At which point Wal-Mart goes to each label individually, and says something like:
"We fully appreciate Sony's position on this issue, and will be discontinuing your music. No, not just in our online music program, but also in-store sales of CDs. That's 25% of your worldwide CD sales, according to market figures. By the way, due to market difficulties, we're cutting our orders of PlayStation consoles/games/accessories, Sony electronics, and Sony Home Video DVDs 25%, with a possibility of cutting another 25% in six months."
"We understand Warner Music won't budge on this issue. Okay, we'll charge higher prices. By the way, we are reducing by 35% the advertising we pay for on the WB, CNN, and other Time Warner television stations. Also, we're cutting back Warner CD purchases 75%, discontinuing the stocking of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and will have to stop stocking Loony Tunes toys for the immediate future."
And so on. The only response the labels could mount would be antitrust complaints -- with is the last thing you want to bring up when you're part of a cartel trying to raise prices.
How is a G5 more expensive than an x86 PC of the exact same components.
How? By about $1,100.
The Mac, from the Apple online store:
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
2GB DDR333 SDRAM (PC2700) - 4x512
120GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Apple Studio Display (17" flat panel)
56k V.92 internal modem
SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English
Mac OS X - U.S. English Price: $3,623.00
The x86, from the Dell online store:
Pentium 4 HT 3.2GHz w/800MHz FSB
2GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 400MHz (4x512M)
120GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
17 inch 1703FP Flat Panel Display
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
8x DVD+RW Drive
Dell keyboard & Logitech® MX(TM) 500 Optical Mouse
Micosoft Windowws XP Pro
(Dell Gigabit Ethernet)
(Free printer and digital camera) Price: $2,517
Price difference: $1,106, a printer and a camera.
Now, sure, there may be some features the Mac has that the Dell doesn't. But matched on RAM, hard drive, optical drive, video card, and networking, the Dell machine comes in over a thousand dollars less than the slowest G5 Mac.
(Its not)
Damn, I wish I were rich enough that a $1,100 price differential was so meaningless to me.
Given the G5 uses the same jointly-developed-by-AMD-and-Apple HyperTransport bus architecture that the only 64-bit x86 chips on the market use, I'm skeptical that the G5 outperforms them on I/O tasks. Have any numbers comparing the Athlon 64 and G5?
Of course browsing history is useless; it's horribly implemented. If you'd ever used IBM Web Explorer for OS/2, or Mosaic 3.0, however, you'd know what it could and should be.
As an example, just look at gasoline prices . . . all those costs have gone up.
Compared to when?
When you back out the factor of rising gasoline taxes (such taxes being obviously not a problem of resource depletion, but merely a political decision), and adjust to use constant dollars, gasoline today in the U.S. costs about 25% of what it did in 1964. That's despite the fact that gasoline processing requirements and quality standards have gone up dramatically in that time for environmental reasons.
In fact, Kepler's laws, ultimately derived from Newton's Laws, is much much much more accurate than Ptolemaic theory with gazillion epicycles
No, Kepler-Newton is "much much much" less accurate than a modernized Ptolemaic theory.
Sine wave approximations, like the epicycles in Ptolemaic theory, can be accurate to any arbitrary standard. You can construct a Ptolemaic model of the current known planetary orbits to every decimal place currently measured; you just keep adding epicycles until you have the numbers you need. On the other hand, Newton/Kepler cannot describe Mercury's orbit to the precision available to the measurements achieved over a hundred years ago.
The quest for "simplicity" (more accurately elegance, even though it's also poorly defined) has been the engine of progress in physics since Galileo (who preferred Copernicus over Ptolemy even though Ptolemy was more accurate). To ignore its demands is to risk medieval stagnation.
"[A]n iPod made by Apple then slapped with an HP case" . ..
. . . means not made by Apple at all, because the only significant part of the iPod that's made by Apple is the case.
They don't make the chipset, they don't make the hard drive, thy don't make batteries, they don't make the display, the firmware is made by the chipset maker, FairPlay is licensed from Veridisc, and AAC is by Dolby.
What HP is licensing from Apple is the right to use various bits of tech that Apple grabbed exclusive license to from the original makers, in order to get access to the iTunes/iTMS/iPod market. There is no, or at most very minimal, Apple technology in an HP iPod.
It doesn't matter if they buy the CDs direct or not, they still can severely disrupt the revenue stream of any of the majors. Furthermore, since Wal-Mart is part of the sales-recording network that determines music popularity, they have massive influence over radio playlists.
I say this only because I doubt even Walmart could squeeze profit out of the record companies.
25% of music sales worldwide go through Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart can go to the negotiating table with a music label and say something like, "You know, if you can't come down a bit off that 65-cents-per-song you charge Apple iTunes, we might have to cut the number of CDs we buy from you."
Now, remember that Wal-Mart registers are part of the sales-tracking network that drives radio playlist selection, and radio playlists have a huge impact on sales everywhere. Wal-Mart, unlike anybody else except maybe ClearChannel, has the power to make record company executives stay up late worrying.
And that's even before you evaluate its ability to hit the non-music branches of, say, Sony. Wal-Mart has serious leverage.
Sigh. Why depend on the Google numbers and anecdotes? Apple itself reports Macintosh unit sales in its SEC filings. Look up the 10-K reports in EDGAR, and compare the Macintosh unit numbers. The Macintosh is not "making headway"; it is not getting significant numbers of switchers or new users.
The Mac has been stuck at 3-and-a-bit million units a year for several years now; in fact, it's only had one year since 1996 where it met or exceeded its 1996 sales.
So Apple has flat sales and declining profits. From a Money perspective, it's clear it's a lousy investment. And after all, the point of Money is to analyze things from the investment end.
Who knows if he was right, but it is a cool theory.
Hmm. Interesting.
My only objection is that it explains why the times are prime, but not the coincidence of them all being 17 or 13 years.
Each of the three 17-year varieties' closest relative is a different one of the four 13-year varieties, not another 17-year one. We would therefore, evolutionarily, expect that the ancestral periodic cicadia first divided into at least three species, and then each of those three divided into 13 and 17 year varieties.
So why did each of the three branches evolve both 13 and 17 year terms, but none evolved the equally prime 11 or 19 year terms? 11 and 13, or 17 and 19, are both seemingly more likely pairs than 13 and 17. Why did it become 13 and 17 three times?
Unless you have a contractual relationship with Nintendo that forbids it, you may excercise all the rights granted in 17 U.S. Code 117 with any copy of a work of software you have. That explicitly includes the right to make a copy of, and adapt if necessary, your copy of a work of software if it is an integral step in running it on a machine. What kind of machine is not limited by the US Code, and you don't have a contract with Nintendo limiting that right, which means you have a right to get a ROM reader, copy the game on to your PC, and play it on your PC.
And simply printing the line in the manual does not make it an enforcable contract. For a contractual relationship to exist, there must be evidence of voluntary consent to the terms and consideration granted in exchange for the terms. (Exception; Maryland and Virginia law recongizes shrink-wrap licenses.)
Nintendo can't even show evidence you ever read the no-copy requirements, much less consented to them, and they can show nothing you recieved on the condition of agreeing to it (since you had full rights by default from point of purchase).
(Click-through licenses meet the criteria at least more closely, since you must state you agree. The "consideration" is murkier, but there is at least one case on-point that declares click-throughs an enforcable contract.)
Now, if your copy on your PC is not a copy of the cartridge you own, but someone else's, you're at least arguably violating the law. But you are, under US law, allowed to make your own copy if you have to do it to run the program on a machine of your choice.
US Code, Sec. 117. (a):.... Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or....
I am not a lawyer, but my reading of that is that you have the explicit right to make a copy if you have to do in in order to run it on a machine. Note that there is no provision that limits it to making a copy to run on the machine it was designed to be run on.
When Nintendo says you cannot copy a ROM to your computer to play it on your computer, it looks to me like they're explicitly lying.
Slashdot Mirror
At which point Wal-Mart goes to each label individually, and says something like:
"We fully appreciate Sony's position on this issue, and will be discontinuing your music. No, not just in our online music program, but also in-store sales of CDs. That's 25% of your worldwide CD sales, according to market figures. By the way, due to market difficulties, we're cutting our orders of PlayStation consoles/games/accessories, Sony electronics, and Sony Home Video DVDs 25%, with a possibility of cutting another 25% in six months."
"We understand Warner Music won't budge on this issue. Okay, we'll charge higher prices. By the way, we are reducing by 35% the advertising we pay for on the WB, CNN, and other Time Warner television stations. Also, we're cutting back Warner CD purchases 75%, discontinuing the stocking of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and will have to stop stocking Loony Tunes toys for the immediate future."
And so on. The only response the labels could mount would be antitrust complaints -- with is the last thing you want to bring up when you're part of a cartel trying to raise prices.
Huh?
How is a G5 more expensive than an x86 PC of the exact same components.
How? By about $1,100.
The Mac, from the Apple online store:
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
2GB DDR333 SDRAM (PC2700) - 4x512
120GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Apple Studio Display (17" flat panel)
56k V.92 internal modem
SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English
Mac OS X - U.S. English
Price: $3,623.00
The x86, from the Dell online store:
Pentium 4 HT 3.2GHz w/800MHz FSB
2GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 400MHz (4x512M)
120GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
17 inch 1703FP Flat Panel Display
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
8x DVD+RW Drive
Dell keyboard & Logitech® MX(TM) 500 Optical Mouse
Micosoft Windowws XP Pro
(Dell Gigabit Ethernet)
(Free printer and digital camera)
Price: $2,517
Price difference: $1,106, a printer and a camera.
Now, sure, there may be some features the Mac has that the Dell doesn't. But matched on RAM, hard drive, optical drive, video card, and networking, the Dell machine comes in over a thousand dollars less than the slowest G5 Mac.
(Its not)
Damn, I wish I were rich enough that a $1,100 price differential was so meaningless to me.
Given the G5 uses the same jointly-developed-by-AMD-and-Apple HyperTransport bus architecture that the only 64-bit x86 chips on the market use, I'm skeptical that the G5 outperforms them on I/O tasks. Have any numbers comparing the Athlon 64 and G5?
Well, from the press release:
"April 1, 2004 UTC"
"And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat."
That the news services fell for this with that kind of giveaway line is priceless.
Oh, it's simple. To quote Google's press release:
"And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat."
Why not, they published Jayson Blair . . .
Four quotes from Google's press release:
"Search is Number Two Online Activity - Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders"
"April 1, 2004 UTC"
"Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born."
"And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat."
It has been done before. IBM Web Explorer for OS/2 and Mosaic 3.0 both had tree browser histories.
Of course browsing history is useless; it's horribly implemented. If you'd ever used IBM Web Explorer for OS/2, or Mosaic 3.0, however, you'd know what it could and should be.
Yep. The feature was then included in Mosaic 3.0, too.
As an example, just look at gasoline prices . . . all those costs have gone up.
Compared to when?
When you back out the factor of rising gasoline taxes (such taxes being obviously not a problem of resource depletion, but merely a political decision), and adjust to use constant dollars, gasoline today in the U.S. costs about 25% of what it did in 1964. That's despite the fact that gasoline processing requirements and quality standards have gone up dramatically in that time for environmental reasons.
In fact, Kepler's laws, ultimately derived from Newton's Laws, is much much much more accurate than Ptolemaic theory with gazillion epicycles
No, Kepler-Newton is "much much much" less accurate than a modernized Ptolemaic theory.
Sine wave approximations, like the epicycles in Ptolemaic theory, can be accurate to any arbitrary standard. You can construct a Ptolemaic model of the current known planetary orbits to every decimal place currently measured; you just keep adding epicycles until you have the numbers you need. On the other hand, Newton/Kepler cannot describe Mercury's orbit to the precision available to the measurements achieved over a hundred years ago.
The quest for "simplicity" (more accurately elegance, even though it's also poorly defined) has been the engine of progress in physics since Galileo (who preferred Copernicus over Ptolemy even though Ptolemy was more accurate). To ignore its demands is to risk medieval stagnation.
Hey, it's the spirit that found Neptune!
"[A]n iPod made by Apple then slapped with an HP case" . . .
. . . means not made by Apple at all, because the only significant part of the iPod that's made by Apple is the case.
They don't make the chipset, they don't make the hard drive, thy don't make batteries, they don't make the display, the firmware is made by the chipset maker, FairPlay is licensed from Veridisc, and AAC is by Dolby.
What HP is licensing from Apple is the right to use various bits of tech that Apple grabbed exclusive license to from the original makers, in order to get access to the iTunes/iTMS/iPod market. There is no, or at most very minimal, Apple technology in an HP iPod.
It doesn't matter if they buy the CDs direct or not, they still can severely disrupt the revenue stream of any of the majors. Furthermore, since Wal-Mart is part of the sales-recording network that determines music popularity, they have massive influence over radio playlists.
I say this only because I doubt even Walmart could squeeze profit out of the record companies.
25% of music sales worldwide go through Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart can go to the negotiating table with a music label and say something like, "You know, if you can't come down a bit off that 65-cents-per-song you charge Apple iTunes, we might have to cut the number of CDs we buy from you."
Now, remember that Wal-Mart registers are part of the sales-tracking network that drives radio playlist selection, and radio playlists have a huge impact on sales everywhere. Wal-Mart, unlike anybody else except maybe ClearChannel, has the power to make record company executives stay up late worrying.
And that's even before you evaluate its ability to hit the non-music branches of, say, Sony. Wal-Mart has serious leverage.
A few other common law jurisdictions that also seem to have loser-pays without significant negative impact:
The U.S. State of Alaska (Rule 82 of the Alaska Rules of Civil Proceedure)
Australia
Canada
You make a lot of claims about what would happen if loser-pays is enacted.
Given that Britian has had loser-pays for quite a long time, can you show any evidence that it has had those negative effects in Britain?
Sigh. Why depend on the Google numbers and anecdotes? Apple itself reports Macintosh unit sales in its SEC filings. Look up the 10-K reports in EDGAR, and compare the Macintosh unit numbers. The Macintosh is not "making headway"; it is not getting significant numbers of switchers or new users.
The Mac has been stuck at 3-and-a-bit million units a year for several years now; in fact, it's only had one year since 1996 where it met or exceeded its 1996 sales.
So Apple has flat sales and declining profits. From a Money perspective, it's clear it's a lousy investment. And after all, the point of Money is to analyze things from the investment end.
Mozilla is anything but free software
Richard M. Stallman, inventor of the concept of Free Software, and the Free Software Foundation as an organization, disagree.
Yes, you can get the source code, but their license is NOT GPL.
Somewhat true, but, they're actively moving the code to be covered by the GPL. Most of the code is already triple-licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL; only a few fragments aren't available at the moment.
Who knows if he was right, but it is a cool theory.
Hmm. Interesting.
My only objection is that it explains why the times are prime, but not the coincidence of them all being 17 or 13 years.
Each of the three 17-year varieties' closest relative is a different one of the four 13-year varieties, not another 17-year one. We would therefore, evolutionarily, expect that the ancestral periodic cicadia first divided into at least three species, and then each of those three divided into 13 and 17 year varieties.
So why did each of the three branches evolve both 13 and 17 year terms, but none evolved the equally prime 11 or 19 year terms? 11 and 13, or 17 and 19, are both seemingly more likely pairs than 13 and 17. Why did it become 13 and 17 three times?
IANAL, but as I understand it:
Unless you have a contractual relationship with Nintendo that forbids it, you may excercise all the rights granted in 17 U.S. Code 117 with any copy of a work of software you have. That explicitly includes the right to make a copy of, and adapt if necessary, your copy of a work of software if it is an integral step in running it on a machine. What kind of machine is not limited by the US Code, and you don't have a contract with Nintendo limiting that right, which means you have a right to get a ROM reader, copy the game on to your PC, and play it on your PC.
And simply printing the line in the manual does not make it an enforcable contract. For a contractual relationship to exist, there must be evidence of voluntary consent to the terms and consideration granted in exchange for the terms. (Exception; Maryland and Virginia law recongizes shrink-wrap licenses.)
Nintendo can't even show evidence you ever read the no-copy requirements, much less consented to them, and they can show nothing you recieved on the condition of agreeing to it (since you had full rights by default from point of purchase).
(Click-through licenses meet the criteria at least more closely, since you must state you agree. The "consideration" is murkier, but there is at least one case on-point that declares click-throughs an enforcable contract.)
Now, if your copy on your PC is not a copy of the cartridge you own, but someone else's, you're at least arguably violating the law. But you are, under US law, allowed to make your own copy if you have to do it to run the program on a machine of your choice.
US Code, Sec. 117. (a): ....
....
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
I am not a lawyer, but my reading of that is that you have the explicit right to make a copy if you have to do in in order to run it on a machine. Note that there is no provision that limits it to making a copy to run on the machine it was designed to be run on.
When Nintendo says you cannot copy a ROM to your computer to play it on your computer, it looks to me like they're explicitly lying.
We're just waiting until you guys tick off the Albertans enough that they decide they'll be better off as an independent country.
At worst, the CD would be valued at its commercial rate -- and CheapBytes sells a two-CD-R Open Office set for $6.99.
Malinator doesn't filter spam. Read the FAQ.