This is precisely why we need to get to Singularity and match our biological development to our cultural development fast, before this kind of short-sighted stupidity kills us all.
Price is driven by cost of development - of course it is. If it weren't, then companies would be selling a product for a price floated on the market as you suggest, and then finding themselves out of capital b/c their total income would be *less than* their total expenditures.
No. Cost of development is a sunk cost. Once it's paid, there's nothing to do but to try and maximize your income. If the total income - number of units sold * (price per unit - cost per unit) - is less than price of development, then yes, the company will be running a deficit rather than profit on that product. That's precisely why they often conduct market surveys before investing in R&D.
How they recoup their dev costs depends on the business model, but to suggest that dev costs don't impact pricing is just nonsense.
It's math, and unless and until you understand it - and I mean really understand it - you better not try to run a company, for your own sake, because you will fail miserably.
To recap: profit = number_of_units_sold * (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit) - cost_of_development, where number_of_units_sold is a function of price_per_unit, benefit per unit to the buyer and human psychology.
Seriously, all aspiring businessmen: read this and understand it. If you can't, you can't succeed. There is no way around this.
If one company has lower dev costs than another, they have what's known as "competitive advantage" -- they can create new products with equal value to the consumer at a lower cost. That company now has a viable option (not available to their competitor) to float their product to the market at a price lower than their competitor, and still make positive net revenue.
Of course they do. That's perfectly in agreement with the equation and its implications. After all, they make the same profit with less (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit), since their cost_of_development is lower.
However, in the long run, for long-selling goods, the cost_per_unit is the dominating factor. That's why it's often a good idea to spend some extra R&D to make sure your manufacturing processes are as efficient as possible. Experience shows that this is especially true of goods with low cost_per_unit. In the bottom end are Internet-downlodable games, where all of the costs are in cost_of_development, and cost_per_unit is for all practical purposes zero; in such items, it's almost always beneficial to decrease the price, since it increases the sales a lot - a hundred times as many people pay for a $1 game than $10 one, adding up to 10-time profits.
In the very extreme end of this, Girl Genius, Dwarf Fortress and The Freenet Project seem to survive entirely on donations/auxiliary sells. But then again, they are bringing something valuable and wonderful to the Internet, unlike most corporations.
While your explanation is informative, I still think that fails if licensed IP is involved in the equation.
No; as you noted, it's part of the cost per unit thing. In other words, the licensee is the consumer, as far as the licenser is concerned.
So at least, in some cases, R&D costs is passed directly to the user in form if IP license costs.
No; the licenser will ask whatever they think will maximize their profit, and the licensee will ask whatever they think will maximize their profit. The end result is equal to the licenser and licensee being departments within a same corporation.
IBM makes more than 1 Billion USD a year in license agreements.
And it would make more by rising it's license costs unless such increased costs would mean that the licensees would need to rise their price, thus driving down total sales and thus IBM license costs.
There's no way around this fact: business charges whatever maximizes their profit, unless it's run by an idiot. And I doubt IBM is.
Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies.
Yes, it is. Except it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. And copyright law should be considered an anathema to human spirit and stamped out wherever it rises its ugly head.
It's not Disney using old fairy tales to make their movies that annoys me. It's not even Disney ripping off Stamboat Bill that annoys me, nor is it Disney's failure to give credit to Lee De Forest. It's Disney trying to co-opt ownership of those fairy tales that annoys me.
Copyright law serves no purpose expcept to bring all law to shame.
What other for profit industries can we attack? Maybe someone could come up with a universal electronic key so you can drive any car you want.
If you can come up with a universal electronic key that unlocks any car - including mine - then I want to talk to my car manufacturer. There's no reason whatsoever that car keys shouldn't be completely random rather than derived from a particular master key.
As long as the copyright holder can exclusively decide what DRM will be applied you have no possibility to vote with your wallet short of doing completely without it.
Seriously, just give it up already, cholders. I'd buy Blu-Rays rather than download if I could be assured I can rip the contents to the hard drive, and the disk was DVD-price (4-6 euros). After all, it would both be faster and I'd get a free back-up media in the bargain.
And you think that the cost of that R&D isn't passed on to customers?
Let's put this myth down once and for all, shall we? Companies like to perpetrate it to inoculate themselves against taxes or fines, but it's a flat-out lie.
No fixed cost gets passed on to customers. A company will ask for whatever price the market will bear. More accurately, it will ask for a price that maximizes profit in the equation profit = number of units sold * ( price per unit - cost per unit) - cost of development, where the number of units sold inversely depends on price per unit (for consumer products). It's easy to see that price per unit is completely indepdendent from cost of development, at least as far as maximizing profit goes.
In other words, a (rational) company doesn't pass - can't pass - any fixed (independent of number of units sold) overheads to customers, because rising the price per unit would lower sales and thus profits. The same goes to fines and other fixed costs; in fact, the only costs that can be passed on to customers are costs that affect the cost per unit.
Exactly! Because Oxygen, Food, Shelter, DVD's, BluRay's and CD's are required to live.
To be fair, entertainment is a need. People who aren't getting any will start doing unbelievable stupid things just for fun, quite likely getting themselves and bystanders hurt. Boredom might not seem like much a threat, but it is.
Of course, making movies would likely be far more interesting than just watching them, and with computing power increasing, it's becoming available to a more and more common person. The biggest obstacle right now is the lack of a suitable program; we need some kind of digital actor system to take out the drudgery of 3D animation.
If this is a win for freedom, it's only in the sense of breaking out of jail for as long as it takes them to catch you and toss you back in.
That's the only kind of victory you can ever get. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, for you don't ever run out of people trying to imprison you.
The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests.
Every time a restriction scheme gets broken, the effort it took to develop and establish it goes down the drain. Eventually the bean-counters will decide it's simply not worth it.
That's all fine and dandy for now, but what happens when they start to get really serious about "protecting their content," and start introducing devices that can't be so easily broken?
Seeing how an effective DRM scheme would require absolute omnipotence - superceding the laws of logic, rather than mere physics - I wouldn't worry too much about that.
According to the USDOE it should currently be profitable to make biodiesel from algae grown in the desert with seawater and optionally recapturing CO2 from coal or oil plants.
Why would you grow algae in the desert? It's seaweed! Grow it in the ocean, and cover the desert with concentrating solar power plants.
Typesetting software is precisely the appropriate level of software for a document whose final form should be pdf. Page Layout software however really is overkill for a document over one page indented to convey information primarily through the actual text.
No, a text editor is what should be used here. Typesetting software is for converting the document from text to PDF.
That would also mean death of teflon, kevlar, and numerous other applications of plastics which don't go hand in hand with "cheap", though.
No it wouldn't. These products aren't made from oil, they're made from carbon, which is plentiful. It's simply convenient to extract it from oil nowadays, but you can get it from pretty much anyplace, from thin air to living organisms.
Of course as oil grows more scarce, the price will climb. That's the real issue - how will people be able to afford $10/gallon gasoline.
They won't, and if they can, the price will simply climb to the point where they can't. There simply won't be enough gasoline to fuel all the cars, so those who need it will outbid each other until enough drop out to balance supply and demand.
That is the real issue: not that you can't afford fuel, but that there simply isn't enough fuel. And more won't magically appear, no matter how high the price grows.
Of course we could build lots of nuclear power plants and use the energy to produce hydrocarbons. However, NIMBY keeps that from happening, so we will crash and burn instead. Oh well, time to start learning Chinese, since a dictatorship doesn't have that problem.
Why yes, you are: either take the vaccine or not. These are the logical alternatives; you can't avoid taking one of them. To refuse to gamble is refusing to allow time to pass.
The state requires you to enroll your child in school and ensure attendance, and requires that your child be vaccinated in order to attend.
And a good thing too. This very story shows once again that people are dumb as bricks. Why should we allow them the freedom to hurt other people through their stupidity and irrationality?
So it's only fitting that the state step up when children are harmed by vaccines, just as the airline whose jet falls on my house is liable for the damage done even if the jet was carrying donor organs intended to save lives.
State should step up when children are harmed because the very purpose of the state is to help its citizens. And you'd better hope you don't get the same court as decided this case; they might order you to pay the airline for damages caused to their jet by your house;(.
But unfortunately a few anti-vaccine Nazi types with mod points burning holes in their pockets came tearing through this comment thread not long after I posted that.
Speaking of anti-vaccine Nazi types: just what is it with Americans and vaccine hysteria? I know it's a land of witch hunts, but this is simply idiotic, even by American standards. Where the heck did this thing originate, and what's keeping it going?
For example, perhaps we have evidence some Russia diplomat is selling nuclear secrets to Iran, and the CIA shoots him.
Wouldn't it make more sense to give the evidence to Russia and let them deal with him? Unless, of course, we exchange happened with Russia's blessing, in which case shooting the diplomat would be pointless, since Russia would simply use other people to continue.
Well, okay, we don't want that public, okay. Not to keep it from Russia, who probably figured it out, but to keep it officially from Russia.
Or you could declare it openly and officially. What is Russia going to do, nuke you?
I don't see how your link has anything to do with laws being applied retroactively. From my reading, it's about a Harry Potter book that was released too early by a distributor, putting it in breach of a contract it had with the publisher, and resulting in a lawsuit.
People bought the book. People received the book. A judge told people to not be able to post any details about the book online because a distributor released it too early.
In other words, a judge bound people to an agreement they had not signed for the benefit of the publisher.
This is standard contract law; the distributor signed a contract to be allowed to resell the book directly from the publisher, on the condition that it wait until a "release date". It failed, so it got sued for breach of contract. There was nothing in there about the customers (receiving the book too early) being penalized in any way, unless I missed something.
Yes, you did: this judgement bound the customers, it forbade the vustomers from telling any details about the book until the date signed on by the distributor.
In other words, Mrs. Rowling's financial gain trumps free speech.
Of course, the way things are going now, they'll probably make it a criminal action to use unlicensed software, and we'll probably have a special division of the FBI to run around and raid peoples' homes, looking for unlicensed software. Meanwhile, the missing persons (or worse, missing childrens) division will be chronically understaffed and unable to locate missing children in time, but the copyright division will be well-staffed.
So simply have the unlicensed software department also handle missing children. I mean, if they're already raiding people's homes, it should be okay to look for missing children while they're doing it, right?
Think of the children - support random home inspections!
Publishers are gradually changing to e-books anyway and they've never liked libraries, now they just have to make one of the terms of the license that you can't loan books.
It's funny how people keep on calling Stallman all kinds of nasty things, yet he predicted just that. Maybe he hit a little too close to a nerve?
Push the license for books, CD's, cars, clothing, everything you can.
All that will accomplish is to remove First Sale Doctrine from books, CD's, cars, clothing, everything you can.
Judiciary branch of the Government is still a branch of the Government, and Government is owned by big business. This idiocy will continue and get worse. After all, there's plenty of profit to be made by making it impossible to get second-hand items, and as an added benefit it makes us serfs ever more dependant on our stock-owning nobility.
When someone says "There ought to be a law", there probably ought not. I'm not going to get into how it applies in this case, but I feel it's appropriate here.
When someone says "I'm not going to get into how it applies in this case", it probably does.
Burning books is not ok. Burning books should be a criminal act punishable by a hefty fine and/or prison.
Why? And does this only apply to burning books, or destroying them in any other way - such as recycling them, or throwing them away and letting them rot, or simply keeping them in non-optimal (or even optimal) storage conditions for sufficiently long periods of time?
Also, does this protection only apply to printed books, or should I be thrown to a prison for deleting a text file? How about deleting the cache in my browser? How about the browser deleting it by itself when the disk runs low?
Also, in some countries burning is considered the only honorable way of disposing old and worn flags; should this be taken into account?
Slashdot Mirror
Until the bored attack you for entertainment.
This is precisely why we need to get to Singularity and match our biological development to our cultural development fast, before this kind of short-sighted stupidity kills us all.
Business.
No. Cost of development is a sunk cost. Once it's paid, there's nothing to do but to try and maximize your income. If the total income - number of units sold * (price per unit - cost per unit) - is less than price of development, then yes, the company will be running a deficit rather than profit on that product. That's precisely why they often conduct market surveys before investing in R&D.
It's math, and unless and until you understand it - and I mean really understand it - you better not try to run a company, for your own sake, because you will fail miserably.
To recap: profit = number_of_units_sold * (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit) - cost_of_development, where number_of_units_sold is a function of price_per_unit, benefit per unit to the buyer and human psychology.
Seriously, all aspiring businessmen: read this and understand it. If you can't, you can't succeed. There is no way around this.
Of course they do. That's perfectly in agreement with the equation and its implications. After all, they make the same profit with less (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit), since their cost_of_development is lower.
However, in the long run, for long-selling goods, the cost_per_unit is the dominating factor. That's why it's often a good idea to spend some extra R&D to make sure your manufacturing processes are as efficient as possible. Experience shows that this is especially true of goods with low cost_per_unit. In the bottom end are Internet-downlodable games, where all of the costs are in cost_of_development, and cost_per_unit is for all practical purposes zero; in such items, it's almost always beneficial to decrease the price, since it increases the sales a lot - a hundred times as many people pay for a $1 game than $10 one, adding up to 10-time profits.
In the very extreme end of this, Girl Genius, Dwarf Fortress and The Freenet Project seem to survive entirely on donations/auxiliary sells. But then again, they are bringing something valuable and wonderful to the Internet, unlike most corporations.
No; as you noted, it's part of the cost per unit thing. In other words, the licensee is the consumer, as far as the licenser is concerned.
No; the licenser will ask whatever they think will maximize their profit, and the licensee will ask whatever they think will maximize their profit. The end result is equal to the licenser and licensee being departments within a same corporation.
And it would make more by rising it's license costs unless such increased costs would mean that the licensees would need to rise their price, thus driving down total sales and thus IBM license costs.
There's no way around this fact: business charges whatever maximizes their profit, unless it's run by an idiot. And I doubt IBM is.
This is the Master Key. Forged by the RIAA in the fires of Mount Doom. Taken by an unknown hacker from the hand of RIAA itself.
Jeffmede, the RIAA must never find it.
Yes, it is. Except it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. And copyright law should be considered an anathema to human spirit and stamped out wherever it rises its ugly head.
It's not Disney using old fairy tales to make their movies that annoys me. It's not even Disney ripping off Stamboat Bill that annoys me, nor is it Disney's failure to give credit to Lee De Forest. It's Disney trying to co-opt ownership of those fairy tales that annoys me.
Copyright law serves no purpose expcept to bring all law to shame.
If you can come up with a universal electronic key that unlocks any car - including mine - then I want to talk to my car manufacturer. There's no reason whatsoever that car keys shouldn't be completely random rather than derived from a particular master key.
He can't.
Seriously, just give it up already, cholders. I'd buy Blu-Rays rather than download if I could be assured I can rip the contents to the hard drive, and the disk was DVD-price (4-6 euros). After all, it would both be faster and I'd get a free back-up media in the bargain.
Let's put this myth down once and for all, shall we? Companies like to perpetrate it to inoculate themselves against taxes or fines, but it's a flat-out lie.
No fixed cost gets passed on to customers. A company will ask for whatever price the market will bear. More accurately, it will ask for a price that maximizes profit in the equation profit = number of units sold * ( price per unit - cost per unit) - cost of development, where the number of units sold inversely depends on price per unit (for consumer products). It's easy to see that price per unit is completely indepdendent from cost of development, at least as far as maximizing profit goes.
In other words, a (rational) company doesn't pass - can't pass - any fixed (independent of number of units sold) overheads to customers, because rising the price per unit would lower sales and thus profits. The same goes to fines and other fixed costs; in fact, the only costs that can be passed on to customers are costs that affect the cost per unit.
To be fair, entertainment is a need. People who aren't getting any will start doing unbelievable stupid things just for fun, quite likely getting themselves and bystanders hurt. Boredom might not seem like much a threat, but it is.
Of course, making movies would likely be far more interesting than just watching them, and with computing power increasing, it's becoming available to a more and more common person. The biggest obstacle right now is the lack of a suitable program; we need some kind of digital actor system to take out the drudgery of 3D animation.
That's the only kind of victory you can ever get. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, for you don't ever run out of people trying to imprison you.
Every time a restriction scheme gets broken, the effort it took to develop and establish it goes down the drain. Eventually the bean-counters will decide it's simply not worth it.
Seeing how an effective DRM scheme would require absolute omnipotence - superceding the laws of logic, rather than mere physics - I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Why would you grow algae in the desert? It's seaweed! Grow it in the ocean, and cover the desert with concentrating solar power plants.
No, a text editor is what should be used here. Typesetting software is for converting the document from text to PDF.
No it wouldn't. These products aren't made from oil, they're made from carbon, which is plentiful. It's simply convenient to extract it from oil nowadays, but you can get it from pretty much anyplace, from thin air to living organisms.
They won't, and if they can, the price will simply climb to the point where they can't. There simply won't be enough gasoline to fuel all the cars, so those who need it will outbid each other until enough drop out to balance supply and demand.
That is the real issue: not that you can't afford fuel, but that there simply isn't enough fuel. And more won't magically appear, no matter how high the price grows.
Of course we could build lots of nuclear power plants and use the energy to produce hydrocarbons. However, NIMBY keeps that from happening, so we will crash and burn instead. Oh well, time to start learning Chinese, since a dictatorship doesn't have that problem.
Why yes, you are: either take the vaccine or not. These are the logical alternatives; you can't avoid taking one of them. To refuse to gamble is refusing to allow time to pass.
And a good thing too. This very story shows once again that people are dumb as bricks. Why should we allow them the freedom to hurt other people through their stupidity and irrationality?
State should step up when children are harmed because the very purpose of the state is to help its citizens. And you'd better hope you don't get the same court as decided this case; they might order you to pay the airline for damages caused to their jet by your house ;(.
A database is only as good as whoever wrote it.
Speaking of anti-vaccine Nazi types: just what is it with Americans and vaccine hysteria? I know it's a land of witch hunts, but this is simply idiotic, even by American standards. Where the heck did this thing originate, and what's keeping it going?
Wouldn't it make more sense to give the evidence to Russia and let them deal with him? Unless, of course, we exchange happened with Russia's blessing, in which case shooting the diplomat would be pointless, since Russia would simply use other people to continue.
Or you could declare it openly and officially. What is Russia going to do, nuke you?
People bought the book. People received the book. A judge told people to not be able to post any details about the book online because a distributor released it too early.
In other words, a judge bound people to an agreement they had not signed for the benefit of the publisher.
Yes, you did: this judgement bound the customers, it forbade the vustomers from telling any details about the book until the date signed on by the distributor.
In other words, Mrs. Rowling's financial gain trumps free speech.
Of course, the way things are going now, they'll probably make it a criminal action to use unlicensed software, and we'll probably have a special division of the FBI to run around and raid peoples' homes, looking for unlicensed software. Meanwhile, the missing persons (or worse, missing childrens) division will be chronically understaffed and unable to locate missing children in time, but the copyright division will be well-staffed.
So simply have the unlicensed software department also handle missing children. I mean, if they're already raiding people's homes, it should be okay to look for missing children while they're doing it, right?
Think of the children - support random home inspections!
Of course they can.
Frankly, at this point I think that the only cure is the guillotine.
It's funny how people keep on calling Stallman all kinds of nasty things, yet he predicted just that. Maybe he hit a little too close to a nerve?
All that will accomplish is to remove First Sale Doctrine from books, CD's, cars, clothing, everything you can.
Judiciary branch of the Government is still a branch of the Government, and Government is owned by big business. This idiocy will continue and get worse. After all, there's plenty of profit to be made by making it impossible to get second-hand items, and as an added benefit it makes us serfs ever more dependant on our stock-owning nobility.
When someone says "I'm not going to get into how it applies in this case", it probably does.
Why? And does this only apply to burning books, or destroying them in any other way - such as recycling them, or throwing them away and letting them rot, or simply keeping them in non-optimal (or even optimal) storage conditions for sufficiently long periods of time?
Also, does this protection only apply to printed books, or should I be thrown to a prison for deleting a text file? How about deleting the cache in my browser? How about the browser deleting it by itself when the disk runs low?
Also, in some countries burning is considered the only honorable way of disposing old and worn flags; should this be taken into account?
Do the likes of Taliban recruit by force? Religious zealotry is pretty efficient propaganda, after all...