Another post rightly points out that being a monopolist is not on its face illegal but specific behaviours are. This is different than what I believe you are implying. In short, monopolies do a number of very harmful things:
1. Raise prices. (inevitable with SXm) 2. Reduce quantity available at a given price. 3. Eliminate the benefits of competition which are supposed to be things like lower prices, greater selection.
The Sales Department of any entertainment conglomerate will happily beat the "DRM is bad" drum because their job depends on it.
Meanwhile, executive management is doing everything in their power to maintain their distribution cartel. DRM serves their end game quite nicely thank you.
Consumers don't care and will accept their DRM schemes because they don't know any better. All the righteous outrage on./ amounts to absolutely nothing because nothing will ever be done by nearly all./er's. Most of us on./ know better but won't do a thing to improve the situation for the uninformed. Myself included.
Wikia search site uses something like this "automeritocracy" algorithm to guard the integrity of its results, it's imperative not to use an algorithm vulnerable to the hordes-of-phantom-users attack
That right there is a billion-dollar idea that I'm sure more than a small horde of devs are working on for themselves or for vulture capitalists.
Will Mr. Wales own the magic algorithm to use as he sees fit or what?
You and the moderators who blessed this rant are part of the problem.
We all have the tools to stop this. I can think of two right now: voting and legislation;
Go ahead, get involved in politics if you are so angry. We have a system. Learn it and use it. Other small groups have done so to great effect. Prohibition is one example. No gun-toting rants necessary. Not one.
I can't wait for the day when the RIAA goes back to what they started doing You will be waiting forever then.
When will artists start 1. Is a starving artist is going to bite pretty much the only hand that has the potential (note phrase carefully) of feeding them? The economics of being an independent artist are depressing. 2. There are bands doing this. I have a feeling you want the music to show up at Walmart/Worst Buy. RIAA members control retail outside of a handful of indie stores. No, they won't tollerate someone cutting into their business.
This form of cartelization can't last forever Yes, it has and it does. Music distribution is simply one of many cartels who have been prosecuted many times over in the U.S. to no effect.
Are these "early settlements" financially profitable for the RIAA? Yes. They've got a fleet of full-time lawyers who have probably turned this into a cookie-cutter operation with low paid admins doing most of the work. Strike fear into the consumer's heart and demand the highest price possible for their goods. Sounds like standard operating procedure for any business to me.
This issue's been around for years now and there's no coordinated political reply to any of it. No call to action, just moral outrage. I hope you feel better because it's only going to get worse unless _you_ do something about it.
I know people in the industry and they all tell me, without reservation, that some of the most creative accounting in the world happens in the entertainment industry. If you live anywhere near the Westside of Los Angeles it's easy to see there's a class of entertainment-folks doing quite well.
Or, let's take a look at the price of mega-corp sony. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SNE&t=5y Since stock prices are forward looking indicators of performance, I'd say entertainment is doing just fine considering the price hasn't gone down.
On the mega-software-corporation-industry side, they all talk a good anti-piracy game but everyone and their grandmother knows that users of stolen software are converted into legitimate users quite easily. Certainly much easier than going out and trying to find new customers. (Ask apple about what it takes to get users to switch)
For example, how much does Adobe care that Photochop is pirated? Very little actually. They get onwards of 80% of their Photochop sales in upgrades. I will be generous with adobe and estimate half or more of the upgrade sales are from people with legitimate licenses. The other half are finally making enough money to pay for a photochop license.
I would be very interested to find out how *this* specific story about Google and piracy got published. Discrediting Google seems to be the intent more than anything else.
Can be estimated, however I don't know what some of these costs are, so if some other/.er's could fill in the blanks, please help.
The cost of bringing ONE well-defined issue to court and seeing it all the way through to a verdict of some kind can be estimated at $200,000. Not SCO-style trawling, but one or two concrete issues mixed with the usual absurd claims that get thrown out.
What I want to know is an annual price range for Unix licenses/packages. Then, post the annual costs of some higher-end Oracle packages that probably run on a Unix. Finally, what's the cost of a Windows Server package with lots of CAL's and some support thrown in.
From those estimates you can get a good idea what they are asking for. Not too much, but certainly generating revenue for Microsoft off the normal sales accounting.
You've taken my initial assertion that free markets do not benefit what can be described as "common goods" with substantial scientific support. Biodiversity is a common good. An environment that is not substantially altered by human activity is another common good.
Instead, you introduce a new factor that has nothing to do with my initial assertion.
Please examine your logic carefully. I welcome discussion and debate when you are ready to debate the issue at hand, free markets do not have a mechanism for encouraging "common goods."
As much as/.'ers love to complain about how bad a software mono-culture is, the _entire_ agricultural community is operating under very similar conditions. The risks to our food production capabilities are extremely high.
While doomsday headlines right off the Weekly World News attract eyeballs, the reality is that this seed storage facility may be far more beneficial than most people realize.
It's been a while since I've done these calculations, but I think the present value of the so-called $25 million bounty is $6.2 million with the payment schedule given. That's what $25 million with the payments laid out as proposed is worth today at 4% return.
We don't pay anyone already producing lots of oxygen with their undeveloped lands, why would anyone buy the earth-saving properties of the as-yet unmade device?
Not only is the bounty $6.2 million, but the innovator doesn't appear to have any kind of way to sustain the earth-saving properities of this device.
This is an example of why we are in what most indicators suggest is a global warming scenario of our own making.
Despite what the popular political opinion attempts to have us believe, So-called "Free-markets" do not accomodate the health and general well-being of humans or their environment.
If it is so useless, then please pay Microsoft for the privilege to serve your porn and stop wasting your time trolling about how much Microsoft rulez.
This is an excellent example of how large and deep the cesspool is in government contracting.
The competitors intentionally draw out the certification process for the newcomer to literally exhauste them and drive the competition away. This is just one relatively small library/suite of applications. (albeit critical)
For any of you entrepreneurial developers thinking they're onto the the next great thing that gov'ts will buy, please consider this story carefully. A long career at the top of an agency you wish to pursue (nepotism) and a massive bankroll are material requirements to get any money out of gov't contracting.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of the process, but it's my understanding, based on the level of certification and any issues that may arise during certification, a source code review is necessary to clarify concerns and issues.
In my experience, the devs didn't port anything to a brand-new OS release that wasn't their _core_ business until it was, for all practical purposes, released for sale.
From a business perspective, there is little reason to rush to an OS that few people are using. Even if it's microsoft.
Many consumer hardware/software vendors will have some kind of support for Vista by Q4. Apple included.
Don't vote. Don't voice your opinion to the representatives most of you didn't vote for. Don't organize a coordinated political attack on the DMCA and this is what we all get.
For dog's sake don't support the eff either. http://www.eff.org/ You wouldn't want to be marginalized as a zealot, fanatic or crackpot.
I'll never find out, but it would be good to know if the deal between Novell and Microsoft figured strongly into the desktop selection.
The adoptions sound good, but when money is involved there's a "winner takes all" environment which I think Microsoft wants to promote. Later on, they can assimilate or crush them easily.
From the ISP's side, they will take the time/effort to simply provide a way for the data to be delivered in bulk to a gov't contractor. From there the contractor does the actual storage. The ISP's will jump at that because it's costs practically nothing. On the contractor's side, when you are buying storage by the petabyte, it's pretty cheap.
It still boggles my mind that this is somehow offensive behavior in the/. echo-chamber. The time to have done something about it was maybe 10 years ago.
Most of us have *no* clue about the scale and scope of data collection is like in the U.S. right now and I believe most would be very nervous if we actually knew besides what's already been leaked. What brings me some comfort is gov't agencies are not known for their effectiveness or ability to coordinate much beyond a luncheon.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank all unbox consumers for abaondoning the decades of time and people's effort to create and guard the principal that I own my media.
Maybe not every child, but mine certainly does. I have found kids want a way to explain the world as much as adults and a God can be useful in that way.
In our experience, the services we've tried don't really work for a child. They all tend to have a very promotional engine that includes some dogma that kids can't connect with.
The lawsuit accuses Dell of artificially inflating profits "by secretly receiving approximately $250 million a quarter in likely illegal rebate kickbacks payments" from Intel in return for an exclusive deal to purchase Intel's microprocessors, class-action lawyer William Lerach told Reuters.
There's some smoke here and probably a fire below it given how corrupt the decision making process is in a corporation. But it's not really actionable by a money trawling lawyer. The SEC certainly doesn't care. Otherwise they could make Elliot Spitzer's recent accomplishments look like a drop in the bucket.
The plaintiffs also contend that the company and its executives participated in a "widespread, long-running scheme to defraud" shareholders and inflate Dell's stock price, said Lerach, head of law firm Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP in San Diego.
Bingo! This is how the lawyer gets his and the only reason we would ever hear anything about it. I don't see shareholders benefitting in any way shape or form.
Don't do a wholesale switch where you abandon your skill set for whatever Science you prefer.
The way I did it was literally cold-calling people in the field I wanted to be in, eventually got some feedback on the skills I had versus the skills I needed to be desirable in that field and figured out ways to get those skills in a professional environment.
It won't happen overnight and it requires constantly thinking about where you want to be versus where you are but it will happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Another post rightly points out that being a monopolist is not on its face illegal but specific behaviours are. This is different than what I believe you are implying. In short, monopolies do a number of very harmful things:
n g_for_unregulated_monopolies.
1. Raise prices. (inevitable with SXm)
2. Reduce quantity available at a given price.
3. Eliminate the benefits of competition which are supposed to be things like lower prices, greater selection.
Most people won't or don't understand the graph, but it's clear consumers are harmed. The little yellow triangle says so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Price_setti
I urge you to examine the issue carefully.
The Sales Department of any entertainment conglomerate will happily beat the "DRM is bad" drum because their job depends on it.
./ amounts to absolutely nothing because nothing will ever be done by nearly all ./er's. Most of us on ./ know better but won't do a thing to improve the situation for the uninformed. Myself included.
Meanwhile, executive management is doing everything in their power to maintain their distribution cartel. DRM serves their end game quite nicely thank you.
Consumers don't care and will accept their DRM schemes because they don't know any better. All the righteous outrage on
Wikia search site uses something like this "automeritocracy" algorithm to guard the integrity of its results, it's imperative not to use an algorithm vulnerable to the hordes-of-phantom-users attack
That right there is a billion-dollar idea that I'm sure more than a small horde of devs are working on for themselves or for vulture capitalists.
Will Mr. Wales own the magic algorithm to use as he sees fit or what?
You and the moderators who blessed this rant are part of the problem.
We all have the tools to stop this. I can think of two right now: voting and legislation;
Go ahead, get involved in politics if you are so angry. We have a system. Learn it and use it. Other small groups have done so to great effect. Prohibition is one example. No gun-toting rants necessary. Not one.
In inverse order from your post.
I can't wait for the day when the RIAA goes back to what they started doing
You will be waiting forever then.
When will artists start
1. Is a starving artist is going to bite pretty much the only hand that has the potential (note phrase carefully) of feeding them? The economics of being an independent artist are depressing.
2. There are bands doing this. I have a feeling you want the music to show up at Walmart/Worst Buy. RIAA members control retail outside of a handful of indie stores. No, they won't tollerate someone cutting into their business.
This form of cartelization can't last forever
Yes, it has and it does. Music distribution is simply one of many cartels who have been prosecuted many times over in the U.S. to no effect.
Are these "early settlements" financially profitable for the RIAA?
Yes. They've got a fleet of full-time lawyers who have probably turned this into a cookie-cutter operation with low paid admins doing most of the work. Strike fear into the consumer's heart and demand the highest price possible for their goods. Sounds like standard operating procedure for any business to me.
This issue's been around for years now and there's no coordinated political reply to any of it. No call to action, just moral outrage. I hope you feel better because it's only going to get worse unless _you_ do something about it.
FIRST LETTER TO ISP's
Dear Sir or Madam:
It has come to the RIAA's attention that our requests for subscriber information has not been........ blah blah blah.
Please correct this matter at once.
Best regards,
RIAA Legal Hack
SECOND LETTER TO ISP's
Dear Sir or Madam:
It has come to our attention that our requests for subscriber information has not been corrected... blah blah blah...
Be prepared for further strongly worded documents sent via Next Day Delivery!
Best regards,
RIAA Legal Hack.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Funniest thing I've heard this morning.
g reek-lawsuit/
I know people in the industry and they all tell me, without reservation, that some of the most creative accounting in the world happens in the entertainment industry. If you live anywhere near the Westside of Los Angeles it's easy to see there's a class of entertainment-folks doing quite well.
Hardly an authoritative link, but you'll get the idea. http://www.dailyhaggis.com/2003/07/02/my-big-fat-
Or, let's take a look at the price of mega-corp sony. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SNE&t=5y Since stock prices are forward looking indicators of performance, I'd say entertainment is doing just fine considering the price hasn't gone down.
On the mega-software-corporation-industry side, they all talk a good anti-piracy game but everyone and their grandmother knows that users of stolen software are converted into legitimate users quite easily. Certainly much easier than going out and trying to find new customers. (Ask apple about what it takes to get users to switch)
For example, how much does Adobe care that Photochop is pirated? Very little actually. They get onwards of 80% of their Photochop sales in upgrades. I will be generous with adobe and estimate half or more of the upgrade sales are from people with legitimate licenses. The other half are finally making enough money to pay for a photochop license.
I would be very interested to find out how *this* specific story about Google and piracy got published. Discrediting Google seems to be the intent more than anything else.
Can be estimated, however I don't know what some of these costs are, so if some other /.er's could fill in the blanks, please help.
The cost of bringing ONE well-defined issue to court and seeing it all the way through to a verdict of some kind can be estimated at $200,000. Not SCO-style trawling, but one or two concrete issues mixed with the usual absurd claims that get thrown out.
What I want to know is an annual price range for Unix licenses/packages. Then, post the annual costs of some higher-end Oracle packages that probably run on a Unix. Finally, what's the cost of a Windows Server package with lots of CAL's and some support thrown in.
From those estimates you can get a good idea what they are asking for. Not too much, but certainly generating revenue for Microsoft off the normal sales accounting.
You've taken my initial assertion that free markets do not benefit what can be described as "common goods" with substantial scientific support. Biodiversity is a common good. An environment that is not substantially altered by human activity is another common good.
Instead, you introduce a new factor that has nothing to do with my initial assertion.
Please examine your logic carefully. I welcome discussion and debate when you are ready to debate the issue at hand, free markets do not have a mechanism for encouraging "common goods."
As much as /.'ers love to complain about how bad a software mono-culture is, the _entire_ agricultural community is operating under very similar conditions. The risks to our food production capabilities are extremely high.
While doomsday headlines right off the Weekly World News attract eyeballs, the reality is that this seed storage facility may be far more beneficial than most people realize.
It's been a while since I've done these calculations, but I think the present value of the so-called $25 million bounty is $6.2 million with the payment schedule given. That's what $25 million with the payments laid out as proposed is worth today at 4% return.
We don't pay anyone already producing lots of oxygen with their undeveloped lands, why would anyone buy the earth-saving properties of the as-yet unmade device?
Not only is the bounty $6.2 million, but the innovator doesn't appear to have any kind of way to sustain the earth-saving properities of this device.
This is an example of why we are in what most indicators suggest is a global warming scenario of our own making.
Despite what the popular political opinion attempts to have us believe, So-called "Free-markets" do not accomodate the health and general well-being of humans or their environment.
Discuss amongst yourselves
My point was the deep pockets competitors abuse the process to get their desired result: No new competition.
If it is so useless, then please pay Microsoft for the privilege to serve your porn and stop wasting your time trolling about how much Microsoft rulez.
This is an excellent example of how large and deep the cesspool is in government contracting.
The competitors intentionally draw out the certification process for the newcomer to literally exhauste them and drive the competition away. This is just one relatively small library/suite of applications. (albeit critical)
For any of you entrepreneurial developers thinking they're onto the the next great thing that gov'ts will buy, please consider this story carefully. A long career at the top of an agency you wish to pursue (nepotism) and a massive bankroll are material requirements to get any money out of gov't contracting.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of the process, but it's my understanding, based on the level of certification and any issues that may arise during certification, a source code review is necessary to clarify concerns and issues.
In my experience, the devs didn't port anything to a brand-new OS release that wasn't their _core_ business until it was, for all practical purposes, released for sale.
From a business perspective, there is little reason to rush to an OS that few people are using. Even if it's microsoft.
Many consumer hardware/software vendors will have some kind of support for Vista by Q4. Apple included.
Don't vote. Don't voice your opinion to the representatives most of you didn't vote for. Don't organize a coordinated political attack on the DMCA and this is what we all get.
For dog's sake don't support the eff either. http://www.eff.org/ You wouldn't want to be marginalized as a zealot, fanatic or crackpot.
[\rant]
I'll never find out, but it would be good to know if the deal between Novell and Microsoft figured strongly into the desktop selection.
The adoptions sound good, but when money is involved there's a "winner takes all" environment which I think Microsoft wants to promote. Later on, they can assimilate or crush them easily.
From the ISP's side, they will take the time/effort to simply provide a way for the data to be delivered in bulk to a gov't contractor. From there the contractor does the actual storage. The ISP's will jump at that because it's costs practically nothing. On the contractor's side, when you are buying storage by the petabyte, it's pretty cheap.
/. echo-chamber. The time to have done something about it was maybe 10 years ago.
It still boggles my mind that this is somehow offensive behavior in the
Most of us have *no* clue about the scale and scope of data collection is like in the U.S. right now and I believe most would be very nervous if we actually knew besides what's already been leaked. What brings me some comfort is gov't agencies are not known for their effectiveness or ability to coordinate much beyond a luncheon.
Here's the link to a plain-english read on it by the chicago tribune: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ez orn/2006/09/scary_movie_dow.html
_ to_cust.html
m l/ref=atv_dp_cs_use/002-8388024-7705601?ie=UTF8&no deId=200026970
Here's an explitive laced though pretty good summary: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/15/amazon_unbox
Here's the EULA: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.ht
From the bottom of my heart, I thank all unbox consumers for abaondoning the decades of time and people's effort to create and guard the principal that I own my media.
Correct. I didn't make that clear.
No child wonders about a god or gods.
Maybe not every child, but mine certainly does. I have found kids want a way to explain the world as much as adults and a God can be useful in that way.
In our experience, the services we've tried don't really work for a child. They all tend to have a very promotional engine that includes some dogma that kids can't connect with.
The lawsuit accuses Dell of artificially inflating profits "by secretly receiving approximately $250 million a quarter in likely illegal rebate kickbacks payments" from Intel in return for an exclusive deal to purchase Intel's microprocessors, class-action lawyer William Lerach told Reuters.
There's some smoke here and probably a fire below it given how corrupt the decision making process is in a corporation. But it's not really actionable by a money trawling lawyer. The SEC certainly doesn't care. Otherwise they could make Elliot Spitzer's recent accomplishments look like a drop in the bucket.
The plaintiffs also contend that the company and its executives participated in a "widespread, long-running scheme to defraud" shareholders and inflate Dell's stock price, said Lerach, head of law firm Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP in San Diego.
Bingo! This is how the lawyer gets his and the only reason we would ever hear anything about it. I don't see shareholders benefitting in any way shape or form.
Don't do a wholesale switch where you abandon your skill set for whatever Science you prefer.
The way I did it was literally cold-calling people in the field I wanted to be in, eventually got some feedback on the skills I had versus the skills I needed to be desirable in that field and figured out ways to get those skills in a professional environment.
It won't happen overnight and it requires constantly thinking about where you want to be versus where you are but it will happen.