Hell, that's how my boss got started. His employer didn't have a non-compete clause and he proceeded to run them out of business.
Competition is the core of good Capitalism but nothing says you have to help your enemies.
You're making an incorrect jump in your reasoning, that if the action is beneficial for individual party, it must be beneficial for all parties as a whole. That's notalways true. It's possible to have situations where if all individuals choose the action most beneficial to themselves, everyone can arrive at a worse situation than if they had made sub-optimal choices.
That's what the article is claiming - that although non-competes give the appearance of benefiting the individual companies, they harmed Boston's tech industry as a whole to the point where it fell behind the same industry in Silicon Valley. In other words, the competition in Silicon Valley which forced companies to "help their enemies" as you put it actually produced better results.
NASA has two factions - manned and unmanned missions - who both compete internally for the same money. Big-name manned NASA projects like Apollo, the shuttle, ISS, and this manned Mars mission have a history of expanding until they consume almost the entirety of NASA's budget. Many, maybe even most, would say most of the useful science comes from NASA's unmanned missions. On a bang-for-the-buck basis, I think almost everyone agrees the unmanned missions yield much greater returns. But of course there's an allure, a romance with sending a man out there.
Congress is trying to protect the other projects from being cannibalized to fund the manned Mars mission. And they want Bush to pony up the dollars for it if he's going to give NASA a mandate to put a man on Mars (as opposed to just giving the mandate with no funds, forcing NASA to divert funds from other useful missions).
Gates was anti-Internet. He thought netspace would consolidate on the CompuServe / AOL model of nationwide dialup BBSes, and ignored the Internet with Windows for as long as he could. Windows didn't even have an official TCP/IP stack until Windows 95, well after the World Wide Web took off and Microsoft finally conceded that the Internet was the future. Prior to Win95, you need to figure out how to install Trumpet WinSock into Windows 3.0 or 3.1.
Microsoft is Microsoft's own worst enemy. While I applaud the intentions of the Justice Department in attempting to impose a longer period of fine-grained monitoring on Microsoft's activities, I think they're missing most of the "big picture" here. Popular news and media outlets are routinely running stories about the slow adoption of Vista by major corporations and small businesses alike. New sales of Office are apparently lagging, too. Basically, the old story of "what we have now is good enough" is, in many cases, happening all over again.
I think that's kind of the point the states are trying to make. The possibility you posit is that OSes and browsers have pretty much matured and there's nothing groundbreaking that can be added to them. Advancement has stalled because all the new features in Vista and Office 2007 are nonessential bells and whistles which don't add enough functionality for businesses and home users to want to spend the time and money to upgrade. Either everything worth inventing has already been invented, or it's not being developed and added to the product because Microsoft feels no pressure to do so.
The other possibility is that there's lots more left to innovate, but it isn't happening because there's no competition. If there was even just one other major competitor, the two companies would be at each others throats trying their hardest to come up with innovative new features which are compelling enough to make people want to switch to their product (and consequently encourage current users to upgrade). That's what happens with Intel and AMD, with nVidia and ATI (now AMD). So I think the postulate the states are putting forth is that Microsoft was so successful at killing off any competitors that just a few years of an anti-trust ruling haven't been enough for a viable competitor(s) to gestate, and more time is needed.
It's called a meta-analysis and is very common in statistical analysis. While I can't say anything about this particular meta-study, it's usually done by grabbing every study you can find which covers what you're studying and seems to have fairly robust methodology. A decade or more ago that meant being published in a respected journal, since journals have a pretty rigorous screening processes. I dunno what it means now since I've been out of research for a decade.
Basically what it works off of is that in a typical statistical analysis, your final conclusion is tied to a confidence interval, typically 95%. In other words, if you did the study 20 times, just by chance alone 1 of those would arrive at a different conclusion because of differences due to randomness. A metastudy attempts to weed out these random contradictory results by sampling multiple studies. In certain cases it can also look for trends which the individual studies missed because their sample size was insufficient (whereas several of them grouped together may have sufficient sample size).
The 700 MHz spectrum auction is supposed to happen before Jan 28, 2008. Verizon's announcement says the technical specifications will be released in "early 2008". Sounds to me like it's to discourage any further mandates by the FCC on the bidding process, and to provide a disincentive for any other bit players thinking of lining up behind Google. "Oh, there's no need to mandate any more openness requirements, we're already going to do it. See, look at this announcement we made. What? Of course we're going to follow through on it. Trust us." It's pretty pathetic that I'm this cynical of Verizon's motives, but that cynicism comes from 3 years experience as a customer.
They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
Yes they were in a lose-lose situation, but they themselves created that situation. What we're seeing is a disparity between the market domain (i.e. reality) and the legal domain shaking out. The market recognizes that software (including patents, music, pictures, video) has essentially zero cost of duplication and (thanks to the Internet) zero cost of distribution. It wants to drive the cost of such services towards zero. The *AA saw that, panicked, and got a bunch of laws passed which made it illegal to do what the market wanted to do; that made common sense illegal (e.g. I paid for that DRM's music, why can't I have a copy of it both on my computer and my MP3 player?). They took laws created ostensibly to crack down on commercial copyright infringers, and started (ab)using them as a sledgehammer against petty personal infringement.
What we're seeing now is reality reasserting itself over these nonsensical laws. If the RIAA had recognized what was happening and concentrated on developing a workable business model, they wouldn't have put themselves into a lose-lose situation. But the industry as it pre-existed were so abusive of performers' rights that I'm not sure that was even possible. The Internet has made the value of the distributor nearly worthless -- anybody can distribute now, just slap your MP3s onto a web server. Since any workable business model has to accurately reflect the value the distributor adds to the music production process, their revenue would've gone from >95% of the pie to less than 5%. The MPAA is in much better shape because movie production involves a lot more capital (they add much more value to the process), and their final product is more realistically priced ($20-$30 for a DVD or BR/HD-DVD feels about right to me for the value I'm getting, so I don't have much problem justifying to myself paying for it).
Here are the US moon shot programs preceding Apollo:
Pioneer - the path to success is built on failures Ranger - shoot the moon, literally Lunar Orbiter - look before you leap (and risk a manned vehicle) Surveyor - practice makes perfect (again without risking a manned lander)
Most of these occurred in parallel with the equivalent Soviet programs (links are at the bottom of the above Wikipedia pages). Give the huge failure rate with both countries' programs (unmanned), I consider who managed to succeed first at each individual goal to be more a matter of luck. (The U.S. essentially "won" the race to put a man on the moon when the equivalent Soviet rocket blew up. The Soviets then decided they couldn't catch up with Apollo, gave up, and concentrated on a robotic mission to return samples.)
Er, no. Only a few expensive smartphones have GPS built-in. And there is certainly no standardised way to transmit this information.
The vast majority of cell phones in the U.S. have GPS built-in. It's necessary to satisfy the FCC's 911 requirements. The receivers only cost like 75 cents. It's so cheap because it's assisted GPS, not self-contained GPS. The receiver just picks up the satellite signals and relays them to the cell phone tower. The hardware there does the number crunching to figure out location, then transmits it back to the phone. So the signals to transmit all this is indeed standardized.
How does the US system help in your scenario? Somehow, I don't believe they'll send out a SWA-Team to every phone accidentally calling 911.
That's what they do. The police are sent to investigate every 911 call, even if it's an immediate hang-up. When I did some work for a hotel, they'd have a customer pull a prank 911 call every couple of weeks. The police came every time. So in the U.S. system, you'd call 911, lose consciousness, and the police would be out trying to find where your phone call came from. Note that this also covers the case where you're trying to make the 911 call in secret. You don't have to risk getting caught on the phone by the criminal. You can call and hang up, and the police will be on their way.
I dunno which system is better, but I will point out that one assumes the caller is honest while the other assumes the caller is a prankster.
There isn't a business model that could truly work, at least not a direct one. Commonly floated is the idea that if you release music for free, word of mouth and subsequent sales will make up for this. This, unfortunately, ignores the simple human traits that a) they will take anything not nailed down and b) perceived anonymity gives them an impetus to do things they wouldn't usually do (cf Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory...).
There is indeed a business model which can work. But not in the way as the music industry currently exists.
About 10-15 years ago, wedding photographers charged for prints. They'd charge a nominal fee to shoot your wedding, but then make the bulk of their money selling you and your relatives the prints. All that changed when scanners and color photo printers became commonplace. Upon finding that a reprint would cost them $10-$30, people would just scan the original photo and print it for themselves. Sure there was some loss of quality since it was a copy, but the cost savings made it worthwhile. Faced with this threat, most photographers shifted their business model. Recognizing that it wasn't cost-effective nor good business to chase down every incident of copyright infringement, they now charge you a lot to shoot the wedding, while giving away the prints at-cost.
When you come down to it, there's really no difference from the music industry (other than an entrenched publication industry). Both musicians and photographers create a product which is essentially software. Back when software was difficult to duplicate, they both used to charge for the final product. Technology suddenly dropped the cost of duplication to near zero.
The key difference I see is that the music publication industry is vested in generating big name stars. The obvious reason is that it minimizes their cost - make a lot of money from a few big stars, rather than a little money from many small bands. Unfortunately for them, big stars are particularly susceptible to piracy - their market saturation approaches 100% so the only way they can make more money is by going after the copyright infringers. Small bands on the other hand could very well welcome piracy. If you only have 1% market saturation, if piracy increases your exposure to 10%, you're probably all for it. The additional business due to the widespread exposure (e.g. "I love your wedding photos! Who did you hire?") offsets the loss in revenue due to copyright infringement.
So very long-term, as the legal issues of copyright on the Internet are sorted out, that's the business model I see music shifting towards. Lots of small bands being paid to play live events (or being paid for the right to place recordings of their music at live events) and giving away copies of their music for free on the Internet as marketing. The era of the music superstar as we know it is coming to a close. Sure there might still be some stars whose music is so catchy it's known across the country (or even the world). But they'll make their money from the performance bookings they'll get from that widespread notoriety, not from selling CDs or MP3s. The vast majority of musicians will eek out a modest living plying their trade, just like most photographers do.
Or, if McDonalds had a deal that if you bought 100 hamburgers at a time they would sell them for $0.10 each. So you go there, by 100 hamburgers and set up a stand on the corner reselling them - right in front of McDonalds. And your sign is saying how cheap your "McDonalds" hamburgers are compared to the store behind you. Would McDonalds sell you another 100? Maybe not.
If they're able to sell hamburgers for $0.10 at a profit, the fact that they're selling burgers for much more in their retail stores represents a market inefficiency. It's completely natural for a competitor to show up which takes advantage of that inefficiency. That's the way the market works. The problem isn't that a competitor is reselling McDonalds' hamburgers for a lower price in front of their stores. The problem is that the price in their stores is too high.
This is the sort of situation that Verizon found itself in. They do not have to support their competitors, but they had to support Vonage. The government and state regulators won't let them stop supporting Vonage directly. So we dust off an old patent and find it can be used to beat up Vonage. If it wasn't for the patent, there would be something else.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what Verizon the DSL company has to do with Verizon the phone company, aside from sharing a corporate structure. Verizon the DSL company sells Internet connectivity. They're not in competition with Vonage. They set their DSL priced at a rate which they feel they can generate a profit. That means the money I pay them each month is enough to cover their expenses, including for the phone line. They're not subsidizing their competitors - I've already paid them for the phone line and the connectivity. It shouldn't matter at all to them what I do with that connectivity.
Verizon the phone company is in competition with Vonage. If they can't compete with VoIP, they need to do something to lower their prices. If they can't do so without generating a profit, then they need to improve their business model (maybe switch to VoIP) or die trying.
I haven't fully read up on the patents at issue here, so maybe Verizon is in the right on those grounds. But from a free market standpoint, this smacks of abusing legal procedure to stifle competition to maintain higher prices (Verizon DSL is consistently about 30% higher priced than SBC DSL in areas where SBC does not offer service - funny what a little competition can do). Of course if the patents are valid, then the temporary monopoly granted to them via the patent justifies the higher pricing. But if the patents aren't valid, then Verizon is holding back progress and technological efficiency so they can gouge customers for more money.
If you're a member, Costco now has a recycling program through Greensight. Shipping is free at the moment, and newer items may qualify for a trade-in value (paid via a Costco CashBack card).
But we shouldn't even consider building any until we have a *completed* (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for nuclear waste. Deferring it to the next generation is not OK.
That's like saying we should continue crapping in our house until we're absolutely certain that the toilet is completely functional and operational. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a typical coal plant generates millions of tons of CO2 and tens of tousands of tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in a year. Coal also contains trace amounts of radioactive materials that are released when burned. In 1982 a typical 1000 MW coal plant released "5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium" into the atmosphere.
In contrast, According to Greenpeace, a 1000 MW nuclear plant generates 27 tons of highly radioactive waste and less than 1000 tons of total radioactive waste. (Realistic amounts are probably lower, but I'll use Greenpeace as an upper bound). The total amount of spent nuclear fuel generated by all nuclear power in the U.S. since 1951-2003 is about 49,000 tons. At a density of about 8-10 tons per cubic meter, this represents a cube about 18 meters on a side, about the volume of two olympic-sized swimming pools.
So what do we do? Continue dumping billions of tons of pollutants, and thousands of tons of uranium and thorium into the atmosphere killing an estimated 24,000 each year? Because we aren't sure it's safer to switch to a power source which has had zero fatalities in 50+ years, and we aren't yet sure what to do with the two swimming pools of waste it's generated in that time?
I'd love to know the secret that makes them think that they'll be able to keep these strips around for more than a year or so.
Maybe they're not built by the lowest bidder?
I remember an interview with the chief engineer of a road construction company. He claimed that if the state was willing to pay about twice as much, he could build them a road which could last 100 years. But if he did that he'd be underbid for every contract and would go out of business. So the state ends up with roads which need to be resurfaced after 5 years and rebuilt after 15-25. Essentially the longevity is enough to span one politician's career in that office. After that it'll be someone else's problem, so why spend extra money on it?
- Some have put bombs at abortion clinics: i.e., tried to kill people to prevent them from having an abortion. (I think most of us agree that someone willing to kill another to get people to conform to their beliefs about what is "moral" is most certainly a religious extremist.)
As near as I can tell, there has been just one death and one injury in the U.S. due to a bombing at an abortion clinic. And those were due to Eric Rudolph, the nutcase who set off the bomb at the 1996 Olympics (i.e. he just wanted to build bombs and kill people, targeting an abortion clinic was just an excuse or perhaps a ruse to divert suspicion). As much as I despise abortion clinic bombings, it would seem their record contradicts your assertion. Whoever the perpetrators are, they're going out of their way to avoid fatalities, and doing a damn good job of it given there were 41 bombings between 1977-2005.
Corporations can't hold copyright, only the individuals that actually created the work. Work-for-hire would not transfer ownership to the hiring entity.
Work for hire exists to allow risk transferral and to simplify collaborative works. e.g. A company makes a PC game which does poorly for the first three months, losing money. The development and art teams are disbanded and released, but have been paid because the company assumed the risk of failure in exchange for ownership of copyright. Now say the game suddenly takes off and becomes a huge success. The company wants to release a version for Mac, Linux, and various consoles. But they can't because they need to get copyright releases from the 50-100 coders and artists who worked on the original, and they can't track them all down.
The real problem with work for hire is that the record industry has managed to subvert and twist it such that they get the copyright, but the bands assume the risk. The band pays for production costs out of their royalties, so if an album does poorly, they end up in debt to the studio even though the studio holds the copyright. Outlaw that practice (so the person/group who pays gets the copyright) and I don't see much problem with work for hire.
That sounds contradictory to me. If the parents are responsible enough to talk with and come to an agreement with their kids about playtime, it doesn't sound like they'd be the type of parents who'd ignore their kids once the timer kicked in. Seems to me that the parents likely to abuse the timer as you describe are the type who without the timer would just let the kids play as long as they like without supervision, or arbitrarily and unilaterally decide when the kids can and can't play. The timer wouldn't appear to have a net negative impact on any of these individual cases. (Well, the kids may think it's a net negative.)
If the average paid was $5-$8, that blows a huge hole into the argument that DRM is needed because without it, customers would just copy everything for free. Remember, an average includes the people who paid zero. It sounds more like piracy due to lack of DRM and a fixed price will only negatively impact sales revenue by 20%-50%. And you still haven't accounted for the mitigating effect of having wider distribution due to more availability. I was pretty skeptical of the "music for donations" business model, but this is making me re-think that stance.
The monkey wrench in the works is that we don't know how many copies were acquired via filesharing. But it's a pretty safe bet that those people wouldn't have bought it anyway if it had been released at a fixed price. If these payment rates hold up long-term, the RIAA's business model is pretty much dead. There is no reason for a band to sign a contract with a label which gives them less than 50% of revenue from Internet sales -- they could make more publishing independently.
Criminal? That's an hyperbole. Here's a use of the word that's not: preventing access to emergency services because it affords you a little convenience is, literally, criminal.
Both seem like hyperbole to me. "Something you're doing might delay response in an emergency, so it's criminal for you to do it." Yeah, right, why don't we get rid of all doors and locks using the same reasoning? Restaurants and theaters have landline phones you know.
Besides, while I can see the harm of a cellphone ring during a live theatrical performance, such as a play or an opera, it's merely an annoyance during a movie. And as far as restaurants are concerned, well, it's not like asking the offending patron to STFU is going to stop the globe from spinning. And sysadmins, doctors and other "on-call" professions have a right to eat, don't they?
This is the one I have a really hard time understanding. Why does their right to eat or go to a theater trump the property owner's right to control the aural atmosphere of their facilities? To me it seems really simple. If the property owner doesn't want cell phones, he can block them. If you don't like it, don't visit that restaurant or theater, visit one where they allow cell phones.
As for jammers, they're typically illegal because they violate FCC rules on transmission in frequencies owned ("leased") by the cell phone service providers. It has nothing to do with a right to eat or ability to call 911. That's why shielding your theater to block cell phone signals is perfectly legal.
Even if they own a trademark on SimpleDog, that's insufficient grounds for a domain transfer. ICANN has some pretty well-established arbitration rules for these cases. Of particular note are sections 4a and 4b. A valid complaint exists only if:
(i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
(ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
(iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.
You'll notice there's an "and" between each of those. All three have to be true for the complaint to even be considered. Section 4b outlines some examples of "bad faith".
(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or
(ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that you have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or
(iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or
(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.
Please note that putting a parked page with targeted advertising on the domain is considered a legitimate business use. However, it's generally considered to have the lowest priority among business uses. If its use infringes on the trademark of another (non-targeted ad parked page) legitimate business, generally ICANN comes down on the side of the trademark holder and authorizes the transfer of the domain to the trademark holder if that trademark is somewhat well-known.
In other words, even if the other site has a trademark on SimpleDog, if you're using it for a legitimate business and your site does not compete with them (does not leech off their fame for commercial gain), you're pretty safe. In fact, if your thesimpledog.com site became famous and you were able to turn it into a multi-million dollar business venture with widespread name recognition, and simpledog.com was still an advertising site which advertised what your business sold, you'd actually have pretty a good chance to get their domain transferred to you. They would be leeching off your fame for commercial gain, and thus satisfy definition 4b(iv) of using the domain in "bad faith".
(Incidentally, section 4b(i) is why you never, ever put a dollar amount on your domain in these cases. Their lawyers will immediately jump on it as evidence that you're using the domain in bad faith.)
How could a post that is blatantly wrong end up with +5 insightful? There was a discussion here on this exact topic only a week or so ago, and it was pointed out that it goes back to at least the 1970s for IBM's winchester drives. A quick search of Google verifies that IBM quoted 4 70MB drives (the maximum capacity of the System/360 model 115) as holding 280 million bytes, rather than 293 million bytes.
Interesting. I started buying hard drives in the late 1980s, around the time typical PC RAM amounts reached and exceeded 1 MB. All hard drives at that time were labeled using 1 MB = 1024^2 bytes. So it would seem the definition used by hard drive manufacturers has changed several times.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what the article is claiming - that although non-competes give the appearance of benefiting the individual companies, they harmed Boston's tech industry as a whole to the point where it fell behind the same industry in Silicon Valley. In other words, the competition in Silicon Valley which forced companies to "help their enemies" as you put it actually produced better results.
Dunno if this video is real, but it sure looks like it is. Near miss between a UAV and an Airbus A300.
Congress is trying to protect the other projects from being cannibalized to fund the manned Mars mission. And they want Bush to pony up the dollars for it if he's going to give NASA a mandate to put a man on Mars (as opposed to just giving the mandate with no funds, forcing NASA to divert funds from other useful missions).
Gates was anti-Internet. He thought netspace would consolidate on the CompuServe / AOL model of nationwide dialup BBSes, and ignored the Internet with Windows for as long as he could. Windows didn't even have an official TCP/IP stack until Windows 95, well after the World Wide Web took off and Microsoft finally conceded that the Internet was the future. Prior to Win95, you need to figure out how to install Trumpet WinSock into Windows 3.0 or 3.1.
Basically what it works off of is that in a typical statistical analysis, your final conclusion is tied to a confidence interval, typically 95%. In other words, if you did the study 20 times, just by chance alone 1 of those would arrive at a different conclusion because of differences due to randomness. A metastudy attempts to weed out these random contradictory results by sampling multiple studies. In certain cases it can also look for trends which the individual studies missed because their sample size was insufficient (whereas several of them grouped together may have sufficient sample size).
The 700 MHz spectrum auction is supposed to happen before Jan 28, 2008. Verizon's announcement says the technical specifications will be released in "early 2008". Sounds to me like it's to discourage any further mandates by the FCC on the bidding process, and to provide a disincentive for any other bit players thinking of lining up behind Google. "Oh, there's no need to mandate any more openness requirements, we're already going to do it. See, look at this announcement we made. What? Of course we're going to follow through on it. Trust us." It's pretty pathetic that I'm this cynical of Verizon's motives, but that cynicism comes from 3 years experience as a customer.
What we're seeing now is reality reasserting itself over these nonsensical laws. If the RIAA had recognized what was happening and concentrated on developing a workable business model, they wouldn't have put themselves into a lose-lose situation. But the industry as it pre-existed were so abusive of performers' rights that I'm not sure that was even possible. The Internet has made the value of the distributor nearly worthless -- anybody can distribute now, just slap your MP3s onto a web server. Since any workable business model has to accurately reflect the value the distributor adds to the music production process, their revenue would've gone from >95% of the pie to less than 5%. The MPAA is in much better shape because movie production involves a lot more capital (they add much more value to the process), and their final product is more realistically priced ($20-$30 for a DVD or BR/HD-DVD feels about right to me for the value I'm getting, so I don't have much problem justifying to myself paying for it).
Pioneer - the path to success is built on failures
Ranger - shoot the moon, literally
Lunar Orbiter - look before you leap (and risk a manned vehicle)
Surveyor - practice makes perfect (again without risking a manned lander)
Most of these occurred in parallel with the equivalent Soviet programs (links are at the bottom of the above Wikipedia pages). Give the huge failure rate with both countries' programs (unmanned), I consider who managed to succeed first at each individual goal to be more a matter of luck. (The U.S. essentially "won" the race to put a man on the moon when the equivalent Soviet rocket blew up. The Soviets then decided they couldn't catch up with Apollo, gave up, and concentrated on a robotic mission to return samples.)
So does that mean the Pakistani nukes aren't secure even if they have PALs installed?
I dunno which system is better, but I will point out that one assumes the caller is honest while the other assumes the caller is a prankster.
About 10-15 years ago, wedding photographers charged for prints. They'd charge a nominal fee to shoot your wedding, but then make the bulk of their money selling you and your relatives the prints. All that changed when scanners and color photo printers became commonplace. Upon finding that a reprint would cost them $10-$30, people would just scan the original photo and print it for themselves. Sure there was some loss of quality since it was a copy, but the cost savings made it worthwhile. Faced with this threat, most photographers shifted their business model. Recognizing that it wasn't cost-effective nor good business to chase down every incident of copyright infringement, they now charge you a lot to shoot the wedding, while giving away the prints at-cost.
When you come down to it, there's really no difference from the music industry (other than an entrenched publication industry). Both musicians and photographers create a product which is essentially software. Back when software was difficult to duplicate, they both used to charge for the final product. Technology suddenly dropped the cost of duplication to near zero.
The key difference I see is that the music publication industry is vested in generating big name stars. The obvious reason is that it minimizes their cost - make a lot of money from a few big stars, rather than a little money from many small bands. Unfortunately for them, big stars are particularly susceptible to piracy - their market saturation approaches 100% so the only way they can make more money is by going after the copyright infringers. Small bands on the other hand could very well welcome piracy. If you only have 1% market saturation, if piracy increases your exposure to 10%, you're probably all for it. The additional business due to the widespread exposure (e.g. "I love your wedding photos! Who did you hire?") offsets the loss in revenue due to copyright infringement.
So very long-term, as the legal issues of copyright on the Internet are sorted out, that's the business model I see music shifting towards. Lots of small bands being paid to play live events (or being paid for the right to place recordings of their music at live events) and giving away copies of their music for free on the Internet as marketing. The era of the music superstar as we know it is coming to a close. Sure there might still be some stars whose music is so catchy it's known across the country (or even the world). But they'll make their money from the performance bookings they'll get from that widespread notoriety, not from selling CDs or MP3s. The vast majority of musicians will eek out a modest living plying their trade, just like most photographers do.
Verizon the phone company is in competition with Vonage. If they can't compete with VoIP, they need to do something to lower their prices. If they can't do so without generating a profit, then they need to improve their business model (maybe switch to VoIP) or die trying.
I haven't fully read up on the patents at issue here, so maybe Verizon is in the right on those grounds. But from a free market standpoint, this smacks of abusing legal procedure to stifle competition to maintain higher prices (Verizon DSL is consistently about 30% higher priced than SBC DSL in areas where SBC does not offer service - funny what a little competition can do). Of course if the patents are valid, then the temporary monopoly granted to them via the patent justifies the higher pricing. But if the patents aren't valid, then Verizon is holding back progress and technological efficiency so they can gouge customers for more money.
Freecycle has already been mentioned elsewhere.
In contrast, According to Greenpeace, a 1000 MW nuclear plant generates 27 tons of highly radioactive waste and less than 1000 tons of total radioactive waste. (Realistic amounts are probably lower, but I'll use Greenpeace as an upper bound). The total amount of spent nuclear fuel generated by all nuclear power in the U.S. since 1951-2003 is about 49,000 tons. At a density of about 8-10 tons per cubic meter, this represents a cube about 18 meters on a side, about the volume of two olympic-sized swimming pools.
So what do we do? Continue dumping billions of tons of pollutants, and thousands of tons of uranium and thorium into the atmosphere killing an estimated 24,000 each year? Because we aren't sure it's safer to switch to a power source which has had zero fatalities in 50+ years, and we aren't yet sure what to do with the two swimming pools of waste it's generated in that time?
More shots from the sequence scanned at approx 2400x2400 resolution.
I remember an interview with the chief engineer of a road construction company. He claimed that if the state was willing to pay about twice as much, he could build them a road which could last 100 years. But if he did that he'd be underbid for every contract and would go out of business. So the state ends up with roads which need to be resurfaced after 5 years and rebuilt after 15-25. Essentially the longevity is enough to span one politician's career in that office. After that it'll be someone else's problem, so why spend extra money on it?
The real problem with work for hire is that the record industry has managed to subvert and twist it such that they get the copyright, but the bands assume the risk. The band pays for production costs out of their royalties, so if an album does poorly, they end up in debt to the studio even though the studio holds the copyright. Outlaw that practice (so the person/group who pays gets the copyright) and I don't see much problem with work for hire.
That sounds contradictory to me. If the parents are responsible enough to talk with and come to an agreement with their kids about playtime, it doesn't sound like they'd be the type of parents who'd ignore their kids once the timer kicked in. Seems to me that the parents likely to abuse the timer as you describe are the type who without the timer would just let the kids play as long as they like without supervision, or arbitrarily and unilaterally decide when the kids can and can't play. The timer wouldn't appear to have a net negative impact on any of these individual cases. (Well, the kids may think it's a net negative.)
The monkey wrench in the works is that we don't know how many copies were acquired via filesharing. But it's a pretty safe bet that those people wouldn't have bought it anyway if it had been released at a fixed price. If these payment rates hold up long-term, the RIAA's business model is pretty much dead. There is no reason for a band to sign a contract with a label which gives them less than 50% of revenue from Internet sales -- they could make more publishing independently.
As for jammers, they're typically illegal because they violate FCC rules on transmission in frequencies owned ("leased") by the cell phone service providers. It has nothing to do with a right to eat or ability to call 911. That's why shielding your theater to block cell phone signals is perfectly legal.
- (i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
- (ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
- (iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.
You'll notice there's an "and" between each of those. All three have to be true for the complaint to even be considered. Section 4b outlines some examples of "bad faith".- (i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or
- (ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that you have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or
- (iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or
- (iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.
Please note that putting a parked page with targeted advertising on the domain is considered a legitimate business use. However, it's generally considered to have the lowest priority among business uses. If its use infringes on the trademark of another (non-targeted ad parked page) legitimate business, generally ICANN comes down on the side of the trademark holder and authorizes the transfer of the domain to the trademark holder if that trademark is somewhat well-known.In other words, even if the other site has a trademark on SimpleDog, if you're using it for a legitimate business and your site does not compete with them (does not leech off their fame for commercial gain), you're pretty safe. In fact, if your thesimpledog.com site became famous and you were able to turn it into a multi-million dollar business venture with widespread name recognition, and simpledog.com was still an advertising site which advertised what your business sold, you'd actually have pretty a good chance to get their domain transferred to you. They would be leeching off your fame for commercial gain, and thus satisfy definition 4b(iv) of using the domain in "bad faith".
(Incidentally, section 4b(i) is why you never, ever put a dollar amount on your domain in these cases. Their lawyers will immediately jump on it as evidence that you're using the domain in bad faith.)