Another way of looking at this is that the US dollar is in freefall against the Euro and other major currencies. The shift between the US and Canadian dollars reflects this new reality. That said, I suspect Forex traders are caught up in the euphoria of parity. The Canadian dollar might well dip significantly below $1 American again as the rush of breathless media attention dries up and currency traders take their profits and run. This certainly isn't good news for Canadian manufacturers - I run a little electronics company that sells 90% of our goods in the USA. We have raised some prices by as much as 30% over the past five years, just to maintain margins. However, our customers don't necessarily see it that way - they think we're getting greedy. To keep things from getting out of hand, we've moved some production to China and started to source North American components in the USA, rather than dealing with Canadian distributors. That's not good news for our economy.
There are many cases when an online presentation won't cut it. I've often found myself without a network connection when visiting a potential client, especially when dealing with large corporations. I've also found that the network drop in boardrooms seems to have befriended Schroedinger's Cat - sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. Wireless may or may not be an issue, depending on the organization. And I've been in several secure nuclear facilities where the mere mention of a wireless network makes everyone start twitching and glancing nervously at the walls. I can only imagine the rectal probing I'd get for asking them for a network connection so I could run an online presentation app.
Well its not like you can only apply the power gradually like a petrol engine. My understanding is that when you turn an electric engine on, that's it, full power full torque.
I also owned one of those cheap slot car sets that would only do full power or off. Luckily, things are slightly different in the real world. Just imagine what would happen if you applied full throttle to the electric engine of your Prius in a parking lot every time you wanted to back out of your spot.
Why on earth would three "businessmen" bother to take their iPhones abroad but switched off? These are expensive gadgets, and if I wasn't planning to use my iPhone on my trip to Tangiers I would simply leave it and its charger at home.
The tracking devices were attached to collect evidence. The smart thing would have been to leave them attached and continue life in a nice, law abiding fashion. Instead, Mr. Dimwit rips the bloody things out of the cars and tries to sell 'em. Duh.
its a pretty dismal state of affairs in the UK, and it seems to be repeating itself in the EU and in the colonies.
Do they still teach you that Great Britain has colonies? Time to get a new map of the world. The antique one is pretty, but we prefer to refer to your "colonies" by their modern names. Some of the most popular include India, Canada, and the United States of America.
Isn't Pandora an internet radio station? If so, I'm not sure why you're comparing their royalty rates to purchase rates. The primary issue with Allofmp3.com is that they haven't actually licensed the product they're selling. They're bootlegging CDs and selling digital copies internationally. It would be much like photocopying the latest Harry Potter book, selling it for a couple of dollars and making a token payment to some "licensing authority" in an attempt to legitimize what you're doing.
The big problem is that the amount paid to ROMS is incredibly small and has not been negotiated with the rights holders or artists. The standard US mechanical copyright rate paid to an *artist* (not the record label) is 9.1 cents per song, or 1.75 cents per minute (whichever is more). Allofmp3.com is able to sell content for less because they're ripping their content from commercial CDs (if you're lucky) and not paying the guys and girls who worked their butts off to make it.
The "we pay royalties to ROMS" claim is a smokescreen to hide the fact that allofmp3.com is not paying enough money to the creators to actually sustain their work. It's easy to dismiss the rights holders as "a bunch of rich musicians" who aren't earning a few extra million, but the cold reality is that most moderately successful recording artists find it incredibly hard to earn a decent living in a fickle and competitive industry.
You're not going to have much of a choice but to change once oil costs $10 a gallon and your vapid "management" job vaporizes. It'll take you most of the afternoon to hitch a horse up to your Hummer and ride through your godforsaken urban wasteland to get to the nearest Wal-Mart.
You're projecting the present onto the future. The future should not be filled with the cars that we have now, simply running on a different kind of fuel. You can't build roads out of hydrogen. You can't make plastic out of hydrogen. There's a lot more to solving the fossil fuel crisis that simply shifting to a different fuel for internal combustion and continuing to live our suburban lifestyle. The vision of a Utopian hydrogen economy is appealing because it doesn't seem to involve any sacrifice or major behavioral shifts.
Do you get the feeling that manufacturers are stumbling around in the dark a bit when it comes to replacing the 'classic' automobile? "Gosh, Juergen... let's run our century old internal combustion engine on a new fuel! We should make it unnecessarily large and capable of blinding (and unnecessary) performance! Ausgezeichnet!!" and off they go to spend millions on an idea that isn't sensible in the grand scheme of things. It would be far better to rethink the automobile altogether. It's possible to design something very small and lightweight - like the www.twike.com - except with the benefit of hundreds of millions of euros design and research. A true "personal" vehicle would be far easier to propel with electricity or extremely small internal combustion engines. It would also require significantly less fossil fuel to manufacture (because we can't make plastic out of hydrogen...)
I can hear the naysayers now: "But it'd get squashed by a Hummer." or, "I need a high performance car." But the reality is that *if* scientists are right and we've reached Peak Oil, fuel is going to get incredibly expensive and shortages will become a regular occurrence. Once that happens, companies will start to aggressively compete to create a solution and the car will evolve into something that fits the new reality of a fossil fuel depleted world.
I don't think adapting existing designs t hydrogen is the answer for one moment - the infrastructure would cost billions, the technology would cost billions, and it doesn't solve the root problems: 1. Our transportation devices are wasteful and 2. We're turning a blind eye to the benefits of mass transportation, and 3. Planned obsolescence has trained generations of vehicle purchasers to devalue six or seven year old cars as "old" and replace them unnecessarily.
I bought one of these Dells for my wife a couple of days ago. It's absolutely perfect for what she needs. I'll install Open Office Thunderbird and Firefox for her, and forget about it. But that's about as low-end as I'd be willing to go. Saving an extra $100 at Wal-Mart to purchase a dubiously underpowered cut-rate machine seems like false economy. It'll need replacing in no time, will never give reasonably snappy performance while performing basic tasks, and is probably more failure prone because of cheap parts.
I'm waiting for the day that someone like Oprah launches a movement based on the old-fashioned idea of buying quality . It'll be the logical continuation of the anti-China backlash that seems to be catching hold in the food, tech and even auto industries in the USA.
"...a $275 free upgrade to 2GB memory and a 160-GB hard drive is available for Windows only."
Dell makes a fortune on upgrades, and this little "freebie" highlights that. Swapping out an 80GB HD for a 160GB model should cost all of about $10, given today's prices, and a 1GB stick of RAM can be had retail for around $70. That leaves about $200 on the table. Far better to build your own machine to run Ubuntu, especially since you can never be sure what brand components Dell will ship in your box.
"intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."
A couple of observations:
1. If people were actually forced to buy the 'intellectual property' that they currently copy illegally, I suspect that the vast majority would not or could not. Therefore, there would be no economic or social benefit to preventing illegal media and software distribution. In fact, you could argue that it would do social harm by limiting access to music and films. On the other hand, not preventing armed robberies would have very real and nasty social and economic consequences.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
3. I suspect that the bulk of that "hundreds of billions" would be going to a few very large companies that are already making extremely high profits. Making a monopoly stronger through punitive legislation is probably not in the public best interest.
You sound like an ideal candidate for an address book. A decent pocket-sized one costs less than $10 and has an interface quite similar to a tablet PC. It's non-volatile, doesn't require batteries, and has infinite graphic resolution. Heck, mine is even encrypted, because I'm the only person capable of reading my illegible scrawl.
The word tundra comes from the Finnish word for barren or treeless land. You're not going to be growing much in a tundra rock field that's capable of supporting little more than lichen in the sparse soil. Personally, I'm going to buy a few acres somewhere in Sussex and wait for the polar ice caps to melt so I can flood my rice paddies.;)
Strictly speaking, Apples are PCs. In the past, there were significant architectural differences between the Intel/AMD and PowerPC platforms and it was fair to separate them into different camps. These days, the differences between a MacOS and Windows notebook boil down to some industrial design and the operating system. Consequently, it stands to reason that prices should be similar. Because of Apple's proprietary OS, they have the luxury of avoiding the extreme low-end market -- it's not worth trying to sell an Apple notebook for $600, because of squeezed margins.
You're a bit of an anomaly, with only a single 13 year-old car. Most families own two (or even three) vehicles, and fuel costs are only part of the expense. When dealing with a newish car, don't forget to add $1500 for annual insurance, $5000 for car payments and another $300 for repairs, oil changes and so on. If there are two cars in a typical driveway, that equates to about $13,600 a year PLUS fuel. We waste vast amounts of money on our shiny metal boxes.:)
(1) they overheat in closed fixtures
More so than incandescents, which are notoriously inefficient and VERY hot.
You misunderstand: The installation instructions on CF bulbs specifically tell you not to install in a closed fixture because the bulb will not function correctly at high temperatures. You'll end up with reduced brightness and severely shortened lifespan.
I think the widespread banning of incandescents might accelerate the rush to develop more powerful and affordable LED lamps (although these are extremely complicated to manufacture). My concern is that CF bulbs require substantially more energy to manufacture, and nowhere in North America seems to have proper disposal facilities. They have other problems, too: (1) they overheat in closed fixtures. This might force people to replace perfectly good ceiling fixtures - hardly environmental. (2) CF bulbs are not designed for short on cycles. They're a poor choice for a hallway where the light is only turned on for a minute or two, or in a laundry room. (3) no matter what manufacturers claim, they just don't give the same warm light as incandescents - although this is something we'll get used to.
My biggest fear is that we're simply shifting energy consumption to the manufacturing/disposal part of the product lifecycle (and why the hell are these "green" bulbs sold in plastic blister packs?).
The Second Amendment was drafted in 1789 and much has changed in the world since then. To hold a section of the Bill of Rights above your head and declare that it should bestow a particular right upon a group of humans forever just because they happen to have been born in the middle third of North America is utterly illogical. There were no automatic or semi-automatic weapons in the 18th Century, and it was conceivable that a group of a few thousand armed and motivated farmers could sack the White House should the need arise. Those days are long gone, unless you're willing to ensure that private citizens also have the right to drive battle tanks and possess tactical nuclear weapons.
TGV is an intercity train, so in reality the concept of a train station is not really that different from an airport. The big advantage that train stations have is that they take up much less space and there are usually train lines that run into the center of most cities. I'd much rather take a train from city center to city center than make my way to a sprawling airport on the outskirts (probably on a commuter train... oh, the irony).
Everyone seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of AAC vs MP3 without considering what happens to that extra 30 cents that iTunes will be charging for non-encumbered songs. I suspect very little of that extra profit will be going to Apple, which means that EMI is probably pulling in about twice as much per track once expenses and royalties are figured in. Is any of that money shared with the artist? I can see EMI arguing that the 30% premium is intended to offset increased piracy, but in that case the artists should be compensated as well.
I was discussing the Star Wars post boxes with someone a few days ago. We both think they're extremely clever, but they're also a rather strange bit of corporate advertising by the United States Postal Service. It didn't take long before one of us wondered if this is yet another sign that things have slipped a bit too far in favor of the service sector as far as the US economy goes. After all, the post office really doesn't have any reason to promote a film franchise (yes, I know it's an anniversary celebration and all... but it still leaves a strange taste in my mouth)
Slashdot Mirror
Another way of looking at this is that the US dollar is in freefall against the Euro and other major currencies. The shift between the US and Canadian dollars reflects this new reality. That said, I suspect Forex traders are caught up in the euphoria of parity. The Canadian dollar might well dip significantly below $1 American again as the rush of breathless media attention dries up and currency traders take their profits and run. This certainly isn't good news for Canadian manufacturers - I run a little electronics company that sells 90% of our goods in the USA. We have raised some prices by as much as 30% over the past five years, just to maintain margins. However, our customers don't necessarily see it that way - they think we're getting greedy. To keep things from getting out of hand, we've moved some production to China and started to source North American components in the USA, rather than dealing with Canadian distributors. That's not good news for our economy.
There are many cases when an online presentation won't cut it. I've often found myself without a network connection when visiting a potential client, especially when dealing with large corporations. I've also found that the network drop in boardrooms seems to have befriended Schroedinger's Cat - sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. Wireless may or may not be an issue, depending on the organization. And I've been in several secure nuclear facilities where the mere mention of a wireless network makes everyone start twitching and glancing nervously at the walls. I can only imagine the rectal probing I'd get for asking them for a network connection so I could run an online presentation app.
Well its not like you can only apply the power gradually like a petrol engine. My understanding is that when you turn an electric engine on, that's it, full power full torque.
I also owned one of those cheap slot car sets that would only do full power or off. Luckily, things are slightly different in the real world. Just imagine what would happen if you applied full throttle to the electric engine of your Prius in a parking lot every time you wanted to back out of your spot.
Why on earth would three "businessmen" bother to take their iPhones abroad but switched off? These are expensive gadgets, and if I wasn't planning to use my iPhone on my trip to Tangiers I would simply leave it and its charger at home.
The tracking devices were attached to collect evidence. The smart thing would have been to leave them attached and continue life in a nice, law abiding fashion. Instead, Mr. Dimwit rips the bloody things out of the cars and tries to sell 'em. Duh.
its a pretty dismal state of affairs in the UK, and it seems to be repeating itself in the EU and in the colonies.
Do they still teach you that Great Britain has colonies? Time to get a new map of the world. The antique one is pretty, but we prefer to refer to your "colonies" by their modern names. Some of the most popular include India, Canada, and the United States of America.Isn't Pandora an internet radio station? If so, I'm not sure why you're comparing their royalty rates to purchase rates. The primary issue with Allofmp3.com is that they haven't actually licensed the product they're selling. They're bootlegging CDs and selling digital copies internationally. It would be much like photocopying the latest Harry Potter book, selling it for a couple of dollars and making a token payment to some "licensing authority" in an attempt to legitimize what you're doing.
The big problem is that the amount paid to ROMS is incredibly small and has not been negotiated with the rights holders or artists. The standard US mechanical copyright rate paid to an *artist* (not the record label) is 9.1 cents per song, or 1.75 cents per minute (whichever is more). Allofmp3.com is able to sell content for less because they're ripping their content from commercial CDs (if you're lucky) and not paying the guys and girls who worked their butts off to make it.
The "we pay royalties to ROMS" claim is a smokescreen to hide the fact that allofmp3.com is not paying enough money to the creators to actually sustain their work. It's easy to dismiss the rights holders as "a bunch of rich musicians" who aren't earning a few extra million, but the cold reality is that most moderately successful recording artists find it incredibly hard to earn a decent living in a fickle and competitive industry.
You're not going to have much of a choice but to change once oil costs $10 a gallon and your vapid "management" job vaporizes. It'll take you most of the afternoon to hitch a horse up to your Hummer and ride through your godforsaken urban wasteland to get to the nearest Wal-Mart.
You're projecting the present onto the future. The future should not be filled with the cars that we have now, simply running on a different kind of fuel. You can't build roads out of hydrogen. You can't make plastic out of hydrogen. There's a lot more to solving the fossil fuel crisis that simply shifting to a different fuel for internal combustion and continuing to live our suburban lifestyle. The vision of a Utopian hydrogen economy is appealing because it doesn't seem to involve any sacrifice or major behavioral shifts.
Do you get the feeling that manufacturers are stumbling around in the dark a bit when it comes to replacing the 'classic' automobile? "Gosh, Juergen... let's run our century old internal combustion engine on a new fuel! We should make it unnecessarily large and capable of blinding (and unnecessary) performance! Ausgezeichnet!!" and off they go to spend millions on an idea that isn't sensible in the grand scheme of things. It would be far better to rethink the automobile altogether. It's possible to design something very small and lightweight - like the www.twike.com - except with the benefit of hundreds of millions of euros design and research. A true "personal" vehicle would be far easier to propel with electricity or extremely small internal combustion engines. It would also require significantly less fossil fuel to manufacture (because we can't make plastic out of hydrogen...)
I can hear the naysayers now: "But it'd get squashed by a Hummer." or, "I need a high performance car." But the reality is that *if* scientists are right and we've reached Peak Oil, fuel is going to get incredibly expensive and shortages will become a regular occurrence. Once that happens, companies will start to aggressively compete to create a solution and the car will evolve into something that fits the new reality of a fossil fuel depleted world.
I don't think adapting existing designs t hydrogen is the answer for one moment - the infrastructure would cost billions, the technology would cost billions, and it doesn't solve the root problems: 1. Our transportation devices are wasteful and 2. We're turning a blind eye to the benefits of mass transportation, and 3. Planned obsolescence has trained generations of vehicle purchasers to devalue six or seven year old cars as "old" and replace them unnecessarily.I bought one of these Dells for my wife a couple of days ago. It's absolutely perfect for what she needs. I'll install Open Office Thunderbird and Firefox for her, and forget about it. But that's about as low-end as I'd be willing to go. Saving an extra $100 at Wal-Mart to purchase a dubiously underpowered cut-rate machine seems like false economy. It'll need replacing in no time, will never give reasonably snappy performance while performing basic tasks, and is probably more failure prone because of cheap parts.
I'm waiting for the day that someone like Oprah launches a movement based on the old-fashioned idea of buying quality . It'll be the logical continuation of the anti-China backlash that seems to be catching hold in the food, tech and even auto industries in the USA.
"...a $275 free upgrade to 2GB memory and a 160-GB hard drive is available for Windows only." Dell makes a fortune on upgrades, and this little "freebie" highlights that. Swapping out an 80GB HD for a 160GB model should cost all of about $10, given today's prices, and a 1GB stick of RAM can be had retail for around $70. That leaves about $200 on the table. Far better to build your own machine to run Ubuntu, especially since you can never be sure what brand components Dell will ship in your box.
"intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."
A couple of observations:
1. If people were actually forced to buy the 'intellectual property' that they currently copy illegally, I suspect that the vast majority would not or could not. Therefore, there would be no economic or social benefit to preventing illegal media and software distribution. In fact, you could argue that it would do social harm by limiting access to music and films. On the other hand, not preventing armed robberies would have very real and nasty social and economic consequences.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
3. I suspect that the bulk of that "hundreds of billions" would be going to a few very large companies that are already making extremely high profits. Making a monopoly stronger through punitive legislation is probably not in the public best interest.
You sound like an ideal candidate for an address book. A decent pocket-sized one costs less than $10 and has an interface quite similar to a tablet PC. It's non-volatile, doesn't require batteries, and has infinite graphic resolution. Heck, mine is even encrypted, because I'm the only person capable of reading my illegible scrawl.
The word tundra comes from the Finnish word for barren or treeless land. You're not going to be growing much in a tundra rock field that's capable of supporting little more than lichen in the sparse soil. Personally, I'm going to buy a few acres somewhere in Sussex and wait for the polar ice caps to melt so I can flood my rice paddies. ;)
Strictly speaking, Apples are PCs. In the past, there were significant architectural differences between the Intel/AMD and PowerPC platforms and it was fair to separate them into different camps. These days, the differences between a MacOS and Windows notebook boil down to some industrial design and the operating system. Consequently, it stands to reason that prices should be similar. Because of Apple's proprietary OS, they have the luxury of avoiding the extreme low-end market -- it's not worth trying to sell an Apple notebook for $600, because of squeezed margins.
You're a bit of an anomaly, with only a single 13 year-old car. Most families own two (or even three) vehicles, and fuel costs are only part of the expense. When dealing with a newish car, don't forget to add $1500 for annual insurance, $5000 for car payments and another $300 for repairs, oil changes and so on. If there are two cars in a typical driveway, that equates to about $13,600 a year PLUS fuel. We waste vast amounts of money on our shiny metal boxes. :)
I think the widespread banning of incandescents might accelerate the rush to develop more powerful and affordable LED lamps (although these are extremely complicated to manufacture). My concern is that CF bulbs require substantially more energy to manufacture, and nowhere in North America seems to have proper disposal facilities. They have other problems, too: (1) they overheat in closed fixtures. This might force people to replace perfectly good ceiling fixtures - hardly environmental. (2) CF bulbs are not designed for short on cycles. They're a poor choice for a hallway where the light is only turned on for a minute or two, or in a laundry room. (3) no matter what manufacturers claim, they just don't give the same warm light as incandescents - although this is something we'll get used to.
My biggest fear is that we're simply shifting energy consumption to the manufacturing/disposal part of the product lifecycle (and why the hell are these "green" bulbs sold in plastic blister packs?).
The Second Amendment was drafted in 1789 and much has changed in the world since then. To hold a section of the Bill of Rights above your head and declare that it should bestow a particular right upon a group of humans forever just because they happen to have been born in the middle third of North America is utterly illogical. There were no automatic or semi-automatic weapons in the 18th Century, and it was conceivable that a group of a few thousand armed and motivated farmers could sack the White House should the need arise. Those days are long gone, unless you're willing to ensure that private citizens also have the right to drive battle tanks and possess tactical nuclear weapons.
Don't worry, you'll get five minute's warning just like everybody else.
TGV is an intercity train, so in reality the concept of a train station is not really that different from an airport. The big advantage that train stations have is that they take up much less space and there are usually train lines that run into the center of most cities. I'd much rather take a train from city center to city center than make my way to a sprawling airport on the outskirts (probably on a commuter train... oh, the irony).
Everyone seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of AAC vs MP3 without considering what happens to that extra 30 cents that iTunes will be charging for non-encumbered songs. I suspect very little of that extra profit will be going to Apple, which means that EMI is probably pulling in about twice as much per track once expenses and royalties are figured in. Is any of that money shared with the artist? I can see EMI arguing that the 30% premium is intended to offset increased piracy, but in that case the artists should be compensated as well.
I was discussing the Star Wars post boxes with someone a few days ago. We both think they're extremely clever, but they're also a rather strange bit of corporate advertising by the United States Postal Service. It didn't take long before one of us wondered if this is yet another sign that things have slipped a bit too far in favor of the service sector as far as the US economy goes. After all, the post office really doesn't have any reason to promote a film franchise (yes, I know it's an anniversary celebration and all... but it still leaves a strange taste in my mouth)