loan against their projected success.
The RIAA has been convicted of price fixing in the past, and of other forms of collusion. There have been multiple anti-trust suits where they were convicted in Federal court. It is also easily verifiable that stores don't make much in profit from individual CD sales, but they do move a very large volume and make good profit as a result. Physical costs of a CD are cents on the sale, as are distribution costs. The RIAA affiliates have a huge cash cow, and for some reason you feel the need to try to defend their illegal actions.
By your "calculation", that means that basically NOTHING could cost less than $10 retail. Last I checked, I can buy some things that are considerably larger than a CD, for under $10, and these things have much higher production costs (ie: furniture).
1) Labels do not charge themselves for studio work of any type. They have people on salary for this stuff. They charge the *band* for these things, and put the band into debt from the start. This is part of their contract practices that ensures that the band is reliant on the label.
2) It costs significantly less than $0.25 to ship a CD, as in around a tenth of that.
3) It costs less than $0.25 for them to manufacture a CD. Again, they don't pay themselves, they just bill the band as part of the contract. I'll keep the $0.25 because it's close enough, and would include the shipping cost.
--- So, we're up to $0.25 for a CD. ---
4) These people do not make $0.25 per unit sold. The band makes a percentage of the sale price, less massive deductions that go back to the label. Most CDs *never* make the band any royalties; it's all eaten up by the label. In your 100,000 copy sale run, the artist makes nothing. The producer takes about $0.25, though. The artist cut still comes out, but they don't get it, so it has to count. We'll use 7% of retail for this, and retail is about $15, so I'll say $1.00.
--- We're up to $1.50 now ---
5) Now we have to subtract the payback to the label from this cost, which brings it down to $1.25. This leaves just the real costs in the CD price.
You do have costs, such as marketing, but they are actually taken care of by the artist owning the label. The artist might start getting 10% of the retail as a royalty, but under 250,000 pieces or so, they get nothing; it all goes back to the label to cover all of their costs. By that quarter million sold mark, the label has made back their investment, and it only costs shipping and duplication.
So, it costs $1.25 to have that CD on its way to a wholesaler. Using what the GP said, a CD should retail for $10, and that's assuming that there is a seperate distributer and that the retail outlet marks up the price considerably. In reality, neither is true, but $10 is still a lot less than typical retail. That's even less than someone like Amazon.
You're most of the way there. "cmd" is a native win32 program running native CLI commands, and is not DOS in anything more than having implementations of many of the DOS commands, and the ability to run batch scripts. "command" is still there, and that is an emulation of the MS-DOS environment. In that respect, Win2k/XP still has a DOS environment.
I don't disagree with you that this solution is not the necessarily the best possible way. You have to consider what solutions are available, and which of those solutions are possible to enforce. The best way really would be to have an abusive company, such as Microsoft, stop abusing their position. However, is there a way to force that to happen?
What you suggest as the necessary fix, and the one that you are probably correct in, is really a social problem. The people running the company are willing to do what we are considering to be "the wrong thing". To have them stop doing the wrong thing would require those people to change their minds. That isn't something you can cause to happen with law, or with government force.
This leaves less than ideal methods of dealing with the problem. Much like sending someone to prison doesn't fix the crime, or necessary cause them to not commit a later crime, to impose a fine, or similar, may not necessary cause the company to begin to "behave". So, these governments have attempted to find a way to deal with the situation that they can actually impose.
Microsoft broke the rules in these countries, and that carries a penalty. The governments of these countries decided that penalty is to force Microsoft to alter their products in an attempt to correct for their predatory practices. Unfortunately, the threat of this action hasn't caused Microsoft to behave itself in the slightest. They continually attempt to go around government sanctions as if they were meaningless. Now they are being hit hard because of their repeated actions.
Apple may be brought up on charges at some point for illegally leveraging a monopoly on downloadable music. At this point, I can't see that happening... there are many other ways, and ITMS is still not the dominant method that people use to obtain music. They do not have a monopoly on music, just one form of music distribution. Having an antitrust styled case against Apple for this would be difficult, anyway. Being able to carry around music on a little portable player just isn't important. These governments aren't exactly likely to want to bother to bring a case against Apple for this, unless they get bored, or Apple attempts to start tying other important products into it.
No; where do people get this ridiculous stuff? MS and Windows is singled out because MS is *violating law*. Apple, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc, are *not violating law*. There is no double standard, and there is no government conspiracy against MS or Windows. As I said, MS keeps getting sued and punished because they continue to ignore the laws of the majority of the countries they are doing business in.
Distributions do not produce Linux. They also don't usually produce the software that they're shipping as part of that distribution. They do not benefit because more people use GNOME or Amarok or Firefox. They ship the versions of software that they want to, and they can change what software they ship at will. They tend to make the defaults be the most popular, or most capable, applications.
Likewise, you can choose which software you use. You could run a business that sells computers, and you can install, say, Ubuntu on those machines, and you could change the applications that are on the system before you deliver it. You can decide that the default web browser will be Lynx, and that you won't ship Firefox. You can decide that the kernel will no include Fibre Channel drivers. Hell, you can decide that you won't ship X-Window at all! You can swap around things however you want, and then sell machines with that on it.
MS' licensing for OEMs stipulates that they *may not* remove default Windows components, or install software that competes with those components. If you bothered to read up on the topic, you would see that this is a requirement that MS forces, but no other OS company does. As MS has a monopoly on the market, and they are outright preventing competing software from being delivered on machines using their OS, they get to be in the unique position of illegally abusing their monopoly, and subject to many fines and sanctions. They are doing something that *nobody* else is doing, and they are being punished, in accordance with the laws of several countries.
MS doesn't compete on an even playing field. Where do you get the idea that they do? They have a *monopoly*, part of that outright means that *everyone else* is not on a level playing field with them; everyone else is at a disadvantage, no matter the quality or price of their products.
To quote you: "By all means, punish MS for its anti-competitive behavior and practices. Punish it for forcing OEMs to exclude competing apps from their products."
That is precisely what these countries are doing. MS' bundling of applications on the monopoly OS, and subsequent flooding of the markets of those applications, destroys the ability for others to compete, and so is anti-competitive. Should MS decide, at some point, to compete fairly, they will stop getting regularly sued by multiple countries for violating their monopoly, fair trade, and business practice laws.