>>The cost of city water and sewer aren't the REAL costs. Many billions of dollars in subsidies are going into it,
I think you're confusing utilities with roads. Provincial (or State) money is often provided for major roads, interchanges, bridges, and so on, within cities. Utilities, especially electric, are strictly user-pay.
Indeed, it's much more common for the municipality that runs/owns the water utilities, to make money off the utility; the public reacts better to raised utility rates than raised taxes.
Gas utilities are almost always wholly private (but regulated) firms; their costs are, if anything, inflated above the regulated profit level, via creative accounting. Ditto on TV Cable companies.
And all these businesses that have to bury the connectors of a network that branches out from very centralized supplies to every building, were able to do so for an annualized cost per customer of about $20-$30/month. That includes perpetual maintenance and replacement of the infrastructure. The rest of your gas/electric/water/sewer/phone/TV bill is the cost of supplying whatever's coming down the pipe.
So I was puzzled that the new technology of fiber, which was clearly, before 1990, the future of telephone, TV, data, and more...was not rolled out to every building, like gas and water and so on before it. For $30/month, plus whatever your bandwidth deal was.
I'm joking, of course - it sounds technologically obvious, but politically it was too hot for comfort. It would be the first network to compete with a previous network. Indeed, two of them, cable and phone. They weren't about to allow new companies to rise up to run fiber, or municipally-owned fiber to the home. Neither industry could allow the other to switch to fiber to the home, as it would immediately allow them to supplant the other. (As it is, cable is making a bid for the local phone market, and vice-versa in a few spots).
So there we are, 20 years later, nobody but a few experimental neighbourhoods has fiber to the home, and Internet is delivered in single-digit Mb/s, at best. Using networks designed for other purposes.
It's several years now since then-active industry pundit and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe commented on his frustration with the "teleopolies" (hooray for that word not catching on) not providing broadband like they could.
I'm a waterworks/sewer engineer and wrote him to ask why is it that *real*, fiber-to-the-home broadband isn't cheaper than water and sewer service, which run about $30-$40/month. To supply you with that, local utilities have to bury large, heavy pipes in the ground up to your house, and every day, they have to run multi-hundred-million-dollar plants to clean, sterilize and pump a ton or more of water (usually some ways uphill from your local river) to your house.
Offhand, that SOUNDS more expensive than running a hair-thin fiber to your house and maintaining the operation of some silent, no-moving-parts routers in your neighbourhood and downtown.
After water treatment, transmission and delivery became possible, within a few decades, they'd been run to every house in major cities; utilities took out some big loans and started paying them off from part of your $30/month.
Metcalfe replied that he had no idea why there was not fiber to the home for the same price as water, sewer, gas, phone and electric to the home. Neither could any of his readers who posted reply comments. There just is no answer to why we were able to do the first five and not the sixth, "utility install".
The Internet providers have instead been charging that $40 and up per month to provide service over infrastructure that was already paid for - phone wires by 1960, cable by 1995, about 25 years after they were put in. So they were free, from an ISP point of view.
The Canadian and European broadband penetrations are the result of tighter regulation of the monopolies - they were just told to spend more of that $40/month on providing service to rural areas or at higher quality in urban, by regulators who knew damn well they could still make a VERY decent profit.
But only Asia has solved the problem the way American and Europe just called out the backhoes and put in water, sewer, electric and phone lines as soon as they were practicable. Asia got out the backhoes and put in fiber to the home, and that's why they have many, many MB/s to the home.
So could we, if the internet-providing companies had not largely completed a "regulatory capture" and told their own regulators what to tell them to do.
>>Canada dumps lumber in the US at subsidized prices
Well, that would be YOUR point of view. Canada's point of view is different.
That's why we have courts...in this case, the WTO.
And the WTO court found your point of view to not reflect reality, and Canada's point of view to reflect reality much, much better. Repeatedly.
And every time, the US effectively ignored the court ruling. Please, I don't want to start an argument over softwood lumber. I'm just stating the facts: the WTO ruled against the US, and the US did not adjust its behaviour the way they would have insisted on another country doing had another country received the same ruling.
The headline on this story would have been more correct by removing the "IP" from the sentence. "The US ignores unwelcome WTO Rulings" - of every kind. Maybe not ALL of them, but certainly some cases that are matters of much, much journalistic coverage. Many of these cases pre-date the Bush2 administration.
on the topic. Short version: as predicted by Dan & Jerry Hutcheson in Scientific American about 1997, the market is turning from "endlessly bigger and faster at the same price point" to "smaller and way cheaper if not as fast". We're taking our "Moore's Law gains" in the form of money rather than than speed, thanks very much.
And this price drop into $300 and $200 laptops (and under in the case of the XO) is colliding with the surge in global population that make $10/day or more in the developing world. Sales in the billions beckon. 100,000 per day? Hah. If they make the right product, they'll have to ramp up to many hundreds of millions per year.
Sorry, I guess I have to spell out the second half of my argument; my post was getting long, so I left it implied.
I didn't mean to say, "so it never makes sense to go to the theatre", I meant "it starts getting less attractive with a $600 player", much less a $900 player.
Now contrast surfing the wave's trailing edge. Buy the player when they drop below $180, which is also to say, start renting discs when the first bargain shelf appears at the video store and Wal-Mart starts selling remaindered Blu-Rays for $9.99 and less.
For a few years' wait, you're down to a couple of dollars per viewing.
I have an HD set, and am into my second year of just using it to enjoy DVDs in widescreen and resolution-doubled. If my satellite company, now starting it's 3rd year of offering a 25-hr HD-DVR, offers a version with double that much hard drive this year, I'll buy into that and get 1080i, otherwise, next year. And that will keep me happy for a year before I want to see what 1080p is like. The $180/bargain-shelf/Wal-Mart future should have come by then.
Such a ridiculous premium is put on technology costs by the "first on my block" factor, and so much value is ignored by the "fear of obsolescence" that great economies can be had by doing the opposite - jumping on technologies as they start to age.
Everybody who buys computers knows there's a "sweet spot" in price/performance that's about in the middle of the pack. If 1TB drives are just available, and you can still get 80GB drives but no smaller (not new), the the lowest $/GB is going to be around the 500GB size.
Well, the sweet spot for consumer entertainment boxes has tended to be near the trailing edge for over a decade now, not the middle. Unlike computer parts, there's very little Moore's Law involved.
I got a DVD player when they hit $300, and watched about 20 movies on it by the time they'd dropped below $100. So those 20 movies cost me $5 each to rent, and $10 each to own the player that early; I bought too soon.
Better results came from buying a LaserDisc AFTER the DVD had been announced and LD's dropped like a stone. I got it for a couple of hundred, watched several dozen movies on it before they were being sold from the stores, bought 20 discs for $5 each, and am still watching them one-by-one (and it's barely less good than DVD). In addition, it's now a conversation piece, a historical curio.
People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, that it will last a long time like a house, or at least a good car. It's not. It won't last that long anymore; not just the gadget, the ENTIRE FORMAT. My tapes lasted 20 years, DVD came and went in about 10, Blu-Ray is widely expected to be obsoleted by (often downloaded) AVI files in less than 10.
So treat it as an operating-money decision instead. Figure out the number of movies you watch in a year - if you're out of the dating years, have a family, generally Have A Life, it's probably less than 30, may be under 20. Then figure a five-year lifespan for a format these days, and that's the number of discs you'll play: maybe 100-150. Paying $600 for a player is $4-$6 per disc. Add then rental, and are you sure you don't just want to go to the theatre?
...but it's to benefit the PUBLIC, not their servants.
When it was all paper, Calgary used to let you come look at your own street map (dollar figure on every house lot superimposed) for free. That, to most people's mind, satisfied the requirement that you have transparency about your own assessment and those most directly comparable to it.
If you wanted a whole neighbourhood map, though, that was some hundreds of dollars; and it scaled up to tens of thousands for 10 lbs. of paper that gave you the hundreds of thousands of homes for the whole city.
The argument was that this amount of data was of very little interest to the private citizen - and a valuable professional tool for any real-estate company. So since the public data cost the public a lot of money to gather, due diligence in exploiting that property of the municipality required extraction of a market price from those businessmen, we charged what that traffic would bear. No different than letting a community group use a city building for free to have a meeting about re-zoning, but charging 1,000 salesmen market price to use it for a business conference.
Alas, nobody could deny that putting it all on the Internet was a public service. I think the "business" of selling large amounts of it has also fallen off because the real-estate agents just use the web site heavily, looking up one street at a time around houses they are selling or thinking of buying. Again, the "greater good" ruled...it was nice to have a revenue stream of four bits or a buck per citizen selling a $20K sheaf of paper to a dozen-odd real estate companies every year, but allowing the resource on the Net so people didn't have to come down to City Hall to make an inquiry was overall a greater public good. If somebody suffered from the change, well, that happens with changes, even overall-good ones.
I rather doubt the assessor lady is the personal owner of the copyright - the copyright holder has decided to do something else with their property. It's not copyright violation, it's use of copyright to maximize public good. Sorry.
I'm surprised and disappointed to read comments from people who've read Tufte's books and agreed with them, and then say the opposite about this case. I wonder, did they ever 'get it' ?
Tufte's view, consistent for decades, is that the information display should be designed around the human visual system's abilities and preferences, not the designer's prejudices or what's easy for the display system.
The human eye automatically "drills down" in an information-rich visual field by focusing the fovea on anything that is noticed as being of interest. Further information on the subject of interest is gained in a dozen milliseconds by the act of focus. No jumping to new pages over a second later.
A couple of posters offered the absurd assertions that
a) Tufte is stuck in the paper era - when he's been commenting on computer displays for 20 years. His criticisms of the screen real-estate forgone to 'computer administrative debris' in Mac and, later, Windows, go back to their inception.
b) That space is limited on those paper pages when they are far more information-rich than screens. Multiply 8.5x11x300x300 and get over 8 Mpixels, guys. (And an open magazine is twice as big; an open newspaper, 10x that!) Why do you think most people prefer to read on paper even now? Richer colours, too; compare TIME print edition photos to the web pages printed out.
People who think information-thin combined with drill-down is the way to go are responsible for those frustrating answering-machine menus.
And definitely have never taken a look at Craigslist, where there are a maximum of index words per page, using smaller print, and every piece of information in the index is also a 'control'. a link to another information-dense page. You rarely have to go more than three clicks in until you are looking at a list of the things you want, out of all the country and all the products and services there are.
Bottom-line: provide the user with as much information as possible, use visual cues (size, colour, position) to prioritize, and have trust that they will pick out what they want. Providing them with less information so as to lead them by the nose down your little trail insults their intelligence and human abilities.
In his "Triumph of the Nerds" book over a decade back. I don't have a copy handy so won't attempt to quote, but the upshot was that your R&D, your patents, your general technological superiority, does NOT depend on how well most of your kids do in science & math.
They depend on how well your top 1% of kids do in science and math at the post-secondary, and especially post-graduate, level.
Not to mention, as others have posted, how many of the top 1% of people around the world flock to your nation to do their post-secondary and grad work, and stay to work in private R&D shops and startups.
Oh, and dropping a few percent of a $500B military budget on R&D, those tens of billions of government subsidy of high-tech research, they kind of help too.
So, frankly, you can ignore those poor students. Unless you want them as informed voters or something, or useful as everyday technicians, engineers, MDs etc - for that you might want to do some better science education.
Almost all the replies to my post have been answered, but I wouldn't mind rubbing it in a bit more:
- Yes, the repair kids had help. Of course. How many videos are there out there of kids replacing the motherboard of other laptops, with or without help? I've never spoken to a member of the Calgary Unix Users Group who's replaced his laptop's motherboard. (Probably somebody has, but it just isn't common).
- More recharge options = better, even if you are in the US. How many kids are responsible enough to charge up their laptop every night? You can't get them to leave their shoes near the door. If the "charger" is a few ounces and can be used in the schoolyard, come on, that's a plus anywhere.
- I did not claim that Windows was unable to teach primary-school kids, of course it can. (Probably less well than "Sugar", which is designed for it, but that's unproven). I only noted that the "Windows advantage" of being standard business software is NOT an advantage in primary school.
I don't think that $75 (which is a minimum, most of the commercial products are more like $300, thus over $110 more) is a "small" added cost. The budgets tend to be fixed, so even if they are buying a $250 alternative, they will be getting 25% fewer machines. It's the old Windows-vs-Unix question, I'm afraid, this time biting Windows back. It isn't whether 900MHz is more horsepower than 433MHz, it's whether 433MHz is "good enough" to teach kids 5-11 to do reading, writing and arithmetic. And quite a lot more.
Three socks is more than two...but I only need two.
Many reviewers unconnected with the OLPC project would take issue with the notion that any other product has a better cost/value ratio. The review by WIRED contrasting the XO (OLPC's laptop) with the competitor "Intel Classmate" had the headline "One Looks Like a Toy, the Other Acts Like One":
A few reviews have found the opposite, but a common criterion is self-fulfilling: that running Windows and Office is a killer feature because it instructs the kids in the "software standards" of business. That's relevant for teaching "computers for business" but not relevant for using the computer to teach reading, arithmetic, history, geometry, etc.
Especially for primary-school levels, the target market.
Bottom line: the XO has half the horsepower and Flash drive, the same RAM, comparable screen, except in sunlight where it has the unique, power-saving, read-by-reflection trick that'll be a killer app in some locations. It has a long list of recharge options, for the Classmate only standard power will do. It has a a wider WiFi range and the network-extending "mesh" trick; the sealed-membrane keyboard makes it less typeable but more rugged. And the XO is at least $75 cheaper. And greener, when you're producing a billion of them. Whoops, forgot to mention the youtube video of an 8 and 10-year-old replacing the motherboard using only a screwdriver:
Particularly for primary grades, the XO has a lot of value-for-money to offer.
And it's the opposition that has the money to hire lobbyists. OLPC is the non-profit, so not much motivation to push them where they don't work or aren't wanted.
They listened in on your phone calls without a warrant, and giving them amnesty for it is being seriously discussed.
That about establishes the principle that it's their network, not yours, and the moment you put your traffic on it, that's also theirs, to review and pass judgment on, and approve.
Or not.
Isn't it nice that they plan to do it "politely", though? That should count for something.
Summary: Intel's "Emerging Market Platform Group" details several computers they've developed that are targeted at the poor in various ways: small laptops, cybercafe machines, school machines, etc.
The document dates to 2005. Intel did not discover this market because of the OLPC project, they have been pursuing it for years. Education is just one of the markets they are pursuing in the developing world. OLPC is obviously in the way of the education area marketing strategy, and so they tried undercutting them, then joining them, and now they're back to undercutting again.
The ethical concern here is not competition per se - its that private companies can "market" in ways that a non-profit project cannot: ways that involve special forms of "persuasion" for the purchasing bureaucrats of developing nation's educational institutions. It's not about the poor buying either product directly, it's about their public servants picking one product over another based on, ah, marketing techniques, rather than measurable cost/benefit ratios.
$239/$188 = 27% higher. If the Classmate lasts 27% longer than the OLPC in field conditions, or delivers 27% more educational value in some way, well and good. But I haven't seen that independent study. I suspect, neither have the department heads that have picked it. Indeed, I kind of suspect they've seen a highly-biased, very slick presentation, while lunching on chicken cordon bleu.
It'll be a few years more before you see a projector that doesn't do VGA. If you have room & money for only one output, you go with the most popular one. DVI-only would have cost me a couple of presentations of the half-dozen I've done on it.
that *still* takes up little enough room in my pack that it can go anywhere, whether I know I'll need it or not.
But as slide #5 notes, the killer app for me is that I can give presentations with it. I can do that with a regular laptop, too, but this one's just 3X as easy to lug through the whole nightmare that is air travel in the 21st century. This is a combination of the hardware having a VGA-out and video signal up to 1600x1200 if needed, and that OpenOffice does Powerpoint files just fine these days. Sometimes I have to adjust a few font sizes, took about a half hour to check through 30 slides.
Oh, I know that Linux does run on mainframes (and digital picture frames and supercomputers, and...) but I don't think it ever came within two country miles of dominating over installs of VM and MVS.
The "Year of the Linux Desktop" generally referred, IMHO, to Linux attaining if not dominance (yeah, right) then a respectable enough market share to be in the news, like Mac. For which 10% is minimal and 20% better.
As to mobiles having many non-Linux OS's, true enough, and my apologies for not writing "mostly Linux or BSD, what else?". I think a lot of those proprietary little gadget OSs are in some part BSD code that can be so used.
And whatever they are, it points to an appliance market that won't have a dominant (near) monopolist for the main platform...but across the industry basic knowledge of Linux and/or BSD is crucial to getting a job with anybody...or getting the most out of your product as a consumer.
Now, the "Linux Desktop" fantasists can finally let it go. There will be no "year of the Linux desktop", just as there will be no "year of the Linux mainframe".
Like the $1,000,000 "mainframe", the DEC $100,000 "minicomputer", and the Sun $10,000 Unix "workstation", each major generation had its most-popular software environment, the one with highest network effects.
Pushing for a change in the desktop from Windows to Mac or Linux is, in 10 years, going to seem like striving to continue the VMS vs Unix wars on the VAX platform.
What 2008, 2009, and 2010 are going to be are the "years where appliances took over half the desktop functions" - you still want a big monitor and ergo keyboard to Photoshop, do development of web pages and code, and so on. But people sitting right at their desktop will whip out their paperback-sized appliance to do E-mail and chat, because that's where their communication apps live.
And, yes, those new appliances will mostly run Linux. What else?
All the hot new developers and innovative companies are not going to hogtie themselves to proprietary platforms like Windows and Mac; they've tossed themselves out of the running by their lack of freedom. They can put out their own product entries, sure -- but as Bill Joy said, most of the smart people in the world don't work for you.
Well, it wasn't what I'd imagined, some kind of forum with Prentice up front of an audience, taking questions.
It was an Xmas party, I think mostly with his supporters.
However, it was clear many others were there to talk copyright, (some "We Demand Fair Use" posters left out in the hall.) and people were more or less lined up to have a few minutes talk with him, and Prentice was taking them all on at arm's length, eyeball-to-eyeball. Everybody was polite.
So we went with that, too. Four of us showed up. We waited in the (very small) room where people were talking to him, listened in on some young creative-content people talking to him about the same stuff.
Then he turned to me, I introduced us, handed him the note with eight names on it, and summarized (even further) the its-bad-for-industry-itself arguments about radio and the VCR. He engaged with that, asked several questions, we had a real discussion. He wasn't spouting industry talking points. And he said we (and Prof. Geist) hadn't read the legislation yet. So I just phrased it as "there's a broad concern in the land that there's going to be legislation that only defends the rights of copyright holders and not the public ones". Etc.
I expressed concern that if we cripple our industry with bad legislation, people may start making choices to buy from other countries, say maybe Bollywood will start making English movies and with studios that don't use DRM. "Canada, the US, and Europe aren't the whole world any more". He asked something amounting to, "why not let the market decide", and I grinned to make it a joke (sort of), saying "we'll fight them on the beaches and in the streets, but I'd rather fight them on the beaches now so that is isn't on the streets a decade away - head it off in legislation before the market loses billions". Or something like that, probably even less clear.
One great bit at the end is that he asked how we distinguished between a $5 CD and $1500 CD of Photoshop. I felt like thanking him for raising the subject. I said, we don't - and it was the software vendors with $1500 to lose that gave up on DRM twenty years ago, not worth the lost customers.
He nodded, said "thanks", and we were done. The "threat" part was left on the paper and didn't cloud the Xmas party...but it's in his pocket. Message delivered! Hand delivered, to the Minister for Industry.
So, though we just had 3 hours to pull an effort together (I read this on/. about 11 AM), a few CUUG members did their bit for copyright reform.
There hasn't been time to make this an "official" move of the Calgary Unix Users Group, but a number of group members are planning to show up at Prentice's office at 2:30 PM.
My proposal is to deliver one message and have everybody just walk out without asking questions or getting into debate. We'll leave behind a printed copy with names, addresses, phone numbers on it of people who couldn't be there. It's not a "petition", its just a threat. (Why mess around.) The proposed text I posted at the CUUG mailing list is:
Mr. Prentice, my companions and I are members or friends of the Calgary Unix Users Group, basically an organization of mostly middle-aged computer professionals that operate and program the kind of servers that run large corporations and the Internet itself. As members of the high-tech industry, we have been monitoring the copyright debate for over a decade now and we are all convinced that most industry-backed copyright legislation is bad for the industry itself.
The same kind of people opposed radio 80 years ago because it 'gave away free music' and the VCR 25 years ago when Jack Valenti infamously described it as being to Hollywood what the Boston Strangler was to women. Your proposed legislation could easily damage both hi-tech and artistic content industries alike as much as the proposed laws against VCRs and radio would have if legislators of those times had been foolish enough to enact them.
We see it as our duty as citizens, therefore, to let you know that if anything remotely resembling this legislation is passed by this government that we will have to cast aside all our former political preferences in favour of ending conservative party rule. We are not talking about changing our votes. We are talking about donating to your strongest opponents, fund-raising for those opponents, working for those opponents. Your own seat here in Calgary is no-doubt safe, so we as rational engineers will of course devote our efforts to seats where the conservative party is weakest. At our age and income, we can simply afford to travel to those ridings at election times and devote a few vacation days to the noble cause of firing you, if you do not reconsider this ill-advised legislation.
>> There's an argument to be made about the future careers of the crews being jeopardized by damaging the revenue stream of movie production as a whole, but that's about as far as it goes.
Yeah, that WAS my argument, and it goes far enough - in the long run.
It's the difference between the immediate tactical question of "what's the direct effect at the moment" and the moral question of "what if EVERYBODY did this, for all time to come?" ASUS actions are hardly about to destroy Free & Open Source Software. But people jump on them because of the moral issue - if everybody did it all the time, most people would eventually stop writing free software, because it would just be giving away work to big companies that gave nothing back.
And if everybody pirated every movie, eventually, the industry would grind down, if not to a halt, to a far lower level. Music can now be made in $10,000 basement studios, and musicians can work part time and have day jobs and make money from performance. None of that really applies to movie-making. Well, you'd see a lot of little indie dramas and comedies shot on HDTV on weekends with few props or sets, I guess, but the last special-effects SF movie in history would already be in the can.
For any one act of piracy, you're right, there's no effect on the crew, or anybody but the investors, a bunch of rich people nobody will ever have sympathy for. But in the "big picture", those investors and producers just act as money-aggregators, assembling the money paid by society for the last couple of movies into the salaries and costs for the *next* one. When they lose their business model, so does everybody they cut cheques for.
Thanks for using the word "propaganda", though...here I am, just a single person making a posting to a forum, and I get accused of being some kind of entertainment-industrial complex. I now feel very powerful and important.
Sorry, if you want to violate copyright terms and get some "benefit of the doubt" out of Slashdot, you have to give away for free the work of a team of hundreds of camera, sound, lighting, carpentry and special effects crews, artists, and so forth, who dropped $100M worth of work on an SF movie. Then you can have benefit of the doubt.
But if you fail in the first month of your rushed-to-market product to post source code and hurt the feelings of authors who aren't getting any money for it either way, man, there will be no mercy. Had they the power, you'd be sent to Antarctica in a Speedo.
(That argument's a two-edged sword, of course: since the poverty-stricken software authors ask only for respect and academic cooperation, it IS kicking-down-at-the-weak to abuse their rights.)
This whole argument's already in the comments below the original blog post, by the way. The comments run about 4:1 in favour of giving ASUS that benefit of the doubt. Also common in those postings: please don't imagine we "fans" are doing anything more than offering BotD to a company that put out a cooool product. Even we concede they're the usual bunch of hard-eyed conscience-free businessmen with no inherent respect for the GPL, and do need to be held to account, or they'll never "get around" to that posting.
When an AI can mimic *this* aspect of human intelligence and decide to risk a change from "well-off and greatly respected", to being shut in a concrete box, all for the greater good of its fellows, THEN I'll be impressed with AI.
Until then, its just a glorified calculator brute-forcing its way through a mechanical computation, as impressive as a newspaper press making 500,000 copies of todays celebrity news faster than 50,000 human scribes.
Monopoly may provide "absolute power" (in a given market) but having billions and billions of dollars and enormous industry influence is quite a lot of power, certainly enough to corrupt.
At some point, people start saying "but we can get away with it" about some dirty move that will create higher profits.
At which point, the old "don't be evil" thing is just...corrupted.
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>>The cost of city water and sewer aren't the REAL costs. Many billions of dollars in subsidies are going into it,
I think you're confusing utilities with roads. Provincial (or State) money is often provided for major roads, interchanges, bridges, and so on, within cities. Utilities, especially electric, are strictly user-pay.
Indeed, it's much more common for the municipality that runs/owns the water utilities, to make money off the utility; the public reacts better to raised utility rates than raised taxes.
Gas utilities are almost always wholly private (but regulated) firms; their costs are, if anything, inflated above the regulated profit level, via creative accounting. Ditto on TV Cable companies.
And all these businesses that have to bury the connectors of a network that branches out from very centralized supplies to every building, were able to do so for an annualized cost per customer of about $20-$30/month. That includes perpetual maintenance and replacement of the infrastructure. The rest of your gas/electric/water/sewer/phone/TV bill is the cost of supplying whatever's coming down the pipe.
So I was puzzled that the new technology of fiber, which was clearly, before 1990, the future of telephone, TV, data, and more...was not rolled out to every building, like gas and water and so on before it. For $30/month, plus whatever your bandwidth deal was.
I'm joking, of course - it sounds technologically obvious, but politically it was too hot for comfort. It would be the first network to compete with a previous network. Indeed, two of them, cable and phone. They weren't about to allow new companies to rise up to run fiber, or municipally-owned fiber to the home. Neither industry could allow the other to switch to fiber to the home, as it would immediately allow them to supplant the other. (As it is, cable is making a bid for the local phone market, and vice-versa in a few spots).
So there we are, 20 years later, nobody but a few experimental neighbourhoods has fiber to the home, and Internet is delivered in single-digit Mb/s, at best. Using networks designed for other purposes.
It's several years now since then-active industry pundit and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe commented on his frustration with the "teleopolies" (hooray for that word not catching on) not providing broadband like they could.
/month. To supply you with that, local utilities have to bury large, heavy pipes in the ground up to your house, and every day, they have to run multi-hundred-million-dollar plants to clean, sterilize and pump a ton or more of water (usually some ways uphill from your local river) to your house.
I'm a waterworks/sewer engineer and wrote him to ask why is it that *real*, fiber-to-the-home broadband isn't cheaper than water and sewer service, which run about $30-$40
Offhand, that SOUNDS more expensive than running a hair-thin fiber to your house and maintaining the operation of some silent, no-moving-parts routers in your neighbourhood and downtown.
After water treatment, transmission and delivery became possible, within a few decades, they'd been run to every house in major cities; utilities took out some big loans and started paying them off from part of your $30/month.
Metcalfe replied that he had no idea why there was not fiber to the home for the same price as water, sewer, gas, phone and electric to the home. Neither could any of his readers who posted reply comments. There just is no answer to why we were able to do the first five and not the sixth, "utility install".
The Internet providers have instead been charging that $40 and up per month to provide service over infrastructure that was already paid for - phone wires by 1960, cable by 1995, about 25 years after they were put in. So they were free, from an ISP point of view.
The Canadian and European broadband penetrations are the result of tighter regulation of the monopolies - they were just told to spend more of that $40/month on providing service to rural areas or at higher quality in urban, by regulators who knew damn well they could still make a VERY decent profit.
But only Asia has solved the problem the way American and Europe just called out the backhoes and put in water, sewer, electric and phone lines as soon as they were practicable. Asia got out the backhoes and put in fiber to the home, and that's why they have many, many MB/s to the home.
So could we, if the internet-providing companies had not largely completed a "regulatory capture" and told their own regulators what to tell them to do.
>>Canada dumps lumber in the US at subsidized prices
Well, that would be YOUR point of view. Canada's point of view is different.
That's why we have courts...in this case, the WTO.
And the WTO court found your point of view to not reflect reality, and Canada's point of view to reflect reality much, much better. Repeatedly.
And every time, the US effectively ignored the court ruling. Please, I don't want to start an argument over softwood lumber. I'm just stating the facts: the WTO ruled against the US, and the US did not adjust its behaviour the way they would have insisted on another country doing had another country received the same ruling.
The headline on this story would have been more correct by removing the "IP" from the sentence. "The US ignores unwelcome WTO Rulings" - of every kind. Maybe not ALL of them, but certainly some cases that are matters of much, much journalistic coverage. Many of these cases pre-date the Bush2 administration.
Sounds like the new big market is "ultra-mobile" mini-laptops, from those links to "MID" and "UMPC" in the Wikipedia.
My purchase of an Eee PC got me to do up a presentation for the engineers at work,
"Poor Man's Computer: Cheap Internet Appliances for the Whole World"
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc
on the topic. Short version: as predicted by Dan & Jerry Hutcheson in Scientific American about 1997, the market is turning from "endlessly bigger and faster at the same price point" to "smaller and way cheaper if not as fast". We're taking our "Moore's Law gains" in the form of money rather than than speed, thanks very much.
And this price drop into $300 and $200 laptops (and under in the case of the XO) is colliding with the surge in global population that make $10/day or more in the developing world. Sales in the billions beckon. 100,000 per day? Hah. If they make the right product, they'll have to ramp up to many hundreds of millions per year.
Sorry, I guess I have to spell out the second half of my argument; my post was getting long, so I left it implied.
I didn't mean to say, "so it never makes sense to go to the theatre", I meant "it starts getting less attractive with a $600 player", much less a $900 player.
Now contrast surfing the wave's trailing edge. Buy the player when they drop below $180, which is also to say, start renting discs when the first bargain shelf appears at the video store and Wal-Mart starts selling remaindered Blu-Rays for $9.99 and less.
For a few years' wait, you're down to a couple of dollars per viewing.
I have an HD set, and am into my second year of just using it to enjoy DVDs in widescreen and resolution-doubled. If my satellite company, now starting it's 3rd year of offering a 25-hr HD-DVR, offers a version with double that much hard drive this year, I'll buy into that and get 1080i, otherwise, next year. And that will keep me happy for a year before I want to see what 1080p is like. The $180/bargain-shelf/Wal-Mart future should have come by then.
Such a ridiculous premium is put on technology costs by the "first on my block" factor, and so much value is ignored by the "fear of obsolescence" that great economies can be had by doing the opposite - jumping on technologies as they start to age.
Everybody who buys computers knows there's a "sweet spot" in price/performance that's about in the middle of the pack. If 1TB drives are just available, and you can still get 80GB drives but no smaller (not new), the the lowest $/GB is going to be around the 500GB size.
Well, the sweet spot for consumer entertainment boxes has tended to be near the trailing edge for over a decade now, not the middle. Unlike computer parts, there's very little Moore's Law involved.
I got a DVD player when they hit $300, and watched about 20 movies on it by the time they'd dropped below $100. So those 20 movies cost me $5 each to rent, and $10 each to own the player that early; I bought too soon.
Better results came from buying a LaserDisc AFTER the DVD had been announced and LD's dropped like a stone. I got it for a couple of hundred, watched several dozen movies on it before they were being sold from the stores, bought 20 discs for $5 each, and am still watching them one-by-one (and it's barely less good than DVD). In addition, it's now a conversation piece, a historical curio.
People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, that it will last a long time like a house, or at least a good car. It's not. It won't last that long anymore; not just the gadget, the ENTIRE FORMAT. My tapes lasted 20 years, DVD came and went in about 10, Blu-Ray is widely expected to be obsoleted by (often downloaded) AVI files in less than 10.
So treat it as an operating-money decision instead. Figure out the number of movies you watch in a year - if you're out of the dating years, have a family, generally Have A Life, it's probably less than 30, may be under 20. Then figure a five-year lifespan for a format these days, and that's the number of discs you'll play: maybe 100-150. Paying $600 for a player is $4-$6 per disc. Add then rental, and are you sure you don't just want to go to the theatre?
And, you know, It Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby, Cause Baby, Look At It Now...
...but it's to benefit the PUBLIC, not their servants.
When it was all paper, Calgary used to let you come look at your own street map (dollar figure on every house lot superimposed) for free. That, to most people's mind, satisfied the requirement that you have transparency about your own assessment and those most directly comparable to it.
If you wanted a whole neighbourhood map, though, that was some hundreds of dollars; and it scaled up to tens of thousands for 10 lbs. of paper that gave you the hundreds of thousands of homes for the whole city.
The argument was that this amount of data was of very little interest to the private citizen - and a valuable professional tool for any real-estate company. So since the public data cost the public a lot of money to gather, due diligence in exploiting that property of the municipality required extraction of a market price from those businessmen, we charged what that traffic would bear. No different than letting a community group use a city building for free to have a meeting about re-zoning, but charging 1,000 salesmen market price to use it for a business conference.
Alas, nobody could deny that putting it all on the Internet was a public service. I think the "business" of selling large amounts of it has also fallen off because the real-estate agents just use the web site heavily, looking up one street at a time around houses they are selling or thinking of buying. Again, the "greater good" ruled...it was nice to have a revenue stream of four bits or a buck per citizen selling a $20K sheaf of paper to a dozen-odd real estate companies every year, but allowing the resource on the Net so people didn't have to come down to City Hall to make an inquiry was overall a greater public good. If somebody suffered from the change, well, that happens with changes, even overall-good ones.
I rather doubt the assessor lady is the personal owner of the copyright - the copyright holder has decided to do something else with their property. It's not copyright violation, it's use of copyright to maximize public good. Sorry.
I'm surprised and disappointed to read comments from people who've read Tufte's books and agreed with them, and then say the opposite about this case. I wonder, did they ever 'get it' ?
Tufte's view, consistent for decades, is that the information display should be designed around the human visual system's abilities and preferences, not the designer's prejudices or what's easy for the display system.
The human eye automatically "drills down" in an information-rich visual field by focusing the fovea on anything that is noticed as being of interest. Further information on the subject of interest is gained in a dozen milliseconds by the act of focus. No jumping to new pages over a second later.
A couple of posters offered the absurd assertions that
a) Tufte is stuck in the paper era - when he's been commenting on computer displays for 20 years. His criticisms of the screen real-estate forgone to 'computer administrative debris' in Mac and, later, Windows, go back to their inception.
b) That space is limited on those paper pages when they are far more information-rich than screens. Multiply 8.5x11x300x300 and get over 8 Mpixels, guys. (And an open magazine is twice as big; an open newspaper, 10x that!) Why do you think most people prefer to read on paper even now? Richer colours, too; compare TIME print edition photos to the web pages printed out.
People who think information-thin combined with drill-down is the way to go are responsible for those frustrating answering-machine menus.
And definitely have never taken a look at Craigslist, where there are a maximum of index words per page, using smaller print, and every piece of information in the index is also a 'control'. a link to another information-dense page. You rarely have to go more than three clicks in until you are looking at a list of the things you want, out of all the country and all the products and services there are.
Bottom-line: provide the user with as much information as possible, use visual cues (size, colour, position) to prioritize, and have trust that they will pick out what they want. Providing them with less information so as to lead them by the nose down your little trail insults their intelligence and human abilities.
In his "Triumph of the Nerds" book over a decade back. I don't have a copy handy so won't attempt to quote, but the upshot was that your R&D, your patents, your general technological superiority, does NOT depend on how well most of your kids do in science & math.
They depend on how well your top 1% of kids do in science and math at the post-secondary, and especially post-graduate, level.
Not to mention, as others have posted, how many of the top 1% of people around the world flock to your nation to do their post-secondary and grad work, and stay to work in private R&D shops and startups.
Oh, and dropping a few percent of a $500B military budget on R&D, those tens of billions of government subsidy of high-tech research, they kind of help too.
So, frankly, you can ignore those poor students. Unless you want them as informed voters or something, or useful as everyday technicians, engineers, MDs etc - for that you might want to do some better science education.
Almost all the replies to my post have been answered, but I wouldn't mind rubbing it in a bit more:
- Yes, the repair kids had help. Of course. How many videos are there out there of kids replacing the motherboard of other laptops, with or without help? I've never spoken to a member of the Calgary Unix Users Group who's replaced his laptop's motherboard. (Probably somebody has, but it just isn't common).
- More recharge options = better, even if you are in the US. How many kids are responsible enough to charge up their laptop every night? You can't get them to leave their shoes near the door. If the "charger" is a few ounces and can be used in the schoolyard, come on, that's a plus anywhere.
- I did not claim that Windows was unable to teach primary-school kids, of course it can. (Probably less well than "Sugar", which is designed for it, but that's unproven). I only noted that the "Windows advantage" of being standard business software is NOT an advantage in primary school.
I don't think that $75 (which is a minimum, most of the commercial products are more like $300, thus over $110 more) is a "small" added cost. The budgets tend to be fixed, so even if they are buying a $250 alternative, they will be getting 25% fewer machines. It's the old Windows-vs-Unix question, I'm afraid, this time biting Windows back. It isn't whether 900MHz is more horsepower than 433MHz, it's whether 433MHz is "good enough" to teach kids 5-11 to do reading, writing and arithmetic. And quite a lot more.
Three socks is more than two...but I only need two.
Many reviewers unconnected with the OLPC project would take issue with the notion that any other product has a better cost/value ratio. The review by WIRED contrasting the XO (OLPC's laptop) with the competitor "Intel Classmate" had the headline "One Looks Like a Toy, the Other Acts Like One":
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/04/intel_olpc_smac.html
A few reviews have found the opposite, but a common criterion is self-fulfilling: that running Windows and Office is a killer feature because it instructs the kids in the "software standards" of business. That's relevant for teaching "computers for business" but not relevant for using the computer to teach reading, arithmetic, history, geometry, etc.
Especially for primary-school levels, the target market.
Bottom line: the XO has half the horsepower and Flash drive, the same RAM, comparable screen, except in sunlight where it has the unique, power-saving, read-by-reflection trick that'll be a killer app in some locations. It has a long list of recharge options, for the Classmate only standard power will do. It has a a wider WiFi range and the network-extending "mesh" trick; the sealed-membrane keyboard makes it less typeable but more rugged. And the XO is at least $75 cheaper. And greener, when you're producing a billion of them. Whoops, forgot to mention the youtube video of an 8 and 10-year-old replacing the motherboard using only a screwdriver:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pus_fA1Tv9w
Particularly for primary grades, the XO has a lot of value-for-money to offer.
And it's the opposition that has the money to hire lobbyists. OLPC is the non-profit, so not much motivation to push them where they don't work or aren't wanted.
They listened in on your phone calls without a warrant, and giving them amnesty for it is being seriously discussed.
That about establishes the principle that it's their network, not yours, and the moment you put your traffic on it, that's also theirs, to review and pass judgment on, and approve.
Or not.
Isn't it nice that they plan to do it "politely", though? That should count for something.
The strategy:
http://www.nten.org/sites/nten/files/Sustainable%20Computing_0.pdf
Seminar about it:
http://www.nten.org/events/webinar/2006/04/21/sustainable-computing-for-developing-countries
Summary: Intel's "Emerging Market Platform Group" details several computers they've developed that are targeted at the poor in various ways: small laptops, cybercafe machines, school machines, etc.
The document dates to 2005. Intel did not discover this market because of the OLPC project, they have been pursuing it for years. Education is just one of the markets they are pursuing in the developing world. OLPC is obviously in the way of the education area marketing strategy, and so they tried undercutting them, then joining them, and now they're back to undercutting again.
The ethical concern here is not competition per se - its that private companies can "market" in ways that a non-profit project cannot: ways that involve special forms of "persuasion" for the purchasing bureaucrats of developing nation's educational institutions. It's not about the poor buying either product directly, it's about their public servants picking one product over another based on, ah, marketing techniques, rather than measurable cost/benefit ratios.
$239/$188 = 27% higher. If the Classmate lasts 27% longer than the OLPC in field conditions, or delivers 27% more educational value in some way, well and good. But I haven't seen that independent study. I suspect, neither have the department heads that have picked it. Indeed, I kind of suspect they've seen a highly-biased, very slick presentation, while lunching on chicken cordon bleu.
OK, my New Year's Resolution is 1920x1200.
I swear, no more fiddling around with 4:3 aspect ratios of the past. The CRT hits the junk pile in 2004, replaced by LCD, so help me.
It'll be a few years more before you see a projector that doesn't do VGA. If you have room & money for only one output, you go with the most popular one. DVI-only would have cost me a couple of presentations of the half-dozen I've done on it.
I "reviewed" this in a presentation to my local Unix User Group, whole presentation with many pix at:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/eeepc/
of which my favourite is my own "external mod" for it, that I keep the machine, mini-mouse, spare Ethernet cord and some USB keys all in a cookie tin:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/eeepc/009_eee_armored.html
that *still* takes up little enough room in my pack that it can go anywhere, whether I know I'll need it or not.
But as slide #5 notes, the killer app for me is that I can give presentations with it. I can do that with a regular laptop, too, but this one's just 3X as easy to lug through the whole nightmare that is air travel in the 21st century. This is a combination of the hardware having a VGA-out and video signal up to 1600x1200 if needed, and that OpenOffice does Powerpoint files just fine these days. Sometimes I have to adjust a few font sizes, took about a half hour to check through 30 slides.
Oh, I know that Linux does run on mainframes (and digital picture frames and supercomputers, and...) but I don't think it ever came within two country miles of dominating over installs of VM and MVS.
The "Year of the Linux Desktop" generally referred, IMHO, to Linux attaining if not dominance (yeah, right) then a respectable enough market share to be in the news, like Mac. For which 10% is minimal and 20% better.
As to mobiles having many non-Linux OS's, true enough, and my apologies for not writing "mostly Linux or BSD, what else?". I think a lot of those proprietary little gadget OSs are in some part BSD code that can be so used.
And whatever they are, it points to an appliance market that won't have a dominant (near) monopolist for the main platform...but across the industry basic knowledge of Linux and/or BSD is crucial to getting a job with anybody...or getting the most out of your product as a consumer.
Now, the "Linux Desktop" fantasists can finally let it go. There will be no "year of the Linux desktop", just as there will be no "year of the Linux mainframe".
Like the $1,000,000 "mainframe", the DEC $100,000 "minicomputer", and the Sun $10,000 Unix "workstation", each major generation had its most-popular software environment, the one with highest network effects.
Pushing for a change in the desktop from Windows to Mac or Linux is, in 10 years, going to seem like striving to continue the VMS vs Unix wars on the VAX platform.
What 2008, 2009, and 2010 are going to be are the "years where appliances took over half the desktop functions" - you still want a big monitor and ergo keyboard to Photoshop, do development of web pages and code, and so on. But people sitting right at their desktop will whip out their paperback-sized appliance to do E-mail and chat, because that's where their communication apps live.
And, yes, those new appliances will mostly run Linux. What else?
All the hot new developers and innovative companies are not going to hogtie themselves to proprietary platforms like Windows and Mac; they've tossed themselves out of the running by their lack of freedom. They can put out their own product entries, sure -- but as Bill Joy said, most of the smart people in the world don't work for you.
Well, it wasn't what I'd imagined, some kind of forum with Prentice up front of an
/. about 11 AM), a few
audience, taking questions.
It was an Xmas party, I think mostly with his supporters.
However, it was clear many others were there to talk copyright, (some "We Demand Fair Use"
posters left out in the hall.) and people were more or
less lined up to have a few minutes talk with him, and Prentice was taking them all on
at arm's length, eyeball-to-eyeball. Everybody was polite.
So we went with that, too. Four of us showed up. We waited in the (very small) room
where people were talking to him, listened in on some young creative-content people
talking to him about the same stuff.
Then he turned to me, I introduced us, handed him the note with eight names on it, and
summarized (even further) the its-bad-for-industry-itself arguments about radio and the
VCR. He engaged with that, asked several questions, we had a real discussion. He
wasn't spouting industry talking points. And he said we (and Prof. Geist) hadn't read
the legislation yet. So I just phrased it as "there's a broad concern in the land that
there's going to be legislation that only defends the rights of copyright holders and
not the public ones". Etc.
I expressed concern that if we cripple our industry with bad legislation, people may start
making choices to buy from other countries, say maybe Bollywood will start making English movies
and with studios that don't use DRM. "Canada, the US, and Europe aren't the whole world
any more". He asked something amounting to, "why not let the market decide", and I grinned to
make it a joke (sort of), saying "we'll fight them on the beaches and in the streets, but I'd rather
fight them on the beaches now so that is isn't on the streets a decade away - head it off in
legislation before the market loses billions". Or something like that, probably even less clear.
One great bit at the end is that he asked how we distinguished between a $5 CD and $1500
CD of Photoshop. I felt like thanking him for raising the subject. I said, we don't - and it was the software
vendors with $1500 to lose that gave up on DRM twenty years ago, not worth the lost
customers.
He nodded, said "thanks", and we were done. The "threat" part was left on the paper and didn't cloud the Xmas
party...but it's in his pocket. Message delivered! Hand delivered, to the Minister
for Industry.
So, though we just had 3 hours to pull an effort together (I read this on
CUUG members did their bit for copyright reform.
There hasn't been time to make this an "official" move of the Calgary Unix Users Group, but a number of group members are planning to show up at Prentice's office at 2:30 PM.
My proposal is to deliver one message and have everybody just walk out without asking questions or getting into debate. We'll leave behind a printed copy with names, addresses, phone numbers on it of people who couldn't be there. It's not a "petition", its just a threat. (Why mess around.) The proposed text I posted at the CUUG mailing list is:
Mr. Prentice, my companions and I are members or friends of the Calgary Unix Users Group,
basically an organization of mostly middle-aged computer professionals that operate and
program the kind of servers that run large corporations and the Internet itself. As
members of the high-tech industry, we have been monitoring the copyright debate for
over a decade now and we are all convinced that most industry-backed copyright
legislation is bad for the industry itself.
The same kind of people opposed radio 80 years ago because it 'gave away free music' and
the VCR 25 years ago when Jack Valenti infamously described it as being to Hollywood
what the Boston Strangler was to women. Your proposed legislation could easily damage
both hi-tech and artistic content industries alike as much as the proposed laws against
VCRs and radio would have if legislators of those times had been foolish enough to
enact them.
We see it as our duty as citizens, therefore, to let you know that if anything remotely
resembling this legislation is passed by this government that we will have to cast
aside all our former political preferences in favour of ending conservative party rule.
We are not talking about changing our votes. We are talking about donating to your strongest
opponents, fund-raising for those opponents, working for those opponents. Your own seat
here in Calgary is no-doubt safe, so we as rational engineers will of course devote our
efforts to seats where the conservative party is weakest. At our age and income, we can
simply afford to travel to those ridings at election times and devote a few vacation days to the
noble cause of firing you, if you do not reconsider this ill-advised legislation.
Thank you for your attention.
>> There's an argument to be made about the future careers of the crews being jeopardized by damaging the revenue stream of movie production as a whole, but that's about as far as it goes.
Yeah, that WAS my argument, and it goes far enough - in the long run.
It's the difference between the immediate tactical question of "what's the direct effect at the moment" and the moral question of "what if EVERYBODY did this, for all time to come?" ASUS actions are hardly about to destroy Free & Open Source Software. But people jump on them because of the moral issue - if everybody did it all the time, most people would eventually stop writing free software, because it would just be giving away work to big companies that gave nothing back.
And if everybody pirated every movie, eventually, the industry would grind down, if not to a halt, to a far lower level. Music can now be made in $10,000 basement studios, and musicians can work part time and have day jobs and make money from performance. None of that really applies to movie-making. Well, you'd see a lot of little indie dramas and comedies shot on HDTV on weekends with few props or sets, I guess, but the last special-effects SF movie in history would already be in the can.
For any one act of piracy, you're right, there's no effect on the crew, or anybody but the investors, a bunch of rich people nobody will ever have sympathy for. But in the "big picture", those investors and producers just act as money-aggregators, assembling the money paid by society for the last couple of movies into the salaries and costs for the *next* one. When they lose their business model, so does everybody they cut cheques for.
Thanks for using the word "propaganda", though...here I am, just a single person making a posting to a forum, and I get accused of being some kind of entertainment-industrial complex. I now feel very powerful and important.
Sorry, if you want to violate copyright terms and get some "benefit of the doubt" out of Slashdot, you have to give away for free the work of a team of hundreds of camera, sound, lighting, carpentry and special effects crews, artists, and so forth, who dropped $100M worth of work on an SF movie. Then you can have benefit of the doubt.
But if you fail in the first month of your rushed-to-market product to post source code and hurt the feelings of authors who aren't getting any money for it either way, man, there will be no mercy. Had they the power, you'd be sent to Antarctica in a Speedo.
(That argument's a two-edged sword, of course: since the poverty-stricken software authors ask only for respect and academic cooperation, it IS kicking-down-at-the-weak to abuse their rights.)
This whole argument's already in the comments below the original blog post, by the way. The comments run about 4:1 in favour of giving ASUS that benefit of the doubt. Also common in those postings: please don't imagine we "fans" are doing anything more than offering BotD to a company that put out a cooool product. Even we concede they're the usual bunch of hard-eyed conscience-free businessmen with no inherent respect for the GPL, and do need to be held to account, or they'll never "get around" to that posting.
When an AI can mimic *this* aspect of human intelligence and decide to risk a change from "well-off and greatly respected", to being shut in a concrete box, all for the greater good of its fellows, THEN I'll be impressed with AI.
Until then, its just a glorified calculator brute-forcing its way through a mechanical computation, as impressive as a newspaper press making 500,000 copies of todays celebrity news faster than 50,000 human scribes.
Power Corrupts.
Monopoly may provide "absolute power" (in a given market) but having billions and billions of dollars and enormous industry influence is quite a lot of power, certainly enough to corrupt.
At some point, people start saying "but we can get away with it" about some dirty move that will create higher profits.
At which point, the old "don't be evil" thing is just...corrupted.