How many new PCs are going to be bought this year? A *lot*.
Interesting claim. Got anything to back it up?
IME, while businesses continue their three-year upgrade policies because far too many CIOs remain too stupid/naive to question that policy, almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment. In fact, the only person I know who is considering getting new kit in the near future is me, and I have specific reasons for upgrading now that are entirely unconnected with Vista.
I've read the "Vista capable PC + Vista = all three consoles + games + change" thing a few times, and it's simply wrong.
Perhaps it is, but I find it odd that someone who thinks they can put together that kind of system for under £1,000 can't find also the consoles for less than RRP.
I remember when people said the same thing about XP. There was no reason to upgrade from Win 2k (or even 98), WPA was an egregious violation of privacy, etc etc.
I don't much care what "people" said. I personally never made the same claim about XP. For a start, there was nothing like the level of competition from consoles then, with PCs hosting most of the best games while today the consoles dominate the gaming market in the most popular genres. For seconds, XP was a significant technical improvement over the Win98SE or WinME platforms that were the mainstays of PC gamers until that point. Neither of these advantages applies to Vista.
how long do you think it will be before Vista has enough market penetration to make a difference in gaming?
Is that a trick question?
I'm guessing there is a lot of overlap between the kind of person who buys the latest and greatest games and the kind of person who finds Vista's DRM, signal degradation, product activation, upgrade-unfriendliness and such offensive. Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change. Not much of a geek/supergamer market, then.
As far as I can see, the only technical advantage Vista has over XP for most home users is DirectX 10. AFAICS, exactly no current games on the planet are anywhere near using current video hardware and DX9 to their full capabilities yet. Moreover, DirectX as a whole is a nasty vendor lock-in that's never popular with game vendors who also want to support the much larger console market (and may even be considering support for other desktop platforms, given the bad press Vista has been getting). Put that all together, and I can't see DX10 being worth more than the advertising it gives to $500 video cards that no-one can take advantage of, at least not for several years. Meanwhile, numerous compatibility problems are already being reported between big name graphics cards, drivers, and Vista. Doesn't look like the software support is going to drive Vista adoption, either.
And finally, there is simply no compelling reason for most home users to upgrade their hardware any more. Any desktop bought in the past five years is going to cope with your average e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so on in its sleep, and most will do things like photo editing and video editing for those with digital cameras/camcorders too. In other words, while previous versions of Windows have benefitted from users buying new PCs fairly often and upgrading by default, I don't think that's going to happen to anything like the same extent in future. Games and serious multimedia editing are the only major software that might stretch a current PC (apart from running Vista, of course), and the gamers can more cheaply buy a console, while the multimedia people are probably nervous about the artificial limitations in Vista and giving Apple a renewed interest. That pretty much rules out high uptake through the new hardware channel. Strike three, Microsoft: you're out.
So the short answer is: I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a difference.
(Final amusing anecdote, reported in local press, for the benefit of doubters: our local PC superstore opened two hours early on 30 January, so the gagging hordes could get their Vista upgrades. They sold exactly zero upgrades for Vista all day, and while Vista was supplied preinstalled on their new PCs from that date, there was no significant increase in sales of new PCs that day either.)
Hmm... I think I've played three games on that list: Halo, Warcraft III and NWN. Halo was fun. The latter two were dropped within hours, since watching paint dry was more entertaining. Coincidentally, I think the reason was similar in both cases: when you've played the BG series with a party of six, and RTS games with armies of hundreds of units, somehow you+henchman or "armies" with only a handful of units just don't seem spectacular or varied enough as drop-in replacements. You could certainly have games based on those ideas, but you'd need very different gameplay to what works with the larger groups, and for me, these titles just didn't have it.
I played a demo of Oblivion too, but while technically impressive, the gameplay just didn't inspire me enough to buy the real thing. There must be something to it given all the rave reviews, so maybe that was just a bad demo.
Disclaimer: my PC is about four years old now, so some of the games on the list are beyond my current kit, and will probably get tried when I've finished building the new box.
So basically what you're saying is, all these successful companies that use an interative approach to development have got the wrong idea, and we should all go back to the waterfall model?
I'm not knocking the importance of maintaining a clean, flexible design. On the contrary, I agree wholeheartedly that this is something many projects fail to do and suffer for it. But you seem to be saying that it's better to work out essentially the whole design, before starting to code anything.
The problem with the AC parent's argument is that developing software well is actually more efficient (and therefore both faster and cheaper) than developing it using crap like deathmarches and heavyweight processes. Unfortunately, only a relatively small (but remarkably successful) proportion of managers appreciate this.
Re:It needs more professionalism
on
Why Software is Hard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mostly programmers are trained in the technical details of languages and the libraries/APIs associated with them.
Mostly, in my experience, programmers aren't trained much at all.
There is an old saying: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Well, we have been, and early results are pretty much in line with predictions.
So far, there is no mathematical way to prove that a given non trivial software program will actually work as intended.
I disagree, kind of. In many declarative programming languages, for example, you can prove the effects of a program very much the same way that you'd construct a mathematical proof, as long as you assume the underlying software and hardware function as specified.
The problem is the same as that facing some mathematicians: when things get more than trivially complex, usually so do the corresponding proofs. Then you get into the question of how you prove a proof. This is a recursive problem which may go arbitrarily deep.
In mathematics, we hit this problem only occasionally. New results are rarely so complex, because they build on earlier results, and the key earlier results have already been proved over a period of hundreds of years.
In software, however, almost anything beyond "Hello, world" is into the realms where proving every module functions as intended using the traditional, mathematical approach is nigh-on impossible. Even in a perfectly modular world where the base level code was proved trivially and higher level proofs were constructed on top, you get problems like ambiguities in the specification, or complications like not knowing the inputs until run-time.
So the problem isn't that there is no mathematical way to prove a program. Plenty of techniques exist for doing that, in theory. The problem is that the practical applications of such techniques are themselves so complex that they have little real value.
You could certainly argue both those things, at least where the jurisdiction supports Fair Use to that extent (which not all do). Indeed, both arguments would be very reasonable. My point is simply that until you have actually argued them in court, you don't know how much legal weight such arguments really have in practice.
You don't need a court case for that. It's a direct result of reading contract law.
Lots of things appear to be a direct result of reading the law, and in any sane legal system that would be all that was necessary to established their veracity. However, I am aware of no sane legal system in the western world, and we see all too often that a court ruling does not go as the pundits expected. Therefore, unless it's been tested in court, or at least I see a direct legal opinion from a suitably qualified lawyer, I'm afraid I'm not just going to take someone on Slashdot's word for it.
For a post modded (+5, Informative), the parent is remarkably short on details. Can you show us a court case in any jurisdiction where someone has successfully argued that EULAs are unenforceable?
Go read the replies she got from the head of Customer Service. That kind of answer is totally unprofessional.
I can't. Not only was the original site slashdotted over its threshold and blocked by the service provider, but as I write this, services like Google Cache just show a "page not found" type of message from their caches, too. I haven't been able to find anything that looks like the original material since this story was posted earlier this evening, which makes me wonder whether this was an outright hoax, or at least whether the complainant wasn't being entirely honest in the report and the lawyers for Lycos rapidly squished her at the service provider or court level.
Of course they're right. It's crappy PR, as this story demonstrates, but it's a free service and you get what you pay for.
While I would have some sympathy for the woman concerned if she hadn't understood this, there are several morals to this story:
Free services are worth what you pay for them, plus a little bit of convenience. They rarely, if ever, have any obligation to you.
Take regular back-ups of your important information.
It is foolish to trust an Internet service with whom you have no professional relationship to look after information that is valuable (or worth keeping secret, for that matter).
Every now and then, one of these e-mail or blogging or social networking sites actually invokes the clauses in their terms of service that basically say "we owe you nothing, and may drop or commercialise our service at any time". It's sad when people get caught out by that, and I think it's shitty of the companies concerned to take advantage of others' distress, but ultimately you can only reasonably come down on one side of the argument if the deal was advertised honestly up-front.
I was just rereading these posts and realised I was misleading earlier on: it is the UK government that I believe would suffer "financial hardship" if people actually got out of their cars (via a major loss of tax revenue), not UK business as a whole (who as you say ought to see an increase in custom because people have more money to spend due to paying less tax). Sorry I wasn't clear before.
Looking at it directly, It would boil down to who thinks it is the best interest and wether or not you agree.
That's true. But how can you ever define "best interest" in absolute terms? What objective measure can you use to determine who is correct?
The unfortunate reality is that you can't. And therefore I fall back on the best answer I know: people, by and large, are sensible but uninformed. The safest way to make decisions is to educate the people to the level where they can make an informed and reasoned decision, and then trust them to do the best they can. Typically, this will happen via a few of the smarter people appreciating the big picture, and then drawing it to the attention of everyone else. Hopefully, we elected those smart people to govern us, but nothing stops them from speaking up even if we didn't.
While the government who disagrees should make the reasons known and make somewhat of an attempt to educate the people, the common use of this tactic might lead into the government not being able to acomlish something. But the frightening thing is that it might lead to a department who's entire focus is re-educating people and spreading the propaganda. We don't need another government sponsors propaganda and re-education department.
Of course that's not an ideal outcome, I agree. But I would rather have a government that was compelled to be open, and to spend some public money keeping the people informed, but to respect public opinion afterwards, than have a government that can be closed and do whatever it wants, with the people being kept in the dark.
The second thing I have issue with is the premise that If they cannot explain thier position, they don't need to be in government. The fact is that the smartest people sometimes have problems comunicating to a level others can redily understand.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It has been my experience, throughout my adult life and in any field I can think of, that the really smart people almost invariably can explain something in simple terms. The people who make complicated things sound complicated are usually the ones who think they are smart, but aren't.
We elect leaders to represent us in government because we know majority's rule causes problems. We expect them to make the right decision even when majority's opinions differ.
On the contrary, I think we elect people to run the government because we have better things to do than have the entire population spend their time pondering exactly the same issues. But if they can't convince the population that they have the right policy on a contentious call that does attract public consideration, how do we know their policy is right at all?
Personally, I think the entire concept of electing a political party based on detailed manifesto promises is just daft anyway. We ought to vote for our representatives based on their basic principles and general philosophy -- things that can at least be applied meaningfully to changing circumstances that will inevitably arise before the next election. Where those principles give a clear direction, they can then take it, with some degree of confidence that the people would agree with them. Where an important issue is not clearly guided by the principles, the people can be consulted.
Sorry, I've no economics PhD, and I just don't follow your argument. Petrol is currently taxed at somewhere around 80p in the pound, if memory serves. In fact, it's taxed and then you pay tax on the tax, because of the VAT issue.
The alternative uses people might have for their money may involve paying some tax in other ways, but not nearly as much. Nothing -- not buying other consumables, not interest on bank accounts, not capital gains from investments, not corporate profits -- is taxed at a rate anything like what is raised directly from tax on petrol. Taxation is not a zero-sum game; if it were, the total government funding wouldn't vary by tax policy, would it?
Quality is not a driving factor at the moment, save for the early adopters.
And they already got screwed, because until a relatively short time ago, HDCP wasn't included as standard on a lot of HDTVs...
I think you're absolutely right about convenience vs. quality, though. People like to have great picture and sound quality, but once you're into a good film, it doesn't really matter that much. On the other hand, making people wait through several minutes of trailers and irrelevant foreign copyright notices before they get to the film, or making them wait months for the local release with the right region code to play on their player, those piss people off.
A couple of weeks ago I asked the guys behind the counter what customers were more interested in, they agreed that it was about 3:1 in favor of HD.
Sure: they hired out six HD-DVD disks that week, and only a couple of Blu-Ray ones. In other news, DVD rentals remained at their previous rate of 100/hour, as 99.7% of the market didn't give a **** about HD because of the lack of good films available in either format, the overpriced hardware, and the bad PR one format or the other seems to get for a new reason each week...
One thing is certain. Only one device can play 30Mbit H.264 HD files from a network and it's a BD player.
I'm pretty certain about something else: only a tiny fraction of the consumer market even knows that means, and it is therefore about as relevant to end user sales as the technical details of Linux security models vs. Vista's.
Although somewhat true, other forms of transport (i.e. roads and planes) do actually receive massive subsidies via methods such as road/airport building projects.
Except that roads don't. In fact, if you look at the amount of money raised by the government through direct methods of taxation on motorists (petrol tax, VED, etc.) and compare it to the amount of money spent on maintaining the roads and providing related services like road policing, you'll be lucky to find a year in which motorists get back as much as 1/3 of what they're charged. The motorists subsidise the government, and heavily, not the other way around.
This is one obvious reason the whole "everyone should use public transport" argument is disingenuous. If everyone used public transport, UK Plc would go bust within months. The same hypocrisy is evident in speeding fines, congestion charging, car parking charges and so on as well, of course: those administering such schemes have a vested interest in charging as much as possible from as many people as possible without actually making it so expensive that they really do change people's behaviour.
Some of those are a little out of date. For example, after overwhelming feedback against the idea (you can read the submissions on the web site), the Gowers Review recommended against extending the copyright period on sound recordings, and the government has pretty much uniformly backed the Review's recommendations.
One of the reasons for a government is that what best ofr you isn't neccesarily best for everyone. On the same note, what is best for everyone might not be whats best for the country. And even more easily seen is that just because something is popular doesn't mean it is the best for anything.
Much of that is true, though I question what you think is best for a country if it's not what's best for everyone in that country.
However, in a democracy (or a republic, or...) the government has a duty to act as the people collectively wish. The only exception that can be justified is when the government knows something that the population as a whole doesn't, and that something would influence people's decisions if they understood it.
This can happen because government has access to privileged information. This should be very rare, only really applying to genuine national security matters that necessitate a level of secrecy.
More usually, it happens because government has the resources to collect and analyse a large amount of information, to a level of detail that most people just don't have time to look at. In this case, the appropriate response from the government is not to legislate against the will of the people. Rather, the government should educate the people so they can appreciate why something else is a better way. If the government are right, the people will naturally tend to support going down that path once they understand the issue, and there is no longer any need to legislate against their wishes. If the government cannot convince the population that they are wrong and it is right, maybe it doesn't deserve to be the government any more?
We hear a lot of nonsense about transferring freight to railways, but the commercial logic has been the reverse for over 50 years now. Trains and railways are EXTREMELY expensive and inflexible, the only people who believe otherwise are the same clowns who think that rail should be publically subsidised and that public money grows on fucking trees.
Looked at purely in economic terms, railways are a commercial nonsense and always have been. As far as I'm aware, there is no heavy rail system anywhere in the world that competes successfully with other modes of transport on price alone, nor even that makes a profit without government subsidy to drive it.
The thing about railways is that they have other advantages, in terms of capacity, predictability, speed and the like. It may be in the national interest to subsidise railways in general and rail freight in particular, to reduce the congestion, wear-and-tear, and often-serious accidents that come from having our roads carrying increasing numbers of increasingly heavy goods vehicles.
In fact, it may even make economic sense to do so, when you consider the economic impact of the downsides of road freight. Just because our current government seems to be taking more tax money by the day but not improving front-line services, that doesn't mean improving things always costs more.
Sure, our current lifestyles are demonstrably sustainable. It's not like many species are exctinct or on the verge of being so because of us...
There are thousands of people dying in Africa every day because of famine and disease, too, yet there is enough food in the world to feed everyone and most of the health problems they have are trivially cured by western medicine.
Just because something bad is happening, that doesn't mean we can't fix it. It just means that we (or our elected representatives, on this scale) aren't fixing it, and that's a very different kind of problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting claim. Got anything to back it up?
IME, while businesses continue their three-year upgrade policies because far too many CIOs remain too stupid/naive to question that policy, almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment. In fact, the only person I know who is considering getting new kit in the near future is me, and I have specific reasons for upgrading now that are entirely unconnected with Vista.
Perhaps it is, but I find it odd that someone who thinks they can put together that kind of system for under £1,000 can't find also the consoles for less than RRP.
I don't much care what "people" said. I personally never made the same claim about XP. For a start, there was nothing like the level of competition from consoles then, with PCs hosting most of the best games while today the consoles dominate the gaming market in the most popular genres. For seconds, XP was a significant technical improvement over the Win98SE or WinME platforms that were the mainstays of PC gamers until that point. Neither of these advantages applies to Vista.
Is that a trick question?
I'm guessing there is a lot of overlap between the kind of person who buys the latest and greatest games and the kind of person who finds Vista's DRM, signal degradation, product activation, upgrade-unfriendliness and such offensive. Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change. Not much of a geek/supergamer market, then.
As far as I can see, the only technical advantage Vista has over XP for most home users is DirectX 10. AFAICS, exactly no current games on the planet are anywhere near using current video hardware and DX9 to their full capabilities yet. Moreover, DirectX as a whole is a nasty vendor lock-in that's never popular with game vendors who also want to support the much larger console market (and may even be considering support for other desktop platforms, given the bad press Vista has been getting). Put that all together, and I can't see DX10 being worth more than the advertising it gives to $500 video cards that no-one can take advantage of, at least not for several years. Meanwhile, numerous compatibility problems are already being reported between big name graphics cards, drivers, and Vista. Doesn't look like the software support is going to drive Vista adoption, either.
And finally, there is simply no compelling reason for most home users to upgrade their hardware any more. Any desktop bought in the past five years is going to cope with your average e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so on in its sleep, and most will do things like photo editing and video editing for those with digital cameras/camcorders too. In other words, while previous versions of Windows have benefitted from users buying new PCs fairly often and upgrading by default, I don't think that's going to happen to anything like the same extent in future. Games and serious multimedia editing are the only major software that might stretch a current PC (apart from running Vista, of course), and the gamers can more cheaply buy a console, while the multimedia people are probably nervous about the artificial limitations in Vista and giving Apple a renewed interest. That pretty much rules out high uptake through the new hardware channel. Strike three, Microsoft: you're out.
So the short answer is: I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a difference.
(Final amusing anecdote, reported in local press, for the benefit of doubters: our local PC superstore opened two hours early on 30 January, so the gagging hordes could get their Vista upgrades. They sold exactly zero upgrades for Vista all day, and while Vista was supplied preinstalled on their new PCs from that date, there was no significant increase in sales of new PCs that day either.)
Hmm... I think I've played three games on that list: Halo, Warcraft III and NWN. Halo was fun. The latter two were dropped within hours, since watching paint dry was more entertaining. Coincidentally, I think the reason was similar in both cases: when you've played the BG series with a party of six, and RTS games with armies of hundreds of units, somehow you+henchman or "armies" with only a handful of units just don't seem spectacular or varied enough as drop-in replacements. You could certainly have games based on those ideas, but you'd need very different gameplay to what works with the larger groups, and for me, these titles just didn't have it.
I played a demo of Oblivion too, but while technically impressive, the gameplay just didn't inspire me enough to buy the real thing. There must be something to it given all the rave reviews, so maybe that was just a bad demo.
Disclaimer: my PC is about four years old now, so some of the games on the list are beyond my current kit, and will probably get tried when I've finished building the new box.
So basically what you're saying is, all these successful companies that use an interative approach to development have got the wrong idea, and we should all go back to the waterfall model?
I'm not knocking the importance of maintaining a clean, flexible design. On the contrary, I agree wholeheartedly that this is something many projects fail to do and suffer for it. But you seem to be saying that it's better to work out essentially the whole design, before starting to code anything.
The problem with the AC parent's argument is that developing software well is actually more efficient (and therefore both faster and cheaper) than developing it using crap like deathmarches and heavyweight processes. Unfortunately, only a relatively small (but remarkably successful) proportion of managers appreciate this.
Mostly, in my experience, programmers aren't trained much at all.
There is an old saying: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Well, we have been, and early results are pretty much in line with predictions.
I disagree, kind of. In many declarative programming languages, for example, you can prove the effects of a program very much the same way that you'd construct a mathematical proof, as long as you assume the underlying software and hardware function as specified.
The problem is the same as that facing some mathematicians: when things get more than trivially complex, usually so do the corresponding proofs. Then you get into the question of how you prove a proof. This is a recursive problem which may go arbitrarily deep.
In mathematics, we hit this problem only occasionally. New results are rarely so complex, because they build on earlier results, and the key earlier results have already been proved over a period of hundreds of years.
In software, however, almost anything beyond "Hello, world" is into the realms where proving every module functions as intended using the traditional, mathematical approach is nigh-on impossible. Even in a perfectly modular world where the base level code was proved trivially and higher level proofs were constructed on top, you get problems like ambiguities in the specification, or complications like not knowing the inputs until run-time.
So the problem isn't that there is no mathematical way to prove a program. Plenty of techniques exist for doing that, in theory. The problem is that the practical applications of such techniques are themselves so complex that they have little real value.
You could certainly argue both those things, at least where the jurisdiction supports Fair Use to that extent (which not all do). Indeed, both arguments would be very reasonable. My point is simply that until you have actually argued them in court, you don't know how much legal weight such arguments really have in practice.
Lots of things appear to be a direct result of reading the law, and in any sane legal system that would be all that was necessary to established their veracity. However, I am aware of no sane legal system in the western world, and we see all too often that a court ruling does not go as the pundits expected. Therefore, unless it's been tested in court, or at least I see a direct legal opinion from a suitably qualified lawyer, I'm afraid I'm not just going to take someone on Slashdot's word for it.
For a post modded (+5, Informative), the parent is remarkably short on details. Can you show us a court case in any jurisdiction where someone has successfully argued that EULAs are unenforceable?
At which point, in some places, either you or you-on-behalf-of-your-kid will be directly liable for copyright infringement.
I can't. Not only was the original site slashdotted over its threshold and blocked by the service provider, but as I write this, services like Google Cache just show a "page not found" type of message from their caches, too. I haven't been able to find anything that looks like the original material since this story was posted earlier this evening, which makes me wonder whether this was an outright hoax, or at least whether the complainant wasn't being entirely honest in the report and the lawyers for Lycos rapidly squished her at the service provider or court level.
Of course they're right. It's crappy PR, as this story demonstrates, but it's a free service and you get what you pay for.
While I would have some sympathy for the woman concerned if she hadn't understood this, there are several morals to this story:
Every now and then, one of these e-mail or blogging or social networking sites actually invokes the clauses in their terms of service that basically say "we owe you nothing, and may drop or commercialise our service at any time". It's sad when people get caught out by that, and I think it's shitty of the companies concerned to take advantage of others' distress, but ultimately you can only reasonably come down on one side of the argument if the deal was advertised honestly up-front.
I was just rereading these posts and realised I was misleading earlier on: it is the UK government that I believe would suffer "financial hardship" if people actually got out of their cars (via a major loss of tax revenue), not UK business as a whole (who as you say ought to see an increase in custom because people have more money to spend due to paying less tax). Sorry I wasn't clear before.
That's true. But how can you ever define "best interest" in absolute terms? What objective measure can you use to determine who is correct?
The unfortunate reality is that you can't. And therefore I fall back on the best answer I know: people, by and large, are sensible but uninformed. The safest way to make decisions is to educate the people to the level where they can make an informed and reasoned decision, and then trust them to do the best they can. Typically, this will happen via a few of the smarter people appreciating the big picture, and then drawing it to the attention of everyone else. Hopefully, we elected those smart people to govern us, but nothing stops them from speaking up even if we didn't.
Of course that's not an ideal outcome, I agree. But I would rather have a government that was compelled to be open, and to spend some public money keeping the people informed, but to respect public opinion afterwards, than have a government that can be closed and do whatever it wants, with the people being kept in the dark.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It has been my experience, throughout my adult life and in any field I can think of, that the really smart people almost invariably can explain something in simple terms. The people who make complicated things sound complicated are usually the ones who think they are smart, but aren't.
On the contrary, I think we elect people to run the government because we have better things to do than have the entire population spend their time pondering exactly the same issues. But if they can't convince the population that they have the right policy on a contentious call that does attract public consideration, how do we know their policy is right at all?
Personally, I think the entire concept of electing a political party based on detailed manifesto promises is just daft anyway. We ought to vote for our representatives based on their basic principles and general philosophy -- things that can at least be applied meaningfully to changing circumstances that will inevitably arise before the next election. Where those principles give a clear direction, they can then take it, with some degree of confidence that the people would agree with them. Where an important issue is not clearly guided by the principles, the people can be consulted.
Sorry, I've no economics PhD, and I just don't follow your argument. Petrol is currently taxed at somewhere around 80p in the pound, if memory serves. In fact, it's taxed and then you pay tax on the tax, because of the VAT issue.
The alternative uses people might have for their money may involve paying some tax in other ways, but not nearly as much. Nothing -- not buying other consumables, not interest on bank accounts, not capital gains from investments, not corporate profits -- is taxed at a rate anything like what is raised directly from tax on petrol. Taxation is not a zero-sum game; if it were, the total government funding wouldn't vary by tax policy, would it?
And they already got screwed, because until a relatively short time ago, HDCP wasn't included as standard on a lot of HDTVs...
I think you're absolutely right about convenience vs. quality, though. People like to have great picture and sound quality, but once you're into a good film, it doesn't really matter that much. On the other hand, making people wait through several minutes of trailers and irrelevant foreign copyright notices before they get to the film, or making them wait months for the local release with the right region code to play on their player, those piss people off.
Sure: they hired out six HD-DVD disks that week, and only a couple of Blu-Ray ones. In other news, DVD rentals remained at their previous rate of 100/hour, as 99.7% of the market didn't give a **** about HD because of the lack of good films available in either format, the overpriced hardware, and the bad PR one format or the other seems to get for a new reason each week...
I'm pretty certain about something else: only a tiny fraction of the consumer market even knows that means, and it is therefore about as relevant to end user sales as the technical details of Linux security models vs. Vista's.
Except that roads don't. In fact, if you look at the amount of money raised by the government through direct methods of taxation on motorists (petrol tax, VED, etc.) and compare it to the amount of money spent on maintaining the roads and providing related services like road policing, you'll be lucky to find a year in which motorists get back as much as 1/3 of what they're charged. The motorists subsidise the government, and heavily, not the other way around.
This is one obvious reason the whole "everyone should use public transport" argument is disingenuous. If everyone used public transport, UK Plc would go bust within months. The same hypocrisy is evident in speeding fines, congestion charging, car parking charges and so on as well, of course: those administering such schemes have a vested interest in charging as much as possible from as many people as possible without actually making it so expensive that they really do change people's behaviour.
Some of those are a little out of date. For example, after overwhelming feedback against the idea (you can read the submissions on the web site), the Gowers Review recommended against extending the copyright period on sound recordings, and the government has pretty much uniformly backed the Review's recommendations.
Much of that is true, though I question what you think is best for a country if it's not what's best for everyone in that country.
However, in a democracy (or a republic, or...) the government has a duty to act as the people collectively wish. The only exception that can be justified is when the government knows something that the population as a whole doesn't, and that something would influence people's decisions if they understood it.
This can happen because government has access to privileged information. This should be very rare, only really applying to genuine national security matters that necessitate a level of secrecy.
More usually, it happens because government has the resources to collect and analyse a large amount of information, to a level of detail that most people just don't have time to look at. In this case, the appropriate response from the government is not to legislate against the will of the people. Rather, the government should educate the people so they can appreciate why something else is a better way. If the government are right, the people will naturally tend to support going down that path once they understand the issue, and there is no longer any need to legislate against their wishes. If the government cannot convince the population that they are wrong and it is right, maybe it doesn't deserve to be the government any more?
Looked at purely in economic terms, railways are a commercial nonsense and always have been. As far as I'm aware, there is no heavy rail system anywhere in the world that competes successfully with other modes of transport on price alone, nor even that makes a profit without government subsidy to drive it.
The thing about railways is that they have other advantages, in terms of capacity, predictability, speed and the like. It may be in the national interest to subsidise railways in general and rail freight in particular, to reduce the congestion, wear-and-tear, and often-serious accidents that come from having our roads carrying increasing numbers of increasingly heavy goods vehicles.
In fact, it may even make economic sense to do so, when you consider the economic impact of the downsides of road freight. Just because our current government seems to be taking more tax money by the day but not improving front-line services, that doesn't mean improving things always costs more.
There are thousands of people dying in Africa every day because of famine and disease, too, yet there is enough food in the world to feed everyone and most of the health problems they have are trivially cured by western medicine.
Just because something bad is happening, that doesn't mean we can't fix it. It just means that we (or our elected representatives, on this scale) aren't fixing it, and that's a very different kind of problem.