I hate to be a naysayer, but in what way is the 2000000th article a meaningful thing? We could also assign special value to the 1234567th article, or the 1111111th article, or the 1483725th article; it's just a number. How is the fact that it has several zero's in its base-ten representation at all significant?
People complain a lot about various aspects of software. I suspect that some of the things people want out of Firefox are rather unattainable. For instance, if you want the browser to run quickly, then it needs to use more RAM cache, whereas if you want it to take up less memory, then it will have to re-render pages more often and run more slowly. Plus, a lot of my friends complain to me that Firefox takes up too much memory, and when I go to look at their setups, I discover that they have installed twenty or thirty plugins, each with who knows how many memory leaks. In addition, they also often have upwards of ten tabs open. Obviously, the more sites you have open at the same time, the bigger than memory footprint is going to be. The more plugins you install, the more memory they will take up. The moral of the story is, you can never get something for nothing.
And by privilege escalation, you mean users run XP with their Administrator accounts? I'd say that about 99% of home users do this, considering it's the XP default. If you're willing to use a limited account and deal with using runas (a somewhat worse version of su), then you can improve the security in your XP box by a lot. Even if you run malware under a limited account, the worse that can happen is that it trashes your user profile, in most cases. The actual privilege escalation bugs have been fixed, and were fairly rare to begin with. Not much more common than in the Linux world, anyway. All the security patches in the world won't fix the stupid user syndrome.
Luckily, those capable of what you say are probably smart enough not to get infected in the first place. At least, I hope so. Most viruses these days seem to rely on the stupidity of the victim rather than any actual security vulnerability. Part of the problem is that users are forced into clicking confirmation dialogs for legitimate content, and do it without thinking.
1. The fallacy here is assuming that the laws *must* be correct, and failing to consider what the purpose and the origin of the laws are. The laws are presumably there to protect the everyone's rights. If everyone's breaking the law, what's the purpose of the law? Obviously either everyone has a double standard or thinks the law is silly. These "fundamental moral principles" you mention had better be supported by the masses, or they're elitist and don't belong in a social contract.
2. I'm not sure what you're saying. The students could somehow have accidentally caused damage? Oops, the deleted the student records by pressing the wrong button? This is an absurd viewpoint. You might as well argue that driving a car could accidentally hit a pedestrian, and should be punished. Add this to the reality that they didn't cause any damage, and had no malicious intent, since they actively turned over the information they found to the authorities.
3. Your argument is weak, hiding behind the word "hutzpah." It's a legitimate concern if the university computer systems don't provide enough security to ensure that their personal information was secure. How would you like it if your doctor did the equivalent of posting your medical records online?
Second, let us also assume that the movie exec's are not dumb. While this runs contrary to what most/.'ers feel, I have to believe that it takes a bit of intellgence to get put in charge of a movie studio.
Actually, it takes some friends in the right places.
Along with this, I think its pretty safe to assume that most of the exec's have an MBA, or at least a degree in business, of some sort.
Ask the economists. They'll tell you that the MBAs sucks at economics.
Now, don't you think, with all of the above, that a few of them have thought to run a few studies on the price?
Well, these are the same people who think that it's somehow profitable to sue their customers. From what I've seen, piracy has changed little because of litigation of this type. It's actually not so easy to run price studies, since they must happen over at least a month or so, after the price changes trickle down the distribution chain.
Your price point is well below what the average person will pay. In the end though, the current price is probably been examined and re-examined to death, and is the best price for the market.
What price point was that, exactly? So your arguments are less gratuitous . . . how?
*needs to go do work and stop replying to comments:)*
Also, if you want to watch a movie 5 times, do you want to rent it 5 times at $5 or buy it for $20? Buying it has added benefits of being able to show it/lend it to your friends, or to collect DVDs.
Like software, the cost of the DVD and packaging is negligible. I'm not sure why everyone keeps using half. I never said that that would be a good price cut. It's probably too much.
I'm merely making a comment. I suppose that to say anything I need to conduct a broad-based study of economic data to make SURE that I'm right? Absurd.
If I actually ran a movie company, of course I'd have the studies done to see what the elasticity of demand is. More directly, you can do studies to determine demand itself.
My comments consist of an educated guess on my part. The hostility towards the MPAA and RIAA should tell them that their litigation is likely losing them business, in any case.
Exactly. I can't say I really have any economic data to back this up, but there's much empirical data to be had. Ask your friends. Do they think music CDs are too expensive? Most of mine do. Personally, I think $20 is too much to pay for a DVD. If it were $15 or $10 I'd be a lot more likely to buy the DVD. And so it is with a lot of people. True, many just tolerate the prices, but even more don't, in my experience.
As a simple economic matter of optimization, while they would make less per DVD, say, they would sell more DVDs overall, and make a greater profit. If the movie companies were to do so, not only would their customers be happier, but so would their shareholders. I suppose they're going for the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" way of doing business.
The MPAA and RIAA need to realize that they make many billions of dollars each year, even though they charge non-optimal prices for their content. If they charged less, I think they'd actually make more money. I hope this new guy realizes that the cost of the litigation against your average file-sharer is likely more than the gains against piracy. The key here is simple economics: more people would be able and willing to pay if music and movies cost less.
Does everyone here use a mousepad? The newer optical mice work as well or better without a mousepad. Plus, my mousepad with attached wristrest tends to be uncomfortable. Every time I try to use it I get rid of it. Anyway, anyone else get problems with black skin oil deposits on their keyboards? It's quite an annoying problem.
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I hate to be a naysayer, but in what way is the 2000000th article a meaningful thing? We could also assign special value to the 1234567th article, or the 1111111th article, or the 1483725th article; it's just a number. How is the fact that it has several zero's in its base-ten representation at all significant?
People complain a lot about various aspects of software. I suspect that some of the things people want out of Firefox are rather unattainable. For instance, if you want the browser to run quickly, then it needs to use more RAM cache, whereas if you want it to take up less memory, then it will have to re-render pages more often and run more slowly. Plus, a lot of my friends complain to me that Firefox takes up too much memory, and when I go to look at their setups, I discover that they have installed twenty or thirty plugins, each with who knows how many memory leaks. In addition, they also often have upwards of ten tabs open. Obviously, the more sites you have open at the same time, the bigger than memory footprint is going to be. The more plugins you install, the more memory they will take up. The moral of the story is, you can never get something for nothing.
And by privilege escalation, you mean users run XP with their Administrator accounts? I'd say that about 99% of home users do this, considering it's the XP default. If you're willing to use a limited account and deal with using runas (a somewhat worse version of su), then you can improve the security in your XP box by a lot. Even if you run malware under a limited account, the worse that can happen is that it trashes your user profile, in most cases. The actual privilege escalation bugs have been fixed, and were fairly rare to begin with. Not much more common than in the Linux world, anyway. All the security patches in the world won't fix the stupid user syndrome.
Luckily, those capable of what you say are probably smart enough not to get infected in the first place. At least, I hope so. Most viruses these days seem to rely on the stupidity of the victim rather than any actual security vulnerability. Part of the problem is that users are forced into clicking confirmation dialogs for legitimate content, and do it without thinking.
1. The fallacy here is assuming that the laws *must* be correct, and failing to consider what the purpose and the origin of the laws are. The laws are presumably there to protect the everyone's rights. If everyone's breaking the law, what's the purpose of the law? Obviously either everyone has a double standard or thinks the law is silly. These "fundamental moral principles" you mention had better be supported by the masses, or they're elitist and don't belong in a social contract.
2. I'm not sure what you're saying. The students could somehow have accidentally caused damage? Oops, the deleted the student records by pressing the wrong button? This is an absurd viewpoint. You might as well argue that driving a car could accidentally hit a pedestrian, and should be punished. Add this to the reality that they didn't cause any damage, and had no malicious intent, since they actively turned over the information they found to the authorities.
3. Your argument is weak, hiding behind the word "hutzpah." It's a legitimate concern if the university computer systems don't provide enough security to ensure that their personal information was secure. How would you like it if your doctor did the equivalent of posting your medical records online?
Second, let us also assume that the movie exec's are not dumb. While this runs contrary to what most /.'ers feel, I have to believe that it takes a bit of intellgence to get put in charge of a movie studio.
Actually, it takes some friends in the right places.
Along with this, I think its pretty safe to assume that most of the exec's have an MBA, or at least a degree in business, of some sort.
Ask the economists. They'll tell you that the MBAs sucks at economics.
Now, don't you think, with all of the above, that a few of them have thought to run a few studies on the price?
Well, these are the same people who think that it's somehow profitable to sue their customers. From what I've seen, piracy has changed little because of litigation of this type. It's actually not so easy to run price studies, since they must happen over at least a month or so, after the price changes trickle down the distribution chain.
Your price point is well below what the average person will pay. In the end though, the current price is probably been examined and re-examined to death, and is the best price for the market.
What price point was that, exactly? So your arguments are less gratuitous . . . how?
*needs to go do work and stop replying to comments:)* Also, if you want to watch a movie 5 times, do you want to rent it 5 times at $5 or buy it for $20? Buying it has added benefits of being able to show it/lend it to your friends, or to collect DVDs. Like software, the cost of the DVD and packaging is negligible. I'm not sure why everyone keeps using half. I never said that that would be a good price cut. It's probably too much.
I'm merely making a comment. I suppose that to say anything I need to conduct a broad-based study of economic data to make SURE that I'm right? Absurd.
Unless you like sampling every single population you would like to comment about, your comment is meaningless.
No, I didn't say half the price would double the demand. Nice straw man argument.
If I actually ran a movie company, of course I'd have the studies done to see what the elasticity of demand is. More directly, you can do studies to determine demand itself. My comments consist of an educated guess on my part. The hostility towards the MPAA and RIAA should tell them that their litigation is likely losing them business, in any case.
Or you could have common sense. Economics is great, but in the real world you don't always have such nice data available.
Exactly. I can't say I really have any economic data to back this up, but there's much empirical data to be had. Ask your friends. Do they think music CDs are too expensive? Most of mine do. Personally, I think $20 is too much to pay for a DVD. If it were $15 or $10 I'd be a lot more likely to buy the DVD. And so it is with a lot of people. True, many just tolerate the prices, but even more don't, in my experience.
As a simple economic matter of optimization, while they would make less per DVD, say, they would sell more DVDs overall, and make a greater profit. If the movie companies were to do so, not only would their customers be happier, but so would their shareholders. I suppose they're going for the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" way of doing business.
The MPAA and RIAA need to realize that they make many billions of dollars each year, even though they charge non-optimal prices for their content. If they charged less, I think they'd actually make more money. I hope this new guy realizes that the cost of the litigation against your average file-sharer is likely more than the gains against piracy. The key here is simple economics: more people would be able and willing to pay if music and movies cost less.
Does everyone here use a mousepad? The newer optical mice work as well or better without a mousepad. Plus, my mousepad with attached wristrest tends to be uncomfortable. Every time I try to use it I get rid of it. Anyway, anyone else get problems with black skin oil deposits on their keyboards? It's quite an annoying problem.
AIM+ makes AIM tolerable...I wish they would release 3.0 though. I wonder who the idiots who harassed the authors were. Better not be AOL!!