I have the same problem with buying music. Most of the time the album on iTunes costs more than buying the actual CD in the store. That's just crazy. Sure you can save quite a bit if you only buy singles, but personally, I'm not that interested in supporting musicians who can only turn out a single song worth buying on a whole album. The prices really need to come in line with what this stuff is really worth. Also, if they lower prices to "impulse" levels, they will probably make a much larger profit. This is probably around 25-50 cents a track and $2-$5 for the entire album. eBooks should be between $1 and $5. If you don't have to stop and think "Is this really worth my money" you will just click the buy button.
Linux is not a device. The computer itself is the device. The computer will run Netflix just fine as long as you load the right software on it. You complaining that it won't run on a Linux PC, is the same as me complaining that it won't work on my Nokia Symbian phone. Sure it would be nice, but I realize that it will probably never happen because the market for people with Symbian phones is just too small.
To be more fair, and what a lot of people seem to forget is this. Their original price was for mail only, then they added streaming for free. Later they decided that wasn't viable and split the two, charging two different rates for the two separate products. To use the hamburger analogy from the comic you linked to. It's like the hamburger restaurant selling hamburgers for $X. They they start giving away free milkshakes with the hamburgers for $X. Then, they find out the price of milkshakes skyrockets because the milk cartel didn't like people getting free milkshakes, so they split the services, and now they go back to selling hamburgers at $X-Y, and have a different place to sell milkshakes at $X-Z. Sure you end up paying more if you want both, but what you forget is that the milkshake was thrown in for free at some point, and that you got a lot of free milkshakes out of it. Also, in this analogy, you should be angry at the Milk Cartel who raised their rates, not the people selling burgers and milkshakes, because they don't have ultimate control over all the pricing.
Even if all the cars are self driving, a self driving car still has other things to worry about that aren't cars. There's pedestrians and bikes to name a couple. The highway might be a little easier, but there's still things like deer and moose, not to mention broken down cars. However having all automated cars can lead to huge reductions in congestion, for the simple fact that all cars can start moving at exactly the same time, instead of the way its done now.
I agree. If this was the case, there would be no firewall in Windows either. That one seems to have slipped through just fine. If they are restricted from including something simply because somebody else makes a similar product, then Windows is doomed until they no longer have a high enough market share to be considered a monopoly.
20 points sounds more reasonable however I'm unfamiliar with the scoring of water polo, 20 points in American football is nothing. This was soccer, and 5 seems like a pretty small margin. Teams have come back from worse many times. I still really don't get the point. Being behind by 5 points and having the other team play keep-away because they aren't allowed to score is no more fun than being behind by a larger amount. Also When I was a kid, we'd just end the game if the score got too out of control. And the winning team would win automatically. No point in running up the score I agree, but there should be no reason to lose a game because you scored too many goals.
But then there's the other side of the fence where they take it too far. For instance, there's we don't keep score anymore because we don't want kids to feel bad. Or the greatest I've ever heard. We keep score, but if you get ahead more than 5 goals, you lose. That's right, Don't do too well, or you will be declared the loser. The extremists on both sides are taking all the fun out of it.
There is already a "right to bear arms" but that doesn't mean the government has to buy you a gun. It doesn't mean that the government is unable to restrict the sale of firearms to criminals. Your logic is completely flawed when compared to other rights that are granted to citizens.
It does mean that Canadians are allowed to make personal copies of audio recordings if they want. So if you borrow a CD from the library, or from a friend, or just buy it, you are allowed to make a copy for yourself. If you bought the CD, you may then sell it. What you are not allowed to do, is make a copy for someone else. So to clarify. If you make a copy and give the copy to your friend, you are breaking the law. If your friend borrows your CD and makes a copy, that is ok.
You should fill it full of stuff from PortableApps. Tons of great programs there. Plus they don't have to install anything. No worry about messing up their computer.
I still don't understand why you need a new currency though. Everything I hear about bitcoin is good except for the fact that I can put $50 in account, and then the next days it's gone because "bitcoin" was devalued. For something like bitcoin to catch on, people will have to be ensured that putting $50 in your bitcoin wallet means that you will always be able to take $50 back out.
It's a discount, because you end up the same feeds to the carriers even if you own your phone outright. This is my biggest objection to the whole racket. Your monthly bill is the same whether or not you are on a contract, and whether or not you bought the phone at a subsidized price. So, unless you are planning on switching carriers in the next few months (in which case, why are you using them to begin with?) you'd be stupid not to take the subsidized phone, because you'll end up paying the same every month anyway. I could see some advantage from someone who moves around a lot, who doesn't know if they will have good coverage (or if the carrier will offer service at all) in the next place they move to, but for most people who intend to stay in the same city, they get nothing by choosing to pay for their own phone.
This is the best thing that the iPhone has done for the cell phone industry. Apple doesn't bow down and let the carrier load whatever crap they want to on the phone. This makes the iPhone a much better experience, because an iPhone from Verizon is exactly the same as an iPhone from AT&T and it exactly the same as an iPhone you purchase directly from Apple. The only difference is that the carrier specific phones have been locked to that provider, but that's acceptable since you're getting the phone at a huge discount. I wish more handset makes, especially the big ones (HTC, Motorola, Nokia) would do the same to offer their customers a much better and more consistent experience.
But to accomplish this, we don't really need a whole new currency, what we really need is an open payment API. Paypal, Visa, Google Wallet could all use the same API for transferring money, and both the merchant, and the purchaser could choose to use whichever service they wished. You shouldn't have to convert your money into some secondary currency to accomplish this. You should able to place $50 into your wallet, and be able to send that $50 to any body else using the same Open Payment API. There's no reason to have another currency. In my mind, it would work very much like OpenID, except that your OpenID provider would also be holding money for you (or allow you to enter credit card number when payment was required) and then the money could be transferred to the website you are authenticating with.
My 5 year old daughter reads this way already. She has a tough time sounding out words if confronted with something new (we're working on that) but she can read entire books just based off words that she's memorized. And I'm not talking about simple toddler books either. She has a huge vocabulary of words she just recognizes by sight alone.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Copyrights keep on getting extended, so there isn't all that much content in the public domain, and that which is, wasn't recorded digitally, so all we have are less than stellar recordings. Give it another 100 years, we will eventually have a lot of content in pristine condition which is in the public domain, more content then one could watch in a lifetime, or we'll have copyright extended indefinitely. If you look to books, we already have enough freely available content that the "digital Amish" could exist and only read public domain books, and never run out of content.
Because in some countries any kind of porn is deemed illegal, as is much of the conversation on 4chan. 4chan is the home of "anonymous". In some places just visiting sites with such associations could lead to an investigation if someone doesn't like you. Personally, I was just testing out Tor and visited a bunch of sites, some for no particular reason at all.
Why does free speech have to be anonymous? The freedoms we have today are because people have stood up publicly and announced that they are not happy with the status quo. When all the people protesting are faceless anonymous people hiding behind computers, it doesn't really count as free speech. People should be free from prosecution from what they say not because they are good at hiding, but because it is a fundamental right. The people shouldn't require technological measures to protect themselves. Granted, there are some countries where people are truly denied free speech, but communicating over a covert private network will not get the laws changed.
Not only that, but I find that there's a lot of nefarious traffic going on over TOR. Last few times I've tried it, visited 4Chan, and found that the particular IP of my exit node had been banned for uploading child porn. Now i realize that every technology like this will have bad uses and good uses. but I'd think twice about hosting an exit node, unless you enjoy the SWAT team knocking down your door at 3 AM.
Or even worse, a corrupted disk. A change of a single bit could wipe out whatever savings you may have. So now you have to back it up, to multiple places, preferrably one offsite, in case your house burns down. And you have to be able to do this on a daily basis. Whenever you have too much cash in your wallet, or when you need more cash in your wallet. Sorry, but nobody, apart from researchers, and those who want to check it out just for the novelty are going to use bitcoin as a currency.
But pointing a camera a the screen creates very inferior copies. Maybe you can never fill the analog hole, but if you fill the digital hole, you come a long way to stopping piracy. Sure, some people will still go for cam stuff, but that doesn't give you 1080p video (even if you use a 1080p camera) with 7.1 surround sound. I'm not saying that they will be able to make perfect DRM, because I understand that doesn't exist. However, I think they will get it to a point where most people don't want to go through the trouble of breaking the DRM, because it will require physical (ie drilling holes) modification to their TV which most people aren't willing to do.
Must be a conspiracy set up by Amazon to get people to pay for vast amounts of compute time. Why now allow people to purchase copies of the data on hard disk or tape. 5 billion pages, at 100K each (high estimate perhaps) is 500 TB. If you zip it, you could probably get it down to 10 TB if you compress it with a good algorithm. Not "that much" if this is the kind of research you are interested in.
Interesting, However, wouldn't one need to index the data in whatever format they need in order to actually search and get useful results from it? You'd need to pay a fortune in compute time just to analyze that much data. It say's they've indexed it, but I don't see how that helps researchers who will want to run their own indexing and analysis against that dataset. Sure it means you don't have to download and spider all that data, but that's only a very small part of the problem.
It's only broken if you assume general purpose device like a PC. I forsee that once computers get fast enough, small enough, and have little enough heat to dissipate that eventually we will have the components encased in epoxy, with most of the important internals on a single chip, placed in a random place on a board (chips are placed in the same spot during manufacturing, edges are cut differently so they exist in a different physical position in the end product). There will be no media slot and possibly no ports of any kind for hooking up peripherals. It won't have general access to the internet, and will only be able to visit approved services, where all code is signed and encrypted so as not to allow unsigned code to run. If you look at the reason most DRM was cracked, it was because they existed on a run-of-the-mill computer, where the key was stored in memory. Or you have a console, where you can add on a mod chip, or edit the save game files to create a buffer overflow error. If you remove the ability of the user to interact with the machine at that level, then you go a very long way towards most people not bothering to break the DRM. It's only a matter of time before some $25 machine becomes all you need, and the only way, to play your media content, but that $25 machine is encased in epoxy and has no user accessible data of any kind. It just has HDMI out, and an Ethernet port. The software inside will only connect and run certified software.
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I have the same problem with buying music. Most of the time the album on iTunes costs more than buying the actual CD in the store. That's just crazy. Sure you can save quite a bit if you only buy singles, but personally, I'm not that interested in supporting musicians who can only turn out a single song worth buying on a whole album. The prices really need to come in line with what this stuff is really worth. Also, if they lower prices to "impulse" levels, they will probably make a much larger profit. This is probably around 25-50 cents a track and $2-$5 for the entire album. eBooks should be between $1 and $5. If you don't have to stop and think "Is this really worth my money" you will just click the buy button.
I think you missed the joke.
Linux is not a device. The computer itself is the device. The computer will run Netflix just fine as long as you load the right software on it. You complaining that it won't run on a Linux PC, is the same as me complaining that it won't work on my Nokia Symbian phone. Sure it would be nice, but I realize that it will probably never happen because the market for people with Symbian phones is just too small.
To be more fair, and what a lot of people seem to forget is this. Their original price was for mail only, then they added streaming for free. Later they decided that wasn't viable and split the two, charging two different rates for the two separate products. To use the hamburger analogy from the comic you linked to. It's like the hamburger restaurant selling hamburgers for $X. They they start giving away free milkshakes with the hamburgers for $X. Then, they find out the price of milkshakes skyrockets because the milk cartel didn't like people getting free milkshakes, so they split the services, and now they go back to selling hamburgers at $X-Y, and have a different place to sell milkshakes at $X-Z. Sure you end up paying more if you want both, but what you forget is that the milkshake was thrown in for free at some point, and that you got a lot of free milkshakes out of it. Also, in this analogy, you should be angry at the Milk Cartel who raised their rates, not the people selling burgers and milkshakes, because they don't have ultimate control over all the pricing.
Even if all the cars are self driving, a self driving car still has other things to worry about that aren't cars. There's pedestrians and bikes to name a couple. The highway might be a little easier, but there's still things like deer and moose, not to mention broken down cars. However having all automated cars can lead to huge reductions in congestion, for the simple fact that all cars can start moving at exactly the same time, instead of the way its done now.
I agree. If this was the case, there would be no firewall in Windows either. That one seems to have slipped through just fine. If they are restricted from including something simply because somebody else makes a similar product, then Windows is doomed until they no longer have a high enough market share to be considered a monopoly.
20 points sounds more reasonable however I'm unfamiliar with the scoring of water polo, 20 points in American football is nothing. This was soccer, and 5 seems like a pretty small margin. Teams have come back from worse many times. I still really don't get the point. Being behind by 5 points and having the other team play keep-away because they aren't allowed to score is no more fun than being behind by a larger amount. Also When I was a kid, we'd just end the game if the score got too out of control. And the winning team would win automatically. No point in running up the score I agree, but there should be no reason to lose a game because you scored too many goals.
But then there's the other side of the fence where they take it too far. For instance, there's we don't keep score anymore because we don't want kids to feel bad. Or the greatest I've ever heard. We keep score, but if you get ahead more than 5 goals, you lose. That's right, Don't do too well, or you will be declared the loser. The extremists on both sides are taking all the fun out of it.
There is already a "right to bear arms" but that doesn't mean the government has to buy you a gun. It doesn't mean that the government is unable to restrict the sale of firearms to criminals. Your logic is completely flawed when compared to other rights that are granted to citizens.
It does mean that Canadians are allowed to make personal copies of audio recordings if they want. So if you borrow a CD from the library, or from a friend, or just buy it, you are allowed to make a copy for yourself. If you bought the CD, you may then sell it. What you are not allowed to do, is make a copy for someone else. So to clarify. If you make a copy and give the copy to your friend, you are breaking the law. If your friend borrows your CD and makes a copy, that is ok.
You should fill it full of stuff from PortableApps. Tons of great programs there. Plus they don't have to install anything. No worry about messing up their computer.
I still don't understand why you need a new currency though. Everything I hear about bitcoin is good except for the fact that I can put $50 in account, and then the next days it's gone because "bitcoin" was devalued. For something like bitcoin to catch on, people will have to be ensured that putting $50 in your bitcoin wallet means that you will always be able to take $50 back out.
It's a discount, because you end up the same feeds to the carriers even if you own your phone outright. This is my biggest objection to the whole racket. Your monthly bill is the same whether or not you are on a contract, and whether or not you bought the phone at a subsidized price. So, unless you are planning on switching carriers in the next few months (in which case, why are you using them to begin with?) you'd be stupid not to take the subsidized phone, because you'll end up paying the same every month anyway. I could see some advantage from someone who moves around a lot, who doesn't know if they will have good coverage (or if the carrier will offer service at all) in the next place they move to, but for most people who intend to stay in the same city, they get nothing by choosing to pay for their own phone.
This is the best thing that the iPhone has done for the cell phone industry. Apple doesn't bow down and let the carrier load whatever crap they want to on the phone. This makes the iPhone a much better experience, because an iPhone from Verizon is exactly the same as an iPhone from AT&T and it exactly the same as an iPhone you purchase directly from Apple. The only difference is that the carrier specific phones have been locked to that provider, but that's acceptable since you're getting the phone at a huge discount. I wish more handset makes, especially the big ones (HTC, Motorola, Nokia) would do the same to offer their customers a much better and more consistent experience.
But to accomplish this, we don't really need a whole new currency, what we really need is an open payment API. Paypal, Visa, Google Wallet could all use the same API for transferring money, and both the merchant, and the purchaser could choose to use whichever service they wished. You shouldn't have to convert your money into some secondary currency to accomplish this. You should able to place $50 into your wallet, and be able to send that $50 to any body else using the same Open Payment API. There's no reason to have another currency. In my mind, it would work very much like OpenID, except that your OpenID provider would also be holding money for you (or allow you to enter credit card number when payment was required) and then the money could be transferred to the website you are authenticating with.
My 5 year old daughter reads this way already. She has a tough time sounding out words if confronted with something new (we're working on that) but she can read entire books just based off words that she's memorized. And I'm not talking about simple toddler books either. She has a huge vocabulary of words she just recognizes by sight alone.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Copyrights keep on getting extended, so there isn't all that much content in the public domain, and that which is, wasn't recorded digitally, so all we have are less than stellar recordings. Give it another 100 years, we will eventually have a lot of content in pristine condition which is in the public domain, more content then one could watch in a lifetime, or we'll have copyright extended indefinitely. If you look to books, we already have enough freely available content that the "digital Amish" could exist and only read public domain books, and never run out of content.
Because in some countries any kind of porn is deemed illegal, as is much of the conversation on 4chan. 4chan is the home of "anonymous". In some places just visiting sites with such associations could lead to an investigation if someone doesn't like you. Personally, I was just testing out Tor and visited a bunch of sites, some for no particular reason at all.
Why does free speech have to be anonymous? The freedoms we have today are because people have stood up publicly and announced that they are not happy with the status quo. When all the people protesting are faceless anonymous people hiding behind computers, it doesn't really count as free speech. People should be free from prosecution from what they say not because they are good at hiding, but because it is a fundamental right. The people shouldn't require technological measures to protect themselves. Granted, there are some countries where people are truly denied free speech, but communicating over a covert private network will not get the laws changed.
Not only that, but I find that there's a lot of nefarious traffic going on over TOR. Last few times I've tried it, visited 4Chan, and found that the particular IP of my exit node had been banned for uploading child porn. Now i realize that every technology like this will have bad uses and good uses. but I'd think twice about hosting an exit node, unless you enjoy the SWAT team knocking down your door at 3 AM.
Or even worse, a corrupted disk. A change of a single bit could wipe out whatever savings you may have. So now you have to back it up, to multiple places, preferrably one offsite, in case your house burns down. And you have to be able to do this on a daily basis. Whenever you have too much cash in your wallet, or when you need more cash in your wallet. Sorry, but nobody, apart from researchers, and those who want to check it out just for the novelty are going to use bitcoin as a currency.
But pointing a camera a the screen creates very inferior copies. Maybe you can never fill the analog hole, but if you fill the digital hole, you come a long way to stopping piracy. Sure, some people will still go for cam stuff, but that doesn't give you 1080p video (even if you use a 1080p camera) with 7.1 surround sound. I'm not saying that they will be able to make perfect DRM, because I understand that doesn't exist. However, I think they will get it to a point where most people don't want to go through the trouble of breaking the DRM, because it will require physical (ie drilling holes) modification to their TV which most people aren't willing to do.
Must be a conspiracy set up by Amazon to get people to pay for vast amounts of compute time. Why now allow people to purchase copies of the data on hard disk or tape. 5 billion pages, at 100K each (high estimate perhaps) is 500 TB. If you zip it, you could probably get it down to 10 TB if you compress it with a good algorithm. Not "that much" if this is the kind of research you are interested in.
Interesting, However, wouldn't one need to index the data in whatever format they need in order to actually search and get useful results from it? You'd need to pay a fortune in compute time just to analyze that much data. It say's they've indexed it, but I don't see how that helps researchers who will want to run their own indexing and analysis against that dataset. Sure it means you don't have to download and spider all that data, but that's only a very small part of the problem.
It's only broken if you assume general purpose device like a PC. I forsee that once computers get fast enough, small enough, and have little enough heat to dissipate that eventually we will have the components encased in epoxy, with most of the important internals on a single chip, placed in a random place on a board (chips are placed in the same spot during manufacturing, edges are cut differently so they exist in a different physical position in the end product). There will be no media slot and possibly no ports of any kind for hooking up peripherals. It won't have general access to the internet, and will only be able to visit approved services, where all code is signed and encrypted so as not to allow unsigned code to run. If you look at the reason most DRM was cracked, it was because they existed on a run-of-the-mill computer, where the key was stored in memory. Or you have a console, where you can add on a mod chip, or edit the save game files to create a buffer overflow error. If you remove the ability of the user to interact with the machine at that level, then you go a very long way towards most people not bothering to break the DRM. It's only a matter of time before some $25 machine becomes all you need, and the only way, to play your media content, but that $25 machine is encased in epoxy and has no user accessible data of any kind. It just has HDMI out, and an Ethernet port. The software inside will only connect and run certified software.