I assume by MacWorld in Jp they'll have released updated towers. My guess is they'll be G5 based (whether that's the G4++ renamed as the G5 or the other silicon Moto/IBM have been working on remains to be seen).
If they don't have these in place by then--with a nise Ghz+ clock speed to go with them--then I think you're right; they'll lose a lot of profit margin from creaming their high end sales.
... but I was expecting a little bit more. Something truely groundbreaking.
The iMac update is pretty cool (if not a little funky looking). iPhoto gets downloaded when I get home (and it gives me an excuse to go buy a camera... anyone have any advice on a good digital camera in the $300-$400 range?). The new iBook seems to be just a bigger version (no G4). Nice, but again nothing truely groundbreaking.
At least the Quicktime streaming was fairly smooth. I expected them to get hammered. It seemed to have held up pretty well.
Just finished watching the Keynote. A little disappointing on the whole (the new iMac is sorta cool) but one bright spot was iPhoto. Very, very slick looking; very, very free. Of course, if you don't already have an OS X machine handy to run it on then free becomes very, very expensive very, very fast.
To me it looks more like a Universal Remote / Terminal / Control Every God Damn Thing In The House than a dedicated game machine. Somehow I doubt Nintindo has much to worry about. It sounds like the form factor is going to be more tablet like, and that's not the most ergonomic thing to play portable games on (not to mention its going to be huge compared to GBA... Etch-a-sketch huge). And its not like you're going to be able to drop $100 for one for each of the kids. Plus, how happy are you going to be when you lose some functionality of your MS TV Thingy when the nipper's taken its remote control to school to play a little Halo during his lunch hour?
Re:No, Region-2 PAL disks fail on a NTSC TV in USA
on
Emigrating DVD's?
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· Score: 2
Oh, also forgot:
DISKS CONTAIN PAL CONTENT, OR NTSC CONTENT, OR BOTH. A PAL DISK WILL NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY ON A NTSC-ONLY AMERICAN TELEVISION SET.
Is there any way of checking what's on a DVD disc (in term of encoding)? I have some region 2 DVDs that I would think would be PAL only (frightfully british content, never sold here) that plays fine on my region 1 DVD/NTSC only TV.
Re:No, Region-2 PAL disks fail on a NTSC TV in USA
on
Emigrating DVD's?
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm.. checked your links and stand corrected. But it does bring up some issues though:
Why have region encoding at all? If having different encoding systems was good enough to keep markets seperated with video tapes, then why not do the same thing with DVDs. Since the DVD consortium (sp) has the right to dictate what goes in a licencee's machine (and therefor give them the right to display the DVD logo) why not just mandate "DVD players sold in PAL countries can only show PAL DVDs, DVD players in NTSC countries can only show NTSC DVDs, etc." Granted, there will be those manufacturers who tell 'em to "get bent" and do it anyway, but they're the same manufacturers who are telling them to "get bent" by making region free VCRs.
Also, the FAQ mentioned that most NTSC DVD players don't have PAL converters, but all of mine have played region 2 PAL DVDs with no problem. Granted, a few DVD players does not a sample set make, but I've yet to find any problems.
You wrote: Most DVD players are NTSC/PAL/SECAM agnostic-
Isn't that pretty much what I said?
Nothing is encoded on the DVD as NTSC or PAL or SECAM.
Re:NTSC issues to consider???
on
Emigrating DVD's?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't experience any problems when playing off these NTSC-DVDs, so I guess the player has some sort of built in conversion-system.
My understanding is (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) but the actual image data on a DVD is system independent. Nothing is encoded on the DVD as NTSC or PAL or SECAM. Its the player itself that takes the MPEG stream and converts it to the appropriate signal, thus the reason for region encoding in the first place. Back with VCRs the movie studios had market seperation because the "data" on a tape is tied to the system its recorded in. This all goes away with DVDs (and is IMO one of its strengths) but, of course, removed the barriers between each of the TV systems. Region encoding is a way of artifically keeping those barriers up.
I feel the orig poster's pain. I'm heading back from the UK tomorrow and I've purchased a few Region 2 DVDs that you cannot get in Region 1 versions (Billy Conelly vids). The new iBook's DVD-ROM drive gets a firmware update when I get home to make it region free.
The orig. arguement was whether the common utility companies--including telecom companies--were "Natural" monopolies. My arguement was "no". They do not fit the definition: i.e. they come about simply from the free market.
Now, notice I said that MS is *closer* to a natural monopoly, and that they did illegal stuff. I wasn't saying that the entire reason they have achieved a virtual lock on the desktop was via "Natural" means. Yes they manipulated the market, but they didn't achieve market domination simply because of that. There were market oriented reasons why MS/DOS & Windows became the dominient platform for desktop computers which include avaliablilty of apps, familiarity of the OS, etc. Its a virtious cycle. More desirable apps draw in more users which make the platform desirable to develop more apps on.
Now, MS was found guilty of abusing thier monopoly to try to keep anyone else from honing in on thier turf and bully thier way into other markets, but it still doesn't change the fact that a lot of the reason that they are in the postition they are today has nothing to do with their abuse of their position.
I'm no fan of MS, but I'm also not going to claim that EVERYTHING they've achieved have been thru illegal means.
If you read the above post you would have seen that I said they also did illegal crap as well... but the fact of the matter is they didn't get where they were simply by illegal means. Natural selection in the market place helped a whole bunch.
Its still not natural. A natural monopoly is one that happens due to market forces. For instance 5 different companies/products started in the product space and for whatever reason one came out on top (the Microsoft case).
The thing you bring up--cost of infrastructure--is exactly why electrical, water, etc are not natural monopolies. 1st, municipalities deemed them (correctly IMHO) utilities that needed to be available to everyone (i.e. a company couldn't pick and choose areas to serve to maximize profits). Thus, the cost of total coverage vs return on investment is (or at least was at the time of conception) so prohibitive that no market would have sprung up naturally in the first place. That's why a monopoly was created by the gov't. An exchange of a monopoly over a local market in return for total (or at least near) total coverage of that market. These are not natural by any stretch of the imagination. They were created by local municipalities to serve a purpose.
Now, I'm not saying that such monopolies are necc. a bad thing, but they're not necc. good either. For instance, changes in technology have allowed for competition to exist in the electrical utility marketplace. Penn. is one pretty good example of that. Also, I have a hard time seeing how cable TV is a necc. utility. Technology has advanced where new "cable" companies could deliver thier service without having to lay so many wires (fixed wireless, etc) but are hamstrung by local laws / contracts that protect the incumbant cable companies.
The utility sector of the economy is definitely governed by the theory of natural monopoly, regardless of the regulatory enviroment.
A natural monopoly comes to be when the market decides that a single product is more advantageous than a diverse one. The OS example is a pretty good one. There were advantages from application development, training, standardization of hardware on having a common operating system, and MS took advantage of it.
I have a hard time seeing where in a totally open market only one electrical company would be left standing. I do see where there would probably be two or three, each doing deals with large communties/companies, laying lines out to those that are profitable, thus leaving those who are too small or too remote to be profitable shit out of luck. Municipal planners saw this too, and thus traded an open market for a highly regulated one that serviced the entire communtiy. This is by no means natural. Like I said, I'm not saying its a bad thing, but it isn't a natural monopoly.
It doesn't mean that Verizon is right in wanting to squash all competition, but there are things called natural monopolies.
Your electric company is one. Water services.
Uh, no. Electric and water companies are NOT natural monopolies. They are creations of the state. The gov't decided that they were essential utilities that required a huge capital investment. Thus they'd grant a monopoly: they'd provide the exclusive rights to a market in exchange for total coverage of that market.
A natural monopoly is one that comes about in the marketplace not by gov't intervention but simply thru market forces. Actually, Microsoft is closer to a natural monopoly than the Electric company. Think the reverse of the chicken and egg problem: the more popular a platform is the more economic sense it makes to develop software for it, and the more desirable software available for a platform the more appealing it comes to the buying population. Now, I'm not saying MS hasn't done illegal things, but I am saying that Windows on the desktop is more of a natural monopoly than your electric company.
In fact, sometimes it's BETTER to have a monopoly than not. Look at the mess in California's power when they tried to introduce competition.
One datapoint does not make a trend. Penn. has a deregulated market and it has worked a hell of a lot better than Cali.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a skunk works somewhere inside apple with this already being worked on, but not because Apple is all of the sudden going to become a software company.
Apparently Jobs was mighty pissed at Motorola because the PowerPC chips weren't scaling (in terms of Mzh) as quickly as the x86 machines. There were rumors that if things continued at that rate that Apple would switch its machines over to an x86 arch. (with maybe Transmetta for laptops). Now, assuming that was true I wouldn't have expected the new systems to have been standard x86 machines. I would suspect they would have been incompatible with WinTel boxen. Apple is a hardware/software company and would want to control the hardware platform as well.
Since it looks like Motorola has solved some of the speed issues (the new G5s are supposed to be blazing if the Reg is to be believed) I doubt any x86 port of aqua would ever see the light of day.
If you've ever read Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" then OS X is just as he describes BeOS: it has a very powerful core, but also has an incredible UI on top of it that harnesses it. For the average Joe you should never need to drop to the command line. If you didn't care about such things you'd never know you were running *BSD. Its a computer your granny could use.
On the other hand if you do want to tap the OS's power you can drop to the command line and type your little heart out with all the standard *nix tools.
I use NT at work, and run Linux (with KDE and GNOME depending on which way the wind blows each day) and Win 98 at home and I must say in terms of the UI OS X is a huge leap ahead of the aforementioned systems.
One last note is that if, for some reason, you just have to have Word and other MS Office products, they are all there and produced by a totally seperate group at Microsoft.
I must say IE for Mac OS X is a damn site nicer than IE for Windows (use Moz on my NT box at work). It seems to be cleaner and a hell of a lot more useful (the Fav, History, Search, Scrapbook, etc Tabs... they may be in the Win32 version but damned if I've ever seen them).
Amazing what happenes when you focus on making a good product instead of seeing how deep you can bury it into your OS.
Re:all I wanted was a frickin "Laser"
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 1
"BZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!
Thank you for playing. Don Pardo, tell 'em what he's going home with."
Nope, the karma cap is a cap. I've had cases where, at 50, I made a post, got modded up to five, then was modded down to 4 and my Mod total was 49. 50 is the hard cap.
My point was more theoretical than what happens today. I know that both RR and the now defunct @Home were pretty much open. My worry is that they just may close them. As long as they keep them open and allow you to use it as a bare bones ISP (and not force you to use AOL or MNS or any other "content" service) then the "next killer app" for broadband (whatever it may be) has a much better chance of actually making it into existance.
the government's sole involvement at all is it had the right to appoint members of a group of governors, who are chosen apolitically. The BBC's independence is considered important.
And I argue that the Beeb is closer to the Gov't than most independent companies. They held the exclusive rights to broadcasting in England until about 40 years ago. On paper it may be independent, but for the sake of what we're taking about its a lot closer to its gov't than the likes of XM Radio.
This is about the British Radio licence, not about the TV licence.
True, but its still analogous to the system for radio 40 years ago, except now they never got rid of the TV license when they allowed independent TV into the market. The British pay the TV license for the same reasons they paid for Radio: as you said IF THEY DIDN'T WANT TO PAY IT, they didn't have to, but they wouldn't be allowed to receive radio either. They lose the right to own a radio outright. You may technically have a choice, but for all intents and purposes unless you want to live in a cave you pay. It is similar today. You don't pay the license, you can't own a TV, regardless of whether you watch BBC or not.
And the radio licence was abolished once non-BBC radio channels became available in the UK.
In which lies the problem. The BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcast. You either pay and listen to any radio (even if you wanted to listen to foreign stations from across the channel) or you didn't pay and listened to nothing. Yup, I was wrong calling it a tax (I always thought it was. The damn bill showed up and the gov't would throw you in the clink if you didn't pay) but for all intents and purposes it was. Own a radio, pay the licensing fee. Sure, you're paying for the BBC's content, but by gov't mandate it was the only content you could receive from British soil. Not exactly the most free of markets.
Which was my point. People in the UK didn't pay for a radio license for the same reasons that people are going to pay for XM radio here. There, the only choice was either pay the license or lose the right to hear ANY radio (which was the prominent means of mass communications of the time).
I wouldn't say that, the annual ~$160 (tv) licence fee isn't exactly worth taking to the streets in protest.
I wasn't claiming that they were rioting in the streets, but everyone I knew always had a grumble about it.
Now, I agree (like I said above) that the $160 pays for some damn good programming (both TV and Radio). I've always like the Beeb (and stream it here in the states). But that's beside the point. I was simply saying you couldn't equate people in Britian paying for TV (and Radio) because, for all intents and purposes they have to, with people signing up for XM Radio here in the states.
It isn't a tax. Taxation raises money for government.
My point was that while it isn't a tax in name, it is essentially a tax. If you own a TV, you have to pay it. You cannot claim "Hey, I just watch ITV" and get out of paying. Thus, I find it more akin to a property tax than simply a subscription fee.
No, people in Britain paid for radio broadcasts because they wanted to receive them. If you didn't want to receive radio, you didn't have to pay a penny. Which brings us back to the original point.
Again, not quite. My understanding is the money you pay goes to the BBC, which is a gov't entity. (I honestly don't know if any TV licence goes to ITV or not). It is not analagous to Cable. If I don't want to watch cable, I do not pay cable rates, I don't get access to cable programming. On the other hand even if I do not want to watch the BBC by simply owning a TV I still have to pay the TV licence.
Again, this is more akin to a property tax than a subscription service.
So people in Britain did, indeed, pay for radio directly rather than indirectly through higher priced groceries, etc.
And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now).
Now, I won't go into an arguement about the quality of Auntie Beeb's programming (I think its top notch, sans maybe the Archers) and if they cut the free web broadcasts would probably pay for thier service, but that's a different story.
People in Britain pay for broadcasts (be it radio or TV) because they have to by law (call it what you want, it is essentially a tax).
Slashdot Mirror
I assume by MacWorld in Jp they'll have released updated towers. My guess is they'll be G5 based (whether that's the G4++ renamed as the G5 or the other silicon Moto/IBM have been working on remains to be seen).
If they don't have these in place by then--with a nise Ghz+ clock speed to go with them--then I think you're right; they'll lose a lot of profit margin from creaming their high end sales.
... but I was expecting a little bit more. Something truely groundbreaking.
The iMac update is pretty cool (if not a little funky looking). iPhoto gets downloaded when I get home (and it gives me an excuse to go buy a camera... anyone have any advice on a good digital camera in the $300-$400 range?). The new iBook seems to be just a bigger version (no G4). Nice, but again nothing truely groundbreaking.
At least the Quicktime streaming was fairly smooth. I expected them to get hammered. It seemed to have held up pretty well.
iPhoto from Apple (released today).
Just finished watching the Keynote. A little disappointing on the whole (the new iMac is sorta cool) but one bright spot was iPhoto. Very, very slick looking; very, very free. Of course, if you don't already have an OS X machine handy to run it on then free becomes very, very expensive very, very fast.
To me it looks more like a Universal Remote / Terminal / Control Every God Damn Thing In The House than a dedicated game machine. Somehow I doubt Nintindo has much to worry about. It sounds like the form factor is going to be more tablet like, and that's not the most ergonomic thing to play portable games on (not to mention its going to be huge compared to GBA... Etch-a-sketch huge). And its not like you're going to be able to drop $100 for one for each of the kids. Plus, how happy are you going to be when you lose some functionality of your MS TV Thingy when the nipper's taken its remote control to school to play a little Halo during his lunch hour?
Oh, also forgot:
DISKS CONTAIN PAL CONTENT, OR NTSC CONTENT, OR BOTH. A PAL DISK WILL NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY ON A NTSC-ONLY AMERICAN TELEVISION SET.
Is there any way of checking what's on a DVD disc (in term of encoding)? I have some region 2 DVDs that I would think would be PAL only (frightfully british content, never sold here) that plays fine on my region 1 DVD/NTSC only TV.
Hmmm.. checked your links and stand corrected. But it does bring up some issues though:
Why have region encoding at all? If having different encoding systems was good enough to keep markets seperated with video tapes, then why not do the same thing with DVDs. Since the DVD consortium (sp) has the right to dictate what goes in a licencee's machine (and therefor give them the right to display the DVD logo) why not just mandate "DVD players sold in PAL countries can only show PAL DVDs, DVD players in NTSC countries can only show NTSC DVDs, etc." Granted, there will be those manufacturers who tell 'em to "get bent" and do it anyway, but they're the same manufacturers who are telling them to "get bent" by making region free VCRs.
Also, the FAQ mentioned that most NTSC DVD players don't have PAL converters, but all of mine have played region 2 PAL DVDs with no problem. Granted, a few DVD players does not a sample set make, but I've yet to find any problems.
The Rooster.
You wrote: Most DVD players are NTSC/PAL/SECAM agnostic-
Isn't that pretty much what I said?
Nothing is encoded on the DVD as NTSC or PAL or SECAM.
I don't experience any problems when playing off these NTSC-DVDs, so I guess the player has some sort of built in conversion-system.
My understanding is (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) but the actual image data on a DVD is system independent. Nothing is encoded on the DVD as NTSC or PAL or SECAM. Its the player itself that takes the MPEG stream and converts it to the appropriate signal, thus the reason for region encoding in the first place. Back with VCRs the movie studios had market seperation because the "data" on a tape is tied to the system its recorded in. This all goes away with DVDs (and is IMO one of its strengths) but, of course, removed the barriers between each of the TV systems. Region encoding is a way of artifically keeping those barriers up.
I feel the orig poster's pain. I'm heading back from the UK tomorrow and I've purchased a few Region 2 DVDs that you cannot get in Region 1 versions (Billy Conelly vids). The new iBook's DVD-ROM drive gets a firmware update when I get home to make it region free.
The orig. arguement was whether the common utility companies--including telecom companies--were "Natural" monopolies. My arguement was "no". They do not fit the definition: i.e. they come about simply from the free market.
Now, notice I said that MS is *closer* to a natural monopoly, and that they did illegal stuff. I wasn't saying that the entire reason they have achieved a virtual lock on the desktop was via "Natural" means. Yes they manipulated the market, but they didn't achieve market domination simply because of that. There were market oriented reasons why MS/DOS & Windows became the dominient platform for desktop computers which include avaliablilty of apps, familiarity of the OS, etc. Its a virtious cycle. More desirable apps draw in more users which make the platform desirable to develop more apps on.
Now, MS was found guilty of abusing thier monopoly to try to keep anyone else from honing in on thier turf and bully thier way into other markets, but it still doesn't change the fact that a lot of the reason that they are in the postition they are today has nothing to do with their abuse of their position.
I'm no fan of MS, but I'm also not going to claim that EVERYTHING they've achieved have been thru illegal means.
If you read the above post you would have seen that I said they also did illegal crap as well... but the fact of the matter is they didn't get where they were simply by illegal means. Natural selection in the market place helped a whole bunch.
In that case, all monopolies based on copyright or patent rights are by definition not natural.
Not natural in the economic definition of "natural monopoly", no.
Natural and un-natural monopoly do not imply good or bad.. simply how they came into existance.
Its still not natural. A natural monopoly is one that happens due to market forces. For instance 5 different companies/products started in the product space and for whatever reason one came out on top (the Microsoft case).
The thing you bring up--cost of infrastructure--is exactly why electrical, water, etc are not natural monopolies. 1st, municipalities deemed them (correctly IMHO) utilities that needed to be available to everyone (i.e. a company couldn't pick and choose areas to serve to maximize profits). Thus, the cost of total coverage vs return on investment is (or at least was at the time of conception) so prohibitive that no market would have sprung up naturally in the first place. That's why a monopoly was created by the gov't. An exchange of a monopoly over a local market in return for total (or at least near) total coverage of that market. These are not natural by any stretch of the imagination. They were created by local municipalities to serve a purpose.
Now, I'm not saying that such monopolies are necc. a bad thing, but they're not necc. good either. For instance, changes in technology have allowed for competition to exist in the electrical utility marketplace. Penn. is one pretty good example of that. Also, I have a hard time seeing how cable TV is a necc. utility. Technology has advanced where new "cable" companies could deliver thier service without having to lay so many wires (fixed wireless, etc) but are hamstrung by local laws / contracts that protect the incumbant cable companies.
The utility sector of the economy is definitely governed by the theory of natural monopoly, regardless of the regulatory enviroment.
A natural monopoly comes to be when the market decides that a single product is more advantageous than a diverse one. The OS example is a pretty good one. There were advantages from application development, training, standardization of hardware on having a common operating system, and MS took advantage of it.
I have a hard time seeing where in a totally open market only one electrical company would be left standing. I do see where there would probably be two or three, each doing deals with large communties/companies, laying lines out to those that are profitable, thus leaving those who are too small or too remote to be profitable shit out of luck. Municipal planners saw this too, and thus traded an open market for a highly regulated one that serviced the entire communtiy. This is by no means natural. Like I said, I'm not saying its a bad thing, but it isn't a natural monopoly.
It doesn't mean that Verizon is right in wanting to squash all competition, but there are things called natural monopolies.
Your electric company is one. Water services.
Uh, no. Electric and water companies are NOT natural monopolies. They are creations of the state. The gov't decided that they were essential utilities that required a huge capital investment. Thus they'd grant a monopoly: they'd provide the exclusive rights to a market in exchange for total coverage of that market.
A natural monopoly is one that comes about in the marketplace not by gov't intervention but simply thru market forces. Actually, Microsoft is closer to a natural monopoly than the Electric company. Think the reverse of the chicken and egg problem: the more popular a platform is the more economic sense it makes to develop software for it, and the more desirable software available for a platform the more appealing it comes to the buying population. Now, I'm not saying MS hasn't done illegal things, but I am saying that Windows on the desktop is more of a natural monopoly than your electric company.
In fact, sometimes it's BETTER to have a monopoly than not. Look at the mess in California's power when they tried to introduce competition.
One datapoint does not make a trend. Penn. has a deregulated market and it has worked a hell of a lot better than Cali.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a skunk works somewhere inside apple with this already being worked on, but not because Apple is all of the sudden going to become a software company.
Apparently Jobs was mighty pissed at Motorola because the PowerPC chips weren't scaling (in terms of Mzh) as quickly as the x86 machines. There were rumors that if things continued at that rate that Apple would switch its machines over to an x86 arch. (with maybe Transmetta for laptops). Now, assuming that was true I wouldn't have expected the new systems to have been standard x86 machines. I would suspect they would have been incompatible with WinTel boxen. Apple is a hardware/software company and would want to control the hardware platform as well.
Since it looks like Motorola has solved some of the speed issues (the new G5s are supposed to be blazing if the Reg is to be believed) I doubt any x86 port of aqua would ever see the light of day.
If you've ever read Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" then OS X is just as he describes BeOS: it has a very powerful core, but also has an incredible UI on top of it that harnesses it. For the average Joe you should never need to drop to the command line. If you didn't care about such things you'd never know you were running *BSD. Its a computer your granny could use.
On the other hand if you do want to tap the OS's power you can drop to the command line and type your little heart out with all the standard *nix tools.
I use NT at work, and run Linux (with KDE and GNOME depending on which way the wind blows each day) and Win 98 at home and I must say in terms of the UI OS X is a huge leap ahead of the aforementioned systems.
One last note is that if, for some reason, you just have to have Word and other MS Office products, they are all there and produced by a totally seperate group at Microsoft.
I must say IE for Mac OS X is a damn site nicer than IE for Windows (use Moz on my NT box at work). It seems to be cleaner and a hell of a lot more useful (the Fav, History, Search, Scrapbook, etc Tabs... they may be in the Win32 version but damned if I've ever seen them).
Amazing what happenes when you focus on making a good product instead of seeing how deep you can bury it into your OS.
"BZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!
Thank you for playing. Don Pardo, tell 'em what he's going home with."
Nope, the karma cap is a cap. I've had cases where, at 50, I made a post, got modded up to five, then was modded down to 4 and my Mod total was 49. 50 is the hard cap.
My point was more theoretical than what happens today. I know that both RR and the now defunct @Home were pretty much open. My worry is that they just may close them. As long as they keep them open and allow you to use it as a bare bones ISP (and not force you to use AOL or MNS or any other "content" service) then the "next killer app" for broadband (whatever it may be) has a much better chance of actually making it into existance.
Yeah, they stink like French cheese this year.
Gotta support the boys though... been doing it for 20 years.
Yeah, I got that one wrong, although its still a lot cosier to the Gov't than the likes of ITV or networks here in the States.
The BBC is not a government entity
You're right, I stand corrected.. but...
the government's sole involvement at all is it had the right to appoint members of a group of governors, who are chosen apolitically. The BBC's independence is considered important.
And I argue that the Beeb is closer to the Gov't than most independent companies. They held the exclusive rights to broadcasting in England until about 40 years ago. On paper it may be independent, but for the sake of what we're taking about its a lot closer to its gov't than the likes of XM Radio.
This is about the British Radio licence, not about the TV licence.
True, but its still analogous to the system for radio 40 years ago, except now they never got rid of the TV license when they allowed independent TV into the market. The British pay the TV license for the same reasons they paid for Radio: as you said IF THEY DIDN'T WANT TO PAY IT, they didn't have to, but they wouldn't be allowed to receive radio either. They lose the right to own a radio outright. You may technically have a choice, but for all intents and purposes unless you want to live in a cave you pay. It is similar today. You don't pay the license, you can't own a TV, regardless of whether you watch BBC or not.
And the radio licence was abolished once non-BBC radio channels became available in the UK.
In which lies the problem. The BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcast. You either pay and listen to any radio (even if you wanted to listen to foreign stations from across the channel) or you didn't pay and listened to nothing. Yup, I was wrong calling it a tax (I always thought it was. The damn bill showed up and the gov't would throw you in the clink if you didn't pay) but for all intents and purposes it was. Own a radio, pay the licensing fee. Sure, you're paying for the BBC's content, but by gov't mandate it was the only content you could receive from British soil. Not exactly the most free of markets.
Which was my point. People in the UK didn't pay for a radio license for the same reasons that people are going to pay for XM radio here. There, the only choice was either pay the license or lose the right to hear ANY radio (which was the prominent means of mass communications of the time).
I wouldn't say that, the annual ~$160 (tv) licence fee isn't exactly worth taking to the streets in protest.
I wasn't claiming that they were rioting in the streets, but everyone I knew always had a grumble about it.
Now, I agree (like I said above) that the $160 pays for some damn good programming (both TV and Radio). I've always like the Beeb (and stream it here in the states). But that's beside the point. I was simply saying you couldn't equate people in Britian paying for TV (and Radio) because, for all intents and purposes they have to, with people signing up for XM Radio here in the states.
It isn't a tax. Taxation raises money for government.
My point was that while it isn't a tax in name, it is essentially a tax. If you own a TV, you have to pay it. You cannot claim "Hey, I just watch ITV" and get out of paying. Thus, I find it more akin to a property tax than simply a subscription fee.
No, people in Britain paid for radio broadcasts because they wanted to receive them. If you didn't want to receive radio, you didn't have to pay a penny. Which brings us back to the original point.
Again, not quite. My understanding is the money you pay goes to the BBC, which is a gov't entity. (I honestly don't know if any TV licence goes to ITV or not). It is not analagous to Cable. If I don't want to watch cable, I do not pay cable rates, I don't get access to cable programming. On the other hand even if I do not want to watch the BBC by simply owning a TV I still have to pay the TV licence.
Again, this is more akin to a property tax than a subscription service.
So people in Britain did, indeed, pay for radio directly rather than indirectly through higher priced groceries, etc.
And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now).
Now, I won't go into an arguement about the quality of Auntie Beeb's programming (I think its top notch, sans maybe the Archers) and if they cut the free web broadcasts would probably pay for thier service, but that's a different story.
People in Britain pay for broadcasts (be it radio or TV) because they have to by law (call it what you want, it is essentially a tax).