Motorola had a flip cell phone a decade ago, but GE had the "flip-phone, a brand new phone you can own.", that was obviously modeled after the ST communicator.
Unlikely. People at that level have teams of people to read and analyze everything.
More likely she planned to wait until the last moment, and squeeze it through so that nobody noticed. If it had come up for debate sooner, she might have lost, and OSS supporters might have put even stronger language into the doc.
Kodachrome, by Paul Simon (Also mentions Nikon Cameras
Cadillac Ranch, Bruce Sprinstein
Pink Cadillac, Bruce Sprinsein
I'm sure there are others, but those are just off the top of my head. (Yes, I know these songs weren't written with advertising in ming, it's just that it's possible for a hit song to include an endorsement)
The former Soviets got caught with their pants down when they reused OTPads after a year. I sure their reasoning (or lack thereof) went something like this. "OTP is provably unbreakable, therefor no-one would waste time breaking it, so since no-one is trying to break our codes, we can re-use the OTPs" Unfortunatly for them, the British had been recording their stuff for over a year, and were able to trivially break their encryptions.
At least one American Admiral has reused OTPs. It's easy to call these people idiots, but since cryptographers don't tend to have aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, those things tend to be administered by people who aren't cryptographers.
Interestingly OTP are known to be unbreakable, but when the big boys use OTP they still put random garbage in front and behind the real message, "Just in Case" (tm). It's also important to send the same amount of traffic every day at the same times, 24/7, 365 days/year lest that your opponent find out that something is afoot by an increase in transmissions.
Why stop there? Lets put this in the cars of all the politicians that vote for the speed limits and the penalties for violating them, then publish the results periodically. Want to run for office? You have to consent to be monitored. Same with the personal cars of the police and other government officials. If they haven't done anything wrong, why wouldn't they want the public to know?
Interestingly, IBM sold lots of 5150's without floppy drives (or hard drives). The marketing people originally thought that people were actually using the cassette interface. Almost no-one did, they were instead buying 3rd party floppies and hard drives because they were much cheaper.
...But not by Windows. Time Machine goes way beyond Windows' System Restore, and is more similar to VMS's versioning filesystem. Spaces is just virtual desktops, yes, but Windows never had them either [from Microsoft] except for a half-assed "PowerToy."
Yup, VMS had autoversioning of files way back when, but it was the Apple Lisa(tm) that had a GUI based file versioning system. When you created a document, an icon was created that looked like a page. When you editted the document, pages where added to the icon that looked stacked. You could easily go back to any prevision version. (This may have been copied from the Xerox Star system out of PARC that Apple copied.)
No, you would not. I have a friend named Fname Mname Lname II. Why not Jr.? Because he's just the 2nd Lname with that first name and middle name. To be a Third, there just have to be two other ancestors beneath you in the family tree with he same name. You don't have to have the same name as your father.
Because people *say* they aren't interested in your ad, but advertisers perceive that if they could *just* get that ad into their homes, people would change their mind.
Men *say* they don't want tampons. (and tampon ads) But when their wives/girlfriends sent them to the store to buy Kotex, if they've seen enough Tampax commercials, they might get confused and buy the wrong brand.
Extreme example, but it's a real phenomemon. People often say one thing, but when they are in the store, they act differently. Advertising tries to get into people's minds so they act the way the advertiser wants, not what the person wants or needs.
In grade school, we pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I don't remember doing anything for the state of Virginia. Other states might, but in the 1960's VA didn't.
The federal government convinced the courts that they could withhold dollars from states that didn't have laws they liked, thus getting around constitutional barriers to total federalism. Anything from the highway speed limit, to how schools are run, is determined this way. (except in the very few states that can say no to the money)
In the future, look for a Federal Drivers license. It'll still be handed out by the states, but the look and feel will be determined by Federal mandate. (and in a Federal database)
"We have to make sure we aren't infringing on any copyrights or anything," Horowitz said, describing how Ares was selected. "You have to go through that whole process and that just takes time."
Well, pummel me with and ugly stick. I've had real music really stolen from me. Thieves broke in and stole 1/3 of my CD collection as well as my best tape deck and reasonably good speakers. I didn't own the copyrights, but I did own the disks. (way before copying CD's was cost effective.)
As far as I'm concerned, those disks are gone. Some were rare and out of print. I really would have much appriciated it if those thieves had just copied the disks and left me with the originals.
I've sold software before. I've also released it as shareware and freeware. I don't know about you, but I don't feel a disturbance in the force whenever someone copies my stuff with or without permission. I do however, still miss the things that were stolen from me.
Copyright infringment is *not* stealing. As long as copying is possible, people will try to make it impossible.
But, if 200 years ago, someone stole some land, died, his heirs subdivided and sold it, the people who bought it subdivided it and sold it to you, the courts may let you continue to live on the stolen land.
Check out "Grandfathering" of land. There are many cases where someone has started using land next to theirs. After a few years of the rightful owner not asserting his rights, depending on the state, the land becomes the property of the new "owner".
There are many examples of property law that are similar to the "fair use" of copyright. Remember, you can't really own land, you just rent it from the government. If they really want to use your land for something else, they will just take it and pay you "Fair market value". If you don't pay your taxes, they will take it. Check out how the US acquired the land for Arlington National Cemetery. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/historical_inform ation/arlington_house.html "The property was confiscated by the federal government when property taxes levied against Arlington estate were not paid in person by Mrs. Lee." What that link doesn't say is Mrs. Lee's son tried the pay the taxes, but was refused so that the government could take the land.
You cannot read part of the Constitution, interpret it literally, and think you understand what it means
Thus does the law become religion...
You're correct, but this attitude is what lead to the protestant divisions within Christianity. The thought that only the clergy can read and interprete the bible. Lawyers have an amazing ability to take clearly worded English and derive very odd meanings, and to write complete gibberish that only another lawyer can understand.
What I can't understand is why Supreme Court decisions don't have to be unanimous. If even one Supreme Court Justice believes X, shouldn't it be reasonable to assume that some part of the population will believe X? (i.e. no law should remain law if it can't be understood)
I was listening to NPR the other day when the SCOTUS reporter said something like "We don't know how the case is going to turn out..." I understand they are dealing with very difficult problems, but when they're the best judges we've got, why does it seem so much like a crap shoot?
A good friend of mine was involved in some lawsuits involving a trust fund, and his lawyer told him straight out that if the case went to trial, there's a 10% change you'll loose, even if you are absolutly correct and do everything correct
Please don't take this as a personal attack. Just a little ranting on my part.
The astronauts would take refuge on the ISS while mission control in Houston attempts to land a damaged Shuttle
Um, wouldn't it be better to try to land the shuttle after everyone is safely off the ISS? The shuttle has copious amounts of Hydrogen and Oxygen and other supplies that could be useful for keeping people alive, while waiting for a rescue mission. Also the rescue mission could bring repair materials for the shuttle.
Can they buy the music directly from the artist's web site?
Most of the time, when an new artist signs with a label, they give that label an exclusive for the next N albums. So, no, there is no other, legal, way to get that music. For your boycott, convince the teens not to buy any music from RIAA labels, and tell them there are no other *legal* ways to get it. The teenagers will figure out the rest.
*Note. There are groups like "They Might Be Giants" http://www.theymightbegiants.com/, that sell their own music. I highly recommend people buy their music direct from their website.
why are they so incapable of making non-piracy cool?
BR>
Aye, there's the rub. When the **AA employs hyperbole to make their case seem more relevant, they simultaneously make it more cool to be on the other side. Imagine you're 14 and you hear on the news, "A gang of cutthroat pirates electronically broke into the RIAA vaults today and made off with 50 godzillion* dollars worth of music..."
Just look at the products of the entertainment industry. "Ocean's 11 & 12", "Grand Theft Auto", and all the Gangster Rap. Stealing big *is* cool, even if it is immoral and unethical.
If the **AA needs to make copyright infringement uncool, they just need to tell the truth. "Your honor, we're trying to prosecute this teenager for stealing stuff we couldn't even give away. It's worth maybe a buck-fifty to us, but we're really pissed so please throw him into the slammer." Of course, if they did this, nobody would care, and the courts would tell them to quit wasting their time.
*Godzillion: A number 145 feet long (The height of Gozilla)
Nothing. If your time is worth $100/hour (as mine is), and someone will pay you for it, charge it. You just have to only charge for the actual time you spend preparing/sending the distribution.
So, how is this different from closed source stuff? Back in the bad old days, the source to things like VMS was available for thousands of dollars, and you had to sign a non-disclosure. The person preparing the distribution didn't get paid anywhere near $1000/hour, but that's what you were charged. Under GPL, I can charge you $1000/hour for 2 hours to burn and mail you a CD with the distribution, but then, you can distribute as many copies of that as you want for your own terms.
In the end, as far a computing is concerned, Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds might have had more of an impact. But mention those two, and slashdotters will still find something to complain about. "He's crazy, bullhead, etc, etc."
The thing that has always kept people subservient is the risk associated with doing so.
Bingo, risk is what it's all about. Remember, "...Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose..." It's the middle class that has the most to lose. The poor, like Andrew C. started, have nothing to lose, and the rich have so much they can't lose.
That's one reason most companies these days are started by young people. They tend to be single and childless, thus less collateral damage if they go under.
Take ten entrepreneurs. Nine will die, forgotten by history. The tenth will be an Edison, a Carnagie, or a Rockefeller.
Unions are like insurance. Chances are you'll put in much more money than you will ever take out, but they reduce risk. The flipside is that they also reduce the possibility of a big win.
It's true that in America, there's nothing stopping you from striking out on your own, except the risk. If you do, chances are you'll die forgotten, penniless and insane. But since history forgets the people who do fail, it makes success look easy to the new, young and foolish entrepreneurs that come along. (But don't let me be a wet blanket. "Go west young man...", said by a person who stayed east.)
What they do do[1] is get out of the way of oncoming traffic.
To carry your analogy furthur, it doesn't help you to get out the the way of the truck, if you step onto railroad tracks and get hit by the train.
We need to show that we're causing global warming and that it's a bad thing. Last I heard, we were supposed to be heading for an Ice Age, so a little induced warming might not be a bad thing.
The analogy falls down, because in the case of GW, we're doing something that we need to stop, in the truck analogy, we have to do something to get out of the way. With GW, we're probably better off doing less, (emitting less C02) and watching.
Anyway, you're right, even if your analogy is strained. "Ouch, Ouch, a truck ran over me, and I strained my analogy!!"
Ban use of Social Security Number as an identifier
It's not really the use as a password that's the problem. It's that organizations use it as a freaking password!
While Spafford has demonstrated that regular password changes add nothing to security, to use a fixed unrevocable number as a password is beyound stupidity. You have to be able to tell the world, "my password has been compromised, please re-authenticate."
Most companies use your name as an identifer, even though it's non-unique. They'll throw in something else like address to make it unique, but even that isn't enough. I know a guy who was arrested after using his credit card, because his father had reported his lost, and the guy and the father shared the same name and mailing address.
In order to stop fraud, companies do need a way to uniquely identify people so that when I deposit money into a bank account, no one else can get that money out, but I can still walk into a branch where they've never seen me and get my money. Allowing banks to share whatever unique identifers they have helps to prevent fraud. You are absolutely right that a public key infrastructure would be the way to go. If would have to be extendable, so that as computing power and storage grows the keys could be grown without major action on the user's part.
The US post office had a plan to offer people public/private keys that they would get by showing up in person at any post office. These would be revokable keys and they could be used to get services without actually giving away any privacy. If you commited fraud, the USPS, with a court order, would release the keys, and everyone would know who you were. AFAIK, the project was shelved. In pretty sure the plan at the time was to use floppy disks, with USB keys, it could work well.
What is the studio going to do if it actually realizes that the only way to push a big budget movie like King Kong that flopped at the theatres, is to cut the iTMS cost to say $7.95 for a promotional offer
Offer a rebate? Seriously, this belies the studio's position. A rebate program would promote their movie, and provide extremely valuable demographic data, but they aren't interested in tiering the prices *down*, they want to tier them *up*.
Right now, in America, there is almost no competition among movies at the box office. Hard to believe, given the Hollywood hype, but most Americans have enought disposable income to see *all* the good movies that are in the theaters at one time (within the genre that they like) The reason we don't spend all our extra money on movies is that most suck. The real competition is other forms of entertainment, like broadcast TV, DVDs, Video games, sports, board games, reading and others.
The studios are afraid that their back catalogs will be their undoing. They have tons of movies in the vaults, that *don't suck*. They want to make money off them, but are afraid that if they are cheap and convenient, people will stop going to the theaters and stop paying for the latest $150 million extravaganza. If everything on iTMS is the same price, many people will begin to think that the 1939 "Wizard of Oz" is just as good as the 2006 "Over the hedge". If they can charge more for OTH, then the perception is that it is better. (Sounds counter-intuative, but it's a real phenomenon, like buying a low-end Lexus vs. the same car labled a Toyota)
There's a lot of paranoia about erased data not being "really" erased, but Nixon's 18 minutes is still gone. Using identical equipment, many researcher have tried to erase, then recover voices from audio tape like what would have been on the watergate tapes.
Why didn't Nixon just destroy the whole tape? That way it could have simply been "lost" instead of a great mystery.
Slashdot Mirror
aaaand this surprises you how?
Motorola had a flip cell phone a decade ago, but GE had the "flip-phone, a brand new phone you can own.", that was obviously modeled after the ST communicator.
Unlikely. People at that level have teams of people to read and analyze everything.
More likely she planned to wait until the last moment, and squeeze it through so that nobody noticed. If it had come up for debate sooner, she might have lost, and OSS supporters might have put even stronger language into the doc.
Let's see
Kodachrome, by Paul Simon (Also mentions Nikon Cameras
Cadillac Ranch, Bruce Sprinstein
Pink Cadillac, Bruce Sprinsein
I'm sure there are others, but those are just off the top of my head. (Yes, I know these songs weren't written with advertising in ming, it's just that it's possible for a hit song to include an endorsement)
The former Soviets got caught with their pants down when they reused OTPads after a year. I sure their reasoning (or lack thereof) went something like this. "OTP is provably unbreakable, therefor no-one would waste time breaking it, so since no-one is trying to break our codes, we can re-use the OTPs" Unfortunatly for them, the British had been recording their stuff for over a year, and were able to trivially break their encryptions.
At least one American Admiral has reused OTPs. It's easy to call these people idiots, but since cryptographers don't tend to have aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, those things tend to be administered by people who aren't cryptographers.
Interestingly OTP are known to be unbreakable, but when the big boys use OTP they still put random garbage in front and behind the real message, "Just in Case" (tm). It's also important to send the same amount of traffic every day at the same times, 24/7, 365 days/year lest that your opponent find out that something is afoot by an increase in transmissions.
Why stop there? Lets put this in the cars of all the politicians that vote for the speed limits and the penalties for violating them, then publish the results periodically. Want to run for office? You have to consent to be monitored. Same with the personal cars of the police and other government officials. If they haven't done anything wrong, why wouldn't they want the public to know?
It took this guy 3 hours to cross 13 miles. The world's fastest kayak can do 16.9 mph. http://www.kayakwisconsin.net/2006/01/blur.html
Interestingly, IBM sold lots of 5150's without floppy drives (or hard drives). The marketing people originally thought that people were actually using the cassette interface. Almost no-one did, they were instead buying 3rd party floppies and hard drives because they were much cheaper.
Yup, VMS had autoversioning of files way back when, but it was the Apple Lisa(tm) that had a GUI based file versioning system. When you created a document, an icon was created that looked like a page. When you editted the document, pages where added to the icon that looked stacked. You could easily go back to any prevision version. (This may have been copied from the Xerox Star system out of PARC that Apple copied.)
No, you would not. I have a friend named Fname Mname Lname II. Why not Jr.? Because he's just the 2nd Lname with that first name and middle name. To be a Third, there just have to be two other ancestors beneath you in the family tree with he same name. You don't have to have the same name as your father.
Because people *say* they aren't interested in your ad, but advertisers perceive that if they could *just* get that ad into their homes, people would change their mind.
Men *say* they don't want tampons. (and tampon ads) But when their wives/girlfriends sent them to the store to buy Kotex, if they've seen enough Tampax commercials, they might get confused and buy the wrong brand.
Extreme example, but it's a real phenomemon. People often say one thing, but when they are in the store, they act differently. Advertising tries to get into people's minds so they act the way the advertiser wants, not what the person wants or needs.
In grade school, we pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I don't remember doing anything for the state of Virginia. Other states might, but in the 1960's VA didn't.
The federal government convinced the courts that they could withhold dollars from states that didn't have laws they liked, thus getting around constitutional barriers to total federalism. Anything from the highway speed limit, to how schools are run, is determined this way. (except in the very few states that can say no to the money)
In the future, look for a Federal Drivers license. It'll still be handed out by the states, but the look and feel will be determined by Federal mandate. (and in a Federal database)
D'ya mean like just type "project orion" into google and see if you get any hits?
Like this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion?
Well, pummel me with and ugly stick. I've had real music really stolen from me. Thieves broke in and stole 1/3 of my CD collection as well as my best tape deck and reasonably good speakers. I didn't own the copyrights, but I did own the disks. (way before copying CD's was cost effective.)
As far as I'm concerned, those disks are gone. Some were rare and out of print. I really would have much appriciated it if those thieves had just copied the disks and left me with the originals.
I've sold software before. I've also released it as shareware and freeware. I don't know about you, but I don't feel a disturbance in the force whenever someone copies my stuff with or without permission. I do however, still miss the things that were stolen from me.
Copyright infringment is *not* stealing. As long as copying is possible, people will try to make it impossible.
But, if 200 years ago, someone stole some land, died, his heirs subdivided and sold it, the people who bought it subdivided it and sold it to you, the courts may let you continue to live on the stolen land.
m ation/arlington_house.html "The property was confiscated by the federal government when property taxes levied against Arlington estate were not paid in person by Mrs. Lee." What that link doesn't say is Mrs. Lee's son tried the pay the taxes, but was refused so that the government could take the land.
Check out "Grandfathering" of land. There are many cases where someone has started using land next to theirs. After a few years of the rightful owner not asserting his rights, depending on the state, the land becomes the property of the new "owner".
There are many examples of property law that are similar to the "fair use" of copyright. Remember, you can't really own land, you just rent it from the government. If they really want to use your land for something else, they will just take it and pay you "Fair market value". If you don't pay your taxes, they will take it. Check out how the US acquired the land for Arlington National Cemetery. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/historical_infor
Thus does the law become religion...
You're correct, but this attitude is what lead to the protestant divisions within Christianity. The thought that only the clergy can read and interprete the bible. Lawyers have an amazing ability to take clearly worded English and derive very odd meanings, and to write complete gibberish that only another lawyer can understand.
What I can't understand is why Supreme Court decisions don't have to be unanimous. If even one Supreme Court Justice believes X, shouldn't it be reasonable to assume that some part of the population will believe X? (i.e. no law should remain law if it can't be understood)
I was listening to NPR the other day when the SCOTUS reporter said something like "We don't know how the case is going to turn out..." I understand they are dealing with very difficult problems, but when they're the best judges we've got, why does it seem so much like a crap shoot?
A good friend of mine was involved in some lawsuits involving a trust fund, and his lawyer told him straight out that if the case went to trial, there's a 10% change you'll loose, even if you are absolutly correct and do everything correct
Please don't take this as a personal attack. Just a little ranting on my part.
Um, wouldn't it be better to try to land the shuttle after everyone is safely off the ISS? The shuttle has copious amounts of Hydrogen and Oxygen and other supplies that could be useful for keeping people alive, while waiting for a rescue mission. Also the rescue mission could bring repair materials for the shuttle.
Most of the time, when an new artist signs with a label, they give that label an exclusive for the next N albums. So, no, there is no other, legal, way to get that music. For your boycott, convince the teens not to buy any music from RIAA labels, and tell them there are no other *legal* ways to get it. The teenagers will figure out the rest.
*Note. There are groups like "They Might Be Giants" http://www.theymightbegiants.com/, that sell their own music. I highly recommend people buy their music direct from their website.
Just look at the products of the entertainment industry. "Ocean's 11 & 12", "Grand Theft Auto", and all the Gangster Rap. Stealing big *is* cool, even if it is immoral and unethical.
If the **AA needs to make copyright infringement uncool, they just need to tell the truth. "Your honor, we're trying to prosecute this teenager for stealing stuff we couldn't even give away. It's worth maybe a buck-fifty to us, but we're really pissed so please throw him into the slammer." Of course, if they did this, nobody would care, and the courts would tell them to quit wasting their time.
*Godzillion: A number 145 feet long (The height of Gozilla)
Nothing. If your time is worth $100/hour (as mine is), and someone will pay you for it, charge it. You just have to only charge for the actual time you spend preparing/sending the distribution.
So, how is this different from closed source stuff? Back in the bad old days, the source to things like VMS was available for thousands of dollars, and you had to sign a non-disclosure. The person preparing the distribution didn't get paid anywhere near $1000/hour, but that's what you were charged. Under GPL, I can charge you $1000/hour for 2 hours to burn and mail you a CD with the distribution, but then, you can distribute as many copies of that as you want for your own terms.
In the end, as far a computing is concerned, Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds might have had more of an impact. But mention those two, and slashdotters will still find something to complain about. "He's crazy, bullhead, etc, etc."
Bingo, risk is what it's all about. Remember, "...Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose..." It's the middle class that has the most to lose. The poor, like Andrew C. started, have nothing to lose, and the rich have so much they can't lose.
That's one reason most companies these days are started by young people. They tend to be single and childless, thus less collateral damage if they go under.
Take ten entrepreneurs. Nine will die, forgotten by history. The tenth will be an Edison, a Carnagie, or a Rockefeller.
Unions are like insurance. Chances are you'll put in much more money than you will ever take out, but they reduce risk. The flipside is that they also reduce the possibility of a big win.
It's true that in America, there's nothing stopping you from striking out on your own, except the risk. If you do, chances are you'll die forgotten, penniless and insane. But since history forgets the people who do fail, it makes success look easy to the new, young and foolish entrepreneurs that come along. (But don't let me be a wet blanket. "Go west young man...", said by a person who stayed east.)
What they do do[1] is get out of the way of oncoming traffic.
To carry your analogy furthur, it doesn't help you to get out the the way of the truck, if you step onto railroad tracks and get hit by the train.
We need to show that we're causing global warming and that it's a bad thing. Last I heard, we were supposed to be heading for an Ice Age, so a little induced warming might not be a bad thing.
The analogy falls down, because in the case of GW, we're doing something that we need to stop, in the truck analogy, we have to do something to get out of the way. With GW, we're probably better off doing less, (emitting less C02) and watching.
Anyway, you're right, even if your analogy is strained. "Ouch, Ouch, a truck ran over me, and I strained my analogy!!"
Ban use of Social Security Number as an identifier
It's not really the use as a password that's the problem. It's that organizations use it as a freaking password!
While Spafford has demonstrated that regular password changes add nothing to security, to use a fixed unrevocable number as a password is beyound stupidity. You have to be able to tell the world, "my password has been compromised, please re-authenticate."
Most companies use your name as an identifer, even though it's non-unique. They'll throw in something else like address to make it unique, but even that isn't enough. I know a guy who was arrested after using his credit card, because his father had reported his lost, and the guy and the father shared the same name and mailing address.
In order to stop fraud, companies do need a way to uniquely identify people so that when I deposit money into a bank account, no one else can get that money out, but I can still walk into a branch where they've never seen me and get my money. Allowing banks to share whatever unique identifers they have helps to prevent fraud. You are absolutely right that a public key infrastructure would be the way to go. If would have to be extendable, so that as computing power and storage grows the keys could be grown without major action on the user's part.
The US post office had a plan to offer people public/private keys that they would get by showing up in person at any post office. These would be revokable keys and they could be used to get services without actually giving away any privacy. If you commited fraud, the USPS, with a court order, would release the keys, and everyone would know who you were. AFAIK, the project was shelved. In pretty sure the plan at the time was to use floppy disks, with USB keys, it could work well.
What is the studio going to do if it actually realizes that the only way to push a big budget movie like King Kong that flopped at the theatres, is to cut the iTMS cost to say $7.95 for a promotional offer
Offer a rebate? Seriously, this belies the studio's position. A rebate program would promote their movie, and provide extremely valuable demographic data, but they aren't interested in tiering the prices *down*, they want to tier them *up*.
Right now, in America, there is almost no competition among movies at the box office. Hard to believe, given the Hollywood hype, but most Americans have enought disposable income to see *all* the good movies that are in the theaters at one time (within the genre that they like) The reason we don't spend all our extra money on movies is that most suck. The real competition is other forms of entertainment, like broadcast TV, DVDs, Video games, sports, board games, reading and others.
The studios are afraid that their back catalogs will be their undoing. They have tons of movies in the vaults, that *don't suck*. They want to make money off them, but are afraid that if they are cheap and convenient, people will stop going to the theaters and stop paying for the latest $150 million extravaganza. If everything on iTMS is the same price, many people will begin to think that the 1939 "Wizard of Oz" is just as good as the 2006 "Over the hedge". If they can charge more for OTH, then the perception is that it is better. (Sounds counter-intuative, but it's a real phenomenon, like buying a low-end Lexus vs. the same car labled a Toyota)
There's a lot of paranoia about erased data not being "really" erased, but Nixon's 18 minutes is still gone. Using identical equipment, many researcher have tried to erase, then recover voices from audio tape like what would have been on the watergate tapes.
Why didn't Nixon just destroy the whole tape? That way it could have simply been "lost" instead of a great mystery.