As a matter of fact, it is. Each backup diff file is compressed, encrypted, and stored on a server, every day.
So I take it you never work from home or the road, and are never on call.
People work from home and the road all the time. I've done it myself. You bring your laptop home with you, and tunnel into the company network via a VPN. People on call are issued Blackberries, and special accounts that expand to fill their needs. These people are in the extreme minority.
Maybe you can have some sort of draconian company policy that totally disallows attachments (even then, 16 MB is easily filled with mere days of email), but what about emails from vendors and customers? Do you just strip them out and say, "tough luck"?
It's really not a problem. Emails with attachments are typically transfered to personal folders on my hard drive, in Outlook. They show up right there next to all my other mail, in the only place I ever check my mail (on my laptop). The only difference between online and offline mail is which folder they're in.
And data to/from suppliers is strictly controlled, and usually goes through a separate network system that can track submission, review, approval, and scheduling. In the rare case it's sent through email, it gets put on my hard drive with everything else.
The only thing that's different from a 2GB mail system is that you have to create and maintain folders separate from your inbox. Oh, the horror of it all! I must be organized to use my allotted space efficiently!
Get a grip. If you have 2GB of email that you are currently working on RIGHT NOW, then you need an administrative assistant. If you're done with it, sweep it into an offline folder. It's not rocket science.
I work in a giant company of 150,000 employees. Each of us gets 20MB of space on the Exchange server, for mail and calendar.
Every employee, outside of the factory, has their own computer to use at their desk, and if you need to bring files away from your desk frequently, it is not difficult to swap out your desktop for a laptop. (I'm not sure how much extra the laptop costs in a given manager's budget, but it's not much.) There are bigger network servers available for passing files around, but they are paid for by managers' budgets, on an as-needed basis.
No one really has a need to log on to a computer that's not their own, so it makes sense to distribute storage capacity for email among the employees' desktops and laptops, instead of sinking money into giant datacenters. Those desktops and laptops have disk space available, anyway.
This system seems to work well for the company. Occasionally someone with a desktop wishes they had network access during a meeting, but if that happens often enough, their manager just upgrades them to a laptop which they bring to meetings. There is secure wireless available everywhere, and everyone with a laptop gets a docking station at their desk, including a real keyboard, real mouse, and real LCD screen.
Outside of college, I've never really been in a situation where I've needed to log onto lots of random computers and still have network access to my files/email. 16-20 MB is not unreasonable.
Why is it that there are a lot of people in IT who are so snobbish "omg!!!@!!!.... you don't know about xyz technology, you made a mistake hahahhadjhaflkdjfs luser." Are other technical/engineering fields like this? (not a knock on the parent post, just askin' in general).
Yeah, they are.
When you talk about the snobby people in IT, you're usually referring to those at the bottom of the heap, organizationally. These are the guys in the server room who don't really have the authority to make any decisions, and who are simply working on the day-to-day operations of the IT department.
Compare this with trench engineers at any engineering/manufacturing firm. I work as an engineer at a very large engineering/manufacturing firm, and let me tell you, engineers are terrible when it comes to lording minutiae over people's heads. Being able to quote stress calculation numbers for some part we designed a decade ago is a badge of pride. Additionally, those in our organization who are not engineers, but who are also at the bottom, pride themselves in their detailed knowledge of the bureaucracy. These are the people who are always quoting process specs and operations manuals to get their way, and they come off as very snotty and arrogant.
The ones who are not that way inevitably get promoted out of the bottom level of the organization, and I'm sure the same is true in IT departments. People who continue with that attitude will always stay at the bottom, allowing them to become bitter and feed their own need to justify their existence by lording minutiae over people's heads.
I know, I know, it is still not as good as *nix security, and there are lots of programs that need admin privileges to run properly (fewer these days, though), but it isn't that bad.
You know, if any *nix software required the user to be root to run, we would string the developers up alongside the guy who thought Clippy would be a good idea.
Why should it be any different for third-party applications requiring Administrator privileges to run on Windows?
Microsoft is so busy catering to the third party developers in order to maintain their lock-in, that they forgot how to put their foot down on truly important software engineering issues, like security. Locking down XP to an almost *nix-like state can be done. There are read/write/execute permissions available on every directory, drive letter, and registry key, and Windows supports the "home directory sandbox" model. After all, a virus in *nix could conceivably blow away a user directory, but unless it's exploiting a buffer overflow or other coding error hole, it can't take down the system. The same is possible in Windows, but not available by default to your average Dell user.
That's an interesting analogy, and I agree that malware will get consistently more advanced, eventually creating mutatable (and thus evolvable) strains that will evade anti-malware programs without the intervention of the programmer.
However, there's a rather glaring flaw in the analogy, and it's this: in the biological world, the various bacteria that live in or on us do not have purpose. They are simply life forms, doing the things that life forms do (which is eat, shit, and make babies) in an environment that suits them. If they end up overrunning that environment and making us sick, it's not because they wanted to make us sick. If our bodies happen to be the perfect environment for them, and they happen to eat things in a way that is beneficial to us, it's not because they decided to help us out. They are just being bacteria. Symbiosis and infection are merely products of parallel evolution and happy coincidence.
In contrast, malware is written by people, and people do have motives for the things they do. Bacteria don't do this; they just do their thing with the eating and the shitting and the baby-making, and any macroscopic results are not due to the decisions of the bacteria.
Malware is written with purpose. That purpose could be to show the user ads, or participate in a botnet, or collect spammable email addresses, or whatever. But saying that anti-virus programs will ignore the "harmless" malware overlooks the fact that there is no harmless malware. There doesn't exist any malware that's going to go to the trouble of infecting your machine and propogating, and then not do anything. No one would program one. That means that all malware is either black hat (adware, botnet, spyware, etc.) or white hat (attacks other malware). Even if it's not using CPU resources, it is doing some other damage, such as annoying the user or enabling spam (in the case of black hat) or violating the freedom of a user to choose what software they have installed on their machine (in the case of white hat). Either way, all malware should be cleaned by anti-malware programs. In the world of software programmed by people, there's no such thing as harmless piggybacking.
**** Note: I am aware of the parallels of my argument with Intelligent Design. It was not my intent to start a flamewar.
This phone should be available* in the US just in time for the 2011 holiday shopping season!
*Only available from Verizon when coupled with a new 2-year contract. Not all features may be available. Additional Bent Phone Fee of $3.99 a month applies. The Bending Feature of this phone may only be used according to the terms and conditions set forth in the Customer Agreement.
If you want to see how Jobs *REALLY* feels about DRM, just look at how Apple treats indie artists and studios that specifically DON'T want their music DRM'ed. While companies like eMusic sell these same songs without DRM, Apple FORCES them to take DRM.
I have not read the agreements, but my guess would be that the Big Four record companies would have added a clause to their operating agreement with Apple stating that Apple is not allowed to sell music without DRM. The record companies are very aware of how much people hate DRM, and if Apple starts selling non-DRMed music from indy labels right next to the DRMed music from the Big Four, it would weaken the Big Four's market position in online sales.
Apple are not idiots. They are fully aware they would make more money selling indy artists without DRM, because they would attract more indy artists. But their hands are probably tied, which is one of the reasons Jobs wrote this essay.
There is a lot of money to be made here. DRM is a distraction. It's leaving money on the table, and one of these days some smart music exec is going to wake up and leave the rest of the competition in the dust.
You are absolutely right.
But the biggest enemy of business right now is inertia. These record companies have been working under the same paradigm for decades, and it has made them embarassingly large piles of cash as a result. The instinct to keep doing what they have been doing is very strong. It takes a very special kind of company to recognize that their entire business model is being obsoleted, and start taking huge financial risks to shift directions.
And how do they explain this to their shareholders? "Look, I know we've been raking in massive wads of cash using our current system, and we still are, but we see that it won't work at some indeterminate point in the future, so we'd like to completely shift directions. You may lose a ton of money, but hey, we're trailblazers!"
The problem right now is that the current system still works. They choose 40 or so artists, market the ever living hell out of them, and they sell really well. The contracts are incredibly one-sided, so the distributor makes money whether the artist does or not. And if the artist fails, and no one buys them, well... there are 3 dozen others standing in line behind them, waiting to sign their lives away for their "big break".
The system you describe would work really well, but there is difficulty in transitioning to it. How to you market the idea that artists don't have to be screwed by the distributor they sign with? That's going to take a fair amount of marketing capital, and the current crop of distributors are not about to give up their power just to make the world a warmer, fuzzier place.
No, just like the original Google phenomenon, this is going to take some outside force, independent of the entrenched industry, to come in and shake things up with a Better Way (tm).
I'd be happy to take the helm. Have some VC cash lying around?
A nice fat book will keep you company on the commute for a week or more, and if it's any good, keep you thinking long after that.
A DVD will give you two hours of mindless entertainment then merely take up shelf space.
Wait, what?
First you imply that all books are pretty good, and will keep you thinking for a long time. Then you imply that all movies are "mindless entertainment."
I would suggest that instead, books and movies are both just media for conveying a story, and I think the ratio of mindless:thoughtful stories is about equal in both media. Just look at the shelves upon shelves of mindless "Bestseller" crap at the bookstore (romance novels, cookie-cutter thrillers, etc.), and the vast libraries of thought-provoking, well-made movies that don't get as much commercial airtime.
Books have their good and bad examples, just like movies. The mindless crap is marketed more heavily than the thought-provoking stuff in both media. Don't make the mistake of writing off an entire medium just because you can't be bothered to dig deeper than the first table at Borders or the first shelf at Blockbuster.
The ultimate definition of "Spam" is pretty simple: it's email that people don't want to receive. If you're sending out email to people who would rather not be getting it, you're a spammer, plain and simple.
That means all my coworkers and my manager, with requests for me to do work and answer questions, are spammers. I don't want those emails.
I should call IT and have their addresses blocked. Then I can just read Slashdot all day.
This is what the MPAA doesn't quite get. Most people I know over the age of 21 hate going to the theater. It's a fucking hassle.
That's because the theater owners still believe that the point of going to the theater is to see a movie. It's not.
The point of going to a theater is to go out to see a movie.
Theater owners are stuck in the belief that their market is like fast food: when people go to McDonalds, they don't want atmosphere or service, they just want cheap food. But when people go out to dinner, they go to a nice resturaunt with people waiting on them, a nice atmosphere, and a more relaxed experience. They are willing to pay a premium to do so.
Likewise, I would be willing to pay $10 or even $15 for a movie ticket if the theaters were spotlessly clean, cell phone and talking rules were strictly enforced, the ushers provided refills (perhaps for tips), and the trailers and commercials were shown at the end of the movie, where they belong. This is going out to a movie, and not just watching a movie.
The theaters just have to shift their market segment a little. Not everyone wants a cheeseburger. Some of us want a gourmet meal with appropriate levels of service, and are willing to pay more for it.
All releases need to be packaged in rar files and furthermore have an sfv for an additional level of checking of you want to be absolutely sure the release you downloadeded is pristine.
Rar files?! Why, WHY is it always.rar files?! Just give me a frickin'.avi and be done with it.
They don't know how whether or not their computer is already hijacked. They can't tell the difference between the internet and American Online. You expect these people to start installing p2p software and start downloading files for their use (nevermind the fact that to go looking for the stuff in the first place)?
Yes.
Because they have a good friend who told them, "Look, you just install this Azureus program like this, then go to this website Mininova.org, search for what you want, download the file, and open it in Azureus. I'll even set it up for you so your downloaded movies end up in a special folder in My Documents, so you can find them when they're done."
People are not stupid. They don't know the difference between AOL and the internet because AOL marketed very hard to make them believe that, and won. They just don't have the time to invest in becoming knowledgeable about all things computer like you and I do. If they can create documents in Word and work their email, they won't have a problem with a Bittorrent client. They didn't have a problem with Napster... you don't think all those millions of Napster downloaders the music industry got upset at were computer science majors, do you?
I'm 29 myself, and to be honest, with my current lifestyle, I really don't have the time to fuck around with semi-corrupt files and the arduous process of assembling multiple files from different sources, just to get a cracked copy of a computer game or a movie file.
Agreed, I don't have time for those things either (I'm 26). But you have clearly not looked for anything of that nature since 2002... sites like isoHunt and Mininova have made the process fairly painless. We are no longer in the days of warez.com and 20KB crack programs that blast music at you and were packaged as 10.rar files zipped up with a password with the link to download hidden among a giant farm of links to other toplists.
It's much more convenient to take a few bucks and buy the stuff.
Also agreed. However, the ability to buy it does not exist in the form I want it just yet. $20+ for a DVD is ridiculous, especially when the DVD is full of trailers for other films and commercials telling me I'm a dirty filthy stinking pirate whose wanton downloading is forcing the Third Assistant Grip's children to go to a second-rate college. Here's what I want: MPEG-4 encoded at a high bitrate, true surround sound, special features included, fast download pipe, ability to burn to DVD, no restrictions on how long I get to keep it, no f*cking spyware/DRM/rootkits, no special players required but a damn good one available, cross-platform, and $5 a movie. THAT I will pay for. Many times over. And, I imagine, so would a very large majority of people in your and my age group, the 24-35ers. Until that happens, Bittorrent is a better deal for most of us. Which is a shame really, because that vast untapped market is going to waste.
All arguments above aside, I buy DVDs (typically from Columbia House or Amazon where they're cheaper) and I don't usually download movies. I am a ravenous Netflix subscriber. I do download a good deal of television, but only until my homebrew DVR is finished--it's very difficult to download live Big Ten basketball games over bittorrent.
If anything, this piracy phenomenon should be seen as an opportunity for the distribution companies to see what people are looking for, in the wild. Tracking what people rip and what they ignore, what they download and what they ignore, etc. is the best set of raw statistical data on popularity I can think of.
Why would someone spend good hard cash to get virtual stuff simply for the game play?
Why would someone spend good hard cash to pull a lever and watch three wheels with pictures on them spin around and never show three in a row? Why would someone spend good hard cash on alcohol night after night when they know it's ruining their life? Why do people eat more calories in a day than they consume? WHY?
Compulsive behavior does not need a why. You could think of it in terms of stimulus/reward, a la Skinner's pigeons, but usually the reward is not tangible in any way (i.e., "good feelings", or "pleasure center of the brain" for you neurology types).
But my point is that just because you don't understand why someone would do it doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to take advantage of the market opportunity. I don't understand why people go to expensive spas to sit in mud and put cucumbers on their eyes, either, but there is a thriving market for them and plenty of money to be made. Just because I don't want to buy something doesn't mean no one wants to.
If people will buy it, someone will sell it. That's how the market works. eBay is being shortsighted by simply eliminating these auctions, instead of adding more rules that would mitigate the disputes and thus lower eBay's liability cost.
and your point about sticking to a 19th century business model is moot - everyone complains about the business model but no one offers a viable alternative that won't result in a significant contraction/reshuffling of the industry.
Any why, exactly, is that last constraint placed on the hypothetical business model?
From where I'm standing, there is no viable business model that will not result in a significant contraction/reshuffling of the industry. And how is this bad? Their business as a middleman is becoming obsolete. The market has decided that they are no longer needed, and we should let them die, not defy the market by propping them up with pointless legislation.
"Damn, I really wish we could have saved those buggy whip manufacturers, but no one ever suggested an alternate viable business model that didn't result in a significant contraction/reshuffling of the buggy whip industry."
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of fact, it is. Each backup diff file is compressed, encrypted, and stored on a server, every day.
People work from home and the road all the time. I've done it myself. You bring your laptop home with you, and tunnel into the company network via a VPN. People on call are issued Blackberries, and special accounts that expand to fill their needs. These people are in the extreme minority.
It's really not a problem. Emails with attachments are typically transfered to personal folders on my hard drive, in Outlook. They show up right there next to all my other mail, in the only place I ever check my mail (on my laptop). The only difference between online and offline mail is which folder they're in.
And data to/from suppliers is strictly controlled, and usually goes through a separate network system that can track submission, review, approval, and scheduling. In the rare case it's sent through email, it gets put on my hard drive with everything else.
The only thing that's different from a 2GB mail system is that you have to create and maintain folders separate from your inbox. Oh, the horror of it all! I must be organized to use my allotted space efficiently!
Get a grip. If you have 2GB of email that you are currently working on RIGHT NOW, then you need an administrative assistant. If you're done with it, sweep it into an offline folder. It's not rocket science.
I work in a giant company of 150,000 employees. Each of us gets 20MB of space on the Exchange server, for mail and calendar.
Every employee, outside of the factory, has their own computer to use at their desk, and if you need to bring files away from your desk frequently, it is not difficult to swap out your desktop for a laptop. (I'm not sure how much extra the laptop costs in a given manager's budget, but it's not much.) There are bigger network servers available for passing files around, but they are paid for by managers' budgets, on an as-needed basis.
No one really has a need to log on to a computer that's not their own, so it makes sense to distribute storage capacity for email among the employees' desktops and laptops, instead of sinking money into giant datacenters. Those desktops and laptops have disk space available, anyway.
This system seems to work well for the company. Occasionally someone with a desktop wishes they had network access during a meeting, but if that happens often enough, their manager just upgrades them to a laptop which they bring to meetings. There is secure wireless available everywhere, and everyone with a laptop gets a docking station at their desk, including a real keyboard, real mouse, and real LCD screen.
Outside of college, I've never really been in a situation where I've needed to log onto lots of random computers and still have network access to my files/email. 16-20 MB is not unreasonable.
Yeah, they are.
When you talk about the snobby people in IT, you're usually referring to those at the bottom of the heap, organizationally. These are the guys in the server room who don't really have the authority to make any decisions, and who are simply working on the day-to-day operations of the IT department.
Compare this with trench engineers at any engineering/manufacturing firm. I work as an engineer at a very large engineering/manufacturing firm, and let me tell you, engineers are terrible when it comes to lording minutiae over people's heads. Being able to quote stress calculation numbers for some part we designed a decade ago is a badge of pride. Additionally, those in our organization who are not engineers, but who are also at the bottom, pride themselves in their detailed knowledge of the bureaucracy. These are the people who are always quoting process specs and operations manuals to get their way, and they come off as very snotty and arrogant.
The ones who are not that way inevitably get promoted out of the bottom level of the organization, and I'm sure the same is true in IT departments. People who continue with that attitude will always stay at the bottom, allowing them to become bitter and feed their own need to justify their existence by lording minutiae over people's heads.
There. Fixed that for ya.
"thinkofthechildren" is not just a tag, it's also the root password to the U.S. Constitution.
Sure we do.
You know, if any *nix software required the user to be root to run, we would string the developers up alongside the guy who thought Clippy would be a good idea.
Why should it be any different for third-party applications requiring Administrator privileges to run on Windows?
Microsoft is so busy catering to the third party developers in order to maintain their lock-in, that they forgot how to put their foot down on truly important software engineering issues, like security. Locking down XP to an almost *nix-like state can be done. There are read/write/execute permissions available on every directory, drive letter, and registry key, and Windows supports the "home directory sandbox" model. After all, a virus in *nix could conceivably blow away a user directory, but unless it's exploiting a buffer overflow or other coding error hole, it can't take down the system. The same is possible in Windows, but not available by default to your average Dell user.
That's an interesting analogy, and I agree that malware will get consistently more advanced, eventually creating mutatable (and thus evolvable) strains that will evade anti-malware programs without the intervention of the programmer.
However, there's a rather glaring flaw in the analogy, and it's this: in the biological world, the various bacteria that live in or on us do not have purpose. They are simply life forms, doing the things that life forms do (which is eat, shit, and make babies) in an environment that suits them. If they end up overrunning that environment and making us sick, it's not because they wanted to make us sick. If our bodies happen to be the perfect environment for them, and they happen to eat things in a way that is beneficial to us, it's not because they decided to help us out. They are just being bacteria. Symbiosis and infection are merely products of parallel evolution and happy coincidence.
In contrast, malware is written by people, and people do have motives for the things they do. Bacteria don't do this; they just do their thing with the eating and the shitting and the baby-making, and any macroscopic results are not due to the decisions of the bacteria.
Malware is written with purpose. That purpose could be to show the user ads, or participate in a botnet, or collect spammable email addresses, or whatever. But saying that anti-virus programs will ignore the "harmless" malware overlooks the fact that there is no harmless malware. There doesn't exist any malware that's going to go to the trouble of infecting your machine and propogating, and then not do anything. No one would program one. That means that all malware is either black hat (adware, botnet, spyware, etc.) or white hat (attacks other malware). Even if it's not using CPU resources, it is doing some other damage, such as annoying the user or enabling spam (in the case of black hat) or violating the freedom of a user to choose what software they have installed on their machine (in the case of white hat). Either way, all malware should be cleaned by anti-malware programs. In the world of software programmed by people, there's no such thing as harmless piggybacking.
****
Note: I am aware of the parallels of my argument with Intelligent Design. It was not my intent to start a flamewar.
No, the problem with TPM was that lousy Jar-Jar character. He had more than enough jibber-jabber.
This phone should be available* in the US just in time for the 2011 holiday shopping season!
*Only available from Verizon when coupled with a new 2-year contract. Not all features may be available. Additional Bent Phone Fee of $3.99 a month applies. The Bending Feature of this phone may only be used according to the terms and conditions set forth in the Customer Agreement.
And the image of a cat trying to adapt to zero g will keep the crew entertained for months on end.
I have not read the agreements, but my guess would be that the Big Four record companies would have added a clause to their operating agreement with Apple stating that Apple is not allowed to sell music without DRM. The record companies are very aware of how much people hate DRM, and if Apple starts selling non-DRMed music from indy labels right next to the DRMed music from the Big Four, it would weaken the Big Four's market position in online sales.
Apple are not idiots. They are fully aware they would make more money selling indy artists without DRM, because they would attract more indy artists. But their hands are probably tied, which is one of the reasons Jobs wrote this essay.
Wait. Never mind.
But the biggest enemy of business right now is inertia. These record companies have been working under the same paradigm for decades, and it has made them embarassingly large piles of cash as a result. The instinct to keep doing what they have been doing is very strong. It takes a very special kind of company to recognize that their entire business model is being obsoleted, and start taking huge financial risks to shift directions.
And how do they explain this to their shareholders? "Look, I know we've been raking in massive wads of cash using our current system, and we still are, but we see that it won't work at some indeterminate point in the future, so we'd like to completely shift directions. You may lose a ton of money, but hey, we're trailblazers!"
The problem right now is that the current system still works. They choose 40 or so artists, market the ever living hell out of them, and they sell really well. The contracts are incredibly one-sided, so the distributor makes money whether the artist does or not. And if the artist fails, and no one buys them, well... there are 3 dozen others standing in line behind them, waiting to sign their lives away for their "big break".
The system you describe would work really well, but there is difficulty in transitioning to it. How to you market the idea that artists don't have to be screwed by the distributor they sign with? That's going to take a fair amount of marketing capital, and the current crop of distributors are not about to give up their power just to make the world a warmer, fuzzier place.
No, just like the original Google phenomenon, this is going to take some outside force, independent of the entrenched industry, to come in and shake things up with a Better Way (tm).
I'd be happy to take the helm. Have some VC cash lying around?
First you imply that all books are pretty good, and will keep you thinking for a long time. Then you imply that all movies are "mindless entertainment."
I would suggest that instead, books and movies are both just media for conveying a story, and I think the ratio of mindless:thoughtful stories is about equal in both media. Just look at the shelves upon shelves of mindless "Bestseller" crap at the bookstore (romance novels, cookie-cutter thrillers, etc.), and the vast libraries of thought-provoking, well-made movies that don't get as much commercial airtime.
Books have their good and bad examples, just like movies. The mindless crap is marketed more heavily than the thought-provoking stuff in both media. Don't make the mistake of writing off an entire medium just because you can't be bothered to dig deeper than the first table at Borders or the first shelf at Blockbuster.
"90% of everything is crud."
I should call IT and have their addresses blocked. Then I can just read Slashdot all day.
The point of going to a theater is to go out to see a movie.
Theater owners are stuck in the belief that their market is like fast food: when people go to McDonalds, they don't want atmosphere or service, they just want cheap food. But when people go out to dinner, they go to a nice resturaunt with people waiting on them, a nice atmosphere, and a more relaxed experience. They are willing to pay a premium to do so.
Likewise, I would be willing to pay $10 or even $15 for a movie ticket if the theaters were spotlessly clean, cell phone and talking rules were strictly enforced, the ushers provided refills (perhaps for tips), and the trailers and commercials were shown at the end of the movie, where they belong. This is going out to a movie, and not just watching a movie.
The theaters just have to shift their market segment a little. Not everyone wants a cheeseburger. Some of us want a gourmet meal with appropriate levels of service, and are willing to pay more for it.
Because they have a good friend who told them, "Look, you just install this Azureus program like this, then go to this website Mininova.org, search for what you want, download the file, and open it in Azureus. I'll even set it up for you so your downloaded movies end up in a special folder in My Documents, so you can find them when they're done."
People are not stupid. They don't know the difference between AOL and the internet because AOL marketed very hard to make them believe that, and won. They just don't have the time to invest in becoming knowledgeable about all things computer like you and I do. If they can create documents in Word and work their email, they won't have a problem with a Bittorrent client. They didn't have a problem with Napster... you don't think all those millions of Napster downloaders the music industry got upset at were computer science majors, do you? Agreed, I don't have time for those things either (I'm 26). But you have clearly not looked for anything of that nature since 2002... sites like isoHunt and Mininova have made the process fairly painless. We are no longer in the days of warez.com and 20KB crack programs that blast music at you and were packaged as 10
All arguments above aside, I buy DVDs (typically from Columbia House or Amazon where they're cheaper) and I don't usually download movies. I am a ravenous Netflix subscriber. I do download a good deal of television, but only until my homebrew DVR is finished--it's very difficult to download live Big Ten basketball games over bittorrent.
If anything, this piracy phenomenon should be seen as an opportunity for the distribution companies to see what people are looking for, in the wild. Tracking what people rip and what they ignore, what they download and what they ignore, etc. is the best set of raw statistical data on popularity I can think of.
Compulsive behavior does not need a why. You could think of it in terms of stimulus/reward, a la Skinner's pigeons, but usually the reward is not tangible in any way (i.e., "good feelings", or "pleasure center of the brain" for you neurology types).
But my point is that just because you don't understand why someone would do it doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to take advantage of the market opportunity. I don't understand why people go to expensive spas to sit in mud and put cucumbers on their eyes, either, but there is a thriving market for them and plenty of money to be made. Just because I don't want to buy something doesn't mean no one wants to.
If people will buy it, someone will sell it. That's how the market works. eBay is being shortsighted by simply eliminating these auctions, instead of adding more rules that would mitigate the disputes and thus lower eBay's liability cost.
From where I'm standing, there is no viable business model that will not result in a significant contraction/reshuffling of the industry. And how is this bad? Their business as a middleman is becoming obsolete. The market has decided that they are no longer needed, and we should let them die, not defy the market by propping them up with pointless legislation.
"Damn, I really wish we could have saved those buggy whip manufacturers, but no one ever suggested an alternate viable business model that didn't result in a significant contraction/reshuffling of the buggy whip industry."
Repeat after me:
"Encyclopedias are not a source."
Now repeat again after me:
"Encyclopedias ON THE INTERNET are not a source."