The death of Moore's Law has been greatly exaggerated many times before. My Dad (chip designer at IBM) used to tell me "Oh, the naysayers are at it again. Moore's law won't be holding in five years, according to them."
Odd, as a native German having lived in Germany until 1995, I can't recall any laws that require you to lock your car or your house. Your relatives might have confused this with requirementes of their specific insurance company. Indeed, most German insurance companies will not cover theft if the car was unlocked at the time of being stolen. But this is certainly not a law by any stretch of the imagination.
As for having to obtain permission from the government to start a business... For most types of businesses, you only need to go to the local mayor's office, pay $15 and off you go. I've done it myself in order to start a consulting business. As other posters have pointed out, the only restriction is the location for certain types of business that impact the neighborhood. Like brothels, car shops, chemical plants, etc. In this respect, Germany uses zoning much like most of the US.
Having lived in both countries, the amount of freedom you have in either place depends on the subject matter. A few examples:
a) Certain unions in the US have much more power to restrict and constrict businesses than German unions do.
b) On the other hand, the German crafts laws are incredibly restrictive and certainly stifle competition. Fortunately, it looks like the EU will put an end to this hundreds of years old nonsense.
c) As for encryption and copy protection circumvention, Germany's laws have traditionally been far more liberal than the US's. Due to pressure from the US this is changing, sadly.
d) Prostitution is legal in Germany. Illegal in most of the US.
e) Any moron can carry a gun in the US. German gun laws are very restrictive.
f) There is no issue with nakedness on public beaches in Germany.
g) There is no issue with nakedness on TV in Germany.
h) There is no issue with nakedness in printed form in public places. (It is usually too cold for actual nakedness in public places. But there is no law against that either - unless a public disturbance is caused, by a flasher, for example)
The list goes on. On the whole, I prefer the US which is why I moved here a while back. But the statement that the US is more free than other countries requires some qualifiers.
Recent sentiment in European governments is that they've had it with the US services reading each and every email sent in Europe, whether business to business or intra-government. I suspect that - eventually - the Europeans will get their act together and write email security solutions of their own.
That, of course, means replacing Microsoft "swiss cheese" Outlook and other oh-so-convenient-yet-sieve-like software, which is why it hasn't been done yet. It might also be necessary to switch to Linux to avoid all the security problems of closed source Windows. As reported on Slashdot, this is already in the works.
Cat5e will "only" get you up to 1000baseT. For 10000baseT you need Cat7 aka class F. Sadly, I didn't find a real price comparison of copper and fiber but I did find this quote: "Class F will probably cost twice as much as Cat 5-an even higher price than fiber cable!" here. Makes me think the fiber itself will be cheap to put in, but the price tag to be able to use it might make you gag later.:-)
That's not the case. If you were right, I wouldn't get any SMS spam. I get them more or less regulary despite that sending them costs bulk sender about $0.02 from most european operators.
That's why I was going for a variable price. The math for the spammer is pretty simple: as long as cost-per-mail / percentage-of-buyers < profit-per-sale, you will be spammed. This holds true for snail mail, SMS, fax, phone bots and email. As for email, I seem to remember reading somewhere that spammers make about 1 sale out of 1000 spam mails sent. If this holds true for SMS as well, you can see why your SMS inbox is full: The spammer only needs to make more than $20 for this scheme to be successful.
As for the price being too high for developing countries - true. This scheme is both variable and optional though so developing countries can opt to not use this system and/or to set the price at $0.001.
I don't see you spending 1/10th of your wage (unless you're a weirdo) for internet access anyway, and most people using net in transition economies have to.
You don't have to look that far to get to internet access pricing like that. Just a few years ago, in 1998, I'd be billed an average of DM 200 a month for internet related phone charges by German Telekom in addition to the DM 35 I'd have to pay the provider for a 33kbit account. At 5 DM an hour, that doesn't even add up to an addiction (1.33 hours use per day). Minimum wage in Germany is around DM 800. 1 USD ~ 0.5 DM. Granted, most people earn a lot more. But back then, many people weren't that far off from your "weirdo" definition - especially students.
True, laws would have limited effect if there were countries that didn't have such laws, but still, even if the mail was SENT from overseas, most of the crooks that actually COLLECT the money will have to be in the USA.
In non-US countries, most of the spam you receive doesn't even apply. The spam mails mostly assume that you live in the US, can read English, have a US bank account and can write checks drawn on a US bank. The funniest thing are spam mails that were translated with Babelfish to localize them but still assume everything else. Then you can't even understand the mail if you speak both your native language and English.:-) My point is that any European law is irrelevant to the bulk of spam. Nothing will change.
But why would you charge your friends to send you mail? And your 25 cents seems pretty steep.
Good point. As another poster pointed out, an extension to my scheme could be to have variable charges. No charge for friends, $1 for every aol sourced email and 25 cents for everyone else.
As for the 25 cents being high, that's just the cost I assign for the time it takes me to sift through the spam mails and delete them. The amount is a personal choice - if you want a lower one or a higher one just set it up that way.
Then, again, there's listservs. We certainly don't want to ban those!
True. Put the list server on the list of sources that are accepted without charge.
Doing something like this would drastically change the way everything is done! You have to modify mail clients and mail servers! ALL of them!
Not all of them. The only software that would need to be modified is my mail server and the mail clients of people that want to send me email.
The cool thing is that this could be a gradual process. First a few people that are fed up with SPAM (like myself) but only have a handful of friends that send them email would convert to this new system. Perhaps this select group of people would even have two email addresses for a while. Over time, more and more users would force their ISPs to support this new standard to be free of spam. Mail clients would gradually be upgraded as users want to communicate with a growing community of spam free friends.
Eventually, as software becomes available, everybody converts as it is so much nicer to be spam free. I'm envisioning this as a rather landslide-like process in the end.
Look at what hard to enforce laws do - usually nothing at all. Examples: prostitution, drugs, alcohol (prohibition). If you want to change something, you have to either be able to enforce the law effectively or come up with an incentive system that is self-enforcing by using man's basic nature against him (or to his benefit [cf capitalism]).
I think the only thing that has any hope of working are laws, unfortunately. Just banning the obfuscation of sender info would go a LONG way.
As I'm sure time will prove, this won't do anything at all. The fraudulent-to-begin-with spammers (most of them, I'd wager) will ignore such a law. The others will move their operations to another country or will be replaced by entities in other countries. Keep in mind that spammers, by definition, are rude, selfish people oblivious to the needs of others.
In the end, the only thing that will work is a pay per email system. As previous posters have pointed out, with 150+ countries having email - one single country that doesn't sign off on an international SPAM law will be sufficient to make all SPAM laws moot.
If I could set up my email system in such a way that it will only receive email after receiving notification from paypal that an amount X has been transferred to me, I would cease to receive spam overnight. My personal threshold would be 25 cents - less than a stamp but enough to be noticed. This would deter spammers, but not keep entities with a reasonable expectiation that I want the mail from emailing me. It might even deter those pesky friends that keep sending me copies of jokes that were already old when I was still young.
Between friends engaging in conversation, the amounts paid would balance out. But in the case of one way communication, I'd get paid a bit for the time I spend looking at my emails.
Obviously, this can be implemented with reasonable effort pretty quickly. There are some minor details to deal with, nothing traumatic though: The sender would have to be able to determine what the going receiving rate of the recipient is. There needs to be a functional and pervasive micropayment system (paypal). Mail programs would need to be updated to deal with the added protocols.
I find it amusing how politicians still think they can regulate the Internet by way of stroke of pen. They'll have to learn the hard way. Sadly, we'll have to suffer in the meantime.
Intertec's Superbrain, built around 1979, had dual Z80s (one for diskette I/O and booting, the other for everything else). 16k of DRAM - expandable to 64k with a soldering iron. It ran CP/M 2.2. I last used it in 1989 for a college project.
Last mile is a toughy
on
Why ADCo?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In good ol' Germany, the last mile is open to competitors - in theory. In practice, the government sanctioned ex-monopolist (German Telecom) is able to prevent any intrusion into its highly profitable nickle and dime business. They make switching difficult, they play for time, they make impossible offers to share their network, etc. It speaks volumes that GT would not be profitable without the local call charges they amass every year - about 5 billion USD, if memory serves.
According to a heise article, 60% of German customers have access to alternative local loop providers. However, 98% are still served by GT.
Sadly, nothing much will change anytime soon. The government still holds a huge percentage of GT's stock. If their monopoly were broken, the stock would deflate like Enron's and that windfall of cash could not be spent on securing the next election by way of pork.
A year ago, I designed a controller board that takes USB 1.1 as input among other things. The board uses the ScanLogic SL11R USB/RISC controller that implements most of the USB protocol in hardware.
Sadly, the overhead of USB is quite dramatic, bulk packets are 64 bytes max size. Blasting the board with bulk transfers from an Athlon 650, I could get between 860kb and 1.0MB/s into it - depending on the data. Due to bit-stuffing every six bits (this guarantees that the receiver can synthesize the clock from the data stream), the data rate is not constant. In real life it is probably closer to 1MB/s, though.
Interestingly, similar experiments on a Mac showed dramatically worse performance, around 600kB/s. Our resident Mac guru says this is due to very poor implemention in the OS.
Off-topic note to engineers: The part's DMA is broken and the manufacturer doesn't seem to want to rev the die.
Sadly, I think that the government can do little in way of issuing new laws to help network security in the private sector. You can't prevent people from opening viruses "like you told me not to" with a new law. You can't prevent Microsoft from setting "user friendly" defaults in Outlook, Internet Explorer and SQL that violate the most basic security priciples with a new law.
However, the goverment can do some things:
1. Deal with Microsoft's monopoly effectively. Microsoft's continued embrace, extend, kill the competition and then screw it up strategy doesn't help security one bit. They have no motivation whatsoever to fix even the simplest problems in Outlook and other swiss-cheese-like products. If there was a viable competitor in that market the two would probably attempt to one up each other on several points, including security.
2. Use more secure and more reliable software inside the government (read Linux, et al). Refuse to use/purchase products where security flaws crop up every time you read slashdot.
3. Use/support open standards and refuse to use/purchase products that rely on embraced and extended technology.
I disagree with the argument that translating and distribution Civ 3 is not the same as translating and distributing Harry Potter.
Translating and distributing Civ3 is exactly what didn't happen. The translation team created new text lookup files and offered them as a patch for the US version of Civ3.
Had they instead offered a complete localized package for download, I'd have to agree with you. As it is, Infogrames have really ruined their reputation in this market.
Recently, you were informed that our high-speed Internet partner - Excite @
Home - filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. We recognize that this
situation may have caused you some concern about the future of your service.
Rest assured, we are taking all the necessary steps to provide continued reliable
high-speed Internet service to our customers... now and in the future.
We are deeply committed to providing you with a quality high-speed Internet
service. For several months, we have been hard at work creating a new Cox-
managed network to better serve you. There are many benefits to directly
managing our own network, such as:
* Easier, more streamlined customer service experience.
* Enhanced network performance.
* Ability to bring you the latest in cutting-edge technology and product
features.
In the weeks ahead, we'll continue to keep you informed and share more details
of our exciting plans. For more information, please visit www.cox.com/moreinfo.
My provider's backup plan (Cox, Orange County) is to switch over to their own equipment/people sometime next year. I certainly hope Excite doesn't pull the plug before then or I'd up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
I just checked on German Telekom's subsidiary t-online web site. The non-banking applications are to shut down on December 31, 2001. However, home banking service applications are to continue to run on the existing hardware using the existing protocols indefinitely. Doesn't sound quite dead to me. Perhaps Buffy needs to lend a hand.:-)
The article doesn't mention that the original BTX modem only had 1200 baud, one of the most heinous limitations of the system. They stuck with that monster for a long time because they had miscalculated the customer resoponse completely. Expecting a huge crowd of people flocking to BTX early on, they had ordered huge number of these crappy 1200 baud modems, 0.5 million if memory serves. Management was not too pleased to see only 195000 users after ten years of service. I forget at which point they decided to junk them.
Another limiting factor was the use of outdated IBM minicomputers ("system 1" IIRC) as nodes even when PCs became much faster at a fraction of the cost in the mid 80s. This held the cost high, the flexibility at a minimum and the throughput so low as to be unusable for most anything but home banking. The things you can get away with as a monopolist.:-(
In the 90s they finally managed to upgrade their nodes to 2400 baud and even later to a whopping 19200 or something like that. Always two to five years behind the times and with the independent Internet running circles around it, the service finally died. A long struggle it was.
Going with your numbers, assume MS sells 1 million boxed copies of XP annually and has an annual overhead of $2M. That would only increase the cost per box by $2. If they sell 10 million (more likely), that overhead would decrease to 20 cents.
While it is true that there is a very annoying guild of "cease and desist" lawyers in Germany, in this particular case the legal action was indeed initiated by Infogrames Germany.
To expand the subject a bit: If memory serves, "cease and desist" ambulance chasing doesn't work in copyright issues because there is no public interest that needs protection. "Cease and desist" lawyers prefer to pick on incorrect advertising by small companies as there is some moeny to be had and there is little need for research. A few years back, lawyers went bonkers with computer stores advertising 17" monitors (as opposed to 43.18cm monitors). Happily, the courts put a stop to this by declaring "17" monitor" a proper name rather than a measurement and a name. Same with floppy sizes (8.89cm and 13.225cm floppies).:-)
Note: it is legal to advertise using english mesurements as long as metric is shown as well.
Keep in mind that this is playing out in Germany. EULA's don't work there as they are not considered to be a legal contract. The DMCA also does not apply outside the US, although US lawmakers would certainly love to see it do so.
"Cease, desist and pay" on the other hand is very much a fact of life in Germany. Some lawyers even base their entire revenue stream on this concept. In recent cases, these lawyers have had some trouble collecting on their bills though.
I just checked prices at a professional CD manufacturer (acmed). They quoted $0.87 per CD at 10000 quantity for CD, jewel box, three color printed label and insert. Microsoft either has a very sad manufacturing process or the statement "that the savings reflects the cost of Microsoft not having to produce another disc" is not quite accurate.
I've shipped my computers and monitors (two each) from LA to Stuttgart (Germany), then to Dublin (Ireland) and back to LA using freight forwarders. They can strap your stuff on a palette and shrink wrap the whole thing for you. It isn't that terribly expensive and you can insure the whole thing for a reasonable amount $50 premium per $10000 of value I seem to recall. On the way to Germany and Ireland I also packed a $10000 film recorder with a CRT (thin glass, quite fragile).
The advantage of the palettized approach is that the bundle is too heavy to lift manually. Operators are thus forced to use a forklift which has a much gentler way of setting things down. My equipment took no damage whatsoever from a total of 12000 miles of travel.
Slashdot Mirror
This was around 1979.
Neither did he write 'sentance'. :-)
As for having to obtain permission from the government to start a business... For most types of businesses, you only need to go to the local mayor's office, pay $15 and off you go. I've done it myself in order to start a consulting business. As other posters have pointed out, the only restriction is the location for certain types of business that impact the neighborhood. Like brothels, car shops, chemical plants, etc. In this respect, Germany uses zoning much like most of the US.
Having lived in both countries, the amount of freedom you have in either place depends on the subject matter. A few examples:
a) Certain unions in the US have much more power to restrict and constrict businesses than German unions do.
b) On the other hand, the German crafts laws are incredibly restrictive and certainly stifle competition. Fortunately, it looks like the EU will put an end to this hundreds of years old nonsense.
c) As for encryption and copy protection circumvention, Germany's laws have traditionally been far more liberal than the US's. Due to pressure from the US this is changing, sadly.
d) Prostitution is legal in Germany. Illegal in most of the US.
e) Any moron can carry a gun in the US. German gun laws are very restrictive.
f) There is no issue with nakedness on public beaches in Germany.
g) There is no issue with nakedness on TV in Germany.
h) There is no issue with nakedness in printed form in public places. (It is usually too cold for actual nakedness in public places. But there is no law against that either - unless a public disturbance is caused, by a flasher, for example)
The list goes on. On the whole, I prefer the US which is why I moved here a while back. But the statement that the US is more free than other countries requires some qualifiers.
That, of course, means replacing Microsoft "swiss cheese" Outlook and other oh-so-convenient-yet-sieve-like software, which is why it hasn't been done yet. It might also be necessary to switch to Linux to avoid all the security problems of closed source Windows. As reported on Slashdot, this is already in the works.
Cat5e will "only" get you up to 1000baseT. For 10000baseT you need Cat7 aka class F. Sadly, I didn't find a real price comparison of copper and fiber but I did find this quote: "Class F will probably cost twice as much as Cat 5-an even higher price than fiber cable!" here. Makes me think the fiber itself will be cheap to put in, but the price tag to be able to use it might make you gag later. :-)
That's why I was going for a variable price. The math for the spammer is pretty simple: as long as cost-per-mail / percentage-of-buyers < profit-per-sale, you will be spammed. This holds true for snail mail, SMS, fax, phone bots and email. As for email, I seem to remember reading somewhere that spammers make about 1 sale out of 1000 spam mails sent. If this holds true for SMS as well, you can see why your SMS inbox is full: The spammer only needs to make more than $20 for this scheme to be successful.
As for the price being too high for developing countries - true. This scheme is both variable and optional though so developing countries can opt to not use this system and/or to set the price at $0.001.
I don't see you spending 1/10th of your wage (unless you're a weirdo) for internet access anyway, and most people using net in transition economies have to.
You don't have to look that far to get to internet access pricing like that. Just a few years ago, in 1998, I'd be billed an average of DM 200 a month for internet related phone charges by German Telekom in addition to the DM 35 I'd have to pay the provider for a 33kbit account. At 5 DM an hour, that doesn't even add up to an addiction (1.33 hours use per day). Minimum wage in Germany is around DM 800. 1 USD ~ 0.5 DM. Granted, most people earn a lot more. But back then, many people weren't that far off from your "weirdo" definition - especially students.
In non-US countries, most of the spam you receive doesn't even apply. The spam mails mostly assume that you live in the US, can read English, have a US bank account and can write checks drawn on a US bank. The funniest thing are spam mails that were translated with Babelfish to localize them but still assume everything else. Then you can't even understand the mail if you speak both your native language and English. :-) My point is that any European law is irrelevant to the bulk of spam. Nothing will change.
But why would you charge your friends to send you mail? And your 25 cents seems pretty steep.
Good point. As another poster pointed out, an extension to my scheme could be to have variable charges. No charge for friends, $1 for every aol sourced email and 25 cents for everyone else.
As for the 25 cents being high, that's just the cost I assign for the time it takes me to sift through the spam mails and delete them. The amount is a personal choice - if you want a lower one or a higher one just set it up that way.
Then, again, there's listservs. We certainly don't want to ban those!
True. Put the list server on the list of sources that are accepted without charge.
Oddly enough, I do - quite intimately. :-)
Doing something like this would drastically change the way everything is done! You have to modify mail clients and mail servers! ALL of them!
Not all of them. The only software that would need to be modified is my mail server and the mail clients of people that want to send me email.
The cool thing is that this could be a gradual process. First a few people that are fed up with SPAM (like myself) but only have a handful of friends that send them email would convert to this new system. Perhaps this select group of people would even have two email addresses for a while. Over time, more and more users would force their ISPs to support this new standard to be free of spam. Mail clients would gradually be upgraded as users want to communicate with a growing community of spam free friends.
Eventually, as software becomes available, everybody converts as it is so much nicer to be spam free. I'm envisioning this as a rather landslide-like process in the end.
Look at what hard to enforce laws do - usually nothing at all. Examples: prostitution, drugs, alcohol (prohibition). If you want to change something, you have to either be able to enforce the law effectively or come up with an incentive system that is self-enforcing by using man's basic nature against him (or to his benefit [cf capitalism]).
I think the only thing that has any hope of working are laws, unfortunately. Just banning the obfuscation of sender info would go a LONG way.
As I'm sure time will prove, this won't do anything at all. The fraudulent-to-begin-with spammers (most of them, I'd wager) will ignore such a law. The others will move their operations to another country or will be replaced by entities in other countries. Keep in mind that spammers, by definition, are rude, selfish people oblivious to the needs of others.
You don't have to look that far or into fiction. If memory serves, the legal age in the Netherlands is 14. This includes posing for porn.
If I could set up my email system in such a way that it will only receive email after receiving notification from paypal that an amount X has been transferred to me, I would cease to receive spam overnight. My personal threshold would be 25 cents - less than a stamp but enough to be noticed. This would deter spammers, but not keep entities with a reasonable expectiation that I want the mail from emailing me. It might even deter those pesky friends that keep sending me copies of jokes that were already old when I was still young.
Between friends engaging in conversation, the amounts paid would balance out. But in the case of one way communication, I'd get paid a bit for the time I spend looking at my emails.
Obviously, this can be implemented with reasonable effort pretty quickly. There are some minor details to deal with, nothing traumatic though: The sender would have to be able to determine what the going receiving rate of the recipient is. There needs to be a functional and pervasive micropayment system (paypal). Mail programs would need to be updated to deal with the added protocols.
I find it amusing how politicians still think they can regulate the Internet by way of stroke of pen. They'll have to learn the hard way. Sadly, we'll have to suffer in the meantime.
Depending on whether the Z flag is set prior to entering this code it is either an endless loop or it writes fffe to BC.
Intertec's Superbrain, built around 1979, had dual Z80s (one for diskette I/O and booting, the other for everything else). 16k of DRAM - expandable to 64k with a soldering iron. It ran CP/M 2.2. I last used it in 1989 for a college project.
According to a heise article, 60% of German customers have access to alternative local loop providers. However, 98% are still served by GT.
Sadly, nothing much will change anytime soon. The government still holds a huge percentage of GT's stock. If their monopoly were broken, the stock would deflate like Enron's and that windfall of cash could not be spent on securing the next election by way of pork.
Sadly, the overhead of USB is quite dramatic, bulk packets are 64 bytes max size. Blasting the board with bulk transfers from an Athlon 650, I could get between 860kb and 1.0MB/s into it - depending on the data. Due to bit-stuffing every six bits (this guarantees that the receiver can synthesize the clock from the data stream), the data rate is not constant. In real life it is probably closer to 1MB/s, though.
Interestingly, similar experiments on a Mac showed dramatically worse performance, around 600kB/s. Our resident Mac guru says this is due to very poor implemention in the OS.
Off-topic note to engineers: The part's DMA is broken and the manufacturer doesn't seem to want to rev the die.
However, the goverment can do some things:
1. Deal with Microsoft's monopoly effectively. Microsoft's continued embrace, extend, kill the competition and then screw it up strategy doesn't help security one bit. They have no motivation whatsoever to fix even the simplest problems in Outlook and other swiss-cheese-like products. If there was a viable competitor in that market the two would probably attempt to one up each other on several points, including security.
2. Use more secure and more reliable software inside the government (read Linux, et al). Refuse to use/purchase products where security flaws crop up every time you read slashdot.
3. Use/support open standards and refuse to use/purchase products that rely on embraced and extended technology.
Translating and distributing Civ3 is exactly what didn't happen. The translation team created new text lookup files and offered them as a patch for the US version of Civ3.
Had they instead offered a complete localized package for download, I'd have to agree with you. As it is, Infogrames have really ruined their reputation in this market.
Date sent: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 19:50:28 -0500 (EST)
Dear Cox @ Home customer:
Recently, you were informed that our high-speed Internet partner - Excite @ Home - filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. We recognize that this situation may have caused you some concern about the future of your service. Rest assured, we are taking all the necessary steps to provide continued reliable high-speed Internet service to our customers ... now and in the future.
We are deeply committed to providing you with a quality high-speed Internet service. For several months, we have been hard at work creating a new Cox- managed network to better serve you. There are many benefits to directly managing our own network, such as:
* Easier, more streamlined customer service experience.
* Enhanced network performance.
* Ability to bring you the latest in cutting-edge technology and product features.
In the weeks ahead, we'll continue to keep you informed and share more details of our exciting plans. For more information, please visit www.cox.com/moreinfo.
We thank you for being a valued Cox customer.
Sincerely, Cox Communications
My provider's backup plan (Cox, Orange County) is to switch over to their own equipment/people sometime next year. I certainly hope Excite doesn't pull the plug before then or I'd up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
I just checked on German Telekom's subsidiary t-online web site. The non-banking applications are to shut down on December 31, 2001. However, home banking service applications are to continue to run on the existing hardware using the existing protocols indefinitely. Doesn't sound quite dead to me. Perhaps Buffy needs to lend a hand. :-)
Another limiting factor was the use of outdated IBM minicomputers ("system 1" IIRC) as nodes even when PCs became much faster at a fraction of the cost in the mid 80s. This held the cost high, the flexibility at a minimum and the throughput so low as to be unusable for most anything but home banking. The things you can get away with as a monopolist. :-(
In the 90s they finally managed to upgrade their nodes to 2400 baud and even later to a whopping 19200 or something like that. Always two to five years behind the times and with the independent Internet running circles around it, the service finally died. A long struggle it was.
Going with your numbers, assume MS sells 1 million boxed copies of XP annually and has an annual overhead of $2M. That would only increase the cost per box by $2. If they sell 10 million (more likely), that overhead would decrease to 20 cents.
To expand the subject a bit: If memory serves, "cease and desist" ambulance chasing doesn't work in copyright issues because there is no public interest that needs protection. "Cease and desist" lawyers prefer to pick on incorrect advertising by small companies as there is some moeny to be had and there is little need for research. A few years back, lawyers went bonkers with computer stores advertising 17" monitors (as opposed to 43.18cm monitors). Happily, the courts put a stop to this by declaring "17" monitor" a proper name rather than a measurement and a name. Same with floppy sizes (8.89cm and 13.225cm floppies). :-)
Note: it is legal to advertise using english mesurements as long as metric is shown as well.
"Cease, desist and pay" on the other hand is very much a fact of life in Germany. Some lawyers even base their entire revenue stream on this concept. In recent cases, these lawyers have had some trouble collecting on their bills though.
I just checked prices at a professional CD manufacturer (acmed). They quoted $0.87 per CD at 10000 quantity for CD, jewel box, three color printed label and insert. Microsoft either has a very sad manufacturing process or the statement "that the savings reflects the cost of Microsoft not having to produce another disc" is not quite accurate.
The advantage of the palettized approach is that the bundle is too heavy to lift manually. Operators are thus forced to use a forklift which has a much gentler way of setting things down. My equipment took no damage whatsoever from a total of 12000 miles of travel.