Let's give a catchy buzzword to a non existant problem so that we can attract the masses of clueless people to the concept who will inevitably post questions all about the net in an attempt to gain access to this "Skypecasting" which will lead to the creation of one or two small skypecasting applications which will inevitably draw the attention of the media companies who will see it as a massive problem plaguing their business and inevitably bring about lawsuits and laws which serve to do nothing other than make life more difficult and suckier for the common man.
Way to link to an article from a year ago talking about specificaly HDD based MP3 players. Got anything current? And are you saying then that you are talking specificaly about HDD based MP3 players? BTW, I dunno what economics books you've been reading, but demand curves always slope down. Further more:
To get even more technical, Apple clearly has monopoly control of the market because they are able to maintain pricing at levels significantly higher than all of their competitors without significant technical differentiation.
So then would you say Apple has a monopoly on computers as well?
Yes. You really seem to be hung up on your misunderstanding of the RIAA members' monopoly as it applies to the market of music sales. RIAA members have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the most popular music. If their copyright was not legal sanctioned, they would have long ago been forced to allow secondary sources of the music they own the copyright for.
It's legaly sanctioned only because of the contracts which the music creators signed. The RIAA members negotiated and bought those rights. They are market players as much as anyone else is. The RIAA maintains a monopoly over music rights because no one else can compete or is willing to compete. But that is irellevant as your original claim was that the RIAA is a legaly mandated monopoly. If another group of distributors wanted to buy up music rights and provide the services the RIAA does to artists, they could (especially with some well placed maneuvers) oust the RIAA from it's monopoly status just like any other business.
Furthermore, the RIAA could not be forced to allow secondary sources, unless and until congress denies the right of the creator to transfer or assign the copyright which they own (and by the way retain when their contract with the RIAA expires).
No matter how many times you say this, it is still false.
DRM is holding the industry back. I also feel it's a nessesary evil at the moment to drag the industry forward. I also feel that the unwillingness of Apple's competitors to use the fact that Apple has majority control and is playing hardball to their advantage to negotiate better deals for their customers is an example of companies unwillingness to truely compete with Apple and the iPod.
As I stated before - 90%+ control of a market is the definition of monopoly. If you don't know your terms, you clearly aren't qualified to have an opinion.
And if you don't know your numbers you aren't qualified to have an opinion. Apple does not have 90%+ control. No figures that I have seen, even Apple's own give them that much of the market. Furthermore, you keep bandying that number about without specifying which market. MP3 players? AAC players? Music distribution? Which market?
No they are not anything of the kind. The RIAA's monopoly is in their copyright of the music - they have a monopoly on copies of the music. Apple sells hardware and services, there are no copies. Again it sounds like you are unfamiliar with the terms of the debate - copyright is a government granted monopoly, a fact that the supreme court has explicitly acknowledged many times.
You do not seem to understand copyright. Copyright is a monopoly cranted to the creator of the work in question. The RIAA has no exclusive right except that granted by the creator. As such, the RIAA is merely a market player in a market full of mini monopolies, and the RIAA is consuming these mini monopolies to sell a finished product. The RIAA is not granted copyrights by congress or any act of law other then contract law which allows the creator to give away or license that copyright to another individual or company. In short, the RIAA dominates the market for music copyrights, which are a comodity. The RIAA's monopoly appearance is merely due to the fact that they own so many copyrights. Would you call a tiny startup record company a monopoly in the same way you refer to the RIAA? If not why not?
To make the point a bit clearer, the RIAA does not automaticaly have exclusive control over the rights to music I produce. Granted the contract 99.9% of all artists sign make it so, but there is no legal binding other than that contract which gives the RIAA exclusive rights. If I so chose and were to inclined, I could concieveably negotiate a contract where by both an RIAA member (note the RIAA does not own any copyrights itself) and another distribution house would both have rights to my music.
You have taken the first two steps, but ignored the third. It is inherent in any unregulated monopoly, and even most regulated ones, that the "extreme power over the market" will be abused to maintain artifically high pricing.
Only if the barrier to entry is too great to allow for any new competition. The funny thing about monopolies is that they're our favorite until all the competition gives up, then we attack them for doing what they would normaly do in a competative market. Furthermore, the prices are only artificialy high IF there is a competitor willing to provide the same product that the market wants and willing and able to provide it at a lower price, but is unable to due to some artificial barrier to entry. Lack of competition does not make artificialy high prices. If no one wants to compete, or if no one can compete, then that is the market price.
Doh! I had no clue. Of course it was my point -- the guy asked if Apple would ever make a change that would reduce their monopoly control, and I said no they would not make such a change unless they had already lost monopoly control.
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point.
Distribute RIAA files copy protected and distribute non RIAA files unprotected. Then, use the fact that the sales numbers vary and demonstrate that this varience is due to the unprotected nature of the files, and then demonstrate that by distributing through real in such a way the industry can reach 100% of the MP3 player market.
The difference is that the RIAA copyright cartel is legally mandated by the constitution and congress. Apple's monopoly is the result of market domination. It is generally understood that monopolies that arise from market domination are not beneficial for anyone but the monopoly holder. Whether the copyright monopoly is good or bad is irrelevant, it is unfortunately 100% legal.
1) Apple is not a monopoly. They are the majority player in the market but hardly a monopoly.
2) I don't know what constitution or congress you've been paying attention to but the RIAA is not legally mandated at all. The existance of copyright as a right cranted to creators such as song writers and musicians is constitutionaly mandated. The right to transfer that copyright to another individual or corporation such as sony, a member of the RIAA, is legaly allowed. But the RIAA is nothing more than a collection of various copyright holders who have recieved the copy rights to certain creative works from the original creators who have chosen by free will to associate with each other and combine resources to protect their interests. Nothing about the RIAA is constitutionaly mandadted. The RIAA is a monopoly in the same way that Apple is a monopoly, they are the market leader and market dominator. Note this does mean that the RIAA is not a monopoly in the true sense of the word just the dominate market player.
3) It is not understood that monopolies caused by having market dominence is bad. What is understood is that having a monopoly grants a company extreme power over the market and there is great potential to abuse that power, but having a monopoly is not inherrently bad. Remember a monopoly is not an undefeatable monolith, nor is it something that can necessarily be constant in it's power. A monopoly can fall from sheer ignorance of consumer demand or from a failure to recognize the shift of the market.
Of course not, that's because Apple has a monopoly, they would not need to no matter how the ipod users "clamored." If they actually lost sales because of it, then that would mean they no longer hold an effective monopoly.
Um, you do realize you just described how a monopoly loses it's monopoly status. A competitor comes along and offers what the market demands. Again, Apple is not a monopoly they are merely a major market player. Anyone can unseat Apple by providing a better product that the market wants
Apple doesn't have monopoly control. They have majority. But again then, if real is not larger than a gnat, even despite the fact that they offer RIAA music, then clearly if real wants to get in on the iPod scene, they need to try a different tact.
Piss off the content provider. It seems to work very well for apple, why shouldnt' it work for real? Imagine if real played hardball with the industry like Apple is trying to do? Imagine if the industy's only choice was the deals with Apple which they seem to loathe or even worse deals (from their perspective) with Real et al? Online distribution is here, and it isn't going away. They can't stop that now, there's too much consumer demand. It's time for the distributors to play hard.
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is profit. When the 100 top-selling albums are all RIAA produced, any online music business that wants to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes must sell RIAA music.
And do we condider Real to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes? I certainly don't. Yet despite this, there are plenty of online music services selling other music that isnt' RIAA mainstream and making a profit.
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is Apple's monopoly. When the ipod accounts for over 90% of all downloadable music players, and iTunes has the market locked-up, Real has no stick with which to "fight the industry."
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point. Otherwise you are just hand-waving in an attempt to distract from your deliberate obtuseness.
Hmmm, iPods account for 90% of the music players, so real could offer the RIAA access to 10%, or 100% it's a matter of convincing the RIAA that the sacrifice nessecary is worth that last 90% of the market.
On top of that, what prevents real from offering non RIAA music un DRMed or otherwise iPod compatible and offering RIAA music as is? They could then use this as leverage against the RIAA demonstrating that people want the unencumbered music.
The only thing that keeps real from competing well is a lack of drive to get what they want.
And what pray tell excludes Real or any other vendor from selling non RIAA music? What pray tell excludes them from growing a pair of balls and fighting the industry over it?
They've gone to court over breaking the DRM system which the iPod uses. Had real decided to instead release their files in an iPod compatible format without breaking the encryption scheme used by Apple there would have been no lawsuit.
Nobody will sell those MP3 files on-line. So you have to jump through extra hoops to get to them. I'm sorry, but I'm not accepting MP3 as a non-lock-in example.
"Buying an iPod does not force me to buy from iTMS."
Okay, maybe I'm being ignorant here. What other services can you buy iPod compatible music for? I'm dead serious, I'll back down if you can name one or two. Part of my reaction here is that I CAN'T use my existing music service with an iPod, but with other players I can. You'd be doing me a huge favor if you could suggest an alternative music service with a subscription model that I could use an iPod with.
Failure to fill a market void is not lock in. Your subscription services failure to offer iPod compatible music is not lock in. You are the one that chose a subscription service which locks you out of using the iPod.
Where is the lock in? I don't see it in either example. The lock in is present only in the file format, not the player itself. With MP3 formated files, I can move from any one player to any other player. Buying an iPod does not force me to buy from iTMS. Likewise, buying a Microsoft player does not lock me into WMA files.
The problem with voting and the one people just can't seem to get past here is that at some point there has to be trust. Your system is very easily set to fail based on the tests you describe. All the human readable stuff can be accurate, but all the machine has to do is make it's own internal tallies consistant with the barcodes or machine readable outputs and you've succeeded in appearing to be legit unless someone manualy counts the votes and then you're right back to where you started.
This can of course be solved in part by making the machine readable output human readable as well (think scan-tron) but that requires 1) Trusting the voter to check his vote output 2) trusting the voter to understand the vote output and 3) trusting the count machine to accurately make a count.
Trust must be given at some point to the machines or else we have to do manual counts and of course then you have to trust people.
This is the real problem. Go to a class where the professor is engaging and entertaining, where the material taught is relevant and the students are engaged. You'll notice a lot less people slacking off.
I have in my time become thoroughly convinced that this is due in large part to people being told 2 things when they were taught about computers:
1) Macs are different 2) Don't touch anything.
I have sat and explained to someone how to use Netscape, the exact same web browser they used on their PC at home, on a mac. The reason they couldn't figure it out? "It's a mac, it's different isn't it? It has to be." It honestly took about 10 minutes just to convince them that it wasn't different and that web browsing worked the same way and they could type the same stuff, and even then they weren't entirely convinced.
If I decide to write a quartz program in OS X, I now have to rewrite the frontend to run on GNU/Linux. If I however write a program for gnome using Redhat, it easily runs on Debian, Suse....
Why didn't you write the front end for X11 in the first place?
Isn't that akin to not wanting to admit into evidence the security tape of the bomber buying some simple ingredients from the store becuase lots of people buy those same things and it could lead to an incorrect conclusion? He is innocent until proven guilty, it's this and OTHER evidence that will prove him guilty. We're not talking about convicting you because you looked up information on slashing someone's throat, we're talking about convicting you because you don't have an alabi for the time of the murder, you were the last one seen with them, their throat was slashed, your knife was found with their blood on it, AND you looked up information on how to do it. I hate how in this country we demand the most stringent of proof for a case, and yet then turn arround and cry foul whenever police try to gather said proof.
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Thankfuly the iPod plays more than just fairplay encrypted AAC files.
Let's give a catchy buzzword to a non existant problem so that we can attract the masses of clueless people to the concept who will inevitably post questions all about the net in an attempt to gain access to this "Skypecasting" which will lead to the creation of one or two small skypecasting applications which will inevitably draw the attention of the media companies who will see it as a massive problem plaguing their business and inevitably bring about lawsuits and laws which serve to do nothing other than make life more difficult and suckier for the common man.
Way to link to an article from a year ago talking about specificaly HDD based MP3 players. Got anything current? And are you saying then that you are talking specificaly about HDD based MP3 players? BTW, I dunno what economics books you've been reading, but demand curves always slope down. Further more:
To get even more technical, Apple clearly has monopoly control of the market because they are able to maintain pricing at levels significantly higher than all of their competitors without significant technical differentiation.
So then would you say Apple has a monopoly on computers as well?
Yes. You really seem to be hung up on your misunderstanding of the RIAA members' monopoly as it applies to the market of music sales. RIAA members have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the most popular music. If their copyright was not legal sanctioned, they would have long ago been forced to allow secondary sources of the music they own the copyright for.
It's legaly sanctioned only because of the contracts which the music creators signed. The RIAA members negotiated and bought those rights. They are market players as much as anyone else is. The RIAA maintains a monopoly over music rights because no one else can compete or is willing to compete. But that is irellevant as your original claim was that the RIAA is a legaly mandated monopoly. If another group of distributors wanted to buy up music rights and provide the services the RIAA does to artists, they could (especially with some well placed maneuvers) oust the RIAA from it's monopoly status just like any other business.
Furthermore, the RIAA could not be forced to allow secondary sources, unless and until congress denies the right of the creator to transfer or assign the copyright which they own (and by the way retain when their contract with the RIAA expires).
No matter how many times you say this, it is still false.
Oh, but it's quite true. See for yourself, from a more current source . QED.
DRM is holding the industry back. I also feel it's a nessesary evil at the moment to drag the industry forward. I also feel that the unwillingness of Apple's competitors to use the fact that Apple has majority control and is playing hardball to their advantage to negotiate better deals for their customers is an example of companies unwillingness to truely compete with Apple and the iPod.
As I stated before - 90%+ control of a market is the definition of monopoly. If you don't know your terms, you clearly aren't qualified to have an opinion.
And if you don't know your numbers you aren't qualified to have an opinion. Apple does not have 90%+ control. No figures that I have seen, even Apple's own give them that much of the market. Furthermore, you keep bandying that number about without specifying which market. MP3 players? AAC players? Music distribution? Which market?
No they are not anything of the kind. The RIAA's monopoly is in their copyright of the music - they have a monopoly on copies of the music. Apple sells hardware and services, there are no copies. Again it sounds like you are unfamiliar with the terms of the debate - copyright is a government granted monopoly, a fact that the supreme court has explicitly acknowledged many times.
You do not seem to understand copyright. Copyright is a monopoly cranted to the creator of the work in question. The RIAA has no exclusive right except that granted by the creator. As such, the RIAA is merely a market player in a market full of mini monopolies, and the RIAA is consuming these mini monopolies to sell a finished product. The RIAA is not granted copyrights by congress or any act of law other then contract law which allows the creator to give away or license that copyright to another individual or company. In short, the RIAA dominates the market for music copyrights, which are a comodity. The RIAA's monopoly appearance is merely due to the fact that they own so many copyrights. Would you call a tiny startup record company a monopoly in the same way you refer to the RIAA? If not why not?
To make the point a bit clearer, the RIAA does not automaticaly have exclusive control over the rights to music I produce. Granted the contract 99.9% of all artists sign make it so, but there is no legal binding other than that contract which gives the RIAA exclusive rights. If I so chose and were to inclined, I could concieveably negotiate a contract where by both an RIAA member (note the RIAA does not own any copyrights itself) and another distribution house would both have rights to my music.
You have taken the first two steps, but ignored the third. It is inherent in any unregulated monopoly, and even most regulated ones, that the "extreme power over the market" will be abused to maintain artifically high pricing.
Only if the barrier to entry is too great to allow for any new competition. The funny thing about monopolies is that they're our favorite until all the competition gives up, then we attack them for doing what they would normaly do in a competative market. Furthermore, the prices are only artificialy high IF there is a competitor willing to provide the same product that the market wants and willing and able to provide it at a lower price, but is unable to due to some artificial barrier to entry. Lack of competition does not make artificialy high prices. If no one wants to compete, or if no one can compete, then that is the market price.
Doh! I had no clue. Of course it was my point -- the guy asked if Apple would ever make a change that would reduce their monopoly control, and I said no they would not make such a change unless they had already lost monopoly control.
But apple doesn't have monopoly control.
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point.
Distribute RIAA files copy protected and distribute non RIAA files unprotected. Then, use the fact that the sales numbers vary and demonstrate that this varience is due to the unprotected nature of the files, and then demonstrate that by distributing through real in such a way the industry can reach 100% of the MP3 player market.
The difference is that the RIAA copyright cartel is legally mandated by the constitution and congress. Apple's monopoly is the result of market domination. It is generally understood that monopolies that arise from market domination are not beneficial for anyone but the monopoly holder. Whether the copyright monopoly is good or bad is irrelevant, it is unfortunately 100% legal.
1) Apple is not a monopoly. They are the majority player in the market but hardly a monopoly.
2) I don't know what constitution or congress you've been paying attention to but the RIAA is not legally mandated at all. The existance of copyright as a right cranted to creators such as song writers and musicians is constitutionaly mandated. The right to transfer that copyright to another individual or corporation such as sony, a member of the RIAA, is legaly allowed. But the RIAA is nothing more than a collection of various copyright holders who have recieved the copy rights to certain creative works from the original creators who have chosen by free will to associate with each other and combine resources to protect their interests. Nothing about the RIAA is constitutionaly mandadted. The RIAA is a monopoly in the same way that Apple is a monopoly, they are the market leader and market dominator. Note this does mean that the RIAA is not a monopoly in the true sense of the word just the dominate market player.
3) It is not understood that monopolies caused by having market dominence is bad. What is understood is that having a monopoly grants a company extreme power over the market and there is great potential to abuse that power, but having a monopoly is not inherrently bad. Remember a monopoly is not an undefeatable monolith, nor is it something that can necessarily be constant in it's power. A monopoly can fall from sheer ignorance of consumer demand or from a failure to recognize the shift of the market.
Of course not, that's because Apple has a monopoly, they would not need to no matter how the ipod users "clamored." If they actually lost sales because of it, then that would mean they no longer hold an effective monopoly.
Um, you do realize you just described how a monopoly loses it's monopoly status. A competitor comes along and offers what the market demands. Again, Apple is not a monopoly they are merely a major market player. Anyone can unseat Apple by providing a better product that the market wants
Apple doesn't have monopoly control. They have majority. But again then, if real is not larger than a gnat, even despite the fact that they offer RIAA music, then clearly if real wants to get in on the iPod scene, they need to try a different tact.
Piss off the content provider. It seems to work very well for apple, why shouldnt' it work for real? Imagine if real played hardball with the industry like Apple is trying to do? Imagine if the industy's only choice was the deals with Apple which they seem to loathe or even worse deals (from their perspective) with Real et al? Online distribution is here, and it isn't going away. They can't stop that now, there's too much consumer demand. It's time for the distributors to play hard.
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is profit. When the 100 top-selling albums are all RIAA produced, any online music business that wants to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes must sell RIAA music.
And do we condider Real to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes? I certainly don't. Yet despite this, there are plenty of online music services selling other music that isnt' RIAA mainstream and making a profit.
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is Apple's monopoly. When the ipod accounts for over 90% of all downloadable music players, and iTunes has the market locked-up, Real has no stick with which to "fight the industry."
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point. Otherwise you are just hand-waving in an attempt to distract from your deliberate obtuseness.
Hmmm, iPods account for 90% of the music players, so real could offer the RIAA access to 10%, or 100% it's a matter of convincing the RIAA that the sacrifice nessecary is worth that last 90% of the market.
On top of that, what prevents real from offering non RIAA music un DRMed or otherwise iPod compatible and offering RIAA music as is? They could then use this as leverage against the RIAA demonstrating that people want the unencumbered music.
The only thing that keeps real from competing well is a lack of drive to get what they want.
And what pray tell excludes Real or any other vendor from selling non RIAA music? What pray tell excludes them from growing a pair of balls and fighting the industry over it?
They've gone to court over breaking the DRM system which the iPod uses. Had real decided to instead release their files in an iPod compatible format without breaking the encryption scheme used by Apple there would have been no lawsuit.
Nobody will sell those MP3 files on-line. So you have to jump through extra hoops to get to them. I'm sorry, but I'm not accepting MP3 as a non-lock-in example.
"Buying an iPod does not force me to buy from iTMS."
Okay, maybe I'm being ignorant here. What other services can you buy iPod compatible music for? I'm dead serious, I'll back down if you can name one or two. Part of my reaction here is that I CAN'T use my existing music service with an iPod, but with other players I can. You'd be doing me a huge favor if you could suggest an alternative music service with a subscription model that I could use an iPod with.
Failure to fill a market void is not lock in. Your subscription services failure to offer iPod compatible music is not lock in. You are the one that chose a subscription service which locks you out of using the iPod.
Where is the lock in? I don't see it in either example. The lock in is present only in the file format, not the player itself. With MP3 formated files, I can move from any one player to any other player. Buying an iPod does not force me to buy from iTMS. Likewise, buying a Microsoft player does not lock me into WMA files.
The problem with voting and the one people just can't seem to get past here is that at some point there has to be trust. Your system is very easily set to fail based on the tests you describe. All the human readable stuff can be accurate, but all the machine has to do is make it's own internal tallies consistant with the barcodes or machine readable outputs and you've succeeded in appearing to be legit unless someone manualy counts the votes and then you're right back to where you started.
This can of course be solved in part by making the machine readable output human readable as well (think scan-tron) but that requires 1) Trusting the voter to check his vote output 2) trusting the voter to understand the vote output and 3) trusting the count machine to accurately make a count.
Trust must be given at some point to the machines or else we have to do manual counts and of course then you have to trust people.
Bingo.
This is the real problem. Go to a class where the professor is engaging and entertaining, where the material taught is relevant and the students are engaged. You'll notice a lot less people slacking off.
Running GNU/Linux on the laptop is the most sensible choice.
I still don't see why this is. What does GNU/Linux give you that OS X doesn't? If you want KDE/Gnome/whatever you run it. If you don't, you run quartz
As the AC said, because it gives you more choice. You can run X or Quartz or both at the same time if you choose.
You don't need to run quartz to run an X windows environment in OS X.
I have in my time become thoroughly convinced that this is due in large part to people being told 2 things when they were taught about computers:
1) Macs are different
2) Don't touch anything.
I have sat and explained to someone how to use Netscape, the exact same web browser they used on their PC at home, on a mac. The reason they couldn't figure it out? "It's a mac, it's different isn't it? It has to be." It honestly took about 10 minutes just to convince them that it wasn't different and that web browsing worked the same way and they could type the same stuff, and even then they weren't entirely convinced.
And this stops them from aquiring free software how?
If I decide to write a quartz program in OS X, I now have to rewrite the frontend to run on GNU/Linux. If I however write a program for gnome using Redhat, it easily runs on Debian, Suse....
Why didn't you write the front end for X11 in the first place?
Windows tend to be larger targets than menus.
Isn't that akin to not wanting to admit into evidence the security tape of the bomber buying some simple ingredients from the store becuase lots of people buy those same things and it could lead to an incorrect conclusion? He is innocent until proven guilty, it's this and OTHER evidence that will prove him guilty. We're not talking about convicting you because you looked up information on slashing someone's throat, we're talking about convicting you because you don't have an alabi for the time of the murder, you were the last one seen with them, their throat was slashed, your knife was found with their blood on it, AND you looked up information on how to do it. I hate how in this country we demand the most stringent of proof for a case, and yet then turn arround and cry foul whenever police try to gather said proof.
It's not nearly as impressive or creepy as people say it is.