While you do get memory effect in individual cells, what kills the battery pack is when you start overcharging other cells to make up for the cell that is pulling the pack low. For example, my cordless phone has a 3.6v pack made up of 3 2/3 AA size batteries, each at 1.2v, soldered together in series. It's a much better solution to keep cells in a pack separated so you can swap out cells that due to natural variability, have started pulling the pack either high or low. I've charged packs where two of the 3 cells read 1.4v right after being charged, and the last cell reads 0v due to voltage reversal when the pack was discharged during operation. No way to salvage that without a soldering iron and a spare cell, especially once it starts leaking...
If SSNs were only supposed to be used by the IRS, and the current system is so ripe for abuse, why hasn't there been a law against using SSNs for non-tax purposes? Easy - lobbyists and money. Credit card companies and credit bureaus see SSNs as a godsend. For them, it's cheaper and easier to have a central registry in order to troll for new credit accounts, regardless of the security problems inherent in using SSNs for everything.
Every effort to reduce the power of credit bureaus and protect individual privacy has been defeated or weakened by the credit bureaus and credit issuing companies. Their claim is that a central database tied to everyone's SSN is critical to doing business. Of course, they neglect to mention that they do plenty of business outside of the US without having such a system in place, AND the fact that SSNs are not guaranteed to be unique.
At this point, reasonable souls would start to question whether this is a government for the people, by the people, or a government for big business, buy the politicians! Face it, it won't be until the system is completely broken, with millions of people affected, and with the costs of keeping the current way of doing business too high to continue, that they'll change. By then, it'll be too damn late...
Wasn't that due to weird effects on electronic computers when transiting through hyperspace? Though, why they couldn't have built a massive mechanical calulator is kind of strange...
I don't understand why everyone wants to bring stuff back. Given the costs for lofting stuff into orbit in the first place, a pound of shit (literal organic waste) on the moon, or even LEO is worth more than an equivalent amount of gold on earth. Deorbiting space junk to protect new spacecraft is one thing - trying to capture it in order to recycle it on Earth is ludicrous.
If you really want to reuse materials in space, make sure anything that has to be retired has suffcient stationkeeping fuel to get thrown into a moon/earth orbit, or if you're really rich, enough fuel to make it to one of the Lagrange points, as a way of creating an orbital junkyard outside normal flight paths. As for mining the moon, you'd use those resources in space, not Earth. The best export to Earth would be energy (microwave sats) from power and manufacturing plants built in space from asteroid or moon mining.
If you can get your launch costs down low enough, you could turn the Moon and local space into your "New Frontier", and export technical workers and semi-skilled laborers there. Besides, the nation that manages to control local space, controls the globe (a variant on the English control of the seas back in the 1800s.) No need for nukes if you can just drop rocks on people you don't like, and pelt advanced satellites with frozen waste traveling at a few hundred miles and hour.
We used to encourage industrial and agricultural development. Technical advisors were sent to teach modern planting methods. Grants and loans were provided for chemical fertilizers. But it all stopped. Today, we're content to export food from the US, grown with government subsidies that depress the world price for cash crops below subsistence, rather than have these countries grow their own food. And, rather than set policies that would encourage domestic food production in these impoverished nations, we just cut them a welfare check that barely keeps them above poverty level instead.
Consider how important it is to keep antibiotics in reserve. Previously, Cipro was the last line of defense - and it was used up during the anthrax scare. There's plenty of Cipro to go around, but the usefulness has dropped significantly since the appearance of bacteria resistant to Cipro have appeared.
For those of you who don't remember biology, bacteria resistance is particularly nasty because unrelated kinds of bacteria can actually swap genes for traits (including resistance.) Thus, you could take an incomplete course of antibiotics, and end up with drug-resistant e-coli in your gut (which are harmless.) Then, you catch a nastier infection (say, a bacterial pneumonia), the nasty bacterium manages to swap genes with your drug-resistant e-coli, and WHAM, you've got a deadly infection that is resistant to all available drugs. Hospitals are particularly deadly because they tend to treat the sickest patients with the most advanced drugs... and as a result many drug resistant strains LIVE IN HOSPITALS! (Yes, this is a true fact - disinfection is a serious bitch with certain strains of bacteria...)
The longer they keep this new stuff away from the general public, the better it will be in the event we REALLY need it.
The Bells want a lock on local and long distance telephone service. They already have an existing infrastructure which gives them the capability to do that, and an advantage which nobody else had. Now with a lot of broadband penetration, people can use VoIP to sidestep the Bell infrastructure (thus rendering their advantage useless.)
By taxing and hopefully killing VoIP, the bells will thereby be able to maintain their monopoly over local and long distance telephone... which I think won't happen because they still have to compete with wireless carriers. In other words, if they kill VoIP by taxing it to death, they probably won't be using it themselves...
You don't need them to innovate. Just maintain the basic infrastructure (sewer, water, power, copper pairs, co-ax, wireless transmitters, fiber, etc.) Smart people will lease the basics from the city/county for cheap, and innovate on top of them. Want DSL? Pay for a $10 city copper pair, and pay $20 to your choice of DSL ISP. Want phone service? Use the same copper pair, pay for your choice of local carrier.
Of course, you have to write their charter such that some asshole politician wanting kickbacks doesn't sabotage the whole thing by granting exclusive access to some sleazy outfit wanting to milk users for every dime they've got. BTW, which MTA did you work for?
I could be totally mistaken, but I think bcentral is one of their major spamming arms.
It is. I used to be a LinkExchange subscriber, and I was too lazy to cancel my account when Microsoft bought them out. BIG mistake. I soon got bcentral spam from a variety of different sources, and it was impossible to turn it off (unsubscribing does NOTHING.) Anything with bcentral in it now is automatically classed as spam (I have a special spamassassin rule in my prefs for this) and reported.
Special tip for anyone wanting to filter mail by language/country - Spamassassin 1.50 now has that capability (yay!) I just upgraded last weekend, and it's working very nicely.
The problem is that the companies take their profits first before costs are taken out.
That's known as industry standard practice, and it's common practice in the movie business also. But there's no point in bitching about it - if you don't like those terms, negotiate better ones, or don't sign the contract. As monolithic as the movie/music businesses are, you CAN make a living outside the system if you choose to. If you choose to work inside the system, then you live with this kind of shit if you're new, and hope to get enough leverage at some point to get a better contract. Remember, there's no law against accepting a contract that's not in your best interests.
Just a word of advice: You ever hear that no film ever makes money? It's true - everything possible is written off against a film, so there's literally no net (money after expenses and fees) left. That's why if you're smart, you always ask for a cut of gross (total profits before expenses), or cash upfront. NEVER ACCEPT A CUT OF NET! 50% of nothing is still NOTHING. Of course, if you're trying to get people to invest in your film, what are you selling? Why, a cut of the net, of course!
The music/movie businesses aren't like everybody else accounting and contract-wise. They've been playing with money for a very, very, very long time. To them, Enron and Worldcom were run by a bunch of amateurs...
It seems fore likely that an artist is likely to be pirated in proportion to their popularity.
Very good point. Public awareness of the artist would be a definite driver of sales, pirate or otherwise. For the current market in software/music, etc. in the US, I would attribute the marketing blitz that aims to sell product to everyone, regardless of need or income, for driving non-commercial piracy. The analysis for a commercial pirate, on the other hand, would be affected not only by the amount of demand, but by potential profit as well. That's why there are counterfeit copies of Microsoft Word/Windows sold in bulk with retail packaging - high profit margin.
However, if you look at the kinds of street vendors hawking CDs in China (the China model again), they'll sell you collections of everything, and anything - including stuff repackaged to look like the flavor of the week (ie, a generic Pocahantas film by a no-name studio being sold in Disney Pocahantas packaging.) Thus, it isn't inconceivable that someone may bootleg a performance that I might do at a local jazz n blues house, it might get uploaded to Kaaza, and then downloaded by a commercial pirate. From there, my performance would end up a generic track on a generic 1001 blues/jazz MP3 tracks CD, much as freeware and shareware font designers were ripped off during the early to mid nineties by so-called "shovelware" CD producers.
When your overhead and marginal cost are next to nothing, you can afford to sell CDs at such a low cost that any kind of filler helps to increase marginal value. In that case, I'd be surprised if some enterprising soul didn't take to making compilation CDs of MP3s of whatever he could get his hands on (popular acts or unknowns), especially for bandwidth challenged folks.
Basically it boils down to the fact that any public exposure creates the possiblity of recording and distribution that you have no control over. In that situation, if I'm an artist trying to promote my band, I'd make sure I uploaded my MP3s first (ie, official MP3s), with ID3 tags to make sure that when some music/film producer picks up a 1000 track MP3 cd (or DVD as the case may be), my contact info is there. I might not get compensated for the use (I know the piracy is going to happen), but I might be able to get a gig out of it at least.
While I would be filled with glee to see the RIAA and it's parasitic minons take the fall they so richly deserve, there are severely negative aspects to a culture that pirates everything, and pays for very little. The Chinese situation is a unique one in that the primary form of piracy is commercial - I perform a song, and tommorrow my work is being sold on the roadside for a slight markup over blank media. It's the situation before copyright existed - when musicians (like Beethoven) would write knockoffs of their own work at a fever pitch to beat out the guy down the street who was copying his stuff.
Basically, the scenario is diminishing returns where grubby knockoff businessmen with better promotional/distribution networks get to make money off the creative people... which is pretty much exactly the same situation witht the RIAA here, except that here it's legitimized in restrictive contracts that forbid competition.
What's the main difference? With the RIAA, they have an incentive to take care of their master works (master tapes, for film, master negatives) in order to profit from them in the future. The grubby merchant on the corner could give a rat's ass about preserving art/information - he's just out to make a buck, just like those bootleg T-shirt merchants you find at sporting events, and in downtowns everywhere.
In the end, what does this mean? It means that monopolies as we know them would be broken under the Chinese scenario. It also means that the focus would be on production, rather than milking assets. It also means that assets would be worth less than they would under the current system, which might make licensing information easier (faced with making something vs. making nothing, and losing control of the material anyways, I'd think they'd choose making something.)
This poses problems in that a devaluation in the asset means you can't borrow against it (one way companies expand is to leverage their existing library to buy other properties.) If your star dies (ie, Elvis), you can't bank on that property, because of all the ripoffs that will devalue any records/products you put out. This means a big shakeout in terms of overhead - no longer can you support lawyers on staff, etc.
It also depreciates intellectual capital - if you can't bank on the performance of a particular group, then they're worth less to begin with. Instead of getting $250,000 to do a deal, they get $25,000 to do a gig. I can't decide if this means that they'll use more or less marketing to sell product in the face of all that piracy... I'd say at a certain point, they'll just cut back and go local. If that's the case, then they have nothing to lose by opening up their back catalogs, because that material is no longer competing with their big acts, because there won't be any big acts anymore.
Arrgh. Basically, if the Chinese model happens here, a shitload of people will be laid off (some for the better - ie, bloodsucking lawyers and parasitic promo/marketing people, some for the worse - ie, recording engineers and packaging people.) For that reason alone, expect both artists and the existing business interests do whatever it takes to make sure widespread COMMERCIAL piracy stays illegal. As for widespread downloading, that's another issue entirely...
If you've been thinking about cancelling your extra lines (fax/dialup) or your primary phone line (because you have cellular), NOW is the time to do it! Nothing like socking the bells in the pocketbook to make a point (they make oodles of money off of regular voice lines.) Plus, if they get desperate enough, they may very well decide to lease lines to competitors in order to recoup costs on idle infrastructre...
Here's my comment to the FCC (you can submit comments at http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/ecfs/Upload/.) Hell lot of good it will do, but I'm writing my congressman and senator, and whoever the hell else I can get to listen to me.
Is the FCC trying to encourage or destroy competition in the telecommunications industry? Based on the decision to relax line-sharing rules, I'd say that the FCC is trying to quash the last vestige of competition in broadband, and turn it all over to the baby bells, who have systematically tried to exploit their position as local monopolies to shut out competitors.
In case you haven't seen this is what your gift to the bells is being called on Slashdot (www.slashdot.org):
"FCC Abandons Linesharing, Kills DSL Competition"
As a Covad subscriber for several years, I agree with them. I know for a fact that Covad pays MORE for the local loop they lease from Verizon, than I do for my home telephone (they're on separate lines, I'm not using that ADSL on the same line as my regular phone as most folks do.) Couple this with the fact that I can subscribe to a phone service over DSL (www.vonage.com) for an additional $25, and the requirement that a company have to provide both voice and internet in order to lineshare is ridiculous. COMPETITION IS ALREADY HERE - and up until today, it was driving a healthy growth in businesses across the US.
Although I get my local loop from Covad, I get internet access via Speakeasy (www.speakeasy.com). Couple that with regular telephone access via Vonage (www.vonage.com), and I have everything your decision is supposed to encourage. However, the consequence of your decision today gives Verizon (in my area) back their monopoly on voice and data, and destroys these three other businesses. A monopoly, I might add, which in the past has refused to allow number portability, DESPITE my paying a "number portability fee" for many years.
In summary, a data provider need not provide voice for there to be voice competition - all they have to do is provide a high speed connection, and voice competition will use that route to compete (as they already are, for both long distance and local service.) By giving the baby bells the decision they wanted, you have destroyed not only the broadband competition, but also the voice competition that relied on that broadband being available. Why would I subscribe to Vonage, if I used Verizon DSL (which requires that I have Verizon voice service)? I WOULDN'T. Whereas, with Covad, which runs their own loop WITHOUT voice, I can order whatever kind of voice service I want, given enough broadband bandwidth. Just so you know, I pay more for service through Covad/Speakeasy, but their quality of service is justifiably better.
If you doubt that the market has formed the correct impression of your decision (FCC kills broadband on behalf of the baby bells), take a look at Covad stock (COVD): A drop of 39.85% in ONE DAY. Making line-sharing available only to providers that also sell voice is silly and unnecessary, and frankly, incredibly stupid.
KNX 1070 (1070 AM) broadcasts recordings of old radio programs every night at 9pm, and at 2am (a rebroadcast of the 9pm program of the previous night.) Programs like The Shadow, X-1, Box-13, The Jack Benny Show, and the Lone Ranger (among many others - there are two half-hour shows per night on most nights.) I'm personally waiting for them to get around to re-broadcasting Arch Obler's Lights Out series (they change the mix every year or so.) They also post lo-fi recordings of some of the shows on their website.
Companies exist to make money. They want it. To think that they'd willingly hold off on developing a potentially lucrative aspect of their business is simply crazy talk.
The minicomputer makers of the 1970 fell to the micros of the 1980s because they didn't want to belive that the cheaper micros would replace their high margin hardware. The minicomputer makers of the 1980s went the way of the dinosaur in the 1990s, or radically changed, due to me rise of the personal PC. In each case, established companies, with lots of name recognition and deep pockets, who could easily have made the transition (had they really wanted to) put their heads in the ground like ostriches and got their lunch eaten.
Another example. DSL was held up for years because phone companies were pushing ISDN, which billed PER MINUTE during the day (peak hours.) Although penetration of DSL would have landed them a massive market, the established phone monopolies were more than content to milk business customers for the privilege of running a digital connection between them and a ISDN-capable ISP.
Basically, the lesson is that new enterprises may not be as profitable in the short run as milking the shit out of a business you already control. And if you can do more to lock out future competition (tie up suppliers, dry up credit, use vaporware announcement to shatter their market, use FUD, lobby for laws that will raise barrier to entry, etc.) and it was cheaper to do than actually compete, wouldn't you expect these profit oriented companies to do just that?
If there is an incentive to profit by screwing the customer, expect large corporations with little accountability to do exactly that.
I'd rather have local governments sieze the last mile. The damn bastards are already taxing us on the local loop, and I'd rather that money go to maintaining the local loop and enabling competition, rather than feeding a deregulated but still de-facto monopoly interested in stealing me blind. At least with a government-controlled concern, they'll be directly answerable to their customers, rather than a bunch of greedy asshole investment bankers more interested in raping the infrastructure and jacking up rates (see the lesson of Montana Power.)
Seriously, if the last mile is the most expensive and prohibitive part, doesn't it make sense that it should be in the hands of a regulated monopoly, government owned or otherwise?
Actually, I do. It's being produced by a regulated monopoly (LADWP.) However, I like choices, so I'm putting in a 3KW solar power installation to help cut down on the amount of power that I draw from the grid - just in case.
Are you dis-satisfied with your telephone service?
Yep. That's why I'm cancelling my extra lines and going with Vonage IP-based telephony. That's a plus for the deregulated (with local loop sharing by FCC mandate) local telephony markets.
Frankly, I'm less afraid of Palladium (the concept) than I am of the Microsoft groupie/zombies that will push Palladium (the product) onto everybody and everything.
If you believe in choices, don't develop for Palladium - develop for the competition instead, and make your product better, cheaper, faster, and release it earlier. If enough people need to run systems without Palladium, it will die in it's infancy like IBM's Microchannel bus, and Microsoft BOB. Boycott Palladium-laced products, just as people are doing with that DRM-riddled piece of crap that Intuit released as TurboTax.
That's about it. You think the average Joe/Jane is going to consider the greater good over his/her own survival? If the doomsday nuts don't cripple our efforts to avert armageddon, you can bet that self-interest will do a good job of diverting needed resources (ie, California can't spare supply X because the Governor has to protect Californians, Maryland refuses entry to borders because there aren't enough shelters for its own residents, people start looting to get stuff - degenerating into attacks on government installations because they need to blame somebody, etc.)
Seriously, look at the current hysteria over duct tape and plastic sheeting. I'm sure if Tom Ridge didn't come out and immediately tell people not to seal themselves in, we'd have reported cases of suffocation by now. The general populace is stupid (in aggregate) and easily panicked/manipulated. What, you don't think the TV stations wouldn't pull an LA Riots, and display doomsday coverage 24/7, telling everyone they're gonna die, and giving time to nutballs that will further incite panic?
Wait, don't you still need to unlock the XP chips? And while you're unlocking, you should be able to OC the 1600s to something a little hotter, right?
Someone who knows, please clue me in. I've gotten as far as pricing dual athlon systems, but I'm still putting together an ideal (but inexpensive) set of specs...
Hehehe. A good use for traffic shaping. If you saturate the line for more than a few minutes (ie, longer than a burst), you get throttled back to a minimum connection (maybe a few bytes.) Seriously though, I see this as a way of fostering a local community (ie, local filesharing, games, IP telephony, etc.) while enabling some advantages of the internet as a whole (ie, e-mail, newsgroups, world wide web.) Yes, spam will be a problem - don't want people to saturate the link downloading crap. Newsgroups is a problem - the spool sizes are way too big, and there's too much spam. World wide web is a problem - maybe we should set up a proxy to filter out graphics, etc. - ie, a web-lite.
You can't hook up your wireless network point to a 56k modem and share that about.
Why not? Apple's Airport base station has this capability. The meshboxes sold by LocustWorld (as mentioned in the article) are standard PCs adapted for use as low-power, low-heat, high-reliability base stations - I imagine that hacking the stack to route packets from a modem to the rest of the network would be trivial. Even better, forget hacking the meshbox - just set up a NAT with a dialup on the other end, and DHCP access to everybody else on the wireless end.
Sure, it'll be slow as hell. Maybe someone will cache commonly accessed stuff on a daily (or semi-daily) basis to reduce bandwidth load and access time. However 56k is more than enough for basic e-mail, and low-bandwidth web surfing. In the meantime, you build a wireless community that maybe, one day, will have enough users to pony up and put in a leased line, and retire that old 56k modem.:)
SEGA started out as the Japanese subsidiary of an american pinball machine company (Service Entertainment Games of America.) Although the American parent folded, the Japanese company went on to become a major player in the US video games market. Now they're getting back into pinball machines...
Everyone notice the part where you have to pay $250 PER YEAR to participate in this program? I'd feel a lot better about it if it was an internationally agreed upon standard, like UPCs and EANs, and if it was a one-time fee for each block of numbers that you got. $250 a year is no big deal for big outfits, but for small-time publishers who would benefit the most from releasing their work, $250 is a lot of money.
Who wants to bet that some big retailer is going to charge smaller outfits for the privilege of using the big retailer's tracking tags? If I were a small music publisher, I'd cook up my own open-source solution. Form a consortium, charge $50 for a block of 100 numbers & associated database space, create a new IDv3 tag for MP3s & put out code that would allow users to buy music by clicking on the tag. The only reason for the consortium to exist is to keep track of the numberspace (like with UPC and EAN), and help standardize the incorporation of the open-source numberspace into as many pieces of software as possible.
Why give the RIAA another $250 a year to persecute filetraders and destroy fair use rights, when for $50, you can help promote a workable system for buying music on the fly (even streaming music)?
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While you do get memory effect in individual cells, what kills the battery pack is when you start overcharging other cells to make up for the cell that is pulling the pack low. For example, my cordless phone has a 3.6v pack made up of 3 2/3 AA size batteries, each at 1.2v, soldered together in series. It's a much better solution to keep cells in a pack separated so you can swap out cells that due to natural variability, have started pulling the pack either high or low. I've charged packs where two of the 3 cells read 1.4v right after being charged, and the last cell reads 0v due to voltage reversal when the pack was discharged during operation. No way to salvage that without a soldering iron and a spare cell, especially once it starts leaking...
If SSNs were only supposed to be used by the IRS, and the current system is so ripe for abuse, why hasn't there been a law against using SSNs for non-tax purposes? Easy - lobbyists and money. Credit card companies and credit bureaus see SSNs as a godsend. For them, it's cheaper and easier to have a central registry in order to troll for new credit accounts, regardless of the security problems inherent in using SSNs for everything.
Every effort to reduce the power of credit bureaus and protect individual privacy has been defeated or weakened by the credit bureaus and credit issuing companies. Their claim is that a central database tied to everyone's SSN is critical to doing business. Of course, they neglect to mention that they do plenty of business outside of the US without having such a system in place, AND the fact that SSNs are not guaranteed to be unique.
At this point, reasonable souls would start to question whether this is a government for the people, by the people, or a government for big business, buy the politicians! Face it, it won't be until the system is completely broken, with millions of people affected, and with the costs of keeping the current way of doing business too high to continue, that they'll change. By then, it'll be too damn late...
Wasn't that due to weird effects on electronic computers when transiting through hyperspace? Though, why they couldn't have built a massive mechanical calulator is kind of strange...
I don't understand why everyone wants to bring stuff back. Given the costs for lofting stuff into orbit in the first place, a pound of shit (literal organic waste) on the moon, or even LEO is worth more than an equivalent amount of gold on earth. Deorbiting space junk to protect new spacecraft is one thing - trying to capture it in order to recycle it on Earth is ludicrous.
If you really want to reuse materials in space, make sure anything that has to be retired has suffcient stationkeeping fuel to get thrown into a moon/earth orbit, or if you're really rich, enough fuel to make it to one of the Lagrange points, as a way of creating an orbital junkyard outside normal flight paths. As for mining the moon, you'd use those resources in space, not Earth. The best export to Earth would be energy (microwave sats) from power and manufacturing plants built in space from asteroid or moon mining.
If you can get your launch costs down low enough, you could turn the Moon and local space into your "New Frontier", and export technical workers and semi-skilled laborers there. Besides, the nation that manages to control local space, controls the globe (a variant on the English control of the seas back in the 1800s.) No need for nukes if you can just drop rocks on people you don't like, and pelt advanced satellites with frozen waste traveling at a few hundred miles and hour.
We used to encourage industrial and agricultural development. Technical advisors were sent to teach modern planting methods. Grants and loans were provided for chemical fertilizers. But it all stopped. Today, we're content to export food from the US, grown with government subsidies that depress the world price for cash crops below subsistence, rather than have these countries grow their own food. And, rather than set policies that would encourage domestic food production in these impoverished nations, we just cut them a welfare check that barely keeps them above poverty level instead.
And we wonder why they're pissed at us???
Consider how important it is to keep antibiotics in reserve. Previously, Cipro was the last line of defense - and it was used up during the anthrax scare. There's plenty of Cipro to go around, but the usefulness has dropped significantly since the appearance of bacteria resistant to Cipro have appeared.
For those of you who don't remember biology, bacteria resistance is particularly nasty because unrelated kinds of bacteria can actually swap genes for traits (including resistance.) Thus, you could take an incomplete course of antibiotics, and end up with drug-resistant e-coli in your gut (which are harmless.) Then, you catch a nastier infection (say, a bacterial pneumonia), the nasty bacterium manages to swap genes with your drug-resistant e-coli, and WHAM, you've got a deadly infection that is resistant to all available drugs. Hospitals are particularly deadly because they tend to treat the sickest patients with the most advanced drugs... and as a result many drug resistant strains LIVE IN HOSPITALS! (Yes, this is a true fact - disinfection is a serious bitch with certain strains of bacteria...)
The longer they keep this new stuff away from the general public, the better it will be in the event we REALLY need it.
The Bells want a lock on local and long distance telephone service. They already have an existing infrastructure which gives them the capability to do that, and an advantage which nobody else had. Now with a lot of broadband penetration, people can use VoIP to sidestep the Bell infrastructure (thus rendering their advantage useless.)
By taxing and hopefully killing VoIP, the bells will thereby be able to maintain their monopoly over local and long distance telephone... which I think won't happen because they still have to compete with wireless carriers. In other words, if they kill VoIP by taxing it to death, they probably won't be using it themselves...
You don't need them to innovate. Just maintain the basic infrastructure (sewer, water, power, copper pairs, co-ax, wireless transmitters, fiber, etc.) Smart people will lease the basics from the city/county for cheap, and innovate on top of them. Want DSL? Pay for a $10 city copper pair, and pay $20 to your choice of DSL ISP. Want phone service? Use the same copper pair, pay for your choice of local carrier.
Of course, you have to write their charter such that some asshole politician wanting kickbacks doesn't sabotage the whole thing by granting exclusive access to some sleazy outfit wanting to milk users for every dime they've got. BTW, which MTA did you work for?
I could be totally mistaken, but I think bcentral is one of their major spamming arms.
It is. I used to be a LinkExchange subscriber, and I was too lazy to cancel my account when Microsoft bought them out. BIG mistake. I soon got bcentral spam from a variety of different sources, and it was impossible to turn it off (unsubscribing does NOTHING.) Anything with bcentral in it now is automatically classed as spam (I have a special spamassassin rule in my prefs for this) and reported.
Special tip for anyone wanting to filter mail by language/country - Spamassassin 1.50 now has that capability (yay!) I just upgraded last weekend, and it's working very nicely.
The problem is that the companies take their profits first before costs are taken out.
That's known as industry standard practice, and it's common practice in the movie business also. But there's no point in bitching about it - if you don't like those terms, negotiate better ones, or don't sign the contract. As monolithic as the movie/music businesses are, you CAN make a living outside the system if you choose to. If you choose to work inside the system, then you live with this kind of shit if you're new, and hope to get enough leverage at some point to get a better contract. Remember, there's no law against accepting a contract that's not in your best interests.
Just a word of advice: You ever hear that no film ever makes money? It's true - everything possible is written off against a film, so there's literally no net (money after expenses and fees) left. That's why if you're smart, you always ask for a cut of gross (total profits before expenses), or cash upfront. NEVER ACCEPT A CUT OF NET! 50% of nothing is still NOTHING. Of course, if you're trying to get people to invest in your film, what are you selling? Why, a cut of the net, of course!
The music/movie businesses aren't like everybody else accounting and contract-wise. They've been playing with money for a very, very, very long time. To them, Enron and Worldcom were run by a bunch of amateurs...
It seems fore likely that an artist is likely to be pirated in proportion to their popularity.
Very good point. Public awareness of the artist would be a definite driver of sales, pirate or otherwise. For the current market in software/music, etc. in the US, I would attribute the marketing blitz that aims to sell product to everyone, regardless of need or income, for driving non-commercial piracy. The analysis for a commercial pirate, on the other hand, would be affected not only by the amount of demand, but by potential profit as well. That's why there are counterfeit copies of Microsoft Word/Windows sold in bulk with retail packaging - high profit margin.
However, if you look at the kinds of street vendors hawking CDs in China (the China model again), they'll sell you collections of everything, and anything - including stuff repackaged to look like the flavor of the week (ie, a generic Pocahantas film by a no-name studio being sold in Disney Pocahantas packaging.) Thus, it isn't inconceivable that someone may bootleg a performance that I might do at a local jazz n blues house, it might get uploaded to Kaaza, and then downloaded by a commercial pirate. From there, my performance would end up a generic track on a generic 1001 blues/jazz MP3 tracks CD, much as freeware and shareware font designers were ripped off during the early to mid nineties by so-called "shovelware" CD producers.
When your overhead and marginal cost are next to nothing, you can afford to sell CDs at such a low cost that any kind of filler helps to increase marginal value. In that case, I'd be surprised if some enterprising soul didn't take to making compilation CDs of MP3s of whatever he could get his hands on (popular acts or unknowns), especially for bandwidth challenged folks.
Basically it boils down to the fact that any public exposure creates the possiblity of recording and distribution that you have no control over. In that situation, if I'm an artist trying to promote my band, I'd make sure I uploaded my MP3s first (ie, official MP3s), with ID3 tags to make sure that when some music/film producer picks up a 1000 track MP3 cd (or DVD as the case may be), my contact info is there. I might not get compensated for the use (I know the piracy is going to happen), but I might be able to get a gig out of it at least.
While I would be filled with glee to see the RIAA and it's parasitic minons take the fall they so richly deserve, there are severely negative aspects to a culture that pirates everything, and pays for very little. The Chinese situation is a unique one in that the primary form of piracy is commercial - I perform a song, and tommorrow my work is being sold on the roadside for a slight markup over blank media. It's the situation before copyright existed - when musicians (like Beethoven) would write knockoffs of their own work at a fever pitch to beat out the guy down the street who was copying his stuff.
Basically, the scenario is diminishing returns where grubby knockoff businessmen with better promotional/distribution networks get to make money off the creative people... which is pretty much exactly the same situation witht the RIAA here, except that here it's legitimized in restrictive contracts that forbid competition.
What's the main difference? With the RIAA, they have an incentive to take care of their master works (master tapes, for film, master negatives) in order to profit from them in the future. The grubby merchant on the corner could give a rat's ass about preserving art/information - he's just out to make a buck, just like those bootleg T-shirt merchants you find at sporting events, and in downtowns everywhere.
In the end, what does this mean? It means that monopolies as we know them would be broken under the Chinese scenario. It also means that the focus would be on production, rather than milking assets. It also means that assets would be worth less than they would under the current system, which might make licensing information easier (faced with making something vs. making nothing, and losing control of the material anyways, I'd think they'd choose making something.)
This poses problems in that a devaluation in the asset means you can't borrow against it (one way companies expand is to leverage their existing library to buy other properties.) If your star dies (ie, Elvis), you can't bank on that property, because of all the ripoffs that will devalue any records/products you put out. This means a big shakeout in terms of overhead - no longer can you support lawyers on staff, etc.
It also depreciates intellectual capital - if you can't bank on the performance of a particular group, then they're worth less to begin with. Instead of getting $250,000 to do a deal, they get $25,000 to do a gig. I can't decide if this means that they'll use more or less marketing to sell product in the face of all that piracy... I'd say at a certain point, they'll just cut back and go local. If that's the case, then they have nothing to lose by opening up their back catalogs, because that material is no longer competing with their big acts, because there won't be any big acts anymore.
Arrgh. Basically, if the Chinese model happens here, a shitload of people will be laid off (some for the better - ie, bloodsucking lawyers and parasitic promo/marketing people, some for the worse - ie, recording engineers and packaging people.) For that reason alone, expect both artists and the existing business interests do whatever it takes to make sure widespread COMMERCIAL piracy stays illegal. As for widespread downloading, that's another issue entirely...
If you've been thinking about cancelling your extra lines (fax/dialup) or your primary phone line (because you have cellular), NOW is the time to do it! Nothing like socking the bells in the pocketbook to make a point (they make oodles of money off of regular voice lines.) Plus, if they get desperate enough, they may very well decide to lease lines to competitors in order to recoup costs on idle infrastructre...
KNX 1070 (1070 AM) broadcasts recordings of old radio programs every night at 9pm, and at 2am (a rebroadcast of the 9pm program of the previous night.) Programs like The Shadow, X-1, Box-13, The Jack Benny Show, and the Lone Ranger (among many others - there are two half-hour shows per night on most nights.) I'm personally waiting for them to get around to re-broadcasting Arch Obler's Lights Out series (they change the mix every year or so.) They also post lo-fi recordings of some of the shows on their website.
Companies exist to make money. They want it. To think that they'd willingly hold off on developing a potentially lucrative aspect of their business is simply crazy talk.
The minicomputer makers of the 1970 fell to the micros of the 1980s because they didn't want to belive that the cheaper micros would replace their high margin hardware. The minicomputer makers of the 1980s went the way of the dinosaur in the 1990s, or radically changed, due to me rise of the personal PC. In each case, established companies, with lots of name recognition and deep pockets, who could easily have made the transition (had they really wanted to) put their heads in the ground like ostriches and got their lunch eaten.
Another example. DSL was held up for years because phone companies were pushing ISDN, which billed PER MINUTE during the day (peak hours.) Although penetration of DSL would have landed them a massive market, the established phone monopolies were more than content to milk business customers for the privilege of running a digital connection between them and a ISDN-capable ISP.
Basically, the lesson is that new enterprises may not be as profitable in the short run as milking the shit out of a business you already control. And if you can do more to lock out future competition (tie up suppliers, dry up credit, use vaporware announcement to shatter their market, use FUD, lobby for laws that will raise barrier to entry, etc.) and it was cheaper to do than actually compete, wouldn't you expect these profit oriented companies to do just that?
If there is an incentive to profit by screwing the customer, expect large corporations with little accountability to do exactly that.
I'd rather have local governments sieze the last mile. The damn bastards are already taxing us on the local loop, and I'd rather that money go to maintaining the local loop and enabling competition, rather than feeding a deregulated but still de-facto monopoly interested in stealing me blind. At least with a government-controlled concern, they'll be directly answerable to their customers, rather than a bunch of greedy asshole investment bankers more interested in raping the infrastructure and jacking up rates (see the lesson of Montana Power.)
Seriously, if the last mile is the most expensive and prohibitive part, doesn't it make sense that it should be in the hands of a regulated monopoly, government owned or otherwise?
Billy Joe! You overclocked your brain didn't you? Don't bother denying it young man, I see the steam coming out of your ears!
Don't like the price you pay for electic power?
Actually, I do. It's being produced by a regulated monopoly (LADWP.) However, I like choices, so I'm putting in a 3KW solar power installation to help cut down on the amount of power that I draw from the grid - just in case.
Are you dis-satisfied with your telephone service?
Yep. That's why I'm cancelling my extra lines and going with Vonage IP-based telephony. That's a plus for the deregulated (with local loop sharing by FCC mandate) local telephony markets.
Frankly, I'm less afraid of Palladium (the concept) than I am of the Microsoft groupie/zombies that will push Palladium (the product) onto everybody and everything.
If you believe in choices, don't develop for Palladium - develop for the competition instead, and make your product better, cheaper, faster, and release it earlier. If enough people need to run systems without Palladium, it will die in it's infancy like IBM's Microchannel bus, and Microsoft BOB. Boycott Palladium-laced products, just as people are doing with that DRM-riddled piece of crap that Intuit released as TurboTax.
That's about it. You think the average Joe/Jane is going to consider the greater good over his/her own survival? If the doomsday nuts don't cripple our efforts to avert armageddon, you can bet that self-interest will do a good job of diverting needed resources (ie, California can't spare supply X because the Governor has to protect Californians, Maryland refuses entry to borders because there aren't enough shelters for its own residents, people start looting to get stuff - degenerating into attacks on government installations because they need to blame somebody, etc.)
Seriously, look at the current hysteria over duct tape and plastic sheeting. I'm sure if Tom Ridge didn't come out and immediately tell people not to seal themselves in, we'd have reported cases of suffocation by now. The general populace is stupid (in aggregate) and easily panicked/manipulated. What, you don't think the TV stations wouldn't pull an LA Riots, and display doomsday coverage 24/7, telling everyone they're gonna die, and giving time to nutballs that will further incite panic?
Wait, don't you still need to unlock the XP chips? And while you're unlocking, you should be able to OC the 1600s to something a little hotter, right?
Someone who knows, please clue me in. I've gotten as far as pricing dual athlon systems, but I'm still putting together an ideal (but inexpensive) set of specs...
Hehehe. A good use for traffic shaping. If you saturate the line for more than a few minutes (ie, longer than a burst), you get throttled back to a minimum connection (maybe a few bytes.) Seriously though, I see this as a way of fostering a local community (ie, local filesharing, games, IP telephony, etc.) while enabling some advantages of the internet as a whole (ie, e-mail, newsgroups, world wide web.) Yes, spam will be a problem - don't want people to saturate the link downloading crap. Newsgroups is a problem - the spool sizes are way too big, and there's too much spam. World wide web is a problem - maybe we should set up a proxy to filter out graphics, etc. - ie, a web-lite.
:)
But connecting via modem can be done!
You can't hook up your wireless network point to a 56k modem and share that about.
:)
Why not? Apple's Airport base station has this capability. The meshboxes sold by LocustWorld (as mentioned in the article) are standard PCs adapted for use as low-power, low-heat, high-reliability base stations - I imagine that hacking the stack to route packets from a modem to the rest of the network would be trivial. Even better, forget hacking the meshbox - just set up a NAT with a dialup on the other end, and DHCP access to everybody else on the wireless end.
Sure, it'll be slow as hell. Maybe someone will cache commonly accessed stuff on a daily (or semi-daily) basis to reduce bandwidth load and access time. However 56k is more than enough for basic e-mail, and low-bandwidth web surfing. In the meantime, you build a wireless community that maybe, one day, will have enough users to pony up and put in a leased line, and retire that old 56k modem.
SEGA started out as the Japanese subsidiary of an american pinball machine company (Service Entertainment Games of America.) Although the American parent folded, the Japanese company went on to become a major player in the US video games market. Now they're getting back into pinball machines...
Everyone notice the part where you have to pay $250 PER YEAR to participate in this program? I'd feel a lot better about it if it was an internationally agreed upon standard, like UPCs and EANs, and if it was a one-time fee for each block of numbers that you got. $250 a year is no big deal for big outfits, but for small-time publishers who would benefit the most from releasing their work, $250 is a lot of money.
Who wants to bet that some big retailer is going to charge smaller outfits for the privilege of using the big retailer's tracking tags? If I were a small music publisher, I'd cook up my own open-source solution. Form a consortium, charge $50 for a block of 100 numbers & associated database space, create a new IDv3 tag for MP3s & put out code that would allow users to buy music by clicking on the tag. The only reason for the consortium to exist is to keep track of the numberspace (like with UPC and EAN), and help standardize the incorporation of the open-source numberspace into as many pieces of software as possible.
Why give the RIAA another $250 a year to persecute filetraders and destroy fair use rights, when for $50, you can help promote a workable system for buying music on the fly (even streaming music)?