The costs of businesses are not always passed on to consumers. Sometimes they come out of the profits... that's taking money from the owners rather than the consumers.
If music piracy were to go down, do you really think we'd instantly see a price cut?
It's interesting that gas stations have to display an "includes all taxes" price, while in several states such as California there is a sales tax based on a percentage of the true price as a component. In those cases, when the price goes higher, the tax per gallon tags along for the ride...
Nearly every other product in the marketplace is marked with a before-taxes price, and the tax is added when you hit the register...
The newsworthy aspect is because T-Mobile was the last major phone company, celluar or landline, to not be charging such a fee. Now, it's impossible to switch carriers to avoid such fees. It really can be said that everyone's doing it.
For the record, the FCC's FAQ on the issue states very clearly that the USF is an obligation of the telecom carrier that they're allowed to shift onto their consumers, but they clearly don't have to.
So, basically, this is just a way for them to itemize it like it's a tax, when really its a tax on the telecom company rather than one on the consumer at the point of sale.
ABtolls.com maintains a database of phone rate planes, and does the consumer the favor of computing the true cost of a plan after all the USF and PICC fees are added in. This particular dial-around plan has to go down as one of the worst offenders. While they claim that the first three minutes only costs 5 cents, "regulatory fees" make that three-minute call cost 16.37 cents, more than triple the advertised rate!
Sure, that's only pennies of difference, but nickeling and diming in volume adds up.
I've yet to get an explanation for why plain batteries are considered a security risk.
I think you just got it. Batteries represent stored electicity... and they can't exactly trust that the battery's voltage is really what's on the label if you don't have a device that you can show properly operates.
Sure, that's paranoid... but that's what the security people are in the business of doing.
As the article demonstrates, any time you can get a battery, capacitor, and some wire together, you have the resouces to make a simplistic taser.
I don't know any way they'd be able to regulate those situations, since capacitors of some type are found in nearly every electronic device. Anything that has to have a "flash" of power has a high-voltage capacitor behind it... the cammera flashbulb being the most typical example.
About the only way I can think of securing against such a threat would be to ban all battery-operated devices from the plane.
This could be tolerated if some sort of PC functionality were included in seatback entertainment consoles, but since those aren't even found on every plane, I'm going to guess that this would be hell for geek air travelers.
Unfortunately, these religious outfits are existing by renting an entire broadcast day of a station, or just buying the station outright. They're forever money-losing operations being funded by religous groups that rely on donations.
No ammount of low ratings can presently shut them down.
One interesting point is that the FCC doesn't and can't investigate an offending program until some viewer steps forward and claims to be offended.
An interesting case in point is forming now that Howard Stern pointed out a questionable discussion on Oprah's show. A Stern fan has now stepped forward to be the complaining witness... and now Oprah's being investigated in a way that most likely would have slipped under the radar had Stern not said anything.
One of the biggest power tools that the broadcasters use to shut down competiting uses of their frequencies is to claim that when you put radio transmitting equipment into the hands of people other than them, it'll be either incompentently or improperly used such that it exceeds the rated signal strength.
Pringles Can setups are a perfect example. There's nothing wrong with using such a can to redirect the signal... however, if the resulting redirection is too sucessful, it can take a consumer device that started as a perfectly illegal omnidirectional transmitter and put more than the legal limit of signal going in the direction its pointed at.
Sometimes, the urge to hack can be cited against us...
With all the daytime talk shows and nighttime reality shows on now, I'd say that all channels are vacant.
I'd especially argue that there are certain religious broadcasters who are putting out such unwatchable programs that I doubt the people who are paying for the operation are even watching. I'm not against such operations on religious principal, but the idea that if nobody is watching, you're wasting the bandwidth.
There should be a minimum standard that should be attained by all TV stations for a signon-to-signoff ratings average. Even a religious or shopping program can survive, but there has to be at least some interest in the community in order for the station to keep on the air.
The other 55 or so channels are just static... begging to be used.
The problem is, just because you see static overpowering any useful signal doesn't always mean that there isn't a weak one there.
What may be an unused channel number to you could be a used one in the next TV-zone over... therefore too much of another signal on that channel might interfere with some people on the edge of the coverage range.
These devices are most certainly are going to need to be "smart" in determining what an "unused" channel really is...
Anybody who says that Michael Powell is in the pocket of the broadcasters or any other major company doesn't know what they're talking about, and this is the proof for anybody who doubts that.
The FCC is actively looking to recycle frequency space for bandwidth wherever possible. I'm not even sure this is a workable solution... but just the fact that they're even going to open hearings about it is good for the masses.
In the 90s, Wal-Mart passed K-Mart in part because Wal-Mart had a much smarter way of allocating inventory.
Wal-Mart came up with advanced ways of predicting what would sell, and shiping that to stores without anybody at the store having to make a request. K-Mart, stuck with the old fashioned way of having managers estimate what their stores needed and ordering that.
Clearly, a prediction formula will beat a single human's estimates over long term trials... and that's exactly what happened. K-Mart kept getting stuck with the wrong products in stores.
Afterall, a Blue Light Special was a short-term clearance declared by a manager when they had far more inventory on an item than they wanted to have...
From all those companies lying about their revenue during the height of the stock market bubble/scam? Are the numbers the RIAA is reporting to us any better than the numbers Enron or Tyco reported to us?
The RIAA's numbers are at least correct counts of what they're supposed to be representing. However, consumers are paying less for music doesn't ring too when it's the wholesale transactions going down but not the number of retail transations. That just says there's less CDs sitting unsold on shelves these days...
Soundscan would also count an "unsigned artist's" CD just the same as any other because it went through the cash register... but the RIAA's stat doesn't include CDs sold by companies that aren't members of their group.
The RIAA represents most of the recording industry, but not all of it. Sales going down for the RIAA members does not always equate to sales going down for the industry...
You've got to make sure you know what a stat was really counting before you make conclusions based on it.
Sales are down for the RIAA... they're considering a CD sold at the point when they get paid for it, the point that it lands in the warehouse of a store chain, not the point at which it lands in a consumer's hands which is where Soundscan sets up its counting points.
The fact that store shelves are holding less in inventory is bad for them, but isn't exactly a sign of piracy, just a sign that the RIAA's business model is becoming dated.
I'm pretty sure that the major chains such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy would love to have a small CD factory in the back of each store in which they could print the discs and surrounding paperwork on a just-in-time basis. Afterall, both the music and liner notes could be available to the store over a digital network. Why ship physical packages that might not sell when you can just ship blank disks and figure out what to put on them later?
Bottom line, it's going to get worse for the RIAA. They profit from the wastes in the system, and the system just keeps getting better at not buying things that can't be sold to consumers...
Another interesting thing has happened over the last few years. The growth of mega-chains such as Best Buy plus the.com's joining into the marketplace have knocked mom and pop record stores out of existance.
Less stores selling music means not only are stores keeping smaller inventories, but some store inventories fell to zero as they left the business. There's just plain less "unsold" disks sitting in the system.
The student wouldn't have to buy the songs at the end to keep the music. They could just continue subscribing to Napster at the $9.95 a month retail rate on their own...
That doesn't work for some reason. I tried it with a Playstation 2. It lags input from the controler about 2 or 3 seconds.
What you're experiencing there is a card that MPEGs the video with an A-to-D conversion that's taking far too long. My ATI All In Wonder Radeon card can manage to take in audio/video without a noticiable delay.
Don't try to use any DVR-ish features while playing video games. Simply having the pause button available sometimes indicates that the software is saving the video to the HD and then playing it... and there's your 2-3 second lag right there!
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The costs of businesses are not always passed on to consumers. Sometimes they come out of the profits... that's taking money from the owners rather than the consumers.
If music piracy were to go down, do you really think we'd instantly see a price cut?
It's interesting that gas stations have to display an "includes all taxes" price, while in several states such as California there is a sales tax based on a percentage of the true price as a component. In those cases, when the price goes higher, the tax per gallon tags along for the ride...
Nearly every other product in the marketplace is marked with a before-taxes price, and the tax is added when you hit the register...
The newsworthy aspect is because T-Mobile was the last major phone company, celluar or landline, to not be charging such a fee. Now, it's impossible to switch carriers to avoid such fees. It really can be said that everyone's doing it.
For the record, the FCC's FAQ on the issue states very clearly that the USF is an obligation of the telecom carrier that they're allowed to shift onto their consumers, but they clearly don't have to.
So, basically, this is just a way for them to itemize it like it's a tax, when really its a tax on the telecom company rather than one on the consumer at the point of sale.
Just like the IDT ads claim, the big guys even try to pass their own property taxes off to the consumers by a fee.
ABtolls.com maintains a database of phone rate planes, and does the consumer the favor of computing the true cost of a plan after all the USF and PICC fees are added in. This particular dial-around plan has to go down as one of the worst offenders. While they claim that the first three minutes only costs 5 cents, "regulatory fees" make that three-minute call cost 16.37 cents, more than triple the advertised rate!
Sure, that's only pennies of difference, but nickeling and diming in volume adds up.
I've yet to get an explanation for why plain batteries are considered a security risk.
I think you just got it. Batteries represent stored electicity... and they can't exactly trust that the battery's voltage is really what's on the label if you don't have a device that you can show properly operates.
Sure, that's paranoid... but that's what the security people are in the business of doing.
As the article demonstrates, any time you can get a battery, capacitor, and some wire together, you have the resouces to make a simplistic taser.
I don't know any way they'd be able to regulate those situations, since capacitors of some type are found in nearly every electronic device. Anything that has to have a "flash" of power has a high-voltage capacitor behind it... the cammera flashbulb being the most typical example.
About the only way I can think of securing against such a threat would be to ban all battery-operated devices from the plane.
This could be tolerated if some sort of PC functionality were included in seatback entertainment consoles, but since those aren't even found on every plane, I'm going to guess that this would be hell for geek air travelers.
No, that's Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-Select-Start ... which is also a popular backdoor code in many other video games from that era.
Actually, those deadlines also had a component of minimum addoption of at least digital TV decoding by most viewers. That just hasn't happened...
Unfortunately, these religious outfits are existing by renting an entire broadcast day of a station, or just buying the station outright. They're forever money-losing operations being funded by religous groups that rely on donations.
No ammount of low ratings can presently shut them down.
Uhm, the biggest loosening of the rules on media conglomerates in recent memory happened in 1996 under Bill Clinton's watch...
Mike hasn't really had much to do with that.
One interesting point is that the FCC doesn't and can't investigate an offending program until some viewer steps forward and claims to be offended.
An interesting case in point is forming now that Howard Stern pointed out a questionable discussion on Oprah's show. A Stern fan has now stepped forward to be the complaining witness... and now Oprah's being investigated in a way that most likely would have slipped under the radar had Stern not said anything.
That way viruses can spread faster.
Are you saying that all developments in network tech should be halted, because as we communicate faster, so will the viruses and worms?
One of the biggest power tools that the broadcasters use to shut down competiting uses of their frequencies is to claim that when you put radio transmitting equipment into the hands of people other than them, it'll be either incompentently or improperly used such that it exceeds the rated signal strength.
Pringles Can setups are a perfect example. There's nothing wrong with using such a can to redirect the signal... however, if the resulting redirection is too sucessful, it can take a consumer device that started as a perfectly illegal omnidirectional transmitter and put more than the legal limit of signal going in the direction its pointed at.
Sometimes, the urge to hack can be cited against us...
With all the daytime talk shows and nighttime reality shows on now, I'd say that all channels are vacant.
I'd especially argue that there are certain religious broadcasters who are putting out such unwatchable programs that I doubt the people who are paying for the operation are even watching. I'm not against such operations on religious principal, but the idea that if nobody is watching, you're wasting the bandwidth.
There should be a minimum standard that should be attained by all TV stations for a signon-to-signoff ratings average. Even a religious or shopping program can survive, but there has to be at least some interest in the community in order for the station to keep on the air.
The other 55 or so channels are just static... begging to be used.
The problem is, just because you see static overpowering any useful signal doesn't always mean that there isn't a weak one there.
What may be an unused channel number to you could be a used one in the next TV-zone over... therefore too much of another signal on that channel might interfere with some people on the edge of the coverage range.
These devices are most certainly are going to need to be "smart" in determining what an "unused" channel really is...
Anybody who says that Michael Powell is in the pocket of the broadcasters or any other major company doesn't know what they're talking about, and this is the proof for anybody who doubts that.
The FCC is actively looking to recycle frequency space for bandwidth wherever possible. I'm not even sure this is a workable solution... but just the fact that they're even going to open hearings about it is good for the masses.
In the 90s, Wal-Mart passed K-Mart in part because Wal-Mart had a much smarter way of allocating inventory.
Wal-Mart came up with advanced ways of predicting what would sell, and shiping that to stores without anybody at the store having to make a request. K-Mart, stuck with the old fashioned way of having managers estimate what their stores needed and ordering that.
Clearly, a prediction formula will beat a single human's estimates over long term trials... and that's exactly what happened. K-Mart kept getting stuck with the wrong products in stores.
Afterall, a Blue Light Special was a short-term clearance declared by a manager when they had far more inventory on an item than they wanted to have...
From all those companies lying about their revenue during the height of the stock market bubble/scam? Are the numbers the RIAA is reporting to us any better than the numbers Enron or Tyco reported to us?
The RIAA's numbers are at least correct counts of what they're supposed to be representing. However, consumers are paying less for music doesn't ring too when it's the wholesale transactions going down but not the number of retail transations. That just says there's less CDs sitting unsold on shelves these days...
Soundscan would also count an "unsigned artist's" CD just the same as any other because it went through the cash register... but the RIAA's stat doesn't include CDs sold by companies that aren't members of their group.
The RIAA represents most of the recording industry, but not all of it. Sales going down for the RIAA members does not always equate to sales going down for the industry...
You've got to make sure you know what a stat was really counting before you make conclusions based on it.
Sales are down for the RIAA... they're considering a CD sold at the point when they get paid for it, the point that it lands in the warehouse of a store chain, not the point at which it lands in a consumer's hands which is where Soundscan sets up its counting points.
The fact that store shelves are holding less in inventory is bad for them, but isn't exactly a sign of piracy, just a sign that the RIAA's business model is becoming dated.
I'm pretty sure that the major chains such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy would love to have a small CD factory in the back of each store in which they could print the discs and surrounding paperwork on a just-in-time basis. Afterall, both the music and liner notes could be available to the store over a digital network. Why ship physical packages that might not sell when you can just ship blank disks and figure out what to put on them later?
Bottom line, it's going to get worse for the RIAA. They profit from the wastes in the system, and the system just keeps getting better at not buying things that can't be sold to consumers...
Another interesting thing has happened over the last few years. The growth of mega-chains such as Best Buy plus the .com's joining into the marketplace have knocked mom and pop record stores out of existance.
Less stores selling music means not only are stores keeping smaller inventories, but some store inventories fell to zero as they left the business. There's just plain less "unsold" disks sitting in the system.
The student wouldn't have to buy the songs at the end to keep the music. They could just continue subscribing to Napster at the $9.95 a month retail rate on their own...
That doesn't work for some reason. I tried it with a Playstation 2. It lags input from the controler about 2 or 3 seconds.
What you're experiencing there is a card that MPEGs the video with an A-to-D conversion that's taking far too long. My ATI All In Wonder Radeon card can manage to take in audio/video without a noticiable delay.
Don't try to use any DVR-ish features while playing video games. Simply having the pause button available sometimes indicates that the software is saving the video to the HD and then playing it... and there's your 2-3 second lag right there!