You forgot the Sega Mega Drive (CD-ROM) which had only six games ever (all of which were crap) and was sold as an add-on for the Genesis at well over $200. Overpriced and overrated...
It seems to me that Microsoft would do better to concentrate on pressing their advantage in the online console gaming market with their XBOX Live service. This is an area where Microsoft is definitely ahead of Sony, which has left online gaming largely up to the individual publishers whereas Microsoft has concentrated on a single branded and managed service. The XBOX Live network can include a greater variety of content and better integration of online gaming services with the centralized service model. Also, smaller publishers, who would balk at the cost of maintaining their own online console gaming infrastructure, would definitely take advantage of the Microsoft branded service and the marketing support that comes with it.
The next generation console wars will clearly be decided in the online space. If Microsoft concentrates on this then they have a chance.
With all of the space junk floating around up there (nuts, bolts, bits of paint, shards of metal, etc...) his inflatable space station would be Swiss cheese in a matter of days. Just ask NASA how many times the IIS has been hit (the modules are protected by layers of Kevlar to guard against just these types of impacts).
Oddly enough, the article states that 'SCO's continuing Unix intellectual property lawsuits against IBM, Novell and others is apparently putting customers off.' I wonder how that could have happened?
The RIAA and the MPAA would be wise to learn something from the lesson of SCO. Perhaps they will be shrewd enough to do so....let us see.
video and audio do not cost AOL any additional bandwidth over what they are already giving out to subscribers and in the event that two non-AOL AIM users have a video/voice converstaion the cost to AOL is no more than what they already expend to run the list servers. Arbitrarily charging users a per use fee on software that uses bandwidth that they have already paid for in their monthly access fee is a non-starter.
This sounds like a good idea but it is doomed to failure because of a few simple laws of economics. If music is distributed in the manner in which you suggest, or the manner in which it currently available on P2P networks, then it becomes a public good.
A public good is an object or service that has value to people, but from which it is difficult to exclude someone from using and the use of that one person does not deny someone else equal use of the good. Some common examples of public goods are:
1. Clean Air and Water
2. Public Parks
3. National Defense
Generally speaking these goods would be undersupplied in the private marketplace because they are subject to the freerider problem. The freerider problem occurs when someone uses a public good, but does not contribute anything to its creation or maintenance (i.e. they don't pay). It is very difficult to restrict these "freeriders" from using the good even though they have not paid. The result of this "freerider" effect is that the good cannot be profitably produced and thus it is undersuplied in the marketplace
This is a bad situation because it results in what economists call "dead weight loss" that is to say, everyone looses. The good is not produced and nobody enjoys its use despite the fact that people want it and that some of them are willing to pay more than zero to get it.
But wait! there is a solution to this problem. One of the few areas where Government is more efficient than the private sector is at providing public goods. The government can tax the citizens (one cannot legally not pay taxes) and use the proceeds to provide the public goods. This eliminates the freerider problem because everyone is legally obligated to pay their fair share of the cost of the public goods
I am not advocating that the government should nationalize the music business, but clearly the system which you propose would be limited by the free rider problem.
The solution which I have always liked the best is for a publically traded corporation to be formed whereby the corporation buys music/software/movie licenses and makes them available to their shareholders. When a shareholder wants to listen/use/watch some piece of intellectual property then the server grabs an availalbe license and makes the music/software/movie available to the shareholder as a streamed service. It should be possible through analysis of usage patterns to ensure that the optimal number of licenses is always on hand. As far as I know this system would be perfectly legal too.
Doesn't the WindowsNT License contain language to the effect that it should not be used in any situation where human lives are at risk? Wouldn't this warship be a perfect example of this? Forget about hackers, what happens when a malfunction accidentally triggers the weapons system?
Do they still issue paper certificates on stock purchases? I suppose they might if you asked for them but most brokerage firms these days keep track of their accounts purely electronically.
I wonder what the going rate is on a stock option/futures contract to sell the stock short? Does anybody believe that the stock is going to go back up?
Absolutely...generally programs such as key stroke loggers, Trojans, and the like are designed specifically to be difficult to detect and remove. If it doesn't show up in the process list when running (which is possible in windows although I am not sure about Linux) then how will you know that the Trojan/keylogger is running? If the developer was shrewd enough to write the code in hand optimized assembler then you would never notice the performance drain on the system imposed by the Trojan/keylogger. The point is that programmers are not all powerful supermen, they make mistakes too and are duped sometimes just like the rest of us.
The cost is not in the login but rather in the bandwidth which is consumed by the connected users. Even though the data is traveling through the air during the WiFi session it has to make the transition to the fiber networks eventually and the owners of those network backbones (large telecommunications companies) have investors who would like to see a return on the billions of dollars which were spent constructing the fiber networks. T-Mobile charges you $30 per month because with their current number of subscribers and the monthly lease payments for their upstream access that is the price which maximizes profits. They also offer a pay through the nose plan (or pay as you go) for $6 per hour I think. I don't know who pays these sorts of prices for WiFi access but it certainly isn't me. They need to get the price way down before this will really take off.
In the United States bills are made from paper with such high cotton content that they go through the wash just fine. In fact the paper is the first line of defense against counterfeiters (a weak one but better than nothing).
One could argue that IBM is addicted to its mainframe revenue. They charge some hefty fees for maintenance and support of those monolithic relics. Any software company that is more than 10 yeras old has some sort of 'cash cow' which provides steady income. If you dont like that then buy newer technology, nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. You cannot blame the crack cocaine dealer simply because he sells you what you need.
Most of the time it makes sense to pay cash upfront for expenses. Cars are not an investment but an expense. In fact, very few alternative investments will return a higher rate of interest than the amount you will pay on a short term loan (auto loan, credit card, etc...). If such a condition existed then an arbitrageur would quickly take advantage of the opportunity to make a buck (yen, yuan, euro, etc...) and the market interest rates would quickly adjust to correct the discrepency.
In this particular case the hack involved restoring some capabilities, which while present in the hardware, had been locked or hidden by software. Certainly this individual deserves his due for circumventing the software barriers. However, in software products it is much easier to simply leave sections of code out of the finished build in the lesser versions. If the functionality is not there in the first place then no amount of unlocking will enable it. This incident raises important issues about the sale and marketing of technology products, especially in the digital camera market. It is my opinion that the industry has vastly underestimated the demand among consumers for more powerful "professional" grade digital cameras. It would probably make more sense from both a business and technology standpoint to offer the full camera at a price which is higher than the basic entry level model, but less than the full "professional" model since most of the work was probably in the design of the hardware and software and not as much in the manufacturing. People are generally willing to pay for a well built product as long as they know that the quality is there.
A tazer is a nice option since it will generally immobilize even the burliest mugger for a few minutes at least. This will generally be enough time for you to summon the police or get the hell out of there. The problem with guns is that you generally kill or seriously injure the assailant which can leave you in a messy and expensive legal situation, even if it was self defense. Usually, unless you are under immediate threat of deadly force (it is either him or you), then it is not legally acceptable to shoot someone dead. Hell, you can be arrested in most states for merely drawing your weapon in the wrong situation and discharging a firearm in public is certain to get you arrested until you can get a lawyer, post bail, and explain yourself. Tazers take less skill to handle properly than firearms and are generally much more portable. In some places in the United States firearms are doable but if you travel and especially internationally be advised that many other countries, the UK included, take a rather dim view towards firearms and especially handguns, but a Tazer may be acceptable. Bottom line, know the rules wherever you go and do not carry your gadgets conspicuously in the open or give potential attackers the impression of naivety and fear.
Insurance companies can only pass increased costs unto consumers up to a point. Eventually, some consumers will decide that the cost of the insurance, when weighted against the benefits of protection against some loss, is too high and they will leave the market. This leaves fewer people paying into the insurance market which causes costs to move even higher for those that remain because the potential risk of loss is being spread over fewer policy holders. This is compounded by the fact that those policy holders who do remain in the market are most probably paying the higher rates because they know that they are more likely to experience a loss and therefore to collect their insurance benefits when that loss occurs. After some period of time the cycle begins again and prices continue to rise in an ever increasing spiral. Economists refer to this as the "adverse selection problem" and this is EXACTLY what is happening in the healthcare industry right now. Insurance companies have tried to compel consumers to price themselves in the market by means of the deductible, but such measures cannot completely halt the upward spiral of costs. However, in spite of all of this insurance companies do indeed provide a valuable service which for the most part is needed by the public. Now if we could only reign in the lawyers who prey upon the insurance industry we might actually stabilize the situation...
There is nothing at all insidious or underhanded about this practice, IBM has been doing the exact same thing for decades. The primary reason that companies, especially large ones like IBM and Microsoft, do this is to shield themselves from swarms of frivolous lawsuits. If these companies did not take out as many defensive patents as possible then they would become irresistible targets for the armies of unscrupulous lawyers out there looking to exploit the patent laws. These lawyers would continue filing lawsuits until one of them stuck and paid out the jackpot. Microsoft would be especially foolish not to do this because their large hoard of reserve cash ~40 billion is constantly under attack by lawyers looking to capture a share of the loot. In fact, Microsoft has so much cash that even governments, such as the EU, are getting on the legal bandwagon.
They do not seek to entirely eliminate copying with these technologies, but rather to make it so cumbersome to obtain a copy that the majority of users will pay rather than be inconvenienced.
I thought that it would be interesting if someone from the Slashdot community took it upon themselves to compute the net benefit which the downloaders accrue given that they have some probability 'P' of being selected by the RIAA for a lawsuit which they can settle for a loss of $3000. It should be possible, in principle, to compute for a given probability 'P' of being sued by the RIAA how many songs (at $0.99 per song as per the iTunes rate) one should be willing to risk downloading before the total 'winnings' (the money saved by NOT paying for the songs) exactly balances the expected losses from being sued by the RIAA. We will make a few assumptions in order to simplify our mathematical model...
1. Let us assume that all users on the file sharing networks are equally likely to be targeted by an RIAA lawsuit (in reality this would probably be a function of the number of songs shared, they artists and genres of the songs shared, and the amount of bandwidth devoted to sharing them out). Let this probability equal 'P'.
2. Suppose that the RIAA can sue no more than 1500 people per year (this is probably being generous).
3. Suppose that there are approximately 3.5 million users engaged in file sharing on the various networks at any given second (this is probably a lower bound and the actual number is probably much higher).
Now the probability of being sued by the RIAA, assuming that all users are equally likely to be sued, is 1000/3.5 million or approximately 0.003% chance.
Let the expected losses (per year) from continuing to download be P multiplied by 3,000 which is the amount that it will cost to settle in the event that you are sued. Thus the expected losses to the RIAA for each year that you continue to download are only $8.57
which means that if you were planning on downloading more than 8.65 songs per year then your expected savings over paying the $0.99 fee per song on a service like iTunes makes it worth your while.
Now for a few caveats...I do not advocate the steeling of intellectual property music or otherwise and the above should be treated as a simple (and possibly flawed) look at the mathematics of downloading stripped of any moral pretense or consequence. However, even given the crudity of this analysis it is possible to draw a few conclusions...
1. The RIAA lawsuits will probably discourage the small time downloaders and the basically honest people from using the file sharing networks to get free music, but these users are probably in the minority anyway (most people share at about 100 songs).
2. hard core downloaders are not likely to be dissuaded unless the probability of being sued or the amount of the damages or both significantly increase.
3. The RIAA cannot sue everyone so there will always be an equilibrium whereby a user downloads and shares just enough songs not to get noticed so that his expected winnings precisely balance his expected losses.
The best way to handle the UNIX Intellectual Property would be for the open source community to found a non-profit trust fund and holding corporation to buy up the IP out of bankruptcy and then license all of the UNIX Intellectual Property under the GPL in perpetuity. Perhaps some lawyers out there who are feeling magnanimous and would like to help the cause of open source could draft the necessary legal documents so that people can begin contributing to the UNIX Intellectual Property Buyout Fund.
Recall that they must include ALL of the source code, including any new portions of code that they have added, and not just what they originally borrowed from the GPL licensed code. I have not looked through the code, but it would be interesting to see if they are in fact releasing ALL of the code. They might just be releasing part of the source and hoping that either nobody will be willing or nobody will be able to figure out that something is missing.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the Sega Mega Drive (CD-ROM) which had only six games ever (all of which were crap) and was sold as an add-on for the Genesis at well over $200. Overpriced and overrated...
It seems to me that Microsoft would do better to concentrate on pressing their advantage in the online console gaming market with their XBOX Live service. This is an area where Microsoft is definitely ahead of Sony, which has left online gaming largely up to the individual publishers whereas Microsoft has concentrated on a single branded and managed service. The XBOX Live network can include a greater variety of content and better integration of online gaming services with the centralized service model. Also, smaller publishers, who would balk at the cost of maintaining their own online console gaming infrastructure, would definitely take advantage of the Microsoft branded service and the marketing support that comes with it.
The next generation console wars will clearly be decided in the online space. If Microsoft concentrates on this then they have a chance.
With all of the space junk floating around up there (nuts, bolts, bits of paint, shards of metal, etc...) his inflatable space station would be Swiss cheese in a matter of days. Just ask NASA how many times the IIS has been hit (the modules are protected by layers of Kevlar to guard against just these types of impacts).
Oddly enough, the article states that 'SCO's continuing Unix intellectual property lawsuits against IBM, Novell and others is apparently putting customers off.' I wonder how that could have happened?
The RIAA and the MPAA would be wise to learn something from the lesson of SCO. Perhaps they will be shrewd enough to do so....let us see.
video and audio do not cost AOL any additional bandwidth over what they are already giving out to subscribers and in the event that two non-AOL AIM users have a video/voice converstaion the cost to AOL is no more than what they already expend to run the list servers. Arbitrarily charging users a per use fee on software that uses bandwidth that they have already paid for in their monthly access fee is a non-starter.
This sounds like a good idea but it is doomed to failure because of a few simple laws of economics. If music is distributed in the manner in which you suggest, or the manner in which it currently available on P2P networks, then it becomes a public good.
A public good is an object or service that has value to people, but from which it is difficult to exclude someone from using and the use of that one person does not deny someone else equal use of the good. Some common examples of public goods are:
1. Clean Air and Water
2. Public Parks
3. National Defense
Generally speaking these goods would be undersupplied in the private marketplace because they are subject to the freerider problem. The freerider problem occurs when someone uses a public good, but does not contribute anything to its creation or maintenance (i.e. they don't pay). It is very difficult to restrict these "freeriders" from using the good even though they have not paid. The result of this "freerider" effect is that the good cannot be profitably produced and thus it is undersuplied in the marketplace
This is a bad situation because it results in what economists call "dead weight loss" that is to say, everyone looses. The good is not produced and nobody enjoys its use despite the fact that people want it and that some of them are willing to pay more than zero to get it.
But wait! there is a solution to this problem. One of the few areas where Government is more efficient than the private sector is at providing public goods. The government can tax the citizens (one cannot legally not pay taxes) and use the proceeds to provide the public goods. This eliminates the freerider problem because everyone is legally obligated to pay their fair share of the cost of the public goods
I am not advocating that the government should nationalize the music business, but clearly the system which you propose would be limited by the free rider problem.
The solution which I have always liked the best is for a publically traded corporation to be formed whereby the corporation buys music/software/movie licenses and makes them available to their shareholders. When a shareholder wants to listen/use/watch some piece of intellectual property then the server grabs an availalbe license and makes the music/software/movie available to the shareholder as a streamed service. It should be possible through analysis of usage patterns to ensure that the optimal number of licenses is always on hand. As far as I know this system would be perfectly legal too.
Doesn't the WindowsNT License contain language to the effect that it should not be used in any situation where human lives are at risk? Wouldn't this warship be a perfect example of this? Forget about hackers, what happens when a malfunction accidentally triggers the weapons system?
The "mainframe" is probably a WindowsNT box :D
The Third Law of Game Development states that:
All games based upon a movie license are terrible and vice versa.
Do they still issue paper certificates on stock purchases? I suppose they might if you asked for them but most brokerage firms these days keep track of their accounts purely electronically.
I wonder what the going rate is on a stock option/futures contract to sell the stock short? Does anybody believe that the stock is going to go back up?
Absolutely...generally programs such as key stroke loggers, Trojans, and the like are designed specifically to be difficult to detect and remove. If it doesn't show up in the process list when running (which is possible in windows although I am not sure about Linux) then how will you know that the Trojan/keylogger is running? If the developer was shrewd enough to write the code in hand optimized assembler then you would never notice the performance drain on the system imposed by the Trojan/keylogger. The point is that programmers are not all powerful supermen, they make mistakes too and are duped sometimes just like the rest of us.
The cost is not in the login but rather in the bandwidth which is consumed by the connected users. Even though the data is traveling through the air during the WiFi session it has to make the transition to the fiber networks eventually and the owners of those network backbones (large telecommunications companies) have investors who would like to see a return on the billions of dollars which were spent constructing the fiber networks. T-Mobile charges you $30 per month because with their current number of subscribers and the monthly lease payments for their upstream access that is the price which maximizes profits. They also offer a pay through the nose plan (or pay as you go) for $6 per hour I think. I don't know who pays these sorts of prices for WiFi access but it certainly isn't me. They need to get the price way down before this will really take off.
In the United States bills are made from paper with such high cotton content that they go through the wash just fine. In fact the paper is the first line of defense against counterfeiters (a weak one but better than nothing).
One could argue that IBM is addicted to its mainframe revenue. They charge some hefty fees for maintenance and support of those monolithic relics. Any software company that is more than 10 yeras old has some sort of 'cash cow' which provides steady income. If you dont like that then buy newer technology, nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. You cannot blame the crack cocaine dealer simply because he sells you what you need.
Most of the time it makes sense to pay cash upfront for expenses. Cars are not an investment but an expense. In fact, very few alternative investments will return a higher rate of interest than the amount you will pay on a short term loan (auto loan, credit card, etc...). If such a condition existed then an arbitrageur would quickly take advantage of the opportunity to make a buck (yen, yuan, euro, etc...) and the market interest rates would quickly adjust to correct the discrepency.
In this particular case the hack involved restoring some capabilities, which while present in the hardware, had been locked or hidden by software. Certainly this individual deserves his due for circumventing the software barriers. However, in software products it is much easier to simply leave sections of code out of the finished build in the lesser versions. If the functionality is not there in the first place then no amount of unlocking will enable it. This incident raises important issues about the sale and marketing of technology products, especially in the digital camera market. It is my opinion that the industry has vastly underestimated the demand among consumers for more powerful "professional" grade digital cameras. It would probably make more sense from both a business and technology standpoint to offer the full camera at a price which is higher than the basic entry level model, but less than the full "professional" model since most of the work was probably in the design of the hardware and software and not as much in the manufacturing. People are generally willing to pay for a well built product as long as they know that the quality is there.
A tazer is a nice option since it will generally immobilize even the burliest mugger for a few minutes at least. This will generally be enough time for you to summon the police or get the hell out of there. The problem with guns is that you generally kill or seriously injure the assailant which can leave you in a messy and expensive legal situation, even if it was self defense. Usually, unless you are under immediate threat of deadly force (it is either him or you), then it is not legally acceptable to shoot someone dead. Hell, you can be arrested in most states for merely drawing your weapon in the wrong situation and discharging a firearm in public is certain to get you arrested until you can get a lawyer, post bail, and explain yourself. Tazers take less skill to handle properly than firearms and are generally much more portable. In some places in the United States firearms are doable but if you travel and especially internationally be advised that many other countries, the UK included, take a rather dim view towards firearms and especially handguns, but a Tazer may be acceptable. Bottom line, know the rules wherever you go and do not carry your gadgets conspicuously in the open or give potential attackers the impression of naivety and fear.
Insurance companies can only pass increased costs unto consumers up to a point. Eventually, some consumers will decide that the cost of the insurance, when weighted against the benefits of protection against some loss, is too high and they will leave the market. This leaves fewer people paying into the insurance market which causes costs to move even higher for those that remain because the potential risk of loss is being spread over fewer policy holders. This is compounded by the fact that those policy holders who do remain in the market are most probably paying the higher rates because they know that they are more likely to experience a loss and therefore to collect their insurance benefits when that loss occurs. After some period of time the cycle begins again and prices continue to rise in an ever increasing spiral. Economists refer to this as the "adverse selection problem" and this is EXACTLY what is happening in the healthcare industry right now. Insurance companies have tried to compel consumers to price themselves in the market by means of the deductible, but such measures cannot completely halt the upward spiral of costs. However, in spite of all of this insurance companies do indeed provide a valuable service which for the most part is needed by the public. Now if we could only reign in the lawyers who prey upon the insurance industry we might actually stabilize the situation...
It wouldn't matter one bit the small time spammers are too difficult to track down and the larger ones will simply license the patent
There is nothing at all insidious or underhanded about this practice, IBM has been doing the exact same thing for decades. The primary reason that companies, especially large ones like IBM and Microsoft, do this is to shield themselves from swarms of frivolous lawsuits. If these companies did not take out as many defensive patents as possible then they would become irresistible targets for the armies of unscrupulous lawyers out there looking to exploit the patent laws. These lawyers would continue filing lawsuits until one of them stuck and paid out the jackpot. Microsoft would be especially foolish not to do this because their large hoard of reserve cash ~40 billion is constantly under attack by lawyers looking to capture a share of the loot. In fact, Microsoft has so much cash that even governments, such as the EU, are getting on the legal bandwagon.
They do not seek to entirely eliminate copying with these technologies, but rather to make it so cumbersome to obtain a copy that the majority of users will pay rather than be inconvenienced.
I thought that it would be interesting if someone from the Slashdot community took it upon themselves to compute the net benefit which the downloaders accrue given that they have some probability 'P' of being selected by the RIAA for a lawsuit which they can settle for a loss of $3000. It should be possible, in principle, to compute for a given probability 'P' of being sued by the RIAA how many songs (at $0.99 per song as per the iTunes rate) one should be willing to risk downloading before the total 'winnings' (the money saved by NOT paying for the songs) exactly balances the expected losses from being sued by the RIAA. We will make a few assumptions in order to simplify our mathematical model...
1. Let us assume that all users on the file sharing networks are equally likely to be targeted by an RIAA lawsuit (in reality this would probably be a function of the number of songs shared, they artists and genres of the songs shared, and the amount of bandwidth devoted to sharing them out). Let this probability equal 'P'.
2. Suppose that the RIAA can sue no more than 1500 people per year (this is probably being generous).
3. Suppose that there are approximately 3.5 million users engaged in file sharing on the various networks at any given second (this is probably a lower bound and the actual number is probably much higher). Now the probability of being sued by the RIAA, assuming that all users are equally likely to be sued, is 1000/3.5 million or approximately 0.003% chance.
Let the expected losses (per year) from continuing to download be P multiplied by 3,000 which is the amount that it will cost to settle in the event that you are sued. Thus the expected losses to the RIAA for each year that you continue to download are only $8.57
which means that if you were planning on downloading more than 8.65 songs per year then your expected savings over paying the $0.99 fee per song on a service like iTunes makes it worth your while.
Now for a few caveats...I do not advocate the steeling of intellectual property music or otherwise and the above should be treated as a simple (and possibly flawed) look at the mathematics of downloading stripped of any moral pretense or consequence. However, even given the crudity of this analysis it is possible to draw a few conclusions...
1. The RIAA lawsuits will probably discourage the small time downloaders and the basically honest people from using the file sharing networks to get free music, but these users are probably in the minority anyway (most people share at about 100 songs).
2. hard core downloaders are not likely to be dissuaded unless the probability of being sued or the amount of the damages or both significantly increase.
3. The RIAA cannot sue everyone so there will always be an equilibrium whereby a user downloads and shares just enough songs not to get noticed so that his expected winnings precisely balance his expected losses.
The best way to handle the UNIX Intellectual Property would be for the open source community to found a non-profit trust fund and holding corporation to buy up the IP out of bankruptcy and then license all of the UNIX Intellectual Property under the GPL in perpetuity. Perhaps some lawyers out there who are feeling magnanimous and would like to help the cause of open source could draft the necessary legal documents so that people can begin contributing to the UNIX Intellectual Property Buyout Fund.
Recall that they must include ALL of the source code, including any new portions of code that they have added, and not just what they originally borrowed from the GPL licensed code. I have not looked through the code, but it would be interesting to see if they are in fact releasing ALL of the code. They might just be releasing part of the source and hoping that either nobody will be willing or nobody will be able to figure out that something is missing.