How many r00t vulnerablilities did linux have in the past three months? How many Linux vendors got hacked because of undisclosed, in the wild exploits? How many of these effected Linux systems? I think Linux has enough to worry about with their own glass house, and should worry less about throwing rocks at other OS's.
Perhaps you should have tried to restrain your MS zealotry and read the comment all the way through. The discussion was about the dangers of software monocultures, and my point was that UNIX and Linux installations are not affected by MS malware. The reverse would be equally true.
Ah, the old analogy straw man. How about you take some computer classes? Because like all analogies, yours is flawed. A man-made construct is very different from a biological system. If biodiversity is so great, why do they sterilize surgery rooms? Answer- because they WANT a controlled monoculture.
You seem to have confused *operating room* with *operating system*. Typical OSs do not operate in sterile environments, nor do you except when a surgeon is cutting you open. I already have two degrees in CS and MIS, but I do continue to take classes occasionally. Thanks for the advice.
Well, you certainly don't have any degrees in basic logic do you?
From which we can infer that you have a degree in logic, you didn't RTFA, you don't understand what a monoculture is, and you have a reading comprehension problem. Well, at least you were smart enough not to use your nick while posting that crap. Please turn yourself in at the nearest Darwin fulfilment center.
So next time you start uttering some regurgitated Slashdot statement like "Monoculture iZ teh dang3r0us!!!!1111", you should first consider taking an IT or MIS class.
I seem to remember getting a degree or two in those subjects. How many UNIX or Linux installations were infected by all of the recent MS email worms/viruses? Perhaps you should take some classes in biology - then it will make more sense to you, and you'll have a more rounded education.
Why not. Everybody bitches about MS being a monopoly on IBM-PC, but unix was around then. It seems like whomever owned unix at the time missed a huge opportunity by not competing for an IBM contract against MS.
After designing a cheap computer from standard components, IBM needed an OS that would run on an Intel 8088, and they needed it fast. MicroSoft went out and bought one. The IBM/Intel/MicroSoft combination put all the other "home computer" makers out of business (well, except for Apple), and the rest is history. You can call it fate, luck, or serendipity if you want. There was a later attempt to port UNIX to the x86, which became one of the BSD variants. The original PC was a toy computer with a toy operating system. Half of that still holds true for most PCs.
. . . what I just don't understand is why did these OEMs agree to this? Collectively couldn't they have had some leverage against Microsoft in a business sense?
You really expect companies who are trying to cut each other's throats to band together against a company they need to deal with on an individual basis? At least one company did complain about Microsoft's tactics; it was Gateway, IIRC.
Or, for all you know, it's because the evidence is difficult to produce in such a manner a judge can make sense of. A geek can look at code and say "Yep, that was copied." whereas a judge could look at code and say "programming can be a very exact process, it's possible the code just ended up being similar"
I graded C/C++ programming labs for several professors for three years in university. Sure, a coder can look at two files and say the code is copied, but from where? A book? A third-party's code? And who copied whom?
There was more than one instance of copying in school, but there was one major incident involving a fairly tough lab for beginners where I found an obvious copy (globally changed variable names) and marked both zero. Then I found another and another. Finally there were seven students with a zero on the lab (out of a hundred plus). The reason the copying was so obvious was that the copied code was needlessly long and convoluted and contained a strange mistake that was replicated in all the copies. (They were all smart enough to change the comments.)
Although I think I know who the original author of the code was, I'll never know for sure. There were also many labs that contained snippets of code, including whole functions, taken straight from the course textbook, which were perfectly legit. Copied code may get you in trouble or it may mean nothing. I'll give SCO a zero and leave the final score up to the judge.
(2) Well, we're pretty sure that they're infringing somehow, but despite the fact that we claim to own this stuff, doggone if we can't find a current version of it. Anyway, once IBM spells it all out for us I'm sure we'll come up with something that looks like that other thing. Probably.
I think it's even worse than that. From the article:
16. Our engineers have reached the conclusion that parts of Linux have almost certainly been copied or derived from AIX or Dynix/ptx. In those cases, confirmation of this opinion would require access to more current versions of AIX and Dynix/ptx.
So SCO's uber engineers know that some code in Linux has "almost certainly been copied", but they have never seen the original code. Now THAT is a good group of software engineers. Is one of them named John Edward? I wonder if any of them channel Turing? I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask him.
Given all of this plain evidence, why isn't the SEC up SCO's ass!!!!
The SEC has far more important things to worry about right now, and they have all their people busy circling the wagons. The decoration diva, Martha Stewart, is just about to jerk a knot in their tail, and they're scrambling for cover. They can't be bothered with real pump-and-dump schemes like SCO for a while.
So, uh, are you trying to say something about lawyers there?
guttersnipe - n - a person of the lowest moral or economic station
I was going to comment that you had it all wrong, but that was before I looked up the definition.
Okay, then I'll do it. The more common definition of guttersnipe is a child of the slums who spends much of their time in the streets (Webster's). The, er, ambulance chasers in question have no connection with low "economic station", and honest (moral) guttersnipes everywhere take offense at the comparison.
To me, SCO's attitude is more like the way a two-year-old views the world: Whatever I think is mine, is mine. Anything you drop is mine. Anything you don't drop but I want is mine anyway. And if you try to take anything back, I'll just scream, "NO! MINE!"
If and only if the company officers believe in good faith that their IP is being infringed, because of their duty to maximise shareholder value, they are oblidged to sue.
They should only feel obliged to sue if they are fairly certain they can win the case. People on slashdot continually refer to this so-called duty to maximize shareholder value, and I would certainly appreciate it if someone could provide a link to this law. AFAIK, the only duty company officers have is a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. The phrase *maximize shareholder value* is meaningless anyway. Does it mean this quarter, next quarter, next year, in twenty years? If, like SCO, I maximize shareholder value this quarter, and next year the company is a smoking hole in Utah, did that fulfill my duty? The final shareholders are certainly not going to find any value in it.
I know that there have been shareholder suits by people unhappy with the selling price of a company, but that would be the only time that *maximizing value* would make any sense.
Actually, if Linux becomes illegal, and is in the same league as warez, mp3s, and pr0n on Kazaa, it would bode very ill for the future of Linux.
How could Linux become "illegal"? SCO is suing IBM for violation of a contract apparently regarding trade secrets. If SCO were to miraculously win the suit, IBM would have to pay SCO, and SCO is compensated for its loss (hahaha). You cannot put trade secrets back in the bottle; once divulged, they are no longer secret. Unless SCO manages to purchase some new laws, there would be nothing illegal about Linux. In the worst (fantasy) case, IBM pays to make it legal.
wrong about one thing. the average education level of workers in indian call centers is way above that of their american peers.
Well, apparently they weren't educated in customer service. The HP/Compaq offshored help is all but useless even after you stay on hold for 30 minutes. I'll never buy another HP product - I hope you're listening Carly, but I doubt it; you're too busy looting the company.
If she didn't get caught at the time, why is she being ticketed now? How can they prove she was really there?
Perhaps because she admits on her web site that she was there and the bouncer, um, bounced her. Not that I actually checked out her web site with all those supposedly nekkid pictures of her in the bar - it's just hearsay, and I'm really surprised it's not slashdotted with all those graphics; that's good hosting - I mean it's got to be slashdotted anyway.
Photoshop can do some amazing things these days.
If not Photoshop, surgery sure can - er, I mean yes, absolutely.
The birds would nest on it, then you'd need to hire someone to clean shit off the fans.
Actually, I read that dead bugs (think windshield) are building up on the turbine blades and reducing their efficiency. That is going to be some cleaning job. (I hope I didn't just start a save-the-bugs movement.)
However, between 7000 turbines and 22,000 birds, thats not exactly a bad statistic. More birds are killed by lots of other things, such as aircraft, cars, and yes, even your humble domestic cat.
I can vouch for that. I got two pheasants and a sparrow this year with one Toyota. Multiply 3 by the the number of Toyotas on the road, and one can easily see that wind farms and turbines are not the problem. Save the birds! Ban imported cars!
But seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS? Ohh.. that's right, they didn't. Global organizations before IT weren't very common, and weren't very effective. Branches operated largely disconnected as seperate but financially related entities.
Now, you've got me laughing. There were no global organizations before Microsoft? Well, back then we were short of current buzzwords, so we just called them multi-national corporations. I work for a company with over 60,000 employees all over the world and I've worked for larger ones. For global coordination and communication we have often used technologies like email, telephones, faxes, video-conferencing, teleconferencing and such - none of which rely exclusively on MS software.. We really don't seem to have a need for "global" calendaring. We still operate as geographically separate entities, because that is exactly what we are.
Like I said, show me an alternative. SOmething that allows group collobration, e-mail, IM, group-calendars, document sharing/revisioning, and usuable robust remote access.
If you have to have every misfeature of MS software in one package, you will, surprisingly enough, wind up using MS software. There are any number of products that perform some of the functions. Other products like SAP may integrate many functions. Further, companies with an interest in security will implement their own solutions - my company did. By "usable robust remote access", I assume you mean easy, vulnerable, exploitable access. I have usable, secure access to any machine in the organization that I have permission to access, and we aren't using Windows for that access. As others far smarter than I have pointed out, using the homogenous and failure-prone MS software for everything is more troublesome in the long run.
Otherwise, you exisit in some type of "everything MS puts out is crapware" never-never land.
Nope. I live in a now-elightened land where I watched with interest as MicroSoft was born, and I supported them for nearly two decades because I thought they were doing good for the little guys (us). In the later years, they became even worse than what they had supplanted. They became the largest security risk there is because of their maniacal pursuit of profit over everything else (including the well being of their long-time customers - us).
Give me a superior feature-for-feature alternative to Win2k Server + Exchange 2000 + Oulook 2000 for about 1000 people and I'll listen.
If you can't come up with a more useful, misfeature-for-misfeature, more secure alternative, then you prove my point. Too many young people have been brainwashed into thinking Microsoft is the only solution. Enjoy your delusion. There was life before Microsoft, young one. There will be (a better) life after Microsoft (for most of us). Many of us don't see the value in enabling and promoting the distribution of malware.
You know what this means right? We've backed Microsoft into a corner, so now it's going to pull every dirty trick in the book to get it's profits back...
What I don't understand is how did Microsoft get out of the corner in the first place? I know that 10 years is half of a lifetime, or more, for a lot of people on Slashdot, but it really isn't that long.
Twenty years ago, Microsoft was considered something a hobbyist would use. Ten years ago, Microsoft software was considered cheap, partially useful software that couldn't scale. Now, it's still true except for the cheap part.
Now, although the product still sucks, there are all these clueless people who claim it's the best enterprise-class software. This has to be the best example of marketing triumphing over truth and sanity ever.
Nobody here has hard data, but I'm willing to stick with my common-sense impression that, for the vast bulk of consumers, we play CD's ubiquitously (while driving, as background music, etc.) far more than DVD's, your sample-family-size-of-one notwithstanding.
I listen to the radio while driving, but who cares? The price-for-frequency-of-use argument is nonsense. Given your logic, the psycho stalker in his parents' basement listening to the same Britney album over and over continuously should have to pay $50,000 for it. I should get it for free because I will never listen to it.
Insofar as the age of the original is a question which also exists for film (i.e., I could compare a recent symphonic recording with a DVD of Gone with the Wind) I consider that completely irrelevent. (Also, I don't know where you shop, but where I go a new, full-priced CD is 14.95, and a new full-priced DVD is 29.95).
I typically buy my DVDs from Columbia House for $9 to $21. BestBuy often has new movie releases for $20 or less. I suppose there may be some special cases that support your argument, but I have been purchasing quite a few old classics for $9 to $15. Recently, I noted a case where the sound track for a movie (IIRC, it was Titanic) was selling for more than the movie in the same store. I just checked at BestBuy, and the DVD costs $9.99 while the sound track on CD costs 14.95. Since the cost of producing the sound track was part of the cost of producing the movie and the movie contains the sound track, I still maintain that there is something really wrong with CD prices.
Ironically, for your argument, kids' media is almost always cheaper than regular media. You can get a Spongebob DVD for about half the price of a regular movie DVD.
There is no irony involved. If you think you can get a Disney movie at a discount, you obviously don't have kids.
The cost of production argument is specious, because DVD's of films are the second source of income for those films (after all, they were released originally in theaters), while CD's are the only revenue return of significance for a production session.
I asked you not to use that debunked theater-income argument. Studios now also count on income from DVD/tape sales to make a profit. The point is that record labels have already made huge profits on old music but are still charging full price for the CDs. If you think they are still trying to recover their costs, then you aren't paying attention (obviously). The record labels also get money every time a song is played or performed publicly. They get government-mandated fees from webcasters that the RIAA purchased from legislators by way of purloined profits. The RIAA is an illegal cartel (as proven in court) and needs to be outlawed. It serves no purpose except to bleed customers in order to profit organized crime (the cartel). The fact that it prices its less expensive product higher than the other cartel (MPAA) makes the abuse all the more obvious.
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How many r00t vulnerablilities did linux have in the past three months? How many Linux vendors got hacked because of undisclosed, in the wild exploits? How many of these effected Linux systems? I think Linux has enough to worry about with their own glass house, and should worry less about throwing rocks at other OS's.
Perhaps you should have tried to restrain your MS zealotry and read the comment all the way through. The discussion was about the dangers of software monocultures, and my point was that UNIX and Linux installations are not affected by MS malware. The reverse would be equally true.
Ah, the old analogy straw man. How about you take some computer classes? Because like all analogies, yours is flawed. A man-made construct is very different from a biological system. If biodiversity is so great, why do they sterilize surgery rooms? Answer- because they WANT a controlled monoculture.
You seem to have confused *operating room* with *operating system*. Typical OSs do not operate in sterile environments, nor do you except when a surgeon is cutting you open. I already have two degrees in CS and MIS, but I do continue to take classes occasionally. Thanks for the advice.
Well, you certainly don't have any degrees in basic logic do you?
From which we can infer that you have a degree in logic, you didn't RTFA, you don't understand what a monoculture is, and you have a reading comprehension problem. Well, at least you were smart enough not to use your nick while posting that crap. Please turn yourself in at the nearest Darwin fulfilment center.
So next time you start uttering some regurgitated Slashdot statement like "Monoculture iZ teh dang3r0us!!!!1111", you should first consider taking an IT or MIS class.
I seem to remember getting a degree or two in those subjects. How many UNIX or Linux installations were infected by all of the recent MS email worms/viruses? Perhaps you should take some classes in biology - then it will make more sense to you, and you'll have a more rounded education.
Why not. Everybody bitches about MS being a monopoly on IBM-PC, but unix was around then. It seems like whomever owned unix at the time missed a huge opportunity by not competing for an IBM contract against MS.
After designing a cheap computer from standard components, IBM needed an OS that would run on an Intel 8088, and they needed it fast. MicroSoft went out and bought one. The IBM/Intel/MicroSoft combination put all the other "home computer" makers out of business (well, except for Apple), and the rest is history. You can call it fate, luck, or serendipity if you want. There was a later attempt to port UNIX to the x86, which became one of the BSD variants. The original PC was a toy computer with a toy operating system. Half of that still holds true for most PCs.
. . . what I just don't understand is why did these OEMs agree to this? Collectively couldn't they have had some leverage against Microsoft in a business sense?
You really expect companies who are trying to cut each other's throats to band together against a company they need to deal with on an individual basis? At least one company did complain about Microsoft's tactics; it was Gateway, IIRC.
Or, for all you know, it's because the evidence is difficult to produce in such a manner a judge can make sense of. A geek can look at code and say "Yep, that was copied." whereas a judge could look at code and say "programming can be a very exact process, it's possible the code just ended up being similar"
I graded C/C++ programming labs for several professors for three years in university. Sure, a coder can look at two files and say the code is copied, but from where? A book? A third-party's code? And who copied whom?
There was more than one instance of copying in school, but there was one major incident involving a fairly tough lab for beginners where I found an obvious copy (globally changed variable names) and marked both zero. Then I found another and another. Finally there were seven students with a zero on the lab (out of a hundred plus). The reason the copying was so obvious was that the copied code was needlessly long and convoluted and contained a strange mistake that was replicated in all the copies. (They were all smart enough to change the comments.)
Although I think I know who the original author of the code was, I'll never know for sure. There were also many labs that contained snippets of code, including whole functions, taken straight from the course textbook, which were perfectly legit. Copied code may get you in trouble or it may mean nothing. I'll give SCO a zero and leave the final score up to the judge.
(2) Well, we're pretty sure that they're infringing somehow, but despite the fact that we claim to own this stuff, doggone if we can't find a current version of it. Anyway, once IBM spells it all out for us I'm sure we'll come up with something that looks like that other thing. Probably.
I think it's even worse than that. From the article:
16. Our engineers have reached the conclusion that parts of Linux have almost certainly been copied or derived from AIX or Dynix/ptx. In those cases, confirmation of this opinion would require access to more current versions of AIX and Dynix/ptx.
So SCO's uber engineers know that some code in Linux has "almost certainly been copied", but they have never seen the original code. Now THAT is a good group of software engineers. Is one of them named John Edward? I wonder if any of them channel Turing? I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask him.
Given all of this plain evidence, why isn't the SEC up SCO's ass!!!!
The SEC has far more important things to worry about right now, and they have all their people busy circling the wagons. The decoration diva, Martha Stewart, is just about to jerk a knot in their tail, and they're scrambling for cover. They can't be bothered with real pump-and-dump schemes like SCO for a while.
Okay, then I'll do it. The more common definition of guttersnipe is a child of the slums who spends much of their time in the streets (Webster's). The, er, ambulance chasers in question have no connection with low "economic station", and honest (moral) guttersnipes everywhere take offense at the comparison.
SCO:We own you.
Novell: OMG STFU nUb
To me, SCO's attitude is more like the way a two-year-old views the world: Whatever I think is mine, is mine. Anything you drop is mine. Anything you don't drop but I want is mine anyway. And if you try to take anything back, I'll just scream, "NO! MINE!"
Gravastar. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?
It's a minivan. You've been skipping over the commercials again, haven't you?
If and only if the company officers believe in good faith that their IP is being infringed, because of their duty to maximise shareholder value, they are oblidged to sue.
They should only feel obliged to sue if they are fairly certain they can win the case. People on slashdot continually refer to this so-called duty to maximize shareholder value, and I would certainly appreciate it if someone could provide a link to this law. AFAIK, the only duty company officers have is a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. The phrase *maximize shareholder value* is meaningless anyway. Does it mean this quarter, next quarter, next year, in twenty years? If, like SCO, I maximize shareholder value this quarter, and next year the company is a smoking hole in Utah, did that fulfill my duty? The final shareholders are certainly not going to find any value in it.
I know that there have been shareholder suits by people unhappy with the selling price of a company, but that would be the only time that *maximizing value* would make any sense.
yeah that'll be the windows idle process keeping the cpu(s) running at 100% load ;)
Nah, it's the antivirus software fighting with the OS and the apps that actually want to open files.
Actually, if Linux becomes illegal, and is in the same league as warez, mp3s, and pr0n on Kazaa, it would bode very ill for the future of Linux.
How could Linux become "illegal"? SCO is suing IBM for violation of a contract apparently regarding trade secrets. If SCO were to miraculously win the suit, IBM would have to pay SCO, and SCO is compensated for its loss (hahaha). You cannot put trade secrets back in the bottle; once divulged, they are no longer secret. Unless SCO manages to purchase some new laws, there would be nothing illegal about Linux. In the worst (fantasy) case, IBM pays to make it legal.
wrong about one thing. the average education level of workers in indian call centers is way above that of their american peers.
Well, apparently they weren't educated in customer service. The HP/Compaq offshored help is all but useless even after you stay on hold for 30 minutes. I'll never buy another HP product - I hope you're listening Carly, but I doubt it; you're too busy looting the company.
That's a little like Topeka, Kansas...equally convenient to both coasts.
Heh. So how come nobody ever stops there? Been there - left there. Although it could be worse; it could be Wichita. :)
If she didn't get caught at the time, why is she being ticketed now? How can they prove she was really there?
Perhaps because she admits on her web site that she was there and the bouncer, um, bounced her. Not that I actually checked out her web site with all those supposedly nekkid pictures of her in the bar - it's just hearsay, and I'm really surprised it's not slashdotted with all those graphics; that's good hosting - I mean it's got to be slashdotted anyway.
Photoshop can do some amazing things these days.
If not Photoshop, surgery sure can - er, I mean yes, absolutely.
The birds would nest on it, then you'd need to hire someone to clean shit off the fans.
Actually, I read that dead bugs (think windshield) are building up on the turbine blades and reducing their efficiency. That is going to be some cleaning job. (I hope I didn't just start a save-the-bugs movement.)
However, between 7000 turbines and 22,000 birds, thats not exactly a bad statistic. More birds are killed by lots of other things, such as aircraft, cars, and yes, even your humble domestic cat.
I can vouch for that. I got two pheasants and a sparrow this year with one Toyota. Multiply 3 by the the number of Toyotas on the road, and one can easily see that wind farms and turbines are not the problem. Save the birds! Ban imported cars!
Would that make it the longest hole-in-one in History?
Now that I've stopped laughing, is there a Slashdot award for best cruel joke of the year?
Jeez, somebody loses their dog and they blame a crater on Mars.
If they knew anything about Mars, they would know that a banth got it. Bad luck, old boys.
But seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS? Ohh.. that's right, they didn't. Global organizations before IT weren't very common, and weren't very effective. Branches operated largely disconnected as seperate but financially related entities.
Now, you've got me laughing. There were no global organizations before Microsoft? Well, back then we were short of current buzzwords, so we just called them multi-national corporations. I work for a company with over 60,000 employees all over the world and I've worked for larger ones. For global coordination and communication we have often used technologies like email, telephones, faxes, video-conferencing, teleconferencing and such - none of which rely exclusively on MS software.. We really don't seem to have a need for "global" calendaring. We still operate as geographically separate entities, because that is exactly what we are.
Like I said, show me an alternative. SOmething that allows group collobration, e-mail, IM, group-calendars, document sharing/revisioning, and usuable robust remote access.
If you have to have every misfeature of MS software in one package, you will, surprisingly enough, wind up using MS software. There are any number of products that perform some of the functions. Other products like SAP may integrate many functions. Further, companies with an interest in security will implement their own solutions - my company did. By "usable robust remote access", I assume you mean easy, vulnerable, exploitable access. I have usable, secure access to any machine in the organization that I have permission to access, and we aren't using Windows for that access. As others far smarter than I have pointed out, using the homogenous and failure-prone MS software for everything is more troublesome in the long run.
Otherwise, you exisit in some type of "everything MS puts out is crapware" never-never land.
Nope. I live in a now-elightened land where I watched with interest as MicroSoft was born, and I supported them for nearly two decades because I thought they were doing good for the little guys (us). In the later years, they became even worse than what they had supplanted. They became the largest security risk there is because of their maniacal pursuit of profit over everything else (including the well being of their long-time customers - us).
Give me a superior feature-for-feature alternative to Win2k Server + Exchange 2000 + Oulook 2000 for about 1000 people and I'll listen.
If you can't come up with a more useful, misfeature-for-misfeature, more secure alternative, then you prove my point. Too many young people have been brainwashed into thinking Microsoft is the only solution. Enjoy your delusion. There was life before Microsoft, young one. There will be (a better) life after Microsoft (for most of us). Many of us don't see the value in enabling and promoting the distribution of malware.
You know what this means right? We've backed Microsoft into a corner, so now it's going to pull every dirty trick in the book to get it's profits back...
What I don't understand is how did Microsoft get out of the corner in the first place? I know that 10 years is half of a lifetime, or more, for a lot of people on Slashdot, but it really isn't that long.
Twenty years ago, Microsoft was considered something a hobbyist would use. Ten years ago, Microsoft software was considered cheap, partially useful software that couldn't scale. Now, it's still true except for the cheap part.
Now, although the product still sucks, there are all these clueless people who claim it's the best enterprise-class software. This has to be the best example of marketing triumphing over truth and sanity ever.
Nobody here has hard data, but I'm willing to stick with my common-sense impression that, for the vast bulk of consumers, we play CD's ubiquitously (while driving, as background music, etc.) far more than DVD's, your sample-family-size-of-one notwithstanding.
I listen to the radio while driving, but who cares? The price-for-frequency-of-use argument is nonsense. Given your logic, the psycho stalker in his parents' basement listening to the same Britney album over and over continuously should have to pay $50,000 for it. I should get it for free because I will never listen to it.
Insofar as the age of the original is a question which also exists for film (i.e., I could compare a recent symphonic recording with a DVD of Gone with the Wind) I consider that completely irrelevent. (Also, I don't know where you shop, but where I go a new, full-priced CD is 14.95, and a new full-priced DVD is 29.95).
I typically buy my DVDs from Columbia House for $9 to $21. BestBuy often has new movie releases for $20 or less. I suppose there may be some special cases that support your argument, but I have been purchasing quite a few old classics for $9 to $15. Recently, I noted a case where the sound track for a movie (IIRC, it was Titanic) was selling for more than the movie in the same store. I just checked at BestBuy, and the DVD costs $9.99 while the sound track on CD costs 14.95. Since the cost of producing the sound track was part of the cost of producing the movie and the movie contains the sound track, I still maintain that there is something really wrong with CD prices.
Ironically, for your argument, kids' media is almost always cheaper than regular media. You can get a Spongebob DVD for about half the price of a regular movie DVD.
There is no irony involved. If you think you can get a Disney movie at a discount, you obviously don't have kids.
The cost of production argument is specious, because DVD's of films are the second source of income for those films (after all, they were released originally in theaters), while CD's are the only revenue return of significance for a production session.
I asked you not to use that debunked theater-income argument. Studios now also count on income from DVD/tape sales to make a profit. The point is that record labels have already made huge profits on old music but are still charging full price for the CDs. If you think they are still trying to recover their costs, then you aren't paying attention (obviously). The record labels also get money every time a song is played or performed publicly. They get government-mandated fees from webcasters that the RIAA purchased from legislators by way of purloined profits. The RIAA is an illegal cartel (as proven in court) and needs to be outlawed. It serves no purpose except to bleed customers in order to profit organized crime (the cartel). The fact that it prices its less expensive product higher than the other cartel (MPAA) makes the abuse all the more obvious.