You leave a 5th or 6th grade kid home alone using the gas range or electric range, and you watch CPS get called on you the first time they burn a finger and the teacher reports it.
Then you answer to CPS as to why your kid was "unsupervised and allowed to work with dangerous cooking equipment."
Check out the "produce" section in a lower-income neighborhood's grocery stores. Chances it's pretty small and what food is there is wilty and not appetizing-looking. Now go look at the produce section in an upscale chain like Whole Foods or Central Market; produce kept fresh-looking, wilted stuff quickly taken away, perky looking un-bruised fruits and vegetables.
It's not just a "smarts" thing. If I were looking to buy apples or bananas, and all the apples in the bin were bruised and scrawny looking and the bananas looked like they'd been left to rot, I'd probably skip the produce section too.
He wasn't "unneeded." He was fully capable of doing the job, in the position he was in.
The problem was, La Raza the latino racial supremacist organization wanted more "native spanish latino-looking speakers" rather than "ESL certified, Spanish fluent but african, asian, or caucasian-looking" teachers, and were threatening lawsuits against the district if they didn't "make it happen."
It was racist bullshit, as such. Maybe you didn't realize ESL is the shorthand for "English as a second language", in other words, trying to teach the kids of the illegals to speak English...
I probably forgot to mention the weapon the kid was trying to use was a sharpened pencil. Not that I suppose it makes much difference.
The point I am making is: IT DID NOT MATTER WHAT HE DID. If he'd allowed a kid to be stabbed, the question would be "why didn't you stop it" and they were planning to railroad him out for that. If he did what he did, they were going to railroad him out for "touching a kid." They set him up, they put kids into his classroom with a history of gang contact and being involved in fights... they were waiting and PLANNING for him to get stuck in the no-win situation. The moment he was out of the picture, they split the kids into different classrooms again.
It wasn't "I, Robot" (which was a short-story collection) he merged with Foundation. It was the Daneel Olivaw line (Caves of Steel / The Naked Sun / The Robots of Dawn / Robots and Empire) that he merged with Foundation at the end. At best, the I, Robot short stories (along with several other short stories, novelettes, and novels like Pebble in the Sky) provided a theoretical "history" of the human-centric universe he eventually wrote the Foundation series within.
Asimov's stories were a lot like Tolkien's stuff in a way. He had an idea of a long-running universe, and he would place various stories at various points within the universes. The long-running character Daneel Olivaw is really not so different from Gandalf in a way, doing a lot of things "behind the scenes" that are hard to ferret out until you start looking at the long view as well - and they take much the same turn, with Gandalf bailing out to the East with the Elves at the end of LOTR just like Olivaw tries to get "a few more years" to finish his work and set humanity onto a new evolution before he has to finally die.
Friend of mine worked in public education in Dallas. Was a great teacher, repeated teacher of the month and a couple teacher of the year ratings by the district, ESL certified, the works - but they were under the gun to hire more "native spanish speaking ESL teachers."
Their solution? Stick all the troublemaker kids in his class, and REFUSE to give him a second adult to back him up for classroom discipline. We're talking the ones whose dads were in jail for gang violence, who would regularly start fights, who it was known their relatives were members of antagonistic gangs. Sure enough, one day, two of them went at it - one (black) kid trying to stab one (latino) kid in the eye over a fight between their older sibs' gangs. He got the class up, separated the kids, marched them down the hall to the principal's office, holding each by the arm so that they couldn't try to go at each other again.
He gets put "on leave" and let go at the end of the year for - wait for it - "touching a student against policy" by breaking up the fight. And they would have run him off the other way if he'd let a kid get stabbed in his classroom.
Teacher evaluations based on student performance or incidents? Fucking bullshit, there are a dozen ways administrators with an axe to grind or who decide they just don't like someone in an office-politics way can screw with the numbers.
Indeed. Star Wars is "sci-fi". Or is it "space opera"? Or is it "modern fantasy/mythology"? I've seen it described in each way.
The other thing you have to get over, if you want the Academy to accept sci-fi as relevant, is the special effects. The over-65 academy voters came from a time when special effects weren't that grand. They couldn't do many of the things we can do today. So they look at a movie like LOTR, which is extremely driven from a book, and they love it. Then they look at sci-fi and... I'm sorry, but Avatar was crappy, shitty done story with too much politics covered over by extremely well-done special effects. Strip out the effects, leave in the story, and Avatar is just boring. Likewise, the Academy looks at the genre in its entirety and we're looking at the likes of The Last Starfighter, or the alternating passable/awful/passable/awful Star Trek line that peaked with Wrath of Khan (though I did like the reboot). Or they look at ANYTHING AT ALL MICHAEL BAY HAS DONE... why the fuck do studios keep letting him keep ruining franchises?
The point being, the over-65 AA crowd voting looks at sci-fi and they assume (because it's true 99.9% of the time!) that there isn't a story there, that it's all barebones covered up in special effects and explosions. Serenity was cool, but if you didn't watch Firefly beforehand (note: I've never been able to see Firefly in sequence, and my friends took me to see Serenity anyways so I have this perspective) you didn't know what the fuck was going on going into it and you probably, like me, walked out half confused as to what the point of some of the characters was at all. "Pivotal moments", like Wash's flight/death or River's badass moments, mean NOTHING if you haven't seen the TV show. The movie just doesn't stand on its own - kinda like trying to watch Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith, where if you didn't watch the Clone Wars animated series, you have NO FUCKING CLUE who half these characters are and Lucas is too lazy to give even the most barebones of exposition to why they're storyline-relevant.
You want sci-fi to be respected in the Academy, you need to do 3 things:
#1 - you need to let the explosions and CGI take a back seat. That's one of the major things in LOTR that worked: the CGI didn't make Gollum, it just made Gollum possible - Gollum was totally the acting work of Andy Serkis (especially the schizophrenia scene!).
#2 - you have to make sure your movie contains the entire story. Big one here. Drop in a bunch of characters, fail to introduce them because "well the audience knows them from the TV show", and you run the trap that both Star Wars and Serenity failed on: the academy is not your fucking audience and has no goddamn clue who the characters are or why they should care because you left the entire character development process out of the fucking movie. Take a clue from Pixar - they made a better love story in 10 minutes than that hack bitch Stephanie Meyer did in 4 whole movies, AND without that 10 minute montage, the entire rest of the story in Up just doesn't work.
#3 - you need to be sure your story is accessible to the older Academy viewers. Again, this is something Pixar are geniuses at - they can make a G-rated movie that 5 year olds and 65 year olds alike watch, and love, and enjoy because it's accessible to all ages. And they can do it without even shooting the dog or giving someone cancer.
Wish I had modpoints to give - I've two friends who've gone through similar shit. Custody battles turn into more sorts of ugly, and the whole system is predisposed to believe the father is "the bad guy" even in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise.
We're talking about a party whose latest gimmick is "sonogram bills", a new method of "slut shaming" that involves forcing a woman to go through a completely unnecessary procedure in which a dildo-like object is wrapped in a condom, covered in cold nasty goop, and forcefully shoved into her vagina before they'll let her have a completely different, unrelated, completely legal medical procedure.
"Science" doesn't enter into their discussions on any level.
Santorum also got into "I'm more christian than you" bullshit when he insisted that Obama "follows a different theology" the other day... from where I come Republicans are the nonchristian ones. They certainly don't love their neighbors, they don't give a crap about the poor and needy, they're not remotely interested in creating fair legal systems (something the OT is pretty damn big on, Deuteronomy 27:19, Leviticus 19:15 as starters) and as near as I can tell, their religious ceremonies involve the worship of wealthy old white men and the pursuit of money...
Where's Dr. Bob, DC when you need him? I was looking forward to hearing about how the radiation from the commonly used business lighting causes vertebral subluxations to damage the spine and thus cause the eyes to have problems...;)
But seriously - I've always wondered about this. I find I'm happier when I force myself to get outside every couple hours during my working day to get some sunlight. I'm really much happier on vacations when I can get a full day's sun, and even the sunlight going to/from home in summers is much better than the "get up, dark, drive to work, dark, sit in work under flourescents, bleck, drive home, dark, go to bed, dark" rhythm of winter - there are definitely days where my rhythm gets off and I'm starting to slip into the "natural without lighting" 28-30 hour cycle that miners have reported experiencing after working too many long days underground.
I know, and I've made the same point - the fact that they've noticed pirating means that someone, somewhere, decided their software was overpriced at $10k. The fact that they believe potential customers who ought to be willing to pay $10k are using their software, probably could be solved by a gentle phone call if they are in a niche market.
Either that or they're trying to expand into the general market with the "free option + spyware or pay for the spyware-free pricetag version" idea. At which point like I pointed out earlier, they're competing with at least 5 video editing packages from the F/OSS sector (and ones like LiVES are pretty robust), they're competing in the basic-basic market with "free" software like Microsoft's Windows Live Movie Maker, and they're competing with Adobe, Apple, and a host of other companies that make robust competing software available at much lower costs.
It's easy to say "well I think my software is worth $10k in this niche market" in a vacuum, but there's strong evidence to indicate that the software package is simply overpriced...
#1 - get over yourself. I'm not a communist, and I pointed out that maybe their product is just fucking overpriced. Did I suggest giving it all away for free? No.
#2a - "Not profitable." So, their current model of selling only to a few people, at $10k per, is not working. My suggestion was that maybe, if their software did not cost $10k per, their market would enlarge and the increased sales would generate their needed revenue. How is this a communist thought? How does it demonstrate that I lack reading comprehension?
#2b - Where did I ever suggest support is free? But on the same token, you can approach support in multiple ways. Spend a small amount (relatively) on support forums, and charge money for phone support. Many other companies do it this way. If you have corporate customers, offer the option of a yearly support contract with upgrades and phone support bundled in.
Now, I did say that electronic distribution costs on producing extra units or licenses are close to "free." Once it's bits on a drive, once the "release package" has been finalized, making copies is low enough cost to be trivial - and the submitter is talking about electronic distribution of a "free" version anyways.
Hi, you're an anonymous d-bag, probably the one who was calling me a d-bag below, most likely the d-bag who posted the original question in the first place.
So here's my reply:
#1 - Really, "Apparatchik"? You're going to make a communist reference at me? I thought you neanderthals went the way of the dodo a couple decades ago along with Joe McCarthy.
#2 - Yes, it costs money to develop software. It costs THE SAME amount to develop a given software package whether you sell 100 copies, 10,000 copies, or a million copies; the only extra cost is the cardboard for the box, the paper for the manual, and having the CD or DVD media burned or pressed if you're not distributing online. If you CHOOSE to have another extra cost for some form of online check-in, that's your prerogative; likewise, it's your prerogative to decide whether you give free support for the lifetime of the software, free or CD-key checked access to patches (what Stardock Entertainment does), or even to offer a sort of "pay for support" model (very common for business software; either you run a contract, or pay-per-incident for phone support separate from buying the software package), those are all business decisions but they are NOT actually a cost of developing the software itself.
Doesn't matter what size they are. Software from companies large and small alike shows up on TPB. Hell, software made by one guy in his garage in the 1980s that only runs on DOS 5.0 often shows up on TPB. Saying the world is doomed because "our software showed up on TPB" is silly.
If your market size is small, say 3000 users total, you may have to charge that much to pay development staff a decent wage and keep the lights on.
If your market size is that small, finding out if they're using your software without paying is pretty damn easy without having to resort to spyware and nonsense.
That's just the economics of software. Niche market software is always more expensive and has to be. Ultimately, customers should be able to decide if your software is worth that much. If they can get it for free, of course, that process is totally short-circuited.
Except that we're talking about a "small video editing software company." So we're not talking about a "niche market" here; we're talking about someone who is competing with (probably) the following programs/companies to some extent or other:
On top of that, we also have Free/OSS options (leaving a few off like VLMC that I'm not certain how functional they are in alpha/beta): - Avisynth - Blender VSE - CineFX - Kdenlive - LiVES
And if you really need "just the basics", Microsoft gives away Windows Live Movie Maker for free.:P
Either we are talking about a "Niche Software" package that's targeted ONLY to professional grade movie makers who render things on server farms, or the submitter's idea of their "Market" is very different from reality.
Chances are, the "non-paying" customers who are "not potential customers" are people who are using the software to do something like clip videos of their 3 year old crawling around to send to the grandparents.
A dozen free or cheap alternatives, but they were told by a "tech-savvy buddy" that "this software is really kewl."
Note his example pricing - $10,000 a copy. Want to wonder why the potential pool of "non-paying customers" is so high, that's probably the reason. Same way that for the longest time, before their prices came down to something approximating reality, Adobe just kind of looked the other way when kids at home would get copies of Premiere or Photoshop; Adobe assumed that when/if the kids ever got into jobs where they would be doing that sort of work, they'd get the business to buy the software and convert into paying customers, and it was better (for Adobe) for the kids to be used to using pirated Adobe branded stuff rather than, say, GIMP or Paint.net and realizing that Adobe didn't need to be part of the equation.
Also - that Porsche is a physical object. Has a physical materials cost and a line construction cost.
The software? Making extra copies is as easy as bits 'n' bytes. You have no mass-production and materials cost to make "more", whereas with the Porsche, you have to build each one out of materials.
If you can make $10,000 by selling one copy at $10,000, but you could make $20,000 by selling 100 copies at $200 each (and enough customers exist that WOULD pay that but will never fucking pay $10,000), and your current price is $10,000, most people would say you're overpriced...
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You leave a 5th or 6th grade kid home alone using the gas range or electric range, and you watch CPS get called on you the first time they burn a finger and the teacher reports it.
Then you answer to CPS as to why your kid was "unsupervised and allowed to work with dangerous cooking equipment."
Go further than that.
Check out the "produce" section in a lower-income neighborhood's grocery stores. Chances it's pretty small and what food is there is wilty and not appetizing-looking. Now go look at the produce section in an upscale chain like Whole Foods or Central Market; produce kept fresh-looking, wilted stuff quickly taken away, perky looking un-bruised fruits and vegetables.
It's not just a "smarts" thing. If I were looking to buy apples or bananas, and all the apples in the bin were bruised and scrawny looking and the bananas looked like they'd been left to rot, I'd probably skip the produce section too.
What you're missing is Dallas doesn't do "immersion." Dallas does "say it one language, then say it in the other, all the time" bullshit.
Uhm... FUCK YOU.
He wasn't "unneeded." He was fully capable of doing the job, in the position he was in.
The problem was, La Raza the latino racial supremacist organization wanted more "native spanish latino-looking speakers" rather than "ESL certified, Spanish fluent but african, asian, or caucasian-looking" teachers, and were threatening lawsuits against the district if they didn't "make it happen."
It was racist bullshit, as such. Maybe you didn't realize ESL is the shorthand for "English as a second language", in other words, trying to teach the kids of the illegals to speak English...
I probably forgot to mention the weapon the kid was trying to use was a sharpened pencil. Not that I suppose it makes much difference.
The point I am making is: IT DID NOT MATTER WHAT HE DID. If he'd allowed a kid to be stabbed, the question would be "why didn't you stop it" and they were planning to railroad him out for that. If he did what he did, they were going to railroad him out for "touching a kid." They set him up, they put kids into his classroom with a history of gang contact and being involved in fights... they were waiting and PLANNING for him to get stuck in the no-win situation. The moment he was out of the picture, they split the kids into different classrooms again.
You're not referring to the right books.
It wasn't "I, Robot" (which was a short-story collection) he merged with Foundation. It was the Daneel Olivaw line (Caves of Steel / The Naked Sun / The Robots of Dawn / Robots and Empire) that he merged with Foundation at the end. At best, the I, Robot short stories (along with several other short stories, novelettes, and novels like Pebble in the Sky) provided a theoretical "history" of the human-centric universe he eventually wrote the Foundation series within.
Asimov's stories were a lot like Tolkien's stuff in a way. He had an idea of a long-running universe, and he would place various stories at various points within the universes. The long-running character Daneel Olivaw is really not so different from Gandalf in a way, doing a lot of things "behind the scenes" that are hard to ferret out until you start looking at the long view as well - and they take much the same turn, with Gandalf bailing out to the East with the Elves at the end of LOTR just like Olivaw tries to get "a few more years" to finish his work and set humanity onto a new evolution before he has to finally die.
Bullshit - Will Smith, Executive Producer. He didn't just "act the part given to him", he was involved in ruining it and defining his own part.
No shit.
Friend of mine worked in public education in Dallas. Was a great teacher, repeated teacher of the month and a couple teacher of the year ratings by the district, ESL certified, the works - but they were under the gun to hire more "native spanish speaking ESL teachers."
Their solution? Stick all the troublemaker kids in his class, and REFUSE to give him a second adult to back him up for classroom discipline. We're talking the ones whose dads were in jail for gang violence, who would regularly start fights, who it was known their relatives were members of antagonistic gangs. Sure enough, one day, two of them went at it - one (black) kid trying to stab one (latino) kid in the eye over a fight between their older sibs' gangs. He got the class up, separated the kids, marched them down the hall to the principal's office, holding each by the arm so that they couldn't try to go at each other again.
He gets put "on leave" and let go at the end of the year for - wait for it - "touching a student against policy" by breaking up the fight. And they would have run him off the other way if he'd let a kid get stabbed in his classroom.
Teacher evaluations based on student performance or incidents? Fucking bullshit, there are a dozen ways administrators with an axe to grind or who decide they just don't like someone in an office-politics way can screw with the numbers.
It can't be as bad as Will Smith's absolute butchering of "I, Robot"...
That reminds me:
Hey engineers/scientists, you've got 3 years to come up with Mr. Fusion and hovercar conversions or else Marty McFly will never get home to 1985!
Indeed. Star Wars is "sci-fi". Or is it "space opera"? Or is it "modern fantasy/mythology"? I've seen it described in each way.
The other thing you have to get over, if you want the Academy to accept sci-fi as relevant, is the special effects. The over-65 academy voters came from a time when special effects weren't that grand. They couldn't do many of the things we can do today. So they look at a movie like LOTR, which is extremely driven from a book, and they love it. Then they look at sci-fi and... I'm sorry, but Avatar was crappy, shitty done story with too much politics covered over by extremely well-done special effects. Strip out the effects, leave in the story, and Avatar is just boring. Likewise, the Academy looks at the genre in its entirety and we're looking at the likes of The Last Starfighter, or the alternating passable/awful/passable/awful Star Trek line that peaked with Wrath of Khan (though I did like the reboot). Or they look at ANYTHING AT ALL MICHAEL BAY HAS DONE... why the fuck do studios keep letting him keep ruining franchises?
The point being, the over-65 AA crowd voting looks at sci-fi and they assume (because it's true 99.9% of the time!) that there isn't a story there, that it's all barebones covered up in special effects and explosions. Serenity was cool, but if you didn't watch Firefly beforehand (note: I've never been able to see Firefly in sequence, and my friends took me to see Serenity anyways so I have this perspective) you didn't know what the fuck was going on going into it and you probably, like me, walked out half confused as to what the point of some of the characters was at all. "Pivotal moments", like Wash's flight/death or River's badass moments, mean NOTHING if you haven't seen the TV show. The movie just doesn't stand on its own - kinda like trying to watch Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith, where if you didn't watch the Clone Wars animated series, you have NO FUCKING CLUE who half these characters are and Lucas is too lazy to give even the most barebones of exposition to why they're storyline-relevant.
You want sci-fi to be respected in the Academy, you need to do 3 things:
#1 - you need to let the explosions and CGI take a back seat. That's one of the major things in LOTR that worked: the CGI didn't make Gollum, it just made Gollum possible - Gollum was totally the acting work of Andy Serkis (especially the schizophrenia scene!).
#2 - you have to make sure your movie contains the entire story. Big one here. Drop in a bunch of characters, fail to introduce them because "well the audience knows them from the TV show", and you run the trap that both Star Wars and Serenity failed on: the academy is not your fucking audience and has no goddamn clue who the characters are or why they should care because you left the entire character development process out of the fucking movie. Take a clue from Pixar - they made a better love story in 10 minutes than that hack bitch Stephanie Meyer did in 4 whole movies, AND without that 10 minute montage, the entire rest of the story in Up just doesn't work.
#3 - you need to be sure your story is accessible to the older Academy viewers. Again, this is something Pixar are geniuses at - they can make a G-rated movie that 5 year olds and 65 year olds alike watch, and love, and enjoy because it's accessible to all ages. And they can do it without even shooting the dog or giving someone cancer.
Uhm... that's exactly what Nintendo did by not including a GBA slot in the DSi.
And that's the reason I never bought a DSi...
We can only hope...
Wish I had modpoints to give - I've two friends who've gone through similar shit. Custody battles turn into more sorts of ugly, and the whole system is predisposed to believe the father is "the bad guy" even in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise.
This is what the proposed Virginia law really says.
A sonogram is also highly different from an ultrasound.
We're talking about a party whose latest gimmick is "sonogram bills", a new method of "slut shaming" that involves forcing a woman to go through a completely unnecessary procedure in which a dildo-like object is wrapped in a condom, covered in cold nasty goop, and forcefully shoved into her vagina before they'll let her have a completely different, unrelated, completely legal medical procedure.
"Science" doesn't enter into their discussions on any level.
Santorum also got into "I'm more christian than you" bullshit when he insisted that Obama "follows a different theology" the other day... from where I come Republicans are the nonchristian ones. They certainly don't love their neighbors, they don't give a crap about the poor and needy, they're not remotely interested in creating fair legal systems (something the OT is pretty damn big on, Deuteronomy 27:19, Leviticus 19:15 as starters) and as near as I can tell, their religious ceremonies involve the worship of wealthy old white men and the pursuit of money...
Where's Dr. Bob, DC when you need him? I was looking forward to hearing about how the radiation from the commonly used business lighting causes vertebral subluxations to damage the spine and thus cause the eyes to have problems... ;)
But seriously - I've always wondered about this. I find I'm happier when I force myself to get outside every couple hours during my working day to get some sunlight. I'm really much happier on vacations when I can get a full day's sun, and even the sunlight going to/from home in summers is much better than the "get up, dark, drive to work, dark, sit in work under flourescents, bleck, drive home, dark, go to bed, dark" rhythm of winter - there are definitely days where my rhythm gets off and I'm starting to slip into the "natural without lighting" 28-30 hour cycle that miners have reported experiencing after working too many long days underground.
I know, and I've made the same point - the fact that they've noticed pirating means that someone, somewhere, decided their software was overpriced at $10k. The fact that they believe potential customers who ought to be willing to pay $10k are using their software, probably could be solved by a gentle phone call if they are in a niche market.
Either that or they're trying to expand into the general market with the "free option + spyware or pay for the spyware-free pricetag version" idea. At which point like I pointed out earlier, they're competing with at least 5 video editing packages from the F/OSS sector (and ones like LiVES are pretty robust), they're competing in the basic-basic market with "free" software like Microsoft's Windows Live Movie Maker, and they're competing with Adobe, Apple, and a host of other companies that make robust competing software available at much lower costs.
It's easy to say "well I think my software is worth $10k in this niche market" in a vacuum, but there's strong evidence to indicate that the software package is simply overpriced...
Yawn.
#1 - get over yourself. I'm not a communist, and I pointed out that maybe their product is just fucking overpriced. Did I suggest giving it all away for free? No.
#2a - "Not profitable." So, their current model of selling only to a few people, at $10k per, is not working. My suggestion was that maybe, if their software did not cost $10k per, their market would enlarge and the increased sales would generate their needed revenue. How is this a communist thought? How does it demonstrate that I lack reading comprehension?
#2b - Where did I ever suggest support is free? But on the same token, you can approach support in multiple ways. Spend a small amount (relatively) on support forums, and charge money for phone support. Many other companies do it this way. If you have corporate customers, offer the option of a yearly support contract with upgrades and phone support bundled in.
Now, I did say that electronic distribution costs on producing extra units or licenses are close to "free." Once it's bits on a drive, once the "release package" has been finalized, making copies is low enough cost to be trivial - and the submitter is talking about electronic distribution of a "free" version anyways.
Hi, you're an anonymous d-bag, probably the one who was calling me a d-bag below, most likely the d-bag who posted the original question in the first place.
So here's my reply:
#1 - Really, "Apparatchik"? You're going to make a communist reference at me? I thought you neanderthals went the way of the dodo a couple decades ago along with Joe McCarthy.
#2 - Yes, it costs money to develop software. It costs THE SAME amount to develop a given software package whether you sell 100 copies, 10,000 copies, or a million copies; the only extra cost is the cardboard for the box, the paper for the manual, and having the CD or DVD media burned or pressed if you're not distributing online. If you CHOOSE to have another extra cost for some form of online check-in, that's your prerogative; likewise, it's your prerogative to decide whether you give free support for the lifetime of the software, free or CD-key checked access to patches (what Stardock Entertainment does), or even to offer a sort of "pay for support" model (very common for business software; either you run a contract, or pay-per-incident for phone support separate from buying the software package), those are all business decisions but they are NOT actually a cost of developing the software itself.
Yes, and these are much larger companies.
Doesn't matter what size they are. Software from companies large and small alike shows up on TPB. Hell, software made by one guy in his garage in the 1980s that only runs on DOS 5.0 often shows up on TPB. Saying the world is doomed because "our software showed up on TPB" is silly.
If your market size is small, say 3000 users total, you may have to charge that much to pay development staff a decent wage and keep the lights on.
If your market size is that small, finding out if they're using your software without paying is pretty damn easy without having to resort to spyware and nonsense.
That's just the economics of software. Niche market software is always more expensive and has to be. Ultimately, customers should be able to decide if your software is worth that much. If they can get it for free, of course, that process is totally short-circuited.
Except that we're talking about a "small video editing software company." So we're not talking about a "niche market" here; we're talking about someone who is competing with (probably) the following programs/companies to some extent or other:
- Adobe (Premiere/Elements, Encore, After Effects)
- Apple (Final Cut / Pro, iMovie)
- AVS Video Editor
- Avid
- Corel
- Cyberlink
- FXhome Limited
- Magix
- Media 100
- Newtek
- Pinnacle
- Quantel
- Womble
- Clesh
On top of that, we also have Free/OSS options (leaving a few off like VLMC that I'm not certain how functional they are in alpha/beta):
- Avisynth
- Blender VSE
- CineFX
- Kdenlive
- LiVES
And if you really need "just the basics", Microsoft gives away Windows Live Movie Maker for free. :P
Either we are talking about a "Niche Software" package that's targeted ONLY to professional grade movie makers who render things on server farms, or the submitter's idea of their "Market" is very different from reality.
Chances are, the "non-paying" customers who are "not potential customers" are people who are using the software to do something like clip videos of their 3 year old crawling around to send to the grandparents.
A dozen free or cheap alternatives, but they were told by a "tech-savvy buddy" that "this software is really kewl."
Note his example pricing - $10,000 a copy. Want to wonder why the potential pool of "non-paying customers" is so high, that's probably the reason. Same way that for the longest time, before their prices came down to something approximating reality, Adobe just kind of looked the other way when kids at home would get copies of Premiere or Photoshop; Adobe assumed that when/if the kids ever got into jobs where they would be doing that sort of work, they'd get the business to buy the software and convert into paying customers, and it was better (for Adobe) for the kids to be used to using pirated Adobe branded stuff rather than, say, GIMP or Paint.net and realizing that Adobe didn't need to be part of the equation.
Also - that Porsche is a physical object. Has a physical materials cost and a line construction cost.
The software? Making extra copies is as easy as bits 'n' bytes. You have no mass-production and materials cost to make "more", whereas with the Porsche, you have to build each one out of materials.
If you can make $10,000 by selling one copy at $10,000, but you could make $20,000 by selling 100 copies at $200 each (and enough customers exist that WOULD pay that but will never fucking pay $10,000), and your current price is $10,000, most people would say you're overpriced...