Employers and employees really are on equal ground more than the general media wants you to believe. Both parties gain a profit from the jobs performed. If an employee wants to perform a job at a certain income, why is it the employer's role to let them know of any risks beforehand, unless the employee explicitly requests a risk assessment?
Your statement that both parties are on equal ground falls down in face of the information asymmetries that underly your questionning of whether the employer needs to let them know of the risks. Clearly this is not the case. Without disclosure of the risks involved in a job, the employee is not even in a situation to properly assess whether the pay received for task is sufficient to incur the risks inherent in the task. None of the completely absolves the employee of asking the obvious questions when they are in close contact with chemicals but surely this would reduce the company's liability rather than remove it entirely. Any lawyers out there able to give an informed view on this?
I share your belief that most people, most of the time want to behave honestly if at all possible.
I do not, however, think that ISPs would be willing to absorb the 'tape tax'. Sure, radio stations paid for it out of advertising revenue, but they really had no viable alternatives. They needed content to broadcast, so they had to reach an accommodation with the copyright holders and they had no way to directly charge their users. It was a basic cost of doing business that they had to absorb or change to a non-music format. The situation that ISPs face - and their business model - is very different. I don't know if they would want to rely on ad revenue to cover their costs. Online ad revenue has shown itself to be extremely variable and would not be a good way to cover a cost that was fixed per user.
If ISPs thought that enough of their users would accept the charge I imagine that they would simply build it into their pricing structure. Were they to expect customer resistance from people who do not download music, then they would introduce different bundles - as they are beginning to do for high volume users anyway. I think bundling is a better way to go than an eventual micropayment solution because people tend to prefer known fixed costs over variable per use costs even when there is a possibility that they will end up paying less. Strange as it may seem, it is rational behavior in terms of mental accounting and uncertainty avoidance.
That, as you point out, the RIAA is in favor of surcharges on recording media but not in favor of something like the EFF proposal suggests that they are not really looking for alternatives and are going to go down fighting for the obsolete busines model of the record companies. If I had stock in these companies, I would sell it.
the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction
Not so surprising, the figure is not really out of whack. While the population is a little more than one tenth - 32 million vs 292 million - higher internet usage levels, especially broadband penetration probably accounts for some of why the Canadian figure is not closer to the 5.7 - 5.9% that you might expect. As other posters have noted, normalizing the data would have helped make more sense of the of the numbers that they present. At any rate, it is safe to assume that too many Canadians and Americans do not secure their computers properly if compromised machines account for so much of the spam.
As you say, it is analogous to a 'tape tax', but there is still an element of voluntary self-reporting to pay this tax - as the parent post points out. For ISPs to offer a bundle that enables users to download all they want would presumably require that they also give those who do not want to download music a cheaper package or to eat the cost of the 'tape tax' (highly unlikely). This opens the possibility that down-loaders will not self report so that they can save money. It might work if ISPs put an additional access charge on the bundle as a network access charge additional use of bandwidth that file sharing uses. Not a perfect solution, but it gives the ISP an incentive to ensure that downloaders participate in the scheme.
erm... of course they don't deal with it, never meant to imply that they necessarily did. Indeed they probably don't even see it. It gets forwarded by their PA or who ever opens the mail and acts as their gate keeper to the appropriate department, at a higher level than the folks answering the phone. It gets results more often than not, and certainly more than this poor chap has been getting unless the company is actually intent on defrauding the general public, in which case, all bets are off and the various legal remedies suggested elsewhere come into play.
It all depends on your line of work. A lot of computer and communications technology has speeded work up and might be construed as creating more stress. Think of asynchronous communications - snail mail with expected turn around times measured in days, then came fax, you felt you should get something turned around in a day, then email, it should be instantaneous.
We have always have the phone for synchronous communication, but once you could get away from it, now you take it with you. It makes you always available, or creates a perception that you should be, but while it means that you can be controlled/coordinated anywhere anytimem, it also means that you can control/coordinate from anywhere at any time. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your place in the pecking order.
Technology has certainly made me more productive over the years and taken some stress out of some things. I can now be less precise because spell check (if only Slashdot had one) will catch most things, I can revise written work more easily and I don't have to have things finished until just before the deadline, particularly for something like a book where there is going to be a hard copy printed and bound. Once upon a time, proods were assembled physically and sent back and forth by courier. Now things can be done almost entirely electronically and I can keep making changes right up until the time it goes to press. Very annoying for the printers and designers, but very helpful for me.
I suspect that in general the question as to whether or not technology in general or a specific technology is more or less stressful to you depends on whether it empowers you and lets you exercise more control over your work and your environment or whether its implementation has the effect of reducing your ability to control what you do. I have never worked with keystroke loggers and call time recorders, if I had, I would probably blame technology for making my life more stressful.
A strategy that has worked for me in the past is send a letter (or email) to the president or CEO. When things get cascaded down from offices like that, results tend to happen.
... sent that last one off while on the phone, so didn't spell check it (sorry for provervial)... I also forgot to mention a point about how to read ridiculous sounding patents - most patents have multiple levels to the claims that they make. The lawyers will have you try for a very broad strategic claim i.e. for the entire category, then as you work through the application, you get more and more specific about the claims that you make. So you try to get by with the everything, but if the broad claims get rejected, you have the details of how you do something everyone else does protected because it is in some way novel.
Ah, but you don't understand. MS's patent uses xml! That's makes it sufficiently different from all previous desktop pagers.:)
Funny but also (sadly?) true. With the provervial disclaimer IAMAL, but I have worked in R&D labs where were were regularly briefed by the lawyers and harvested for ideas, to be patentable, an idea does not have to be a completely new product area, it just needs to be a way of doing something. So if one step in a process is novel, you can try to patent it. This means, of course, that someone can come around with a different process to do the same thing and they can also try to patent it. In the realm of software, business processes etc. this means that some dubious sounding things can get through - but it also means that there are often work arounds e.g. if one click shopping is patented, add a second step.
I feel like I should defend economists seeing as that is what I started out as, however, defending the talking heads that you see on TV is not a task that I would want to take on.
It never ceases to amaze me what people will say when they get a chance to be on TV. There are 2 or 3 areas in which I would see myself as having some expertise and whenever I come across something about them in the media it is almost invariably rubbish. When you consider that much of what I (or most of us) know about things outside our areas of expertise is via the media, it is quite humbling to realize that most of what we think we know is, in fact, rubbish. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the analysis surrounding the goings on around the irrational exuberance that was the 90s.
The big lesson to learn from the new economy was that the basic rules of economics still applied. Sure there were a lot of innovations that transformed many industries, but the basic laws of supply and demand still held true. The basic requirement that businesses had to generate revenue in order to survive still held true. It seemed that every time you looked around during the 90s there was another new economy: the information economy, the digital economy, the attention economy, the experience economy etc. etc. but these were all put forward by people who didn't know anything about economics.
Technology Review has
a discussion of the coming rivals to Googol in this month's issue. One of
them is an Australian outfit called
Mooter which does some nifty clustering
of results (somewhat familiar to those who remember Northern Light,
once a web search engine, now a provider of enterprise search engines).
They discuss several others, including efforts by Microsoft, but the general
point is that Googol (and Yahoo and Alta Vista etc. before it) have shown the
search business to be a very profitable area if you are the leader, so there are
a lot of eager pretenders to the throne. Competition is good, web users
will end up with better searching, whether from Googol or another provider.
Complimenting e-books and paper seems reasonable, though I'll go to the paper first every time
Definitely, paper if you actually want to read the thing, electronic to give you more flexibility in using the text, as you and the author of the article mention. We all know what staring at a screen for long periods does to your eyes, even if you have a large, hi-res monitor. Given the choice of one, it has to be paper.
Store clerks remembered who you were and got to know you on a personal basis, and could do everything this RFID stuff enables total strangers to do for you now.
Total strangers is the key - back in the *good old days* the clerks had a lot of information about you, but you knew who knew (local gossip notwithstanding), and you probably knew a bit about them. Now we have strangers who pretend to know us and we really can't be sure who has access to the data. Off-putting is right.
Despite the differences between AOL and Comcast cited by other posters in
this thread, the basic similarity remains: linking distribution of content with
content production. Given the history of the AOL Time-Warner mega-merger, I'd say that
your question is quite appropriate. In economics, the theory of the firm
(developed by
Robert Coase) suggests that functions are taken into the firm to
reduce the transaction costs associated with buying in products/services.
Transaction costs are those costs over and above the the price of the
good/service that a firm incurs when going to the market. These include search
and information costs, bargaining costs, oversight costs etc. Evidently
Comcast think that they can save money for themselves by owning a major content
producer. Whether or not this is true is open for debate -thanks to
deregulation and technology (among other things) transaction costs have
fallen tremendously in the past decade. This is why so many companies
outsource functions (ranging from cleaning and security to logistics, hr
and coding) these days. They must have crunched the numbers, but you have
to wonder.
This is not funny, this is insightful in its foresight. Remember, political calls are exempt from the US national do-not-call list. The poster is correct, as politicians adapt themselves to the internet, they will adopt the marketing techniques of the environment and that includes spam.
at the risk of actually being a troll by responding to a troll, I think that you would find that the informed commentary in the media made more frequent reference to the photo being the thin end of the wedge leading towards the introduction of a national ID card than to the expense. Indeed, whenever the idea of a national ID card is mooted, for whatever putative purpose, it is still resisted. Of course, to have seen this, you would have to have been reading the broadsheets not the tabloids.
I lived in the UK during the 1990s when the installation of these things really took off. It always amazed me that at the time, that the idea of photos on driver's licenses was anathema (and was resisted when it was introduced) but people took relatively little umbrage at the notion of surveillance cameras. Once they were installed, people pointed to the benefits, but I seem to recall news reports over the years to the effect that they merely tended to drive street crime to areas without the cameras i.e. they were effective to a point, but sometimes displaced crime rather than reducing it.
Yes Northern... for the Toronto Star. The Sault is a good 7 hrs drive north of TO and most Torontonians would consider that *north* despite the fact that it is south of all of western Canada.
Does anyone know if rather than zapping the tags as discussed in other posts, there might be possible countermeasures? For example, how much shielding would be required to block the signal? i.e. would it be possible for an industry to grow up providing shielded wallets, backpacks, purses, briefcases etc.? Or even *chaff* belts to drown the system with false readings?
You are, of course, correct, and it must also be said that there is and remains a strong privacy constituency with memebers from across the political spectrum in the United States. That being said, as you allude to, they are not often listened to. I can't help but speculate that part of the problem is that not only does it never really become a big public issue in the US but also that political participation in the US keeps on decline. A more politically active population (i.e. taking the trouble to vote) might help, so too would a mass media that more readily courted controversy. Sure if you look you can always get coverage on issues such as this on PBS or NPR, but their audience is a small minority of Americans.
In places like Germany, privacy invasion is a much harder scheme to run with. People fight it tooth and nail.
One of the differences between Europe (especially Germany) is that their views on such things as privacy have been formed in the context of direct recent (in terms of living memory of the politically active population of the past 50 years) experience of totalitarian government and/or occupation. Perhaps some Americans are more willing to trade off security for liberty because they can't conceive of what the loss of liberty means. If you let it go a bit at a time, you do not notice it. If it gets take away all at once, you do.
Now, I'm not saying that they aren't a bunch of bastards who rip off artists and try and restrict technology, but they DO do a lot
They do what they do because that is what they have done... i.e. much of what they do, they do for historic reasons, rather than because they are the best/most efficient providers of this service to the music consumer today. It is arguable how necessary some of these legacy functions remain in a networked world, especially with respect to marketing and distribution, and to a lesser extent recording studios. The RIAA has been fighting to maintain a broken business model that is dis-intermediating them. They need to find a way to become relevant again i.e. add real value to the music consumer, or face growing obsolescence.
paper = ballot , ballot is folded and goes in locked ballot box to be available if recount or audit is needed.
Paper ballots and ballot boxes are used around the world. I am sure that American voters could cope with the inconvenience of being able to check that what they inputted was what got registered. (... and therefore no danger of vote selling, or at least no printed receipt to present for payment;-)
If this were cheaper, it would be a good idea, or if the right business model were used (leaving aside environmentment questions). There are a lot of things that people are willing to pay a premium for convenience on (e.g. prepared food) but clearly this is not one of them. I wonder if the price point reflected their costs of production or their assumption on how much trouble dropping by the video store is. If it is their price, there is a problem, if is their calculation as to the premium on dropping it off, they have miscalculated (or don't they realize that video stores tended to located in convenient locations). I wonder if the logistics of this technology would reduce the costs of running a video rental operation - if so, then the the costs savings should have been passed on to the consumer. They might have adopted the innovation were it cheaper than the alternative. I wonder too, if in besides companies like NetFlix, if this could be used in vending machines and thereby reduce the overhead of running a store. Sure you would only have a limited number of titles, but the big new releases would probably do well.
Slashdot Mirror
Employers and employees really are on equal ground more than the general media wants you to believe. Both parties gain a profit from the jobs performed. If an employee wants to perform a job at a certain income, why is it the employer's role to let them know of any risks beforehand, unless the employee explicitly requests a risk assessment?
Your statement that both parties are on equal ground falls down in face of the information asymmetries that underly your questionning of whether the employer needs to let them know of the risks. Clearly this is not the case. Without disclosure of the risks involved in a job, the employee is not even in a situation to properly assess whether the pay received for task is sufficient to incur the risks inherent in the task. None of the completely absolves the employee of asking the obvious questions when they are in close contact with chemicals but surely this would reduce the company's liability rather than remove it entirely. Any lawyers out there able to give an informed view on this?
I share your belief that most people, most of the time want to behave honestly if at all possible.
I do not, however, think that ISPs would be willing to absorb the 'tape tax'. Sure, radio stations paid for it out of advertising revenue, but they really had no viable alternatives. They needed content to broadcast, so they had to reach an accommodation with the copyright holders and they had no way to directly charge their users. It was a basic cost of doing business that they had to absorb or change to a non-music format. The situation that ISPs face - and their business model - is very different. I don't know if they would want to rely on ad revenue to cover their costs. Online ad revenue has shown itself to be extremely variable and would not be a good way to cover a cost that was fixed per user.
If ISPs thought that enough of their users would accept the charge I imagine that they would simply build it into their pricing structure. Were they to expect customer resistance from people who do not download music, then they would introduce different bundles - as they are beginning to do for high volume users anyway. I think bundling is a better way to go than an eventual micropayment solution because people tend to prefer known fixed costs over variable per use costs even when there is a possibility that they will end up paying less. Strange as it may seem, it is rational behavior in terms of mental accounting and uncertainty avoidance.
That, as you point out, the RIAA is in favor of surcharges on recording media but not in favor of something like the EFF proposal suggests that they are not really looking for alternatives and are going to go down fighting for the obsolete busines model of the record companies. If I had stock in these companies, I would sell it.
the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction
Not so surprising, the figure is not really out of whack. While the population is a little more than one tenth - 32 million vs 292 million - higher internet usage levels, especially broadband penetration probably accounts for some of why the Canadian figure is not closer to the 5.7 - 5.9% that you might expect. As other posters have noted, normalizing the data would have helped make more sense of the of the numbers that they present. At any rate, it is safe to assume that too many Canadians and Americans do not secure their computers properly if compromised machines account for so much of the spam.
As you say, it is analogous to a 'tape tax', but there is still an element of voluntary self-reporting to pay this tax - as the parent post points out. For ISPs to offer a bundle that enables users to download all they want would presumably require that they also give those who do not want to download music a cheaper package or to eat the cost of the 'tape tax' (highly unlikely). This opens the possibility that down-loaders will not self report so that they can save money. It might work if ISPs put an additional access charge on the bundle as a network access charge additional use of bandwidth that file sharing uses. Not a perfect solution, but it gives the ISP an incentive to ensure that downloaders participate in the scheme.
erm... of course they don't deal with it, never meant to imply that they necessarily did. Indeed they probably don't even see it. It gets forwarded by their PA or who ever opens the mail and acts as their gate keeper to the appropriate department, at a higher level than the folks answering the phone. It gets results more often than not, and certainly more than this poor chap has been getting unless the company is actually intent on defrauding the general public, in which case, all bets are off and the various legal remedies suggested elsewhere come into play.
It all depends on your line of work. A lot of computer and communications technology has speeded work up and might be construed as creating more stress. Think of asynchronous communications - snail mail with expected turn around times measured in days, then came fax, you felt you should get something turned around in a day, then email, it should be instantaneous.
We have always have the phone for synchronous communication, but once you could get away from it, now you take it with you. It makes you always available, or creates a perception that you should be, but while it means that you can be controlled/coordinated anywhere anytimem, it also means that you can control/coordinate from anywhere at any time. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your place in the pecking order.
Technology has certainly made me more productive over the years and taken some stress out of some things. I can now be less precise because spell check (if only Slashdot had one) will catch most things, I can revise written work more easily and I don't have to have things finished until just before the deadline, particularly for something like a book where there is going to be a hard copy printed and bound. Once upon a time, proods were assembled physically and sent back and forth by courier. Now things can be done almost entirely electronically and I can keep making changes right up until the time it goes to press. Very annoying for the printers and designers, but very helpful for me.
I suspect that in general the question as to whether or not technology in general or a specific technology is more or less stressful to you depends on whether it empowers you and lets you exercise more control over your work and your environment or whether its implementation has the effect of reducing your ability to control what you do. I have never worked with keystroke loggers and call time recorders, if I had, I would probably blame technology for making my life more stressful.
A strategy that has worked for me in the past is send a letter (or email) to the president or CEO. When things get cascaded down from offices like that, results tend to happen.
... sent that last one off while on the phone, so didn't spell check it (sorry for provervial)... I also forgot to mention a point about how to read ridiculous sounding patents - most patents have multiple levels to the claims that they make. The lawyers will have you try for a very broad strategic claim i.e. for the entire category, then as you work through the application, you get more and more specific about the claims that you make. So you try to get by with the everything, but if the broad claims get rejected, you have the details of how you do something everyone else does protected because it is in some way novel.
Ah, but you don't understand. MS's patent uses xml! That's makes it sufficiently different from all previous desktop pagers.:)
Funny but also (sadly?) true. With the provervial disclaimer IAMAL, but I have worked in R&D labs where were were regularly briefed by the lawyers and harvested for ideas, to be patentable, an idea does not have to be a completely new product area, it just needs to be a way of doing something. So if one step in a process is novel, you can try to patent it. This means, of course, that someone can come around with a different process to do the same thing and they can also try to patent it. In the realm of software, business processes etc. this means that some dubious sounding things can get through - but it also means that there are often work arounds e.g. if one click shopping is patented, add a second step.
Like economists and journalistic 'experts'.
I feel like I should defend economists seeing as that is what I started out as, however, defending the talking heads that you see on TV is not a task that I would want to take on.
It never ceases to amaze me what people will say when they get a chance to be on TV. There are 2 or 3 areas in which I would see myself as having some expertise and whenever I come across something about them in the media it is almost invariably rubbish. When you consider that much of what I (or most of us) know about things outside our areas of expertise is via the media, it is quite humbling to realize that most of what we think we know is, in fact, rubbish. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the analysis surrounding the goings on around the irrational exuberance that was the 90s.
The big lesson to learn from the new economy was that the basic rules of economics still applied. Sure there were a lot of innovations that transformed many industries, but the basic laws of supply and demand still held true. The basic requirement that businesses had to generate revenue in order to survive still held true. It seemed that every time you looked around during the 90s there was another new economy: the information economy, the digital economy, the attention economy, the experience economy etc. etc. but these were all put forward by people who didn't know anything about economics.
Technology Review has a discussion of the coming rivals to Googol in this month's issue. One of them is an Australian outfit called Mooter which does some nifty clustering of results (somewhat familiar to those who remember Northern Light, once a web search engine, now a provider of enterprise search engines). They discuss several others, including efforts by Microsoft, but the general point is that Googol (and Yahoo and Alta Vista etc. before it) have shown the search business to be a very profitable area if you are the leader, so there are a lot of eager pretenders to the throne. Competition is good, web users will end up with better searching, whether from Googol or another provider.
Complimenting e-books and paper seems reasonable, though I'll go to the paper first every time
Definitely, paper if you actually want to read the thing, electronic to give you more flexibility in using the text, as you and the author of the article mention. We all know what staring at a screen for long periods does to your eyes, even if you have a large, hi-res monitor. Given the choice of one, it has to be paper.
Store clerks remembered who you were and got to know you on a personal basis, and could do everything this RFID stuff enables total strangers to do for you now.
Total strangers is the key - back in the *good old days* the clerks had a lot of information about you, but you knew who knew (local gossip notwithstanding), and you probably knew a bit about them. Now we have strangers who pretend to know us and we really can't be sure who has access to the data. Off-putting is right.
Despite the differences between AOL and Comcast cited by other posters in this thread, the basic similarity remains: linking distribution of content with content production. Given the history of the AOL Time-Warner mega-merger, I'd say that your question is quite appropriate. In economics, the theory of the firm (developed by Robert Coase) suggests that functions are taken into the firm to reduce the transaction costs associated with buying in products/services. Transaction costs are those costs over and above the the price of the good/service that a firm incurs when going to the market. These include search and information costs, bargaining costs, oversight costs etc. Evidently Comcast think that they can save money for themselves by owning a major content producer. Whether or not this is true is open for debate -thanks to deregulation and technology (among other things) transaction costs have fallen tremendously in the past decade. This is why so many companies outsource functions (ranging from cleaning and security to logistics, hr and coding) these days. They must have crunched the numbers, but you have to wonder.
Just wait until they start spamming us.
This is not funny, this is insightful in its foresight. Remember, political calls are exempt from the US national do-not-call list. The poster is correct, as politicians adapt themselves to the internet, they will adopt the marketing techniques of the environment and that includes spam.
at the risk of actually being a troll by responding to a troll, I think that you would find that the informed commentary in the media made more frequent reference to the photo being the thin end of the wedge leading towards the introduction of a national ID card than to the expense. Indeed, whenever the idea of a national ID card is mooted, for whatever putative purpose, it is still resisted. Of course, to have seen this, you would have to have been reading the broadsheets not the tabloids.
I lived in the UK during the 1990s when the installation of these things really took off. It always amazed me that at the time, that the idea of photos on driver's licenses was anathema (and was resisted when it was introduced) but people took relatively little umbrage at the notion of surveillance cameras. Once they were installed, people pointed to the benefits, but I seem to recall news reports over the years to the effect that they merely tended to drive street crime to areas without the cameras i.e. they were effective to a point, but sometimes displaced crime rather than reducing it.
Yes Northern ... for the Toronto Star. The Sault is a good 7 hrs drive north of TO and most Torontonians would consider that *north* despite the fact that it is south of all of western Canada.
Does anyone know if rather than zapping the tags as discussed in other posts, there might be possible countermeasures? For example, how much shielding would be required to block the signal? i.e. would it be possible for an industry to grow up providing shielded wallets, backpacks, purses, briefcases etc.? Or even *chaff* belts to drown the system with false readings?
US researchers were the first to blow the whistle
You are, of course, correct, and it must also be said that there is and remains a strong privacy constituency with memebers from across the political spectrum in the United States. That being said, as you allude to, they are not often listened to. I can't help but speculate that part of the problem is that not only does it never really become a big public issue in the US but also that political participation in the US keeps on decline. A more politically active population (i.e. taking the trouble to vote) might help, so too would a mass media that more readily courted controversy. Sure if you look you can always get coverage on issues such as this on PBS or NPR, but their audience is a small minority of Americans.
In places like Germany, privacy invasion is a much harder scheme to run with. People fight it tooth and nail.
One of the differences between Europe (especially Germany) is that their views on such things as privacy have been formed in the context of direct recent (in terms of living memory of the politically active population of the past 50 years) experience of totalitarian government and/or occupation. Perhaps some Americans are more willing to trade off security for liberty because they can't conceive of what the loss of liberty means. If you let it go a bit at a time, you do not notice it. If it gets take away all at once, you do.
Now, I'm not saying that they aren't a bunch of bastards who rip off artists and try and restrict technology, but they DO do a lot
They do what they do because that is what they have done... i.e. much of what they do, they do for historic reasons, rather than because they are the best/most efficient providers of this service to the music consumer today. It is arguable how necessary some of these legacy functions remain in a networked world, especially with respect to marketing and distribution, and to a lesser extent recording studios. The RIAA has been fighting to maintain a broken business model that is dis-intermediating them. They need to find a way to become relevant again i.e. add real value to the music consumer, or face growing obsolescence.
paper = ballot , ballot is folded and goes in locked ballot box to be available if recount or audit is needed.
;-)
Paper ballots and ballot boxes are used around the world. I am sure that American voters could cope with the inconvenience of being able to check that what they inputted was what got registered. (... and therefore no danger of vote selling, or at least no printed receipt to present for payment
If this were cheaper, it would be a good idea, or if the right business model were used (leaving aside environmentment questions). There are a lot of things that people are willing to pay a premium for convenience on (e.g. prepared food) but clearly this is not one of them. I wonder if the price point reflected their costs of production or their assumption on how much trouble dropping by the video store is. If it is their price, there is a problem, if is their calculation as to the premium on dropping it off, they have miscalculated (or don't they realize that video stores tended to located in convenient locations). I wonder if the logistics of this technology would reduce the costs of running a video rental operation - if so, then the the costs savings should have been passed on to the consumer. They might have adopted the innovation were it cheaper than the alternative. I wonder too, if in besides companies like NetFlix, if this could be used in vending machines and thereby reduce the overhead of running a store. Sure you would only have a limited number of titles, but the big new releases would probably do well.