The idea of Democratic Republics came from Rome and Greece before they were Christianized. These ideas were revived during the 17th/18th century Enlightment, first incorporated in the US government, then France and so on.
Yes, but the 'democracies' of the ancient world were hardly democratic. Precious few citizens of Athens had the vote.
What matters in western civilizations is not that they were the first to have the idea of a democratic republic, but that they saw democracy as a natural extention of metaphysical freedom, and that all people (well, all white men who owned property) were equally free. This is the basis of the 'equality and inalienable rights' clause of the Declaration of Independence.
This really all goes back to the Magna Carta -- the first successful challenge to the equally religious notion that kings were kings because God wanted them to be born that way, and everybody better do what the king says because that's what God wants.
The revolutionary idea that the king was just born lucky would eventually lead to the Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the American and French Revolutions, the uprisings of 1848, and ultimately the ending of absolute monarchy in Europe after the First World War.
But my point remains -- if there were no concept that humans were free beings (in the image of God), there would be no reason to allow the unlucky a say in the Res Publicae, and no reason not to accept the king's existence as a divine mandate.
I take serious amounts of offense to a person believing in Creationism or ID being called an extremist. A belief that you do not share does not automatically put someone into a fringe extremist group which is to be feared or summarily dismissed.
Believing in creationism is not extremist. You can believe the moon is made of cheese for all I care, but that is not extremist either.
What is extremist is insisting that a religious doctrine with no basis in scientific method (i.e., not based on direct observation, not testable, not predictive, and neither provable nor disprovable) should be held as valid science.
I am not opposed to the teaching of religion in schools -- without a knowledge of the Bible, it is diffucult to have a real understanding of the artistic, cultural and political histotry of Western civilization, let alone how and why it is different from other civilizations in history.
Our western-style democratic systems of government, after all, stem directly from the Book of Genesis -- that humans are created in the image of God, meaning endowed with metaphysical freedom. Without that notion of metaphysical freedom, there would be no freedom in the real world.
But that is philosophy, not engineering. The Bible is literature, not history. Religion is cutural, not factual. And whatever the euphamism of the day, creationism is doctrine, not science.
If it were up to me, comparative religion would be a required part of every secondary school curriculum, but certainly not part of the science curriculum.
If we teach creationism in biology lessons, does that mean that we should also teach in astronomy the Islamic doctrine that the phases of the moon cannot be predicted, but must be observed? Perhaps in physics we should also teach the perfectly valid theory that an object will fall to the ground because that is the nature of matter.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said, quite the contrary.
But a key defference is that cell and POTS companies still bill calls in $x/minute while an ISP gives you a big ol' internet pipe at $y/month for a given service level -- always-open line with guaranteed bandwidth, latency, etc.
What that means, in the US at least, is the end of long distance rates. For businesses with offices in different countries, it means calls between the London office and the Tokyo office at no cost, assuming the company is running the SIP gateway on both ends. It also means calls between the two cities for local rates. Yes, they have to pay for the bandwidth, but they're already paying for it, and (if they're smart) already have an SLA in place with their ISP guaranteeing enough capacity and low enough latency to handle voice calls.
You're right that if and when this becomes popular, it will be nearly impossible to keep the frequencies unregulated. On the other hand, no one is going to kill the goose until they're sure that the eggs are golden. By then it may be too late.
I would much rather figure out now how I can use this technology to my advantage than wait until the FCC decides how SBC can use it to theirs. This is even more important considering the FCC's recent decision that cable companies don't have to open their networks. You can be sure that the phone companies are doing everything they can to get rid of that requirement for themselves. If that happens, it's either exploring bleeding edge radio, or going back to the good ol' days of monopoly (or at least oligopoly) providers.
I, for one, am not going to sit on my hands and let that happen. Asterisk now gives anyone willing to learn the tools to create their own telecom, and those who have learned are not going to go back.
There seems to be a common misconception that because WiMax is wireless that it logically competes with cells. I'm much more of the opinion that it competes with cable, DSL, and T1, and turns the providers of mainline internet service into the dumb pipes that they are.
You're right -- by that logic, cell phones should be cheaper than landlines, although cell towers don't have anywhere near a 30-mile range (and I doubt that WiMax has a usable range that large either). One reason why cells cost more (at least in the US) is because they try to keep everything in-network, meaning that a company needs lots and lots of towers all over the place for it to work.
With a Wi-Max system, though, you only need a tower within range of your customers; all your calls go through IP, meaning the infrastructure is already there. You can start a WiMax phone company with a single tower; you cannot do the same with a cell company.
There's also the fact that cell companies are still trying to recoup the massive investment they made into buying frequencies and setting up 3G systems that pretty much nobody uses.
In contrast, Wi-Max is capable of operating over unregulated spectrum, and isn't going to lead to 3G-type hysteria because it's all already data packets in standard, open formats and protocols.
It's not the case in the US, but there are plenty of places in the world already where cell phones are cheaper than landlines -- perhaps not measured in cost/minute call-time, but in average cost/month. I used to live in Slovakia, for example, where a landline cost around $15/month plus per minute charges for any call, including local. At the same time, I spent generally less than $10 / month on my contract-free pay-as-you-go cell phone.
It is news because it is the first time, that I'm aware of at least, that a company is offering a more or less complete telecom package without dealing at all with telephone or cable lines.
It may seem at first glance that $600 is a lot for a 1.5 Mbps line (I think a T-1 around here (DC) runs about $300), but according to the Towerstream site the 1.5 Mbps is covered by an SLA (and is $500). Which means that, with or without Vonage, you could handle at least 50, and possibly over 100 VoIP lines over a single wireless network. When you think about it that way, it brings the monthly cost per phone down to single digits.
On top of that, 802.16 is new tech, which means it costs a premium at the moment. This will eventually fall well below the level that any phone company can match because there is no 'last-mile' infrastructure to maintain, no cable to lay or repair, no expensive equipment for laying and repairing cable, no expensive vehicles to carry the equipment, no facilites to store the vehicles and equipment, and no employees to drive the vehicles, work the equipment, repair the lines, or administer and guard the facilities. And most of all, no middle or senior managers to oversee an army of maintenance staff and an archipelago of offices and storage sites.
If a tower has a range of 30 miles, that means a coverage area of nearly 3,000 sq miles. How many maintenence people does Verizon have for an area that size? How many would you need if there were no wires?
This is news because it is very indicative of things to come, and a reminder of how much we are overpaying at the moment for phone service (particularly long distance).
My library, for example has thousands and thousands of CDs, with an especially rich collection of jazz and blues but with plenty of fairly recent pop music as well.
You've already paid for access to your library's resources, so you might as well use them. Plus, considering that the American Library Association is willing to stand up to the Feds when it comes to snooping at people's library records, I don't think the RIAA has much chance to see what I've borrowed, and even less chance to prove that I've ripped anything.
I will not buy another CD from an RIAA company as long as they keep up this nonsense, nor will download anything from them legally or otherwise. But those CDs at the library belong as much to me as to anyone else in my county. I do intend to keep using what is mine.
I like Cringely's articles because they are always insightful, always look at things from a different angle, and almost always feature a prediction that I find very unlikely but compelling enough to make me look at the given topic in a different light (which is strikingly different from Dvorak articles, which are always inept, look at things from the same angle as everyone else but with cracked bifocals, and prove the adage that even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time).
That having been said, Skype is a very dangerous thing for the big telecom providers. As Cringely points out, the big phone companies can't buy it to kill it because something else would take its place. But he misses that this also holds for cable companies.
I use Skype Out regularly to call internationally, and I know that nobody calls to PSTN networks for less unless they own the switch on both ends.
Comcast et al want to sell VoIP on top of broadband, but Skype (or its successor) is free with broadband -- which brings up the whole bit about synergy and technical capabilities and whatnot.
Since the whole Skype backbone is P2P there really isn't a whole lot of infrastructure involved, other than the database for paying customers. There's no real physical infrastructure because the users are the network. As I understand it, Skype only has a few dozen employees (but I may have read that a while ago, before they had 20 million regular users).
The fact that there's basically no infrastructure means that it will be hard for a big incumbent operator to leverage its network size to take advantage of something like Skype. The whole Skype network costs its operators next to nothing to run right now, so how is MegaCableTeleCom, Inc (with all its buildings and employee unions, and executive bonuses, and specialized equipment, and miles and miles of plain-old-copper/coaxial/fiber lines, etc) going to keep it cheap enough to compete with free without losing?
Cringely's right -- Murdoch won't pay $3 billion, but somebody probably will. Only what's for sale is not the network but the customers. And those customers will flee in a minute if whoever runs Skype starts acting like a phone company -- cryptic bills, mystery charges, line-carrier fees, connection charges, etc. After all, something better and cheaper will come along any day now. For $3 billion, I'd sell.
Nah, see what happened was in the 60's, record companies paid cash directly to DJs, under the table, to play songs. "i'll give you $100 if you play $song".
You're missing a few points. First, the original payola was in the 50s, not the 60s. In the original payola scandal, the DJs were implicated for accepting bribes of cash, drugs, hookers, etc directly in return for airplay.
That scandal took down some crooks, but it also took down some good DJs. And it gave a lot more of the decision-making power to the stations and program directors and took it away from the DJs, in order to avoid further scandal.
But since there's a lot more songs than time to play them, the labels needed a new way to make sure that their new 'hit' single got played.
To accomplish this, the majors came up with the independent promotion system -- meaning that a label would contract an independent promoter to get the song on the air. If anything unseemly happened, it was a matter strictly between the promoter and the radio station, not the record label. This allowed the labels to 'outsource' the corruption and at least pretend to be clean.
By the late 70s/early 80s, independent promotion had become institutionalized (and centralized) to the point that paying an independent promoter might not get your song on the air, but not paying would ensure the song stayed off the air, no matter how big the song. IIRC, Pink Floyd was a guinea pig for this -- at a time when The Wall was one of the top selling albums, "Another Brick in the Wall" was one of the top selling singles and the band was promoting a concert tour, they didn't get any radio play in LA. Their label hadn't paid for independent promotion in the LA market.
As the independent promotion system was institutionalized, there were a number of dodgy mafia-connected people getting involved in the RIAA side as well. Tommy Mottola, for example, the former US boss of Sony Music, started as an independent promoter in the 70s, and Frank DiLeo (who played this guy in Goodfellas) was Michael Jackson's manager in the 80s, and was tight with 'our friends in New York and Chicago'.
What bothers the record labels is not that there's corruption or that they have to pay for spins, it's that they have no control over what they're buying -- the label owes whatever the promoter says it owes, and there's no resonable correlation between the number and quality (ie 8.15 am is a better time than 10:00 pm) of spins and the payment rate. If it was up to labels, I imagine they'd rather just buy the time outright.
Forget the fact that all this is illegal, but when Clear Channel bailed out on independent promoters it took away the only leverage the promoters had. With the Justice Department now getting involved and Congressional hearings likely at some point, our RIAA friends will line up and take their wrist-slapping and be glad to be rid of independent promotion.
Although it's almost 15 years old, the book Hit Men is a great look at how the music business got to be the reeking cesspit it is. I only hope that when there are hearings, the record companies get reamed as hard as the mafia middlemen for setting up the system in the first place.
can a person under the legal drinking age purchase these ingrediants without anyone asking for ID?
Yes. It doesn't matter what the malt, hops, yeast, airlocks, fermenting bins, bottle cappers, etc can be used for, it matters what they contain, which is not alcohol.
It's illegal for a person under 21 to buy alcohol, not barley malt or live yeast. It's also illegal for a minor to consume alcohol, but that's a different matter, since you're not going to have any alcohol for at least a couple weeks.
I did exactly this when I was at university in Ohio about 10 years ago. The summer of my freshman year I moved off campus and was working as a janitor at the school for the summer session (eight hours a night, but the work was done in three and janitors have all the keys).
Anyway, the Ohio State liquor store (and homebrew shop) was on my way home from school. At first I didn't have any problem buying beer there, but eventually someone realized that I was only 19.
But the guy who ran the shop was an old-time homebrew guy and we got to talking about beers and the making of them. He said he could sell me whatever I wanted for making beer so long as it didn't have alcohol in it.
So thanks to my janitor keys, I managed to liberate an old 20-liter spring water container from behind some disused florescent fixtures in an ancient storeroom in one of the social sciences buildings. A trip to the surplus store got me a big ol' army-size aluminum boilin' pot for about $20. All that was left were some sundries from the brew-shop -- airlock, rubber tubing, bottle capper and caps, funnel, etc.
The guy at the shop was always very helpful and willing to trade recipes, recommend this hop with that malt, and so on. We ended up sharing a few after I turned 21 (his was much better) and I kept brewing up until I finished school.
Brewing is a lot of work but has very nice rewards.
The fifth season was the last, not the fourth. And in my book some of the last season's episodes rank up there with the best of the Simpsons (and TV don't get much better than that).
Particularly "The Farnsworth Parabox" ("There's a woman for you -- always dyeing her hair instead of not looking in a box") and "Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" (the robot devil's song is an absolute classic).
"The Devil's Hands" showed an amazing depth of character and theme, which makes the ending that much more meaningful now, since it was the last episode.
As for my personal favorite, "Parasites Lost", that's up with the best of any show ever.
Those episodes in the last season really demonstrated what the writers and actors could grow Futurama into if they had been given the chance. Futurama is a show that was killed of before it had reached it's prime, and I think it's great that they're doing something to revive it. Tell me where I can pre-order if it helps the thing get made.
The problem is landlines. You can't connect to them using this software unless you pay extra ? I understand alot of people will save on long distance using pc to pc Voip but connecting to landlines offers no big cost savings.
Actually, Skype and other voip services offer very significant cost savings, since the landline part of the call is only from the termination of the ip network.
Consider this:
EFF has never won any significant legal battle it has taken on. In fact, some of the cases the EFF fought most heavily have been lost in a manner that substantially weakens the EFF positions.
You're right that they record in the hall with one microphone, but not mono.
Generally an extremely high quality stereo condenser mic is used (usually hung from the ceiling around the middle of the hall), as it can replicate the spatial arrangement of the musicians on the stage without spreding them too far apart (you don't want the 1st violins only in the right speaker) as well as capturing the tonal characteristics of the hall itself.
The advantage of this is, of course, that it doesn't take much longer to produce a classical recording than it does to perform the piece. The microphone is designed to pick up and record exactly the sound in the room -- meaning there's very little processing that needs to be done afterwards.
Contrast this with pop music, where it can take weeks in the studio to get the right guitar sound (don't even get me started on what it takes for drums).
If you listen to new pop bands, they may have great sound, but it's not all that impressive considering how much time they spend tweaking things to get that sound.
What is impressive, are those old Elvis recordings with Carl Perkins and the Sun Studio house band, where they'd cut the whole record in a couple of days. That band still sounds tighter and swings harder than just about anything today.
Otherwise, just look at what MS produces: mice, keyboard, office suites, video players, games, consoles, internet portals, TV content, etc etc etc... and none of these activities are failing.
Ummmm. Actually AFIK, the only divisions at MS that actually make a profit are Windows and Office (although I believe MSN recently had their first ever profitable quarter).
It's simply not correct to say that none of their activities are failing -- practically all of them are. It's just that they have so much cash from Windows and Office that they can afford to eat a loss on everything else they do.
Because if tax rates increase exponentially or logorithmically then top money earners will owe far more than they make. Not a particularly good way to motivate people to earn money, but an excellent motivation for people to launder money.
The point of a flat tax is that if a US corporation knows it will have to pay x% of profits in tax, then there is much less administrative waste from them looking for loopholes, and much less administrative waste from government in legislating, auditing for, and subsequently abusing loopholes.
Sure a company can monkey their records to make it appear they haven't actually made anything (and thus owe little tax), but how do you think several years of flat growth would affect the stock performacne?
There is no sloganeering and no false dichotomy in the fact that a tax is either progressive (meaning the wealthy have a larger tax burden due to the fact that they have more to tax) or regressive (meaning the poor have a higher tax burden because a larger portion of their income has to go to taxes).
As for as your trichotomy goes, that is what we have now -- the poor don't pay because they can't, the rich don't pay because they can sneak around it, and the rest of us who are in the middle end up paying for everything.
You had me until the bit about a national sales tax, but other than that, you're pretty spot on.
The solution is a flat tax, not a sales tax. The difference is that with a flat tax, everyone pays a fixed rate (persons and companies) on income (profits), and the more you make, the more you pay. Simple and fair.
Plus this does something to eliminate the real problem with US taxes, which isn't the amount a person has to pay but the fact that there's so much gamesmanship involved in taxes (plus the fact that a good accountant will save you far more than his/her bill by playing these games, but only if your income is large enough to support it).
The problem with a sales tax has to do with relative tax burden rather than absolute. If you charge everyone a sales tax then those who can least afford to pay end up forking over a much greater portion of their income as tax than those who can most afford to pay -- if you're making minimum wage the tax on that bottle of milk is a much greater portion of your income than if you're making $100k per year.
A sales tax is inherently regressive; a flat tax is, by definition, progressive.
I'm not one to bitch about the editing here, but this title really ought to have read: Possible Taxes for US Broadband Users.
That having been said, the purpose of the USF was (is) to ensure that telecom companies extend coverage to sparsely populated areas rather than just staying in cities where they get far more uses per kilometer of cable, right?
They can try to wrap this with libraries and schools, but those entities are funded through local and state governments. As far as healthcare goes, it seems the only thing the US government is interested in funding is marble paneling for the lobbies of Eli-Lily and Phizer.
I guess my question is, how much new cable is actually being laid in rural America? Aren't the telcos much more focused on putting up cell towers and selling much more profitable wireless plans?
What exactly is a provider of two-way communication? Does that mean that every web-site has to pay (since an http request and response is two-way)? Would it mean that Slashdot gets taxed but Drudge Report doesn't, because users can communicate with each other through the former?
What about Skype? Does it mean I'll start getting a monthly bill for $0.00 (10.2 percent of what I pay) from Skype to cover this?
What if, as a previous poster noted, I set up an asterisk box and route all my calls through a number in the UK, or Canada, etc? What if I start selling Canadian numbers here in Washington DC but my company is legally seated in the Caymans?
All of that aside, this is just a letter sent to a Congressional committee, not a law and not even a bill. It was signed by 60 of 435 Reps, mostly so they can go home to their constituents and talk about how they are fighting that damned bureaucratic machine in Washington to win rights for rural America.
It's also quite likely that none of the signatories actually want or expect this to go anywhere, because if it did they would have to explain in the next election why they made grandma pay taxes for her AOL account.
I really find it quite ironic that there's so many MS apologists in this discussion willing to say that getting infected is the user's fault for being too stupid to have a commercial A/V package installed (at additional expense) and have a hardware firewall (at additional expense) between their system and the internet.
Yes, I know that AVG is free and very good, and Zone Alarm has a free version (I make sure both are on every MS box I have to look after).
But this ignores at least two problems. First, OEM PCs don't come with AVG or ZA, they come with Norton or Symantec or McAfee and a very short period of free support. Two months after you bring your new PC home and the new NetskyBlaster.z hits your hotmailbox, you're SOL. Why, if MS is so focused on improving security, do MS customers need to rely on 3rd party vendors for A/V security software?
Secondly, the firewall in XP SP2 is certainly an improvement over nothing at all (or over nothing useful, a category to which the the pre-SP2 firewall certainly belongs). So then why do I need to buy a $70 hardware firewall if XP has a firewall already?
Why does ZA tell me about so many more applications that want to reach the internet than the XP firewall? Why the hell does rundll need the internet (let alone Nero, or my printer for that matter), and why doesn't the XP firewall tell me about it?
For a commercial software vendor, MS's security record is beyond dismal. For a company that claims security as a priority, MS's poor performance would be laughable if it weren't so damned expensive and time consuming.
Why is it that Linux vendors can provide fully configurable firewalls that block anything and everything (if that's what you want) out of the box, but MS Windows insists on leaving open ports, enabling ActiveX, and phoning home to download updates whether you want it or not?
Why is it that wierdo hippy-commu-nazi Linux developers understand the difference between user and administrator but MS developers insist on every little widget having complete kernel access?
Why is it that MS thinks security is something to tack on to an OS through SPs, weekly downloads (with requisite reboots), patches, and 3rd party products, rather than something that is built into the code?
This move would seem to indicate that the RIAA companies have accepted that P2P is a legitimate distribution vehicle, but they still do not get that P2P will let them drastically increase shipments and revenues if they'd only listen to their customers.
CDs no longer represent the value they used to and there is a lot more competition for the 'young, foolish, and flush' demographic.
When I was at school in the mid 90s, DVDs didn't exists, maybe a quarter of students had a computer, and nobody (at least in the dorms) had a TV, VCR or game machine.
In other words, there was very little competition for entertainment dollars. Now if I've got $50 to blow on media I can buy three CDs, at least 4 DVDs, or new game or two (assuming I pay retail). CDs are overvalued and other products are chasing the same dollar.
So bring the cost of a CD down to $7-$8. Just doing that combined with a major press event will cause records to fly out of shops.
As far as the downloads go, a physical CD (original) is always worth more than any download because of the quality gurantee and the paper cover. The cover is the most expensive part of the package to produce, and it is a key reason why people still buy CDs (and vinyl, for that matter). A physical CD always costs more to produce than a download, and adds significant value.
So downloads shouldn't cost more than $5 an ablum. As far as individual tracks go, they should be put on a sliding scale -- the brand new U2 single is $1, a track off an older U2 record is $.50, and Happy Fun Polka by Lawrence Welk is $0.01. As demand decreases, price decreases.
In order to make this work, everything has to be available. The entire catalog, top to bottom. Once that's done, it's time to set up a BT network, with the whole catalog in lo-fi. If you can't stop 'em from trading (you can't), you can take it away by giving access to everything -- at a reduced quality and filesize. You can hear what it sounds like, but it sounds like crap on your stereo, so if you like it you'll want to buy the hi quality version, which is cheap and easy.
But there's an awful lot in the vaults and an awful lot to have to sift through. This is also where the record stores come back in. With access to this database, a lot of local storage, and a fast connection, they could burn, print, and package any CD while you wait. This, of course, is a value-added service but one that folks would be willing to pay for.
A legitimate copy of something is inherently worth more than an illegitimate copy, and people are willing to pay for legitimacy, to a point.
The RIAA shouldn't be so concerned with getting people to stop downloading (meaning listening to less music, getting less exposure to new music, and spending time playing games instead), but with getting them to buy much of the music they would have previously got for free.
If they would just lower the price and open the gates, they would sell more music than even their greedy little heads have ever dreamed.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
No. It means that if ad blocking becomes standard, it will pose a threat to bouncing, popping, blinking, annoying graphical ads on the web. Text ads do not get in the way, do not distract, and do not get blocked.
The fact that Mr Smith sells bouncing, popping, flashing, annoying graphical ads may have something to do with his opinion.
Note to marketers: It is possible to reach your target audience without annoying everyone else.
FTFA: Kay added while Linux users -- who as a whole are becoming less sophisticated, according to other industry observers -- might be more likely to shop at Fry's, the bulk of Linux systems sold end up with other operating systems, particularly pirated Windows, likening the situation to PCs that ship to China.
"I think they may end up with Windows," he said. "The stores just say, 'Look, it had an operating system on it when it went out the door. That's all we know. Hear no evil, see no evil."
That may be, but I've got four systems that came with MS licenses, and none of them are running MS software.
I would be very interested in seeing some valid numbers on this -- how many boxes ship with MS Windows but end up running Linux, vs how many ship Linux and run MS.
It wasn't too long ago that you coundn't buy a PC without MS software unless you built it yourself. I can't imagine every x86 system running Linux today was home-built.
software piracy - loss of income to the programmers.
Ummmm, no. The mechanic works on the clock. He still gets paid. The business itself eats the loss from your very poor wheel balancing analogy, which means the 'lost sale' comes out of the general cashflow.
That money comes out of the till because there was a concrete service performed that has a set value based on the number of man-hours the job takes, materials, fixed operating costs, etc.
This is different from the software situation where no additional costs or efforts for the company went into an illicit copy of the software. Thus 'lost sales' do not come out of the till, are never a part of the company cashflow, and represent at best only potential lost sales (though a far more realistic way to look at illegal copies is potential future sales).
Unless you can show that the programmers' income is directly related to the number of copies sold for a given piece of software, then they don't lose any income either.
They might have been salaried employees at the time the sofware was written, they might have been on contract, they might be developing and servicing the same piece of software now, or they might be working on something completely different.
There is simply no connection between the frequency with which a piece of software is copied and the income of the software's authors (except that the most copied software is, by definition, the most popular, and therefore is built and maintained by the most expensive developers).
Besides, BSA companies themselves are responsible for a lot of their 'piracy' numbers. I lived for six years in eastern Europe, and I can tell you that where I was, the schools had an 'amnesty' from BSA (meaning schools could run whatever they could get their hands on), and member companies would routinely give away burned software as nudge-nudge-wink-wink incentives on other purchases.
I did something relatively minor for a BSA company in 2000, and they loaded my notebook with win98 (it was 95), photoshop, acrobat, office, and a few other packages. A buddy who ran a graphic design place got just about all the software he needed after upgrading a bunch of hardware.
The point is that the BSA's numbers were pulled out of thin air, and they have absolutely no meaning because they discuss a nonexistent loss of imaginary money that nobody ever had to begin with.
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The idea of Democratic Republics came from Rome and Greece before they were Christianized. These ideas were revived during the 17th/18th century Enlightment, first incorporated in the US government, then France and so on.
Yes, but the 'democracies' of the ancient world were hardly democratic. Precious few citizens of Athens had the vote.
What matters in western civilizations is not that they were the first to have the idea of a democratic republic, but that they saw democracy as a natural extention of metaphysical freedom, and that all people (well, all white men who owned property) were equally free. This is the basis of the 'equality and inalienable rights' clause of the Declaration of Independence.
This really all goes back to the Magna Carta -- the first successful challenge to the equally religious notion that kings were kings because God wanted them to be born that way, and everybody better do what the king says because that's what God wants.
The revolutionary idea that the king was just born lucky would eventually lead to the Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the American and French Revolutions, the uprisings of 1848, and ultimately the ending of absolute monarchy in Europe after the First World War.
But my point remains -- if there were no concept that humans were free beings (in the image of God), there would be no reason to allow the unlucky a say in the Res Publicae, and no reason not to accept the king's existence as a divine mandate.
I take serious amounts of offense to a person believing in Creationism or ID being called an extremist. A belief that you do not share does not automatically put someone into a fringe extremist group which is to be feared or summarily dismissed.
Believing in creationism is not extremist. You can believe the moon is made of cheese for all I care, but that is not extremist either.
What is extremist is insisting that a religious doctrine with no basis in scientific method (i.e., not based on direct observation, not testable, not predictive, and neither provable nor disprovable) should be held as valid science.
I am not opposed to the teaching of religion in schools -- without a knowledge of the Bible, it is diffucult to have a real understanding of the artistic, cultural and political histotry of Western civilization, let alone how and why it is different from other civilizations in history.
Our western-style democratic systems of government, after all, stem directly from the Book of Genesis -- that humans are created in the image of God, meaning endowed with metaphysical freedom. Without that notion of metaphysical freedom, there would be no freedom in the real world.
But that is philosophy, not engineering. The Bible is literature, not history. Religion is cutural, not factual. And whatever the euphamism of the day, creationism is doctrine, not science.
If it were up to me, comparative religion would be a required part of every secondary school curriculum, but certainly not part of the science curriculum.
If we teach creationism in biology lessons, does that mean that we should also teach in astronomy the Islamic doctrine that the phases of the moon cannot be predicted, but must be observed? Perhaps in physics we should also teach the perfectly valid theory that an object will fall to the ground because that is the nature of matter.
Doh. And by asyncronous, of course I meant asymmetric.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said, quite the contrary.
But a key defference is that cell and POTS companies still bill calls in $x/minute while an ISP gives you a big ol' internet pipe at $y/month for a given service level -- always-open line with guaranteed bandwidth, latency, etc.
What that means, in the US at least, is the end of long distance rates. For businesses with offices in different countries, it means calls between the London office and the Tokyo office at no cost, assuming the company is running the SIP gateway on both ends. It also means calls between the two cities for local rates. Yes, they have to pay for the bandwidth, but they're already paying for it, and (if they're smart) already have an SLA in place with their ISP guaranteeing enough capacity and low enough latency to handle voice calls.
You're right that if and when this becomes popular, it will be nearly impossible to keep the frequencies unregulated. On the other hand, no one is going to kill the goose until they're sure that the eggs are golden. By then it may be too late.
I would much rather figure out now how I can use this technology to my advantage than wait until the FCC decides how SBC can use it to theirs. This is even more important considering the FCC's recent decision that cable companies don't have to open their networks. You can be sure that the phone companies are doing everything they can to get rid of that requirement for themselves. If that happens, it's either exploring bleeding edge radio, or going back to the good ol' days of monopoly (or at least oligopoly) providers.
I, for one, am not going to sit on my hands and let that happen. Asterisk now gives anyone willing to learn the tools to create their own telecom, and those who have learned are not going to go back.
There seems to be a common misconception that because WiMax is wireless that it logically competes with cells. I'm much more of the opinion that it competes with cable, DSL, and T1, and turns the providers of mainline internet service into the dumb pipes that they are.
You're right -- by that logic, cell phones should be cheaper than landlines, although cell towers don't have anywhere near a 30-mile range (and I doubt that WiMax has a usable range that large either). One reason why cells cost more (at least in the US) is because they try to keep everything in-network, meaning that a company needs lots and lots of towers all over the place for it to work.
With a Wi-Max system, though, you only need a tower within range of your customers; all your calls go through IP, meaning the infrastructure is already there. You can start a WiMax phone company with a single tower; you cannot do the same with a cell company.
There's also the fact that cell companies are still trying to recoup the massive investment they made into buying frequencies and setting up 3G systems that pretty much nobody uses.
In contrast, Wi-Max is capable of operating over unregulated spectrum, and isn't going to lead to 3G-type hysteria because it's all already data packets in standard, open formats and protocols.
It's not the case in the US, but there are plenty of places in the world already where cell phones are cheaper than landlines -- perhaps not measured in cost/minute call-time, but in average cost/month. I used to live in Slovakia, for example, where a landline cost around $15/month plus per minute charges for any call, including local. At the same time, I spent generally less than $10 / month on my contract-free pay-as-you-go cell phone.
Australia has ADSL2+ now, which goes up to 24Mbps
I think you mean goes down 24 Mbps, unless the A no longer stands for asynchronous.
It is news because it is the first time, that I'm aware of at least, that a company is offering a more or less complete telecom package without dealing at all with telephone or cable lines.
It may seem at first glance that $600 is a lot for a 1.5 Mbps line (I think a T-1 around here (DC) runs about $300), but according to the Towerstream site the 1.5 Mbps is covered by an SLA (and is $500). Which means that, with or without Vonage, you could handle at least 50, and possibly over 100 VoIP lines over a single wireless network. When you think about it that way, it brings the monthly cost per phone down to single digits.
On top of that, 802.16 is new tech, which means it costs a premium at the moment. This will eventually fall well below the level that any phone company can match because there is no 'last-mile' infrastructure to maintain, no cable to lay or repair, no expensive equipment for laying and repairing cable, no expensive vehicles to carry the equipment, no facilites to store the vehicles and equipment, and no employees to drive the vehicles, work the equipment, repair the lines, or administer and guard the facilities. And most of all, no middle or senior managers to oversee an army of maintenance staff and an archipelago of offices and storage sites.
If a tower has a range of 30 miles, that means a coverage area of nearly 3,000 sq miles. How many maintenence people does Verizon have for an area that size? How many would you need if there were no wires?
This is news because it is very indicative of things to come, and a reminder of how much we are overpaying at the moment for phone service (particularly long distance).
My library, for example has thousands and thousands of CDs, with an especially rich collection of jazz and blues but with plenty of fairly recent pop music as well.
You've already paid for access to your library's resources, so you might as well use them. Plus, considering that the American Library Association is willing to stand up to the Feds when it comes to snooping at people's library records, I don't think the RIAA has much chance to see what I've borrowed, and even less chance to prove that I've ripped anything.
I will not buy another CD from an RIAA company as long as they keep up this nonsense, nor will download anything from them legally or otherwise. But those CDs at the library belong as much to me as to anyone else in my county. I do intend to keep using what is mine.
I like Cringely's articles because they are always insightful, always look at things from a different angle, and almost always feature a prediction that I find very unlikely but compelling enough to make me look at the given topic in a different light (which is strikingly different from Dvorak articles, which are always inept, look at things from the same angle as everyone else but with cracked bifocals, and prove the adage that even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time).
That having been said, Skype is a very dangerous thing for the big telecom providers. As Cringely points out, the big phone companies can't buy it to kill it because something else would take its place. But he misses that this also holds for cable companies.
I use Skype Out regularly to call internationally, and I know that nobody calls to PSTN networks for less unless they own the switch on both ends.
Comcast et al want to sell VoIP on top of broadband, but Skype (or its successor) is free with broadband -- which brings up the whole bit about synergy and technical capabilities and whatnot.
Since the whole Skype backbone is P2P there really isn't a whole lot of infrastructure involved, other than the database for paying customers. There's no real physical infrastructure because the users are the network. As I understand it, Skype only has a few dozen employees (but I may have read that a while ago, before they had 20 million regular users).
The fact that there's basically no infrastructure means that it will be hard for a big incumbent operator to leverage its network size to take advantage of something like Skype. The whole Skype network costs its operators next to nothing to run right now, so how is MegaCableTeleCom, Inc (with all its buildings and employee unions, and executive bonuses, and specialized equipment, and miles and miles of plain-old-copper/coaxial/fiber lines, etc) going to keep it cheap enough to compete with free without losing?
Cringely's right -- Murdoch won't pay $3 billion, but somebody probably will. Only what's for sale is not the network but the customers. And those customers will flee in a minute if whoever runs Skype starts acting like a phone company -- cryptic bills, mystery charges, line-carrier fees, connection charges, etc. After all, something better and cheaper will come along any day now. For $3 billion, I'd sell.
Nah, see what happened was in the 60's, record companies paid cash directly to DJs, under the table, to play songs. "i'll give you $100 if you play $song".
You're missing a few points. First, the original payola was in the 50s, not the 60s. In the original payola scandal, the DJs were implicated for accepting bribes of cash, drugs, hookers, etc directly in return for airplay.
That scandal took down some crooks, but it also took down some good DJs. And it gave a lot more of the decision-making power to the stations and program directors and took it away from the DJs, in order to avoid further scandal.
But since there's a lot more songs than time to play them, the labels needed a new way to make sure that their new 'hit' single got played.
To accomplish this, the majors came up with the independent promotion system -- meaning that a label would contract an independent promoter to get the song on the air. If anything unseemly happened, it was a matter strictly between the promoter and the radio station, not the record label. This allowed the labels to 'outsource' the corruption and at least pretend to be clean.
By the late 70s/early 80s, independent promotion had become institutionalized (and centralized) to the point that paying an independent promoter might not get your song on the air, but not paying would ensure the song stayed off the air, no matter how big the song. IIRC, Pink Floyd was a guinea pig for this -- at a time when The Wall was one of the top selling albums, "Another Brick in the Wall" was one of the top selling singles and the band was promoting a concert tour, they didn't get any radio play in LA. Their label hadn't paid for independent promotion in the LA market.
As the independent promotion system was institutionalized, there were a number of dodgy mafia-connected people getting involved in the RIAA side as well. Tommy Mottola, for example, the former US boss of Sony Music, started as an independent promoter in the 70s, and Frank DiLeo (who played this guy in Goodfellas) was Michael Jackson's manager in the 80s, and was tight with 'our friends in New York and Chicago'.
What bothers the record labels is not that there's corruption or that they have to pay for spins, it's that they have no control over what they're buying -- the label owes whatever the promoter says it owes, and there's no resonable correlation between the number and quality (ie 8.15 am is a better time than 10:00 pm) of spins and the payment rate. If it was up to labels, I imagine they'd rather just buy the time outright.
Forget the fact that all this is illegal, but when Clear Channel bailed out on independent promoters it took away the only leverage the promoters had. With the Justice Department now getting involved and Congressional hearings likely at some point, our RIAA friends will line up and take their wrist-slapping and be glad to be rid of independent promotion.
Although it's almost 15 years old, the book Hit Men is a great look at how the music business got to be the reeking cesspit it is. I only hope that when there are hearings, the record companies get reamed as hard as the mafia middlemen for setting up the system in the first place.
can a person under the legal drinking age purchase these ingrediants without anyone asking for ID?
Yes. It doesn't matter what the malt, hops, yeast, airlocks, fermenting bins, bottle cappers, etc can be used for, it matters what they contain, which is not alcohol.
It's illegal for a person under 21 to buy alcohol, not barley malt or live yeast. It's also illegal for a minor to consume alcohol, but that's a different matter, since you're not going to have any alcohol for at least a couple weeks.
I did exactly this when I was at university in Ohio about 10 years ago. The summer of my freshman year I moved off campus and was working as a janitor at the school for the summer session (eight hours a night, but the work was done in three and janitors have all the keys).
Anyway, the Ohio State liquor store (and homebrew shop) was on my way home from school. At first I didn't have any problem buying beer there, but eventually someone realized that I was only 19.
But the guy who ran the shop was an old-time homebrew guy and we got to talking about beers and the making of them. He said he could sell me whatever I wanted for making beer so long as it didn't have alcohol in it.
So thanks to my janitor keys, I managed to liberate an old 20-liter spring water container from behind some disused florescent fixtures in an ancient storeroom in one of the social sciences buildings. A trip to the surplus store got me a big ol' army-size aluminum boilin' pot for about $20. All that was left were some sundries from the brew-shop -- airlock, rubber tubing, bottle capper and caps, funnel, etc.
The guy at the shop was always very helpful and willing to trade recipes, recommend this hop with that malt, and so on. We ended up sharing a few after I turned 21 (his was much better) and I kept brewing up until I finished school.
Brewing is a lot of work but has very nice rewards.
The fifth season was the last, not the fourth. And in my book some of the last season's episodes rank up there with the best of the Simpsons (and TV don't get much better than that).
Particularly "The Farnsworth Parabox" ("There's a woman for you -- always dyeing her hair instead of not looking in a box") and "Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" (the robot devil's song is an absolute classic).
"The Devil's Hands" showed an amazing depth of character and theme, which makes the ending that much more meaningful now, since it was the last episode.
As for my personal favorite, "Parasites Lost", that's up with the best of any show ever.
Those episodes in the last season really demonstrated what the writers and actors could grow Futurama into if they had been given the chance. Futurama is a show that was killed of before it had reached it's prime, and I think it's great that they're doing something to revive it. Tell me where I can pre-order if it helps the thing get made.
The problem is landlines. You can't connect to them using this software unless you pay extra ? I understand alot of people will save on long distance using pc to pc Voip but connecting to landlines offers no big cost savings.
Actually, Skype and other voip services offer very significant cost savings, since the landline part of the call is only from the termination of the ip network. Consider this:Verizon long distance per minute USA to Slovakia: $3.69
SkypeOut rate per minute USA to Slovakia: euro 0.055
I'd say there's a bit of savings there.
EFF has never won any significant legal battle it has taken on. In fact, some of the cases the EFF fought most heavily have been lost in a manner that substantially weakens the EFF positions.
You mean like the broadcast flag?
You're right that they record in the hall with one microphone, but not mono.
Generally an extremely high quality stereo condenser mic is used (usually hung from the ceiling around the middle of the hall), as it can replicate the spatial arrangement of the musicians on the stage without spreding them too far apart (you don't want the 1st violins only in the right speaker) as well as capturing the tonal characteristics of the hall itself.
The advantage of this is, of course, that it doesn't take much longer to produce a classical recording than it does to perform the piece. The microphone is designed to pick up and record exactly the sound in the room -- meaning there's very little processing that needs to be done afterwards.
Contrast this with pop music, where it can take weeks in the studio to get the right guitar sound (don't even get me started on what it takes for drums).
If you listen to new pop bands, they may have great sound, but it's not all that impressive considering how much time they spend tweaking things to get that sound.
What is impressive, are those old Elvis recordings with Carl Perkins and the Sun Studio house band, where they'd cut the whole record in a couple of days. That band still sounds tighter and swings harder than just about anything today.
Otherwise, just look at what MS produces: mice, keyboard, office suites, video players, games, consoles, internet portals, TV content, etc etc etc... and none of these activities are failing.
Ummmm. Actually AFIK, the only divisions at MS that actually make a profit are Windows and Office (although I believe MSN recently had their first ever profitable quarter).
It's simply not correct to say that none of their activities are failing -- practically all of them are. It's just that they have so much cash from Windows and Office that they can afford to eat a loss on everything else they do.
Why not a logarithmic tax? Or an exponential tax?
Because if tax rates increase exponentially or logorithmically then top money earners will owe far more than they make. Not a particularly good way to motivate people to earn money, but an excellent motivation for people to launder money.
The point of a flat tax is that if a US corporation knows it will have to pay x% of profits in tax, then there is much less administrative waste from them looking for loopholes, and much less administrative waste from government in legislating, auditing for, and subsequently abusing loopholes.
Sure a company can monkey their records to make it appear they haven't actually made anything (and thus owe little tax), but how do you think several years of flat growth would affect the stock performacne?
There is no sloganeering and no false dichotomy in the fact that a tax is either progressive (meaning the wealthy have a larger tax burden due to the fact that they have more to tax) or regressive (meaning the poor have a higher tax burden because a larger portion of their income has to go to taxes).
As for as your trichotomy goes, that is what we have now -- the poor don't pay because they can't, the rich don't pay because they can sneak around it, and the rest of us who are in the middle end up paying for everything.
This, obviously, is no solution
You had me until the bit about a national sales tax, but other than that, you're pretty spot on.
The solution is a flat tax, not a sales tax. The difference is that with a flat tax, everyone pays a fixed rate (persons and companies) on income (profits), and the more you make, the more you pay. Simple and fair.
Plus this does something to eliminate the real problem with US taxes, which isn't the amount a person has to pay but the fact that there's so much gamesmanship involved in taxes (plus the fact that a good accountant will save you far more than his/her bill by playing these games, but only if your income is large enough to support it).
The problem with a sales tax has to do with relative tax burden rather than absolute. If you charge everyone a sales tax then those who can least afford to pay end up forking over a much greater portion of their income as tax than those who can most afford to pay -- if you're making minimum wage the tax on that bottle of milk is a much greater portion of your income than if you're making $100k per year.
A sales tax is inherently regressive; a flat tax is, by definition, progressive.
I'm not one to bitch about the editing here, but this title really ought to have read: Possible Taxes for US Broadband Users.
That having been said, the purpose of the USF was (is) to ensure that telecom companies extend coverage to sparsely populated areas rather than just staying in cities where they get far more uses per kilometer of cable, right?
They can try to wrap this with libraries and schools, but those entities are funded through local and state governments. As far as healthcare goes, it seems the only thing the US government is interested in funding is marble paneling for the lobbies of Eli-Lily and Phizer.
I guess my question is, how much new cable is actually being laid in rural America? Aren't the telcos much more focused on putting up cell towers and selling much more profitable wireless plans?
What exactly is a provider of two-way communication? Does that mean that every web-site has to pay (since an http request and response is two-way)? Would it mean that Slashdot gets taxed but Drudge Report doesn't, because users can communicate with each other through the former?
What about Skype? Does it mean I'll start getting a monthly bill for $0.00 (10.2 percent of what I pay) from Skype to cover this?
What if, as a previous poster noted, I set up an asterisk box and route all my calls through a number in the UK, or Canada, etc? What if I start selling Canadian numbers here in Washington DC but my company is legally seated in the Caymans?
All of that aside, this is just a letter sent to a Congressional committee, not a law and not even a bill. It was signed by 60 of 435 Reps, mostly so they can go home to their constituents and talk about how they are fighting that damned bureaucratic machine in Washington to win rights for rural America.
It's also quite likely that none of the signatories actually want or expect this to go anywhere, because if it did they would have to explain in the next election why they made grandma pay taxes for her AOL account.
Rest assured, this is going nowhere.
I really find it quite ironic that there's so many MS apologists in this discussion willing to say that getting infected is the user's fault for being too stupid to have a commercial A/V package installed (at additional expense) and have a hardware firewall (at additional expense) between their system and the internet.
Yes, I know that AVG is free and very good, and Zone Alarm has a free version (I make sure both are on every MS box I have to look after).
But this ignores at least two problems. First, OEM PCs don't come with AVG or ZA, they come with Norton or Symantec or McAfee and a very short period of free support. Two months after you bring your new PC home and the new NetskyBlaster.z hits your hotmailbox, you're SOL. Why, if MS is so focused on improving security, do MS customers need to rely on 3rd party vendors for A/V security software?
Secondly, the firewall in XP SP2 is certainly an improvement over nothing at all (or over nothing useful, a category to which the the pre-SP2 firewall certainly belongs). So then why do I need to buy a $70 hardware firewall if XP has a firewall already?
Why does ZA tell me about so many more applications that want to reach the internet than the XP firewall? Why the hell does rundll need the internet (let alone Nero, or my printer for that matter), and why doesn't the XP firewall tell me about it?
For a commercial software vendor, MS's security record is beyond dismal. For a company that claims security as a priority, MS's poor performance would be laughable if it weren't so damned expensive and time consuming.
Why is it that Linux vendors can provide fully configurable firewalls that block anything and everything (if that's what you want) out of the box, but MS Windows insists on leaving open ports, enabling ActiveX, and phoning home to download updates whether you want it or not?
Why is it that wierdo hippy-commu-nazi Linux developers understand the difference between user and administrator but MS developers insist on every little widget having complete kernel access?
Why is it that MS thinks security is something to tack on to an OS through SPs, weekly downloads (with requisite reboots), patches, and 3rd party products, rather than something that is built into the code?
This move would seem to indicate that the RIAA companies have accepted that P2P is a legitimate distribution vehicle, but they still do not get that P2P will let them drastically increase shipments and revenues if they'd only listen to their customers.
CDs no longer represent the value they used to and there is a lot more competition for the 'young, foolish, and flush' demographic.
When I was at school in the mid 90s, DVDs didn't exists, maybe a quarter of students had a computer, and nobody (at least in the dorms) had a TV, VCR or game machine.
In other words, there was very little competition for entertainment dollars. Now if I've got $50 to blow on media I can buy three CDs, at least 4 DVDs, or new game or two (assuming I pay retail). CDs are overvalued and other products are chasing the same dollar.
So bring the cost of a CD down to $7-$8. Just doing that combined with a major press event will cause records to fly out of shops.
As far as the downloads go, a physical CD (original) is always worth more than any download because of the quality gurantee and the paper cover. The cover is the most expensive part of the package to produce, and it is a key reason why people still buy CDs (and vinyl, for that matter). A physical CD always costs more to produce than a download, and adds significant value.
So downloads shouldn't cost more than $5 an ablum. As far as individual tracks go, they should be put on a sliding scale -- the brand new U2 single is $1, a track off an older U2 record is $.50, and Happy Fun Polka by Lawrence Welk is $0.01. As demand decreases, price decreases.
In order to make this work, everything has to be available. The entire catalog, top to bottom. Once that's done, it's time to set up a BT network, with the whole catalog in lo-fi. If you can't stop 'em from trading (you can't), you can take it away by giving access to everything -- at a reduced quality and filesize. You can hear what it sounds like, but it sounds like crap on your stereo, so if you like it you'll want to buy the hi quality version, which is cheap and easy.
But there's an awful lot in the vaults and an awful lot to have to sift through. This is also where the record stores come back in. With access to this database, a lot of local storage, and a fast connection, they could burn, print, and package any CD while you wait. This, of course, is a value-added service but one that folks would be willing to pay for.
A legitimate copy of something is inherently worth more than an illegitimate copy, and people are willing to pay for legitimacy, to a point.
The RIAA shouldn't be so concerned with getting people to stop downloading (meaning listening to less music, getting less exposure to new music, and spending time playing games instead), but with getting them to buy much of the music they would have previously got for free.
If they would just lower the price and open the gates, they would sell more music than even their greedy little heads have ever dreamed.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
No. It means that if ad blocking becomes standard, it will pose a threat to bouncing, popping, blinking, annoying graphical ads on the web. Text ads do not get in the way, do not distract, and do not get blocked.
The fact that Mr Smith sells bouncing, popping, flashing, annoying graphical ads may have something to do with his opinion.
Note to marketers: It is possible to reach your target audience without annoying everyone else.
FTFA: Kay added while Linux users -- who as a whole are becoming less sophisticated, according to other industry observers -- might be more likely to shop at Fry's, the bulk of Linux systems sold end up with other operating systems, particularly pirated Windows, likening the situation to PCs that ship to China.
"I think they may end up with Windows," he said. "The stores just say, 'Look, it had an operating system on it when it went out the door. That's all we know. Hear no evil, see no evil."
That may be, but I've got four systems that came with MS licenses, and none of them are running MS software.
I would be very interested in seeing some valid numbers on this -- how many boxes ship with MS Windows but end up running Linux, vs how many ship Linux and run MS.
It wasn't too long ago that you coundn't buy a PC without MS software unless you built it yourself. I can't imagine every x86 system running Linux today was home-built.
Kaminsky said. "The ability to customize our computers is under attack from those who are customizing it against our will."
. . . and you can have any color car you want as long as it's black.
And you're free to speak your mind as long as your mind speaks what we like to hear.
And you can vote for whomever you want, as long as you're voting for a Party Approved (TM) candidate.
And you can buy whatever TV you want as long as you don't try to open the back and read the digital signal.
And you're free to worship in any Christian church.
And for your security and convenience, would you mind taking off your shoes?
We thank you for holding.
Your call is important to us.
wheel balancing - loss of income to the mechanic
software piracy - loss of income to the programmers.Ummmm, no. The mechanic works on the clock. He still gets paid. The business itself eats the loss from your very poor wheel balancing analogy, which means the 'lost sale' comes out of the general cashflow.
That money comes out of the till because there was a concrete service performed that has a set value based on the number of man-hours the job takes, materials, fixed operating costs, etc.
This is different from the software situation where no additional costs or efforts for the company went into an illicit copy of the software. Thus 'lost sales' do not come out of the till, are never a part of the company cashflow, and represent at best only potential lost sales (though a far more realistic way to look at illegal copies is potential future sales).
Unless you can show that the programmers' income is directly related to the number of copies sold for a given piece of software, then they don't lose any income either.
They might have been salaried employees at the time the sofware was written, they might have been on contract, they might be developing and servicing the same piece of software now, or they might be working on something completely different.
There is simply no connection between the frequency with which a piece of software is copied and the income of the software's authors (except that the most copied software is, by definition, the most popular, and therefore is built and maintained by the most expensive developers).
Besides, BSA companies themselves are responsible for a lot of their 'piracy' numbers. I lived for six years in eastern Europe, and I can tell you that where I was, the schools had an 'amnesty' from BSA (meaning schools could run whatever they could get their hands on), and member companies would routinely give away burned software as nudge-nudge-wink-wink incentives on other purchases.
I did something relatively minor for a BSA company in 2000, and they loaded my notebook with win98 (it was 95), photoshop, acrobat, office, and a few other packages. A buddy who ran a graphic design place got just about all the software he needed after upgrading a bunch of hardware.
The point is that the BSA's numbers were pulled out of thin air, and they have absolutely no meaning because they discuss a nonexistent loss of imaginary money that nobody ever had to begin with.