Time Warner could easily offer the same service at the same cost, but that would be less profitable for them, and they don't want to give up their excessive margins to competition. It's all about greed... There is not much these companies hate more than free market capitalism.
What they should do then... Have a government owned non profit own the physical cable, and turn each local exchange into a carrier neutral dc, or have the non profit operate backhaul from the local exchange so some more centralized ones. Have them rent out the physical lines for the same price to anyone who wants them, and let them rent either a complete circuit or just the physical cable (so they rent space in the dc and have the appropriate lines patched through).
It's standard practice to install more capacity than necessary, the extra cost is marginal if you already have the streets dug up and it makes it much cheaper to service upgrades in the future.
There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas. It costs a lot of money to run cables under the streets, and takes a long time to recoup those costs. You would at best have limited competition, a couple of large suppliers offering you service in a densely populated area. Small suppliers simply couldn't afford to lay the cable, and you would never have very many suppliers because that would dilute the market and even big players wouldn't be able to recover the cable costs.
By helping for-profit corporations for free you are not promoting communism, you are promoting exploitation which is very much a part of capitalism. Any good capitalist organization will always look to pay it's staff the minimum amount possible as paying wages eats into their profit. Free staff are one step away from staff paying them to work.
Because the government gives back... You pay taxes or do volunteer work, and in return you get roads to drive on, police to protect you, a welfare system if you are unable to work, schooling, healthcare, etc etc.
A for-profit company will take from you and give nothing back, any help you give them will go into their pockets and if you provide them volunteer work it might even enable them to cut costs by firing someone they used to pay to do what you're doing for free. Corporations are ruthless self serving beasts and don't deserve any handouts.
They do a cost/benefit analysis... The cost of improving their service will not bring them sufficient additional revenue to make it worth doing. If they can improve their service for free then any profit would be positive and thus worth doing.
It is amusing tho, one of the common pieces of fud thrown against oss is that community support is bad and that you should have support from a large company...
We used to make the interns format and label floppies... At a university, the students would keep their work on floppies rather than our servers, and every new computer we bought came with a huge stack of software floppies so we had 200 copies of everything... We would format them, put new labels on, and sell them to students cheaply. I always hated how sucky the floppy controllers in x86 machines were, it took ages to format floppies and you couldn't really do 2 at once, let alone the 4 simultaneous that an amiga would do.
You could also use nagios and check_apt/check_yum to alert you of out of necessary security updates, put a script for installing updates on every box (different script for centos/ubuntu, but same syntax), create a user who is added to sudoers for only that script, and create an ssh key for authentication... Then you can feed the list of hosts that need updating into a script which will ssh to each one in sequence and execute the update script followed if necessary by a reboot..
Also the shovelware problem, when you are trying to quickly throw out a mediocre game, it's easier to make something based on an existing game and just tack on half assed support for the control system, rather than designing a game for the control system.
No pharma company is going to develop a cure for AIDS, because keeping AIDS sufferers infected while consuming a cocktail of expensive drugs for the rest of their life is far more profitable than a cure. Lives are being lost due to the greed of big pharma companies. Medical research should be conducted by charities and other non profits (think nationalized medical services).
Electronic design companies wouldn't care, because technology moves at such a fast pace that after 5 years their designs have very little value anyway. How much is a 5 year old PC worth these days? They would have even more incentive to innovate and remain on the cutting edge, while old technology would become even cheaper and more easily available to poorer countries... How much cheaper would the OLPC be if they could find the cheapest chinese manufacturing house to build all the components?
If copyright terms were reduced to 5 years or less, you would get more works being created not less... Artists would have to continue creating new work, rather than just sitting around doing drugs and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
A doctor has to study for many years and work very hard before he is able to work as a doctor... Does this give him the right to continue claiming royalties from his patients, many of whom would be dead were it not for the work of the doctor? The ability to continue collecting royalties would provide a big incentive to a doctor to keep their patients healthy, the longer they live the more money they will collect... So what makes the work of a doctor somehow worth less than that of an artist?
Also consider that a live performance involves many people, you have all the people who set up the venue, the security staff, the people who operate the lights and other back end facilities... These people are typically paid by the hour for their work, and don't continue making any money when they stop working. What makes these people's work more worthless than the main performer?
If my boss decides to pay me 0, i will stop working for him... So long as i continue working, i should continue being paid for my work. Why should artists be any different? Keep performing, keep getting paid. Stop performing, stop getting paid.
Should i have the right to continue demanding money from my boss 70 years after i have stopped working for him?
What makes certain types of work worthy of continual compensation while other types of work are not? The average doctor works a lot harder than an artist, and yet they don't collect ongoing royalties from their patients.
Copyright terms should be limited to a year at most. In modern society, things happen so quickly that a given piece of music will be well past it's prime a year from now anyway.
Making old music available detracts from being able to sell newer more profitable music... It's in their interest to bury old music so it gets forgotten, in 70 years time noone will remember it and few copies will still exist so even tho it's copyright has expired it will be completely useless and won't compete with whatever new profitable music they're selling at the time.
If the artist is even still alive 50 years later.. And assuming anyone still remembers them or cares, and assuming any copies of it still exist on readable media.
Because it will benefit a very small number of greedy people at the expense of everyone else, and these people have enough money to influence the politicians.
All it will do, is ensure that more wealth flows out of the economy and into the private vaults of a very small number of people. And because of the 70 year term, it will ensure that a lot of work is lost to society as it has been completely forgotten, all copies of it lost and everyone who remembers it is dead by the time copyright expires.
The toilet paper would be printed anyway, with something else... The white power magazine would be printed anyway, using something else... On the other hand, your mother's works would live on and she would be remembered (and yes attribution should be required). Noone is going to look down on your mother because her work was used on toilet paper or a white power magazine, as it's quite obviously out of her control.
But if some publishing house decides her poetry isn't worth re-releasing, who will remember it in 70 years? Even her children are likely to be dead by that point, as are all the people who read her poetry when it first came out. Her work will most likely be lost to society, and she will be a forgotten nobody. Without being able to copy it, will copies of the work even still exist 70 years later? They might all be in DRM'd formats for which the keys have been lost.
You would be significantly weakening a competitor, and creating a level playing field. Sure, the profits wouldn't be as obscene as under an artificial monopoly, but you could still profit from printing the books.
What right does an artist have to 70 years of income from a single piece of work? What makes an artist so much more special than a doctor or even a supermarket shelf stacker? If a doctor save's someone's life, is he entitled to royalties from that person for as long as they remain alive?
As you pointed out, most artists don't get rich, but a small percentage of them take the piss and make billions for doing relatively little work. The difference has nothing to do with how hard someone works, or even how good their music is, it's purely down to brand recognition and media hype. Why should someone who performs his work every week in a bar earn less than someone who hasn't performed or produced anything in years? The system is unfairly stacked to benefit a select few at the expense of everyone else, and these people have pulled the wool over the eyes of the masses by convincing them they somehow have some inherent right to continue ripping everyone off.
Well, a Linux based netbook running on ARM would have 99% of the same applications as an x86 one, since open source apps can (and usually already have) be recompiled to run on any cpu linux can run on.
Same can be said of windows, it's unlikely to support modern network cards out of the box unless you have a special oem version with drivers included... Linux actually stands a better chance of supporting your nic.
Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner could easily offer the same service at the same cost, but that would be less profitable for them, and they don't want to give up their excessive margins to competition.
It's all about greed... There is not much these companies hate more than free market capitalism.
What they should do then...
Have a government owned non profit own the physical cable, and turn each local exchange into a carrier neutral dc, or have the non profit operate backhaul from the local exchange so some more centralized ones. Have them rent out the physical lines for the same price to anyone who wants them, and let them rent either a complete circuit or just the physical cable (so they rent space in the dc and have the appropriate lines patched through).
It's standard practice to install more capacity than necessary, the extra cost is marginal if you already have the streets dug up and it makes it much cheaper to service upgrades in the future.
There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.
It costs a lot of money to run cables under the streets, and takes a long time to recoup those costs.
You would at best have limited competition, a couple of large suppliers offering you service in a densely populated area.
Small suppliers simply couldn't afford to lay the cable, and you would never have very many suppliers because that would dilute the market and even big players wouldn't be able to recover the cable costs.
By helping for-profit corporations for free you are not promoting communism, you are promoting exploitation which is very much a part of capitalism. Any good capitalist organization will always look to pay it's staff the minimum amount possible as paying wages eats into their profit. Free staff are one step away from staff paying them to work.
Because the government gives back... You pay taxes or do volunteer work, and in return you get roads to drive on, police to protect you, a welfare system if you are unable to work, schooling, healthcare, etc etc.
A for-profit company will take from you and give nothing back, any help you give them will go into their pockets and if you provide them volunteer work it might even enable them to cut costs by firing someone they used to pay to do what you're doing for free. Corporations are ruthless self serving beasts and don't deserve any handouts.
They do a cost/benefit analysis... The cost of improving their service will not bring them sufficient additional revenue to make it worth doing. If they can improve their service for free then any profit would be positive and thus worth doing.
It is amusing tho, one of the common pieces of fud thrown against oss is that community support is bad and that you should have support from a large company...
We used to make the interns format and label floppies...
At a university, the students would keep their work on floppies rather than our servers, and every new computer we bought came with a huge stack of software floppies so we had 200 copies of everything... We would format them, put new labels on, and sell them to students cheaply. I always hated how sucky the floppy controllers in x86 machines were, it took ages to format floppies and you couldn't really do 2 at once, let alone the 4 simultaneous that an amiga would do.
If your internet connection goes down, where will you get updates from?
You could also use nagios and check_apt/check_yum to alert you of out of necessary security updates, put a script for installing updates on every box (different script for centos/ubuntu, but same syntax), create a user who is added to sudoers for only that script, and create an ssh key for authentication...
Then you can feed the list of hosts that need updating into a script which will ssh to each one in sequence and execute the update script followed if necessary by a reboot..
Also the shovelware problem, when you are trying to quickly throw out a mediocre game, it's easier to make something based on an existing game and just tack on half assed support for the control system, rather than designing a game for the control system.
No pharma company is going to develop a cure for AIDS, because keeping AIDS sufferers infected while consuming a cocktail of expensive drugs for the rest of their life is far more profitable than a cure. Lives are being lost due to the greed of big pharma companies. Medical research should be conducted by charities and other non profits (think nationalized medical services).
Electronic design companies wouldn't care, because technology moves at such a fast pace that after 5 years their designs have very little value anyway. How much is a 5 year old PC worth these days? They would have even more incentive to innovate and remain on the cutting edge, while old technology would become even cheaper and more easily available to poorer countries... How much cheaper would the OLPC be if they could find the cheapest chinese manufacturing house to build all the components?
If copyright terms were reduced to 5 years or less, you would get more works being created not less... Artists would have to continue creating new work, rather than just sitting around doing drugs and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
A doctor has to study for many years and work very hard before he is able to work as a doctor...
Does this give him the right to continue claiming royalties from his patients, many of whom would be dead were it not for the work of the doctor?
The ability to continue collecting royalties would provide a big incentive to a doctor to keep their patients healthy, the longer they live the more money they will collect...
So what makes the work of a doctor somehow worth less than that of an artist?
Also consider that a live performance involves many people, you have all the people who set up the venue, the security staff, the people who operate the lights and other back end facilities... These people are typically paid by the hour for their work, and don't continue making any money when they stop working. What makes these people's work more worthless than the main performer?
If my boss decides to pay me 0, i will stop working for him... So long as i continue working, i should continue being paid for my work. Why should artists be any different? Keep performing, keep getting paid. Stop performing, stop getting paid.
Should i have the right to continue demanding money from my boss 70 years after i have stopped working for him?
What makes certain types of work worthy of continual compensation while other types of work are not?
The average doctor works a lot harder than an artist, and yet they don't collect ongoing royalties from their patients.
Copyright terms should be limited to a year at most. In modern society, things happen so quickly that a given piece of music will be well past it's prime a year from now anyway.
Making old music available detracts from being able to sell newer more profitable music... It's in their interest to bury old music so it gets forgotten, in 70 years time noone will remember it and few copies will still exist so even tho it's copyright has expired it will be completely useless and won't compete with whatever new profitable music they're selling at the time.
If the artist is even still alive 50 years later.. And assuming anyone still remembers them or cares, and assuming any copies of it still exist on readable media.
Because it will benefit a very small number of greedy people at the expense of everyone else, and these people have enough money to influence the politicians.
All it will do, is ensure that more wealth flows out of the economy and into the private vaults of a very small number of people. And because of the 70 year term, it will ensure that a lot of work is lost to society as it has been completely forgotten, all copies of it lost and everyone who remembers it is dead by the time copyright expires.
The toilet paper would be printed anyway, with something else...
The white power magazine would be printed anyway, using something else...
On the other hand, your mother's works would live on and she would be remembered (and yes attribution should be required). Noone is going to look down on your mother because her work was used on toilet paper or a white power magazine, as it's quite obviously out of her control.
But if some publishing house decides her poetry isn't worth re-releasing, who will remember it in 70 years? Even her children are likely to be dead by that point, as are all the people who read her poetry when it first came out. Her work will most likely be lost to society, and she will be a forgotten nobody. Without being able to copy it, will copies of the work even still exist 70 years later? They might all be in DRM'd formats for which the keys have been lost.
You would be significantly weakening a competitor, and creating a level playing field. Sure, the profits wouldn't be as obscene as under an artificial monopoly, but you could still profit from printing the books.
What right does an artist have to 70 years of income from a single piece of work? What makes an artist so much more special than a doctor or even a supermarket shelf stacker?
If a doctor save's someone's life, is he entitled to royalties from that person for as long as they remain alive?
As you pointed out, most artists don't get rich, but a small percentage of them take the piss and make billions for doing relatively little work. The difference has nothing to do with how hard someone works, or even how good their music is, it's purely down to brand recognition and media hype.
Why should someone who performs his work every week in a bar earn less than someone who hasn't performed or produced anything in years?
The system is unfairly stacked to benefit a select few at the expense of everyone else, and these people have pulled the wool over the eyes of the masses by convincing them they somehow have some inherent right to continue ripping everyone off.
Not only dead, but unless they decide to re-release that music (a big IF), it will end up completely forgotten and lost before the copyright expires.
Well, a Linux based netbook running on ARM would have 99% of the same applications as an x86 one, since open source apps can (and usually already have) be recompiled to run on any cpu linux can run on.
Same can be said of windows, it's unlikely to support modern network cards out of the box unless you have a special oem version with drivers included... Linux actually stands a better chance of supporting your nic.