I don't even think they can beam power to large (i.e. passenger) aircraft with any nominal success. I encourage you to look at the power output of large jet aircraft - enough power to power a good chunk of a city. (The 777 has 98000 lbf thrust and can go approx 557 MPH at 35,000 ft. This equates to about 108 megawatts - assuming the engines are going full bore at that speed - yeah I know the thrust is probably static thrust at sea level, so it might not be anywhere near 100 MW at altitude, but it's probably still on the order of 10s of megawatts). I don't know about you, but I don't think we have 100+ MW lasers that we can be firing around at aircraft - even if we did, throwing 100 MW at the area of an aircraft would pretty much melt just about every good engineering material of which I can think.
This is a neat idea, but I don't think it will ever replace fuel-laden aircraft for transportation or cargo. I think the article was right in that it metioned unmanned, lightweight drones flying slowly over a city.
Everyone needs to write the patent office. Yapping on Slashdot doesn't do us any good. Also remember to start contacting your congressmen... Here are some methods of communication from The USPTO:
e-mail
Telephone: 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA)
snail mail:
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
USPTO Contact Center (UCC)
Crystal Plaza 3, Room 2C02
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
Umm... the eye doesn't work by seeing a percent of area - the eye has a working resolution, like a digital camera. The question is, what's the resolution of the human eye, and what's the smallest thing that can be resolved by that resolution at the distance of the moon?
This Article indicates that an average resolution is either 4 arc-minutes or 6 arc-seconds. The 6 arc-seconds makes more sense than 4 arc-minutes (4 arc-minutes is a whopping 1.2 mm at a distance of 1 m (I don't know about you but I can see better than that!), where 6 arc-seconds is 0.03 mm (about.001") at one meter. I don't know about you but I can see a 1-mil thick object at a distance of 1 meter (think piece of paper or something seen edge-on - if lighting is correct). According to this, the moon is 3476 km diameter and averages 384,467 km from the earth. That means the moon covers 31 arc-minutes. 6 arc-seconds at the distance of the moon is 11.18 km. So, your 617-square-mile city will be more than visible, since it's surely larger than 11.18 km in one direction. (sqrt(617 sq.mi) = 24mi on a side = 40 km, so you've got a fudge-factor of 4 on my calculation to be visible. Even your smaller cities of 400 sq.mi. are 20 mi/side = 32 km, or a fudge-factor of 3). (This should also prove that we can see better than 4 arc-minutes, since if the moon only covers 31 (This confirms an average of 31 arc-minutes), we sure can see features more fine than 1/8th the diameter of a full moon - even without magnification!)
"Using math since 1986 to sound like I know what I'm saying"
Wow, I keep getting more comments, so here's an attempt to sort some out. And yes, I know I made some gross assumptions and some odd statements about physics, but they're not baseless...here goes:
Where'd you get the 5kW figure?
Most houses (well, the last four in which I've lived, anyway) main breakers are rated at around 60 amps. 60 amps times 120 volt mains is actually 7200 W, which is higher than 5000. Usually people don't trip out their mains, though. So 5kW was probably more of a capacity than a usage. Suffice it to say that while the average might not be 5kW, the average peak load is probably 5kW or more. You realize how much power you use if you've ever been in an RV...just running the A/C and the microwave will trip a 20A breaker (2.4kW)
On seeing stuff on the moon...
Okay, maybe I do have uncanny vision. Considering the power on my contacts is -2.75, though, I doubt it. Yes, I know that we look through our atmosphere to see the moon, but the lensing effects are very different looking out rather than looking in. And the comment regarding color is correct - sort of. Currently we do see mostly the moon's brightness, and the gross color. It would be hard to make out the color of a large structure, but it would definitely change the appearance of what we see. Sure it might be cool to see a "great monument", but I'd also feel morose about something on the moon. And man-made things don't look like craters (unless we spend extra, I guess). As for building on the dark side... well, I might not be able to see it, but there is then the moral dilemma...
And In summary....
Basically this was a semi-technical rant about power consumption, over-commercialization of rare resources, and stuff like that. I love technology (people always gawk at our basement), but I don't believe in technology for the sake of commerce. Especially not McDonal's on the Moon. I'm just hoping that more people out there start being responsible with their business practices rather than just trying to make money so they can die more comfortably (for I doubt that, even if the Methuselah drug is found, anyone will be able to last more than 150 years before committing suicide... but maybe I'm just being pessimistic).
Anyway, this has been a long thread, so I'm now going to let it go...
True, but my 5m2 was assuming 100% efficiency. Okay, so multiply by 5 since we're around 20%, and you only need 25m2. Of course, I'm not so sure you can cover the entire roof with solar cells...but I could be wrong.
Perhaps I should be more careful with my overgeneralizations in the future... although the fact that "modernized" society keeps increasing its power consumption, there may soon come a day when 100m2 isn't enough...
Yes, beautiful, at least in my opinion. I'd also recommend spending some time looking at a desert (my experience was in the northwest of Arizona in the Mojave between Lake Havasu City and Yucca).
Basically my point is, if there is a battle between the freedom to see the moon in its natural state vs being able to build stuff on the near side of the moon, I hope the naturalists win.
2) You must have really good eyes or a decent telescope ... You could build a kick ass solar power station the size of a major metropolis on the moon and not be able to see it with the naked eye.
The size of a MAJOR METROPOLIS? Good grief, unless they paint it moon-rock color, we'd see it. It's not like the moon has an atmosphere or anything to obscure things - it's not at all like looking at Earth from the moon. And the albedo effect isn't even that great. My cursory search was unsuccessful, but I'm sure someone out there has determined the smallest resolvable object visible on the moon's surface from Earth... and I'm guessing it's much smaller than a metropolis.
I echo this one. The big issue is not cost of solar, but area. After all, the average home uses about 5kW . A typical estimate of solar load is 1 kW/m2. That means, even with 100% efficient cells, you'd need 5 square meters (~53 ft2) to power your house. Not to mention you'd need more than that to store power for night, cloudy weather, etc. That's going to eat up a lot of roof space... and need to be protected and cleaned as well.
Yeah, we have lots of "empty" space here and there, and I've heard of people wanting to put solar power stations on the moon. I don't know about you, but I don't want to look up at the moon and see piles of man-made crap instead of its current beautiful state. Power stations on the moon makes me want to vomit.
That said, though, I will embrace the day when I don't have to be connected to any utilities at all...
"All terrestrial energy sources are really solar anyway; this means we've had a nuclear power industry all along!" - me
Okay, okay, we all read more and more of these dumb-ass patent approvals daily. I say we somehow form a movement to beat at our congressmens' doors and cry for reform. Sure, we may not be big business, but we're citizens of this country, and we should have a say in a democrazy (misspelling intentional).
Patents for using lasers to get felines to run around? Patents for pressing a button to buy something? Patents for pay subscriptions through the mail? Patents for an automated problem-solving process? Good lord, whereas patents were originally instituted to help the small inventor, now all they do is help Big Business!
Personally I'm sick of it, and I'm even willing to put some reasonable thought, time, and effort into developing a proposal for a solution rather than just ranting about it. Who's with me, and how do we get started!?
Oddly enough, chances are pretty good the ant will not get squashed because the surface roughness of the boulder will provide pockets of safety (ever step on an ant to have it survive because of the slots in your tread?). Whether the ant will starve/suffocate, however, is another issue entirely.
It all depends on your perspective...and mine is wierd.
Now this I can understand; this is actually the first time anyone has said anything that remotely describes how a high stock price is good for a company (and I've been trying to find out actually). I couldn't for the life of me figure out what good stock valuations did for a company. This does make sense when the company retains some of its shares. Now if you can just explain to me why people actually buy shares that pay no dividends....my enlightenment will be one step further. It seems that this phenomenon might be related to what you already said.
Yes, being a "valued comanpy" has an effect on the cost of capital - but investing in the company does not affect credit ratings. And if you look, stock price does not determine credit ratings; credit ratings are usually determined by performance (well, expectations of future performance, really). Stock price and credit ratings are supposedly indicators of the same thing, but nobody ever raised the credit rating on a company simply because its stock price went up (at least not that I have observed). So I would have to disagree with you there; buying stocks does not help a company's credit rating. Purchasing goods or services, however, will affect credit ratings: - if I buy a company's product, it gets more revenue, which analysts like. Buying more product will reduce the cost of capital and increase the stock price. Of course, buying a company's product does not always guarantee anything; sometimes companies that post profits with high revenues even get downgraded because analysts typically have depth-perception issues when it comes to analyzing companies' performance.
Of course, stocks and credit ratings hardly behave in a logical, rational, deterministic manner; they behave the way they do in a disturbingly self-fullfilling and self-realizing fashion. (loosely tied to the performance of a given company or industry).
Hrm. Actually, it's funny that solid companies are required to pay less return on bonds, since that return is guaranteed; you'd think [investors] would want to extract a higher rate from companies with better profits. Ah, wait; didn't I already say that it wasn't rational?
Investing doesn't really give money to companies unless you:
a) Participate in the IPO
b) Buy bonds directly from the company during its offering
Trading stocks with other stockholders doesn't give any money to the company. It's like trading baseball cards. Sure there are some side effects of having stock prices go up for a company, but usually a high stock price doesn't give any financial benefit to a company (except for subsequent stock issues, which don't happen that often).
If you really want to invest in a company, buy bonds when they are issued (don't trade bonds, because trading them just gives money to the bond holder - not the company whose bond it is!).
That said, the best form of investing in a company is to purchase their product.
Simply get every person in the country to give you $230 and you'll have $57.5 Billion (230x250 mil - yeah, I know there are now more than 250 mil people in the country...). You'd actually be better off than Bill since you'd have that in cash and not the "professional baseball cards" we call stocks. ('course, you'd really need to get about $377 from each person due to taxes...)
That has to be one of the most complicated things I have ever read. Of course, it has the advantages of creating jobs to handle all the infrastructure that will require.
Anyway, I think people are forgetting the real issue here. Here in America we have a market economy, and currently people are "paying" ISPs and CD burner companies rather than record labels to get access to music. There is a moral issue here in that ISPs and CD burner mfgs don't give money to artists, but Record Labels do.
We live in a society where the ubiquitous "content" can no longer be controlled by media distribution, because there is no longer a need for physical "media" on which to transfer the "content". The "media" which is now controllable is the hardware on which the media is played rather than the media itself.
Think of it this way - before you would buy a record player / tape player / ??? player - some small up-front cost. Then you paid someone to give you a device of some sort which the player would be able to convert into movies or sound or whatever. The producer of the 'small device' was able to pay the "content-creator" based on volume sold.
So, what have we now? We've got some companies trying to sell devices which aren't needed to get the content consumers desire. Here's an interesting solution:
ISPs become Record Labels (or Record Labels become ISPs)
Think about it - you pay your ISP to connect to the Internet and then browse as you feel fit. What if the ISPs had to pay each (commercial content) site to which they served based on the amount of traffic to that site? And what if your ISP bill reflected that? Maybe more artists should work out contracts with ISPs to this nature.
*GASP* you say! That means they track where I've been! They will know what content I use!
So you're telling me when you go into Best Buy and plop down $10 (okay, maybe $20) for a CD that's "anonymous"? We (or at least some of us) live in the USA so there is nothing to prevent someone from standing outside the store and knowing that we frequent Best Buy. Also, we don't mind paying "per item" at a grocery store. The same idea of "pay an ISP some fixed amount per month and get as much of all content as I want" would be akin to paying your local grocer a monthly fee but being able to go in and empty the entire place. Hardly equitable, and it definitely seems silly when you think about physical property like food.
Why is it that people seem to think that if it doesn't have mass and can be beamed around over the internet, it's not real and paying for it is silly? Well, that's only part of the problem, so I'll not linger on it.
If you're observant, you will note that this (setting up some arrangement with an ISP type place and distributing obtained funds based on content selected) is not a new concept. Some companies (Apple, for instance) actually already do this, and customers don't have a problem with it.
I could definitely write a dissertation on this topic, but suffice it to say that I understand that people have a problem with the RIAA yapping because they don't get revenue because they have an uncompetitive business model and are resorting to litigation (hrm. sound familiar? It's spelled S-C-O) instead of re-vamping their business practices. However, the RIAA-companies still exist because *somebody* must still be buying their product. If you really want them to change their prices (and I think I read somewhere that one label is dropping prices), STOP BUYING THEIR PRODUCT!
Anyway, that's just a little bit of my thoughts on this insanity.
It's all Econ-101 my friends - supply and demand - oh, wait; they didn't cover stupid litigation in Econ 101 did they... -Me
Hrm. I just had a wierd thought. Entropy in the physical universe is defined as dS = dQ/T. It has to do with energy and temperature. Sure, we all learned that 'entropy is a measure of disorder.' I think a better term is 'entropy is a measure of available work' - it's more akin to potential energy. In physics, one manifestation of an increase in entropy is an increase in the temperature of a gas with a pressure increase that is lower than it would be if it were isentropic. That is, you put in some energy to increase pressure to do some work, but that pressure cannot do as much mechanical work as the energy you put in.
To make a long story short, I don't think you can really say that a jumbled word has more entropy than a non-jumbled word. I guess it depends on what you mean by order and disorder and stuff.
And yes, I am quite bored at work today to be thinking on this.
I didn't see any postings to this effect, so here's my observation:
Some folks have correclty said that the suit appears to be a breach of contract suit related to Apple Computer, Inc. agreeing to not do "something" in the music business. Without knowing exactly what that "something" is, we can't say how this suit will go, and even if we did have a copy of the contract we couldn't be sure because of how the legal system works.
Here are some speculations:
The contract says something like "Apple Computer may not participate in the music industry". That's quite vague and open to the courts to distinguish what "participate in the music industry" means
The contract says "Apple Computer may not produce music." In that case, Apple Computer isn't producing music, it is merely reselling it, so they should be fine, again subject to the oddness that is Law
The contract says something like "Apple Computer may not sell music" Well, then it's clear cut, and then you have to ask if beeps and other system sounds are "music", and if selling an OS which happens to have "music" in it is selling music or not... ugh!
If one thing is clear to me, irrespective of the ruling in this litigation, it is that people are way too worried about who they might be able to sue rather than what it really takes to continue to have a viable business.
Hey, with all of this patent craziness, why don't we use the "Slashdot Effect" and write our senators or whatever and really start pushing for patent reform in an organized fashion?
While I think that most of the current patents, especially the business practices ones, are against the original spirit of the Patent/Copyright/Trademark laws, as far as I know most of these patents fail the requirements for patents. I seem to recall the following things being required for a patent:
Useful
Novel
Unobvious to those versed in the applicable art
While a lot of these patents are useful, I think they pretty much all fail either the Novelness or Unobviousness requirements. I work for a company that patents hinge designs, for crying out loud! I recall the days that a waterbed patent was denied because waterbeds were described in a Heinlein novel. Aren't the patent checkers aware of not just prior art, but novel and unobvious? (It's like the laser cat toy patent of a previous Slashdot article (please help with link) - sure it might be useful, but any doofus 3 year old knows that if you shine a light on a wall a cat will chase it.)
Rather than just yap about this, why don't we form some kind of task force to fight this nonsense?
On a Caterpillar trench digger, there was this funny picture of a NO sign around a chainsaw looking thing and a caption that said, "Engage crowd control before operating".
Well, I didn't see this anywhere else, so here goes:
Mac OSX already has something close to this - if you turn on the System Update notifier, it will check to see if there are updates as frequently as once a day and as infrequently as never. It will then open a box in the middle of your screen (for the "novice home user") and say, "There are updates available! Do you want them?". You can then download them only (to install later, perhaps), download and install right there, or tell it to ignore the update completely.
I think this is a good solution - you are aware of the updates, but aren't forced to update. There is no "automatic" side to it at all, and the user still has control over his system.
Well, I know that starting new threads is discouraged, but I didn't think this fit in with any ongoing responses, so here goes one of my usual tirades on the poor use of semantics...
Analysis of the Issue
Regardless of the "fault" of piracy, here's an interesting thing I have noticed with most industries where something can be pirated - music, software, literature, movies, and the like. They always claim that "piracy cost us N dollars". Now, how can this be the case? Generally, when you think of "cost", you think of a sum that someone must pay. For instance, when the automotive industry says "warranties cost us $2 billion" it makes sense, because they must spend $2 billion of their own cash to cover the warranties. That means they have to take $2 billion they already have and spend it on something.
Compare and contrast with "lost sales due to pirating". The music / software industry does not have to give any of the money they already have because of piracy. They still sell some number of product, and obtain revenue from those things they do sell. The question then becomes, if there was no piracy, would they sell more items and thus increase their revenue?
Any person with a good business brain should see that piracy is not a cost in the strictest sense. It is simply untapped potential, or evidence of a poorly priced product. It is simply supply and demand. The public is willing to purchase a number of items at the set (by cartel or whatever your opinion my be on that one) price. There is demand for more product, but not at the going price, so the public finds an alternative. Because there is an alternative, at a much lower cost (the cost is not dollars but risk associated with ownership of unlicensed product), some people choose the alternative.
A New Business Model
A good solution, if the content industries were real business-savvy, would be to find the price at which they would sell the volume they want to sell. If they cannot make ends meet at the revenues they are currently getting, they should implement some other form of cost-cutting or whatever. And in the content industries, cost of distribution is almost zero - CDs cost pennies each, and packaging, printing, and shipping are also insignificant. (Proof - go to NASDAQ and look up M$s financials - note their revenue of $28 billion and cost of revenue is only $5 billion - gross return of 460%. (Constrast with Ford - revenue $165 B, cost = $125 B; gross return 32%) )
This means that their business structure is not right - they have too much overhead, or are too greedy. Their cost/pricing structure is not sufficient based on the demand for their product at the prices they want to sell. Sure, they will yap that if they sold as many CDs as people are downloading, at the price they want, they would get N more dollars. However, to sell that many more CDs, they'd have to drop the price and only then get M more dollars. But, if by dropping the price 5% increases volume by 10%, then they'd end up with more than they estimate.
Hypothetical Finances
Let's say for instance that CDs would retail for $10 each, say $5 wholesale. If you sell 100,000 copies, that's $500k. I'm guessing production costs are around $50k for tooling and such and $0.01 for each disc at that volume - or $1000. So cost of product is only $51 k. I don't know what labor is to make 100k CDs, but I'm guessing the machines can crank out 5000 / day for sure - that's only 20 days of production. At (auto) union costs of $50 / hour, say for 10 employees for those 20 days, labor would cost $80k. So now our total cost of producing those 100k CDs is $131k. That leaves $369k to split between the band (estimate 5 people) and label people (how many does it take to get a record going? Let's be conservative and say it takes 20 people).
Slashdot Mirror
This is a neat idea, but I don't think it will ever replace fuel-laden aircraft for transportation or cargo. I think the article was right in that it metioned unmanned, lightweight drones flying slowly over a city.
e-mail
Telephone: 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA)
snail mail:
This Article indicates that an average resolution is either 4 arc-minutes or 6 arc-seconds. The 6 arc-seconds makes more sense than 4 arc-minutes (4 arc-minutes is a whopping 1.2 mm at a distance of 1 m (I don't know about you but I can see better than that!), where 6 arc-seconds is 0.03 mm (about .001") at one meter. I don't know about you but I can see a 1-mil thick object at a distance of 1 meter (think piece of paper or something seen edge-on - if lighting is correct). According to this, the moon is 3476 km diameter and averages 384,467 km from the earth. That means the moon covers 31 arc-minutes. 6 arc-seconds at the distance of the moon is 11.18 km. So, your 617-square-mile city will be more than visible, since it's surely larger than 11.18 km in one direction. (sqrt(617 sq.mi) = 24mi on a side = 40 km, so you've got a fudge-factor of 4 on my calculation to be visible. Even your smaller cities of 400 sq.mi. are 20 mi/side = 32 km, or a fudge-factor of 3). (This should also prove that we can see better than 4 arc-minutes, since if the moon only covers 31 (This confirms an average of 31 arc-minutes), we sure can see features more fine than 1/8th the diameter of a full moon - even without magnification!)
"Using math since 1986 to sound like I know what I'm saying"
No, thanks!
"Big Brother is dead / and the Antichrist is watching." -Saviour Machine, Legend
Where'd you get the 5kW figure?
On seeing stuff on the moon...
And In summary....
Anyway, this has been a long thread, so I'm now going to let it go...
Perhaps I should be more careful with my overgeneralizations in the future... although the fact that "modernized" society keeps increasing its power consumption, there may soon come a day when 100m2 isn't enough...
*shrug*
Basically my point is, if there is a battle between the freedom to see the moon in its natural state vs being able to build stuff on the near side of the moon, I hope the naturalists win.
You could build a kick ass solar power station the size of a major metropolis on the moon and not be able to see it with the naked eye.
The size of a MAJOR METROPOLIS? Good grief, unless they paint it moon-rock color, we'd see it. It's not like the moon has an atmosphere or anything to obscure things - it's not at all like looking at Earth from the moon. And the albedo effect isn't even that great. My cursory search was unsuccessful, but I'm sure someone out there has determined the smallest resolvable object visible on the moon's surface from Earth... and I'm guessing it's much smaller than a metropolis.
Yeah, we have lots of "empty" space here and there, and I've heard of people wanting to put solar power stations on the moon. I don't know about you, but I don't want to look up at the moon and see piles of man-made crap instead of its current beautiful state. Power stations on the moon makes me want to vomit.
That said, though, I will embrace the day when I don't have to be connected to any utilities at all...
"All terrestrial energy sources are really solar anyway; this means we've had a nuclear power industry all along!" - me
Quick! Patent that idea now!
Patents for using lasers to get felines to run around? Patents for pressing a button to buy something? Patents for pay subscriptions through the mail? Patents for an automated problem-solving process? Good lord, whereas patents were originally instituted to help the small inventor, now all they do is help Big Business!
Personally I'm sick of it, and I'm even willing to put some reasonable thought, time, and effort into developing a proposal for a solution rather than just ranting about it. Who's with me, and how do we get started!?
Oddly enough, chances are pretty good the ant will not get squashed because the surface roughness of the boulder will provide pockets of safety (ever step on an ant to have it survive because of the slots in your tread?). Whether the ant will starve/suffocate, however, is another issue entirely.
It all depends on your perspective...and mine is wierd.
Now this I can understand; this is actually the first time anyone has said anything that remotely describes how a high stock price is good for a company (and I've been trying to find out actually). I couldn't for the life of me figure out what good stock valuations did for a company. This does make sense when the company retains some of its shares. Now if you can just explain to me why people actually buy shares that pay no dividends....my enlightenment will be one step further. It seems that this phenomenon might be related to what you already said.
Of course, stocks and credit ratings hardly behave in a logical, rational, deterministic manner; they behave the way they do in a disturbingly self-fullfilling and self-realizing fashion. (loosely tied to the performance of a given company or industry).
Hrm. Actually, it's funny that solid companies are required to pay less return on bonds, since that return is guaranteed; you'd think [investors] would want to extract a higher rate from companies with better profits. Ah, wait; didn't I already say that it wasn't rational?
a) Participate in the IPO
b) Buy bonds directly from the company during its offering
Trading stocks with other stockholders doesn't give any money to the company. It's like trading baseball cards. Sure there are some side effects of having stock prices go up for a company, but usually a high stock price doesn't give any financial benefit to a company (except for subsequent stock issues, which don't happen that often).
If you really want to invest in a company, buy bonds when they are issued (don't trade bonds, because trading them just gives money to the bond holder - not the company whose bond it is!).
That said, the best form of investing in a company is to purchase their product.
Simply get every person in the country to give you $230 and you'll have $57.5 Billion (230x250 mil - yeah, I know there are now more than 250 mil people in the country...). You'd actually be better off than Bill since you'd have that in cash and not the "professional baseball cards" we call stocks. ('course, you'd really need to get about $377 from each person due to taxes...)
Anyway, I think people are forgetting the real issue here. Here in America we have a market economy, and currently people are "paying" ISPs and CD burner companies rather than record labels to get access to music. There is a moral issue here in that ISPs and CD burner mfgs don't give money to artists, but Record Labels do.
We live in a society where the ubiquitous "content" can no longer be controlled by media distribution, because there is no longer a need for physical "media" on which to transfer the "content". The "media" which is now controllable is the hardware on which the media is played rather than the media itself.
Think of it this way - before you would buy a record player / tape player / ??? player - some small up-front cost. Then you paid someone to give you a device of some sort which the player would be able to convert into movies or sound or whatever. The producer of the 'small device' was able to pay the "content-creator" based on volume sold.
So, what have we now? We've got some companies trying to sell devices which aren't needed to get the content consumers desire. Here's an interesting solution:
ISPs become Record Labels (or Record Labels become ISPs)
Think about it - you pay your ISP to connect to the Internet and then browse as you feel fit. What if the ISPs had to pay each (commercial content) site to which they served based on the amount of traffic to that site? And what if your ISP bill reflected that? Maybe more artists should work out contracts with ISPs to this nature.
*GASP* you say! That means they track where I've been! They will know what content I use!
So you're telling me when you go into Best Buy and plop down $10 (okay, maybe $20) for a CD that's "anonymous"? We (or at least some of us) live in the USA so there is nothing to prevent someone from standing outside the store and knowing that we frequent Best Buy. Also, we don't mind paying "per item" at a grocery store. The same idea of "pay an ISP some fixed amount per month and get as much of all content as I want" would be akin to paying your local grocer a monthly fee but being able to go in and empty the entire place. Hardly equitable, and it definitely seems silly when you think about physical property like food.
Why is it that people seem to think that if it doesn't have mass and can be beamed around over the internet, it's not real and paying for it is silly? Well, that's only part of the problem, so I'll not linger on it.
If you're observant, you will note that this (setting up some arrangement with an ISP type place and distributing obtained funds based on content selected) is not a new concept. Some companies (Apple, for instance) actually already do this, and customers don't have a problem with it.
I could definitely write a dissertation on this topic, but suffice it to say that I understand that people have a problem with the RIAA yapping because they don't get revenue because they have an uncompetitive business model and are resorting to litigation (hrm. sound familiar? It's spelled S-C-O) instead of re-vamping their business practices. However, the RIAA-companies still exist because *somebody* must still be buying their product. If you really want them to change their prices (and I think I read somewhere that one label is dropping prices), STOP BUYING THEIR PRODUCT!
Anyway, that's just a little bit of my thoughts on this insanity.
It's all Econ-101 my friends - supply and demand - oh, wait; they didn't cover stupid litigation in Econ 101 did they ... -Me
To make a long story short, I don't think you can really say that a jumbled word has more entropy than a non-jumbled word. I guess it depends on what you mean by order and disorder and stuff.
And yes, I am quite bored at work today to be thinking on this.
face begins to twitch.... can't.... stop....cackling.....maniacally
Some folks have correclty said that the suit appears to be a breach of contract suit related to Apple Computer, Inc. agreeing to not do "something" in the music business. Without knowing exactly what that "something" is, we can't say how this suit will go, and even if we did have a copy of the contract we couldn't be sure because of how the legal system works.
Here are some speculations:
That's quite vague and open to the courts to distinguish what "participate in the music industry" means
In that case, Apple Computer isn't producing music, it is merely reselling it, so they should be fine, again subject to the oddness that is Law
Well, then it's clear cut, and then you have to ask if beeps and other system sounds are "music", and if selling an OS which happens to have "music" in it is selling music or not... ugh!
If one thing is clear to me, irrespective of the ruling in this litigation, it is that people are way too worried about who they might be able to sue rather than what it really takes to continue to have a viable business.
While I think that most of the current patents, especially the business practices ones, are against the original spirit of the Patent/Copyright/Trademark laws, as far as I know most of these patents fail the requirements for patents. I seem to recall the following things being required for a patent:
While a lot of these patents are useful, I think they pretty much all fail either the Novelness or Unobviousness requirements. I work for a company that patents hinge designs, for crying out loud! I recall the days that a waterbed patent was denied because waterbeds were described in a Heinlein novel. Aren't the patent checkers aware of not just prior art, but novel and unobvious? (It's like the laser cat toy patent of a previous Slashdot article (please help with link) - sure it might be useful, but any doofus 3 year old knows that if you shine a light on a wall a cat will chase it.)
Rather than just yap about this, why don't we form some kind of task force to fight this nonsense?
I'd be happy to join.
Yes, yes! That was it! It was on a ditch witch! And there was the part about the parking break, too! Thanks for the information and the reminder!
On a Caterpillar trench digger, there was this funny picture of a NO sign around a chainsaw looking thing and a caption that said, "Engage crowd control before operating".
because-trench-diggers-control-crowds
Mac OSX already has something close to this - if you turn on the System Update notifier, it will check to see if there are updates as frequently as once a day and as infrequently as never. It will then open a box in the middle of your screen (for the "novice home user") and say, "There are updates available! Do you want them?". You can then download them only (to install later, perhaps), download and install right there, or tell it to ignore the update completely.
I think this is a good solution - you are aware of the updates, but aren't forced to update. There is no "automatic" side to it at all, and the user still has control over his system.
Analysis of the Issue
Regardless of the "fault" of piracy, here's an interesting thing I have noticed with most industries where something can be pirated - music, software, literature, movies, and the like. They always claim that "piracy cost us N dollars". Now, how can this be the case? Generally, when you think of "cost", you think of a sum that someone must pay. For instance, when the automotive industry says "warranties cost us $2 billion" it makes sense, because they must spend $2 billion of their own cash to cover the warranties. That means they have to take $2 billion they already have and spend it on something.
Compare and contrast with "lost sales due to pirating". The music / software industry does not have to give any of the money they already have because of piracy. They still sell some number of product, and obtain revenue from those things they do sell. The question then becomes, if there was no piracy, would they sell more items and thus increase their revenue?
Any person with a good business brain should see that piracy is not a cost in the strictest sense. It is simply untapped potential, or evidence of a poorly priced product. It is simply supply and demand. The public is willing to purchase a number of items at the set (by cartel or whatever your opinion my be on that one) price. There is demand for more product, but not at the going price, so the public finds an alternative. Because there is an alternative, at a much lower cost (the cost is not dollars but risk associated with ownership of unlicensed product), some people choose the alternative.
A New Business Model
A good solution, if the content industries were real business-savvy, would be to find the price at which they would sell the volume they want to sell. If they cannot make ends meet at the revenues they are currently getting, they should implement some other form of cost-cutting or whatever. And in the content industries, cost of distribution is almost zero - CDs cost pennies each, and packaging, printing, and shipping are also insignificant. (Proof - go to NASDAQ and look up M$s financials - note their revenue of $28 billion and cost of revenue is only $5 billion - gross return of 460%. (Constrast with Ford - revenue $165 B, cost = $125 B; gross return 32%) )
This means that their business structure is not right - they have too much overhead, or are too greedy. Their cost/pricing structure is not sufficient based on the demand for their product at the prices they want to sell. Sure, they will yap that if they sold as many CDs as people are downloading, at the price they want, they would get N more dollars. However, to sell that many more CDs, they'd have to drop the price and only then get M more dollars. But, if by dropping the price 5% increases volume by 10%, then they'd end up with more than they estimate.
Hypothetical Finances
Let's say for instance that CDs would retail for $10 each, say $5 wholesale. If you sell 100,000 copies, that's $500k. I'm guessing production costs are around $50k for tooling and such and $0.01 for each disc at that volume - or $1000. So cost of product is only $51 k. I don't know what labor is to make 100k CDs, but I'm guessing the machines can crank out 5000 / day for sure - that's only 20 days of production. At (auto) union costs of $50 / hour, say for 10 employees for those 20 days, labor would cost $80k. So now our total cost of producing those 100k CDs is $131k. That leaves $369k to split between the band (estimate 5 people) and label people (how many does it take to get a record going? Let's be conservative and say it takes 20 people).