I think the reason it could be said to benefit Apple over the record company is that the record company would rather sell a record than singles. With the "hit song" music industry we've been in for awhile now the album model is much more profitable because you can make the minimum purchase quantity to get the hit song be the whole album. So, people would buy an album to get the song or songs they wanted. With individual song purchases just the hit is purchased, or just the selected songs, and few albums will sell enough tracks to make the amount per album that the record companies make with full album sells. So, it doesn't really benefit the record company because the record company wants to stick with a model that works really well for them. It could be argued that it doesn't really benefit the consumer if it means the profit margin on music would be driven down such that the money invested in bands went down. It could be argued. But it seems more likely that there is just a new consumer model emerging and companies need to adapt - certain large companies simply won't.
Well, part of the problem there is that it wasn't Sony's decision whether UMD titles sold for $6-8. I mean, sure for movies out of Sony studios, but for any other studio, such as those currently dropping it, you'd be asking them to take a loss on Sony's behalf.
Remember also that has to throw a license fee in there somewhere. Part of the problem with the PS2 was that people bought it as a DVD player and Sony made no direct money off many of the DVDs. Since the system was a loss-leader (I assume it also is in the case of the PSP but haven't researched it) this was bad. That is why the X-Box required a $30 add-on before it could play DVDs - so that Microsoft could at least pocket something when it was to be used as a DVD player.
Well, I was not thinking of a list of companies per se. But the statement stands regardless since any particular company is surely soiled by insidious anti-consumer dealings.
I am not sure what my view of Apple is. I view them as relatively good, in the same sense that I view Google and perhaps even Starbucks as relatively good. "Are they good?" is an entirely different question which necessarily entails asking "Good for who?"
That argument is poof. Of course it is better for industries to partner together from a business-relationship/profitability point of view. The point being made was that Apple is choosing the interests of the RIAA over that of its customers. The fact that Apple's actions make good business sense for them is something of an aside.
In addition, we cannot simply say "well, the company is doing what is in its own interests and we should support that" whenever we see otherwise good companies making deals with those that work to screw us.
I know people tote Alienware's hardware and support, but every time I have had to interact with their support it has been horrible.
Most recently I have had a problem with the little screws falling out of my laptop and with my AC adapter dying.
1. I shouldn't have had to call in to get mailed screws (which is aside from the fact that screws shouldn't have been falling out of my laptop in the first place). This should have been simple enough to handle via e-mail, but no, I had to call.
2. I shouldn't have had to wait for 40 minutes on hold when I *did* finally call Alienware.
3. I shouldn't have been lied to by the first person I spoke with, who told me that part was all set and that I'd receive it shortly. When it didn't arrive and I called back they said they were out of stock and they'd ship it when it was back in stock.
4. They really shouldn't have been out of stock of the AC adapter for a laptop STILL UNDER WARRANTY.
5. When the DID finally ship it they shipped it do an address that I haven't used with them in YEARS. I then had to have people I knew at said address (it was a previous employer) ship me the part.
All of this is on my second Alienware laptop, whose only major problem is that it resets if you bump the DVD-ROM the wrong way (this is annoying, but avoidable, and I didn't feel like sending it to them to fix it). This is my second laptop only because THEY HAD TO REPLACE my first one after months of tech support, three round trips back to Alienware TO FIX THE SAME PROBLEM, and TENS OF HOURS on the phone.
In my time at RPI I knew many, many students who had constant problems with their Thinkpads, the RPI help desk, and with the IBM repair shop. It seemed that some years the Thinkpad was pretty good, and that other years it was replete with problems.
Requiring laptops could be seen as a necessary step to create a consistent learning environment. When you have a school such that many or most of the students have and would rather be doing work on their own computers it can be difficult to create a class structure that is balanced. On one hand, if you just require students to do the work using software only available on campus computers then those many students with their own hardware have to come to their work on campus ANYWAYS or else have to purchase the software. On the other, if students are permitted to use laptops in class and the professor has done things to support this such as making class notes available online then those without laptops are at a distinct disadvantage.
But the software can often be much too expensive. Some universities solve this by participating in the MSDN Academic Alliance, but of course that only helps with Microsoft software, and does not include Office.
Another way to go is to require everybody get all the software so that the school can a volume discount and the cost can be spread across the student body. But to require students to get the software you need to require that they have a computer it can run on. If you're going to require computers anyways it is tempting to require laptops because of their versatility. And yes, universities requiring a particular brand smacks of inside interests, but it has the legitimate benefit of giving professors and TAs a relatively consistent base to work with and makes it more likely they'll be able to trouble-shoot problems.
All that said - I did not particularly like what requiring laptops did to my undergraduate university. It stripped away a lot of the feeling of community students got from working in campus labs, and basically pushed the campus from a Unix campus to a Windows campus. In the time I was there I watched the Computer Science program go from training computer scientists to training Microsoft Drones. It also is not clear to me that having a laptop did anything particularly useful in contributing to my education that a desktop wouldn't have.
If I remember correctly the PS1 required 9 game purchases before it became profitable, and the PS2 required 14. I am pretty sure the X-Box required even more. 30 seems ludicrous, but you have to remember that this is a drawn out race for being the set-top-box, the central hub to household multimedia. And, there is a bit more to it than game sales, such as things like the DVD addons, extra controllers, memory cards, etc.
It's a shame to see people missed your joke and modded your post Interesting rather than Funny. =(
Parents simply cannot be assumed to teach their children health, PE, higher sciences, diet, etc. There is a reason just about every developed country in the world has a public education system. Aside from problems like laziness, there are obvious problems like - what if you parents do not understand higher math and science? Is the suggestion then that a child can only rise to the educational level of their parents and parents' friends? How about if your parent is handicapped? There goes the PE. What if you parents have poor eating habits? Sure a teacher could too, but there is more oversight and training. This kind of system forces a student to follow the interest of their parents rather than being able to explore. You parent doesn't know how to play an instrument? thinks painting is a waste of time? doesn't know basic chemistry? never got past algebra? Well, too bad for you.
Without consistent public education you get a hodge-podge of people educated in different ways on different theories and lack a real base to work from. This would be a HUGE problem in higher maths and sciences. Think about how it would affect physics? chemistry? sociology? history? Without a common base of knowledge and assumed background in fundamentals it would be very hard to enter any of these fields.
Obviously this sort of system would favor those with money over those who don't since they could still afford to hire teachers and/or private schools. This would serve to exaggerate and perpetuate the already growing class divides seen the world over.
And all that is aside form the social aspect of public (or private, the key here is groups) education. One of the biggest downsides to home schooling is the lack of social interaction and the lack of an opportunity to develop the relevant skills.
Getting rid of public education is a bad idea all around.
You have presented a rather biased and false dichotomy. Those are hardly the only two things that can happen.
In response to your particular example:
1) if the original "inventor" never did anything more than write the idea down on paper and sell it to somebody, then I'd argue he didn't invent anything and that it wouldn't be possible for somebody to "steal" his invention; the alternative favors the person who just thinks up novel ideas at the expense of the person who has to take the time to realize them, and while that might look good if the metric is the number of patents, it is a deplorable state for actual innovation. In the absence of a prototype that means that a company or individual has to pay for the rights to *try* and implement something that might or might not even work. Where is the real invention occuring? I'd say with the implementors.
2) If the purpose of the holding company is to help inventors find business opportunies and markets for their inventions, I am pretty okay with that. My problem is with the huge number of holding companies that just hold the patents and wait for somebody to do something infringing. They are a leach on the economy and the climate of innovation.
So, I suppose I do have some disagreement on the correctness with which patents are granted, and with holding companies that are directly exploiting the problems with the system.
I am concerned with holding companies that just hold a portfolio of stocks and do nothing with them. If the inventor has invented something by not actually produced it and has no way to market it, then he deserves no exclusive claims on the right to produce and/or market the artifact. Without an implementation or path to production the inventor hasn't *invented* anything - he has proposed an idea.
Merely writing ideas down is not inventing, especially given the current patent climate where the patent is free to employ all sorts of ambiguous and/or amorphous terms.
Note that I do not necessarily have a problem with a pro-active holding company that will purchase a patent and then shop it around and try to get it into production; but that is not the game that many holding companies are in. MANY just hold the stock and sit on it until they see somebody producing something that could be argued to be infringing and then they sue over it. That is despicable behavior, completely counter-productive to innovation, and it is those companies I have a problem with.
Patent holding companies are indeed one of the key problems with the current patent system. Your suggestion is that just somebody thinking of an idea should be able to turn a profit. That is simply not the case - plenty of people *have ideas*, and were that the threshold for a patent then countless inventions could have been patented long ago. Hell, by that reasoning von Neumann could have patented the computer and then sold that patent to some parasitic holding company that just holds the patent and profits without ever producing anything. A patent it meant to protect the integrity of an invention, typically a product - not to make abstract ideas profitable in-and-of themselves.
To be fiar, there are people protesting that some fine wines in recent years have lost their flavor because they moved to better casks that don't admit the rodents that commonly left droppings and died in their previous casks. It changed the flavor.
So, maybe fines need a little shit?
But, but...1.3 GHz is not slow from a Mac and 1 gig of RAM is far from standard. That is a pretty high-end machine compared to the majority of computers running on practice.
My biggest problem with Spiderman 2 was that poor Peter Parker evidently never learned to swim. Can the wallcrawler swim this time around? I didn't see that mentioned in the review.
Not quite. It is more a response to my points being misunderstood or ignored and not having the time to keep trying to rephrase them and find supporting evidence for things which are essentially amorphous.
It seems obvious to me that any given country would not be willing to let control of ANY critical infrastructure component rest solely in the hands of some other country with which relations were uncertain.
Though I suppose to might be accurate to say that it is the last bastion of the debater having better things to do when the argument seems to be going nowhere.
Yeah, the great job US law does protecting against illegal seizure...such as the recent decision that it is permissible for a state to use eminent domain to seize private land and hand it over to an corporation if it is in the state's best interest. Look at the history of seizures and there are many many less deserving instances than ICANN.
ICANN has been riddled with problems. The initial board was entirely appointed by the US government, and then various board members were thrown off the board without any real justification and in a manner many regard as illegal. These are not signs of long-term stability.
You continuously avoid the point that ICANN, in being unbeholden to any particular international country is free to do whatever it wants. That is simply not an acceptable state of management for an integral international resource with multibillions of dollars invested in it.
There are plenty of reasonable arguments here (and in other responses to your post that address some of your individual points more fully but which I do not feel it is necessary to reproduce).
Sorry, I don't have time to continue this banter. Best of luck.
1. That the private company is already an international entity that serves international interests.
Merely saying this doesn't make it true. It currently serves international interests on abstractly and retains prerogative to ignore the input of various countries as it sees fit. Further, it is free to ignore them on relatively arbitrary grounds.
2. That said company has done an excellent job to date, and has shown no need for a government run entity.
Doing an excellent job to date is debatable and, regardless, offers no guarantee that it will continue to do so as political situations change. The international community is understandably reluctant to wait until there IS a problem to construct a more distributed and robust solution.
3. That it is not the US policy to force private companies to give up ownership.
Not really relevant. This is an international issue as the Internet is an international resources with countless billions invested by numerous nations all of which rely upon the system to function properly. Obviously there are numerous cases throughout history of the US and other nations having to adapt national policy or make exceptions to address global issues. (The fact that the US has been increasingly ignoring global issues doesn't really counter this.)
4. That the UN has no compelling argument for wanting control other than the fact that it wants it.
You've mischaracterized even that basic argument entirely: the UN, or rather, the international community, wants to move control from ICANN to a truly international organization that can operate transparently and that is required to acknowledge and assimilate the input from those governments represented in the UN. Again, the alternative is just to trust ICANN to play fair.
5. That the UN has a far poorer track record on joint ventures than ICANN has.
This is true, but is not sufficient to override the objections to your prior points.
So the argument there is that because a private company controls the Internet the many foreign governments and populations that rely upon it should be content?
Why should any foreign government merely trust ICANN to run the Internet smoothly and fairly? Being a private company ICANN is controlled by a board that can choose to allocate resources in ways disregarding world politics, traffic flow, advances in technology, country-specific regulations (that aren't the US), and the like. It is a very dangerous bet to just presume that ICANN will continue to work in everybody's best interest for all time.
The argument of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" seems a little optimistic. What is to say that ICANN will continue in its current form and direction in the future? Or in response to shifting allegiances and political realities? Or, perish the thought, in response to profitability? As a central part of the international infrastructure it seems naive and dangerous to allow a private entity with no direct input from those involved to serve as the sole architect and arbiter of the Internet.
(and all this is aside from the various complaints that have been levied against ICANN over the years)
But is it a step worth the pricetag? What else could NASA use that money for? I am guessing a great many things that would be far more beneficial. Or, for that matter, why give that kind of money to NASA? What about the many other issues we're currently facing?
Actually, including the DVD player in the PS2 hurt Sony a lot. Too many people bought it to be primarily used as a DVD player, which makes Sony no profit. That is why Microsoft setup the X-Box to at least require a remote - so that they'd make *something* off customers who wanted to play DVDs.
It may well be that the decision to not include DVD functionality is exactly why Nintendo is the only one of the three companies making a profit on their console.
"Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule."
No no no no.
Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. The only way that is "back on track" is if the trip itself will be used as a testbed for new technologies and techniques intended to support longer trips, like to Mars.
But even a trip to Mars at this point seems wasteful. I love the notion of traveling the stars and look forward to tea and danish on Alpha Centuri one day.....but not as our country is embroiled in more problems and debt that your average citizen can comprehend.
Not true. Firefox does indeed make patches available. Look at Gentoo Linux - it is currently at Firefox v1.0.6_r7. That is seven revisions (i.e. patches) since v1.0.6.
It was a decision of Mozilla to only bundle prebuilt-binaries as timely groupings of these patches. This was done, as far as I know, because it seemd the most intuitive way of doing so.
Is an e-mail an acceptable form of contacting them regarding this issue? Technically the document stipulates the acceptable forms of submitting comments, and these do not include e-mail.
Would it perhaps be better to encourage people to print and mail in letters?
It says, if sent by mail to send the original and FIVE COPIES (wtf?) to:
Are you suggesting that none of the 30 or 40 games your pirated were worth it enough to fork o'er the money for them?
I roughly agree with your premise...but not with your actions. I will rip friend's CDs as MP3s and when I really enjoy the music I'll go out and buy the album, especially if it is a smaller band (like, say, MSI).
If it always worked out that piracy was done as something of a "preview" that often lead to purchases I do not think there would be much a problem. But, what seems to actually happen WAY too much of the time is that people pirate...and then pirate...and then...well...seldom buy.
I am fine with people pirating things that they never would have bought anyways. For instance, I would be fine with grabbing an MP3, even for an album you did not own, if there was just no way you were going to purchase the entire album, maybe because you just kinda liked that one song.
The problem is when people pirate games, movies, songs, and the like INSTEAD of purchasing them.
Incidentally...why the suspicion that I am in the software development business?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reason it could be said to benefit Apple over the record company is that the record company would rather sell a record than singles. With the "hit song" music industry we've been in for awhile now the album model is much more profitable because you can make the minimum purchase quantity to get the hit song be the whole album. So, people would buy an album to get the song or songs they wanted. With individual song purchases just the hit is purchased, or just the selected songs, and few albums will sell enough tracks to make the amount per album that the record companies make with full album sells. So, it doesn't really benefit the record company because the record company wants to stick with a model that works really well for them. It could be argued that it doesn't really benefit the consumer if it means the profit margin on music would be driven down such that the money invested in bands went down. It could be argued. But it seems more likely that there is just a new consumer model emerging and companies need to adapt - certain large companies simply won't.
Well, part of the problem there is that it wasn't Sony's decision whether UMD titles sold for $6-8. I mean, sure for movies out of Sony studios, but for any other studio, such as those currently dropping it, you'd be asking them to take a loss on Sony's behalf.
Remember also that has to throw a license fee in there somewhere. Part of the problem with the PS2 was that people bought it as a DVD player and Sony made no direct money off many of the DVDs. Since the system was a loss-leader (I assume it also is in the case of the PSP but haven't researched it) this was bad. That is why the X-Box required a $30 add-on before it could play DVDs - so that Microsoft could at least pocket something when it was to be used as a DVD player.
Well, I was not thinking of a list of companies per se. But the statement stands regardless since any particular company is surely soiled by insidious anti-consumer dealings.
I am not sure what my view of Apple is. I view them as relatively good, in the same sense that I view Google and perhaps even Starbucks as relatively good. "Are they good?" is an entirely different question which necessarily entails asking "Good for who?"
That argument is poof. Of course it is better for industries to partner together from a business-relationship/profitability point of view. The point being made was that Apple is choosing the interests of the RIAA over that of its customers. The fact that Apple's actions make good business sense for them is something of an aside.
In addition, we cannot simply say "well, the company is doing what is in its own interests and we should support that" whenever we see otherwise good companies making deals with those that work to screw us.
I know people tote Alienware's hardware and support, but every time I have had to interact with their support it has been horrible.
Most recently I have had a problem with the little screws falling out of my laptop and with my AC adapter dying.
1. I shouldn't have had to call in to get mailed screws (which is aside from the fact that screws shouldn't have been falling out of my laptop in the first place). This should have been simple enough to handle via e-mail, but no, I had to call.
2. I shouldn't have had to wait for 40 minutes on hold when I *did* finally call Alienware.
3. I shouldn't have been lied to by the first person I spoke with, who told me that part was all set and that I'd receive it shortly. When it didn't arrive and I called back they said they were out of stock and they'd ship it when it was back in stock.
4. They really shouldn't have been out of stock of the AC adapter for a laptop STILL UNDER WARRANTY.
5. When the DID finally ship it they shipped it do an address that I haven't used with them in YEARS. I then had to have people I knew at said address (it was a previous employer) ship me the part.
All of this is on my second Alienware laptop, whose only major problem is that it resets if you bump the DVD-ROM the wrong way (this is annoying, but avoidable, and I didn't feel like sending it to them to fix it). This is my second laptop only because THEY HAD TO REPLACE my first one after months of tech support, three round trips back to Alienware TO FIX THE SAME PROBLEM, and TENS OF HOURS on the phone.
In my time at RPI I knew many, many students who had constant problems with their Thinkpads, the RPI help desk, and with the IBM repair shop. It seemed that some years the Thinkpad was pretty good, and that other years it was replete with problems.
Requiring laptops could be seen as a necessary step to create a consistent learning environment. When you have a school such that many or most of the students have and would rather be doing work on their own computers it can be difficult to create a class structure that is balanced. On one hand, if you just require students to do the work using software only available on campus computers then those many students with their own hardware have to come to their work on campus ANYWAYS or else have to purchase the software. On the other, if students are permitted to use laptops in class and the professor has done things to support this such as making class notes available online then those without laptops are at a distinct disadvantage.
But the software can often be much too expensive. Some universities solve this by participating in the MSDN Academic Alliance, but of course that only helps with Microsoft software, and does not include Office.
Another way to go is to require everybody get all the software so that the school can a volume discount and the cost can be spread across the student body. But to require students to get the software you need to require that they have a computer it can run on. If you're going to require computers anyways it is tempting to require laptops because of their versatility. And yes, universities requiring a particular brand smacks of inside interests, but it has the legitimate benefit of giving professors and TAs a relatively consistent base to work with and makes it more likely they'll be able to trouble-shoot problems.
All that said - I did not particularly like what requiring laptops did to my undergraduate university. It stripped away a lot of the feeling of community students got from working in campus labs, and basically pushed the campus from a Unix campus to a Windows campus. In the time I was there I watched the Computer Science program go from training computer scientists to training Microsoft Drones. It also is not clear to me that having a laptop did anything particularly useful in contributing to my education that a desktop wouldn't have.
If I remember correctly the PS1 required 9 game purchases before it became profitable, and the PS2 required 14. I am pretty sure the X-Box required even more. 30 seems ludicrous, but you have to remember that this is a drawn out race for being the set-top-box, the central hub to household multimedia. And, there is a bit more to it than game sales, such as things like the DVD addons, extra controllers, memory cards, etc.
It's a shame to see people missed your joke and modded your post Interesting rather than Funny. =(
Parents simply cannot be assumed to teach their children health, PE, higher sciences, diet, etc. There is a reason just about every developed country in the world has a public education system. Aside from problems like laziness, there are obvious problems like - what if you parents do not understand higher math and science? Is the suggestion then that a child can only rise to the educational level of their parents and parents' friends? How about if your parent is handicapped? There goes the PE. What if you parents have poor eating habits? Sure a teacher could too, but there is more oversight and training. This kind of system forces a student to follow the interest of their parents rather than being able to explore. You parent doesn't know how to play an instrument? thinks painting is a waste of time? doesn't know basic chemistry? never got past algebra? Well, too bad for you.
Without consistent public education you get a hodge-podge of people educated in different ways on different theories and lack a real base to work from. This would be a HUGE problem in higher maths and sciences. Think about how it would affect physics? chemistry? sociology? history? Without a common base of knowledge and assumed background in fundamentals it would be very hard to enter any of these fields.
Obviously this sort of system would favor those with money over those who don't since they could still afford to hire teachers and/or private schools. This would serve to exaggerate and perpetuate the already growing class divides seen the world over.
And all that is aside form the social aspect of public (or private, the key here is groups) education. One of the biggest downsides to home schooling is the lack of social interaction and the lack of an opportunity to develop the relevant skills.
Getting rid of public education is a bad idea all around.
You have presented a rather biased and false dichotomy. Those are hardly the only two things that can happen.
In response to your particular example:
1) if the original "inventor" never did anything more than write the idea down on paper and sell it to somebody, then I'd argue he didn't invent anything and that it wouldn't be possible for somebody to "steal" his invention; the alternative favors the person who just thinks up novel ideas at the expense of the person who has to take the time to realize them, and while that might look good if the metric is the number of patents, it is a deplorable state for actual innovation. In the absence of a prototype that means that a company or individual has to pay for the rights to *try* and implement something that might or might not even work. Where is the real invention occuring? I'd say with the implementors.
2) If the purpose of the holding company is to help inventors find business opportunies and markets for their inventions, I am pretty okay with that. My problem is with the huge number of holding companies that just hold the patents and wait for somebody to do something infringing. They are a leach on the economy and the climate of innovation.
So, I suppose I do have some disagreement on the correctness with which patents are granted, and with holding companies that are directly exploiting the problems with the system.
I am concerned with holding companies that just hold a portfolio of stocks and do nothing with them. If the inventor has invented something by not actually produced it and has no way to market it, then he deserves no exclusive claims on the right to produce and/or market the artifact. Without an implementation or path to production the inventor hasn't *invented* anything - he has proposed an idea.
Merely writing ideas down is not inventing, especially given the current patent climate where the patent is free to employ all sorts of ambiguous and/or amorphous terms.
Note that I do not necessarily have a problem with a pro-active holding company that will purchase a patent and then shop it around and try to get it into production; but that is not the game that many holding companies are in. MANY just hold the stock and sit on it until they see somebody producing something that could be argued to be infringing and then they sue over it. That is despicable behavior, completely counter-productive to innovation, and it is those companies I have a problem with.
Patent holding companies are indeed one of the key problems with the current patent system. Your suggestion is that just somebody thinking of an idea should be able to turn a profit. That is simply not the case - plenty of people *have ideas*, and were that the threshold for a patent then countless inventions could have been patented long ago. Hell, by that reasoning von Neumann could have patented the computer and then sold that patent to some parasitic holding company that just holds the patent and profits without ever producing anything. A patent it meant to protect the integrity of an invention, typically a product - not to make abstract ideas profitable in-and-of themselves.
To be fiar, there are people protesting that some fine wines in recent years have lost their flavor because they moved to better casks that don't admit the rodents that commonly left droppings and died in their previous casks. It changed the flavor. So, maybe fines need a little shit?
But, but...1.3 GHz is not slow from a Mac and 1 gig of RAM is far from standard. That is a pretty high-end machine compared to the majority of computers running on practice.
My biggest problem with Spiderman 2 was that poor Peter Parker evidently never learned to swim. Can the wallcrawler swim this time around? I didn't see that mentioned in the review.
Not quite. It is more a response to my points being misunderstood or ignored and not having the time to keep trying to rephrase them and find supporting evidence for things which are essentially amorphous.
It seems obvious to me that any given country would not be willing to let control of ANY critical infrastructure component rest solely in the hands of some other country with which relations were uncertain.
Though I suppose to might be accurate to say that it is the last bastion of the debater having better things to do when the argument seems to be going nowhere.
Yeah, the great job US law does protecting against illegal seizure...such as the recent decision that it is permissible for a state to use eminent domain to seize private land and hand it over to an corporation if it is in the state's best interest. Look at the history of seizures and there are many many less deserving instances than ICANN. ICANN has been riddled with problems. The initial board was entirely appointed by the US government, and then various board members were thrown off the board without any real justification and in a manner many regard as illegal. These are not signs of long-term stability. You continuously avoid the point that ICANN, in being unbeholden to any particular international country is free to do whatever it wants. That is simply not an acceptable state of management for an integral international resource with multibillions of dollars invested in it. There are plenty of reasonable arguments here (and in other responses to your post that address some of your individual points more fully but which I do not feel it is necessary to reproduce). Sorry, I don't have time to continue this banter. Best of luck.
Ironclad it's not.
1. That the private company is already an international entity that serves international interests.
Merely saying this doesn't make it true. It currently serves international interests on abstractly and retains prerogative to ignore the input of various countries as it sees fit. Further, it is free to ignore them on relatively arbitrary grounds.
2. That said company has done an excellent job to date, and has shown no need for a government run entity.
Doing an excellent job to date is debatable and, regardless, offers no guarantee that it will continue to do so as political situations change. The international community is understandably reluctant to wait until there IS a problem to construct a more distributed and robust solution.
3. That it is not the US policy to force private companies to give up ownership.
Not really relevant. This is an international issue as the Internet is an international resources with countless billions invested by numerous nations all of which rely upon the system to function properly. Obviously there are numerous cases throughout history of the US and other nations having to adapt national policy or make exceptions to address global issues. (The fact that the US has been increasingly ignoring global issues doesn't really counter this.)
4. That the UN has no compelling argument for wanting control other than the fact that it wants it.
You've mischaracterized even that basic argument entirely: the UN, or rather, the international community, wants to move control from ICANN to a truly international organization that can operate transparently and that is required to acknowledge and assimilate the input from those governments represented in the UN. Again, the alternative is just to trust ICANN to play fair.
5. That the UN has a far poorer track record on joint ventures than ICANN has.
This is true, but is not sufficient to override the objections to your prior points.
So the argument there is that because a private company controls the Internet the many foreign governments and populations that rely upon it should be content?
Why should any foreign government merely trust ICANN to run the Internet smoothly and fairly? Being a private company ICANN is controlled by a board that can choose to allocate resources in ways disregarding world politics, traffic flow, advances in technology, country-specific regulations (that aren't the US), and the like. It is a very dangerous bet to just presume that ICANN will continue to work in everybody's best interest for all time.
The argument of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" seems a little optimistic. What is to say that ICANN will continue in its current form and direction in the future? Or in response to shifting allegiances and political realities? Or, perish the thought, in response to profitability? As a central part of the international infrastructure it seems naive and dangerous to allow a private entity with no direct input from those involved to serve as the sole architect and arbiter of the Internet.
(and all this is aside from the various complaints that have been levied against ICANN over the years)
But is it a step worth the pricetag? What else could NASA use that money for? I am guessing a great many things that would be far more beneficial. Or, for that matter, why give that kind of money to NASA? What about the many other issues we're currently facing?
Actually, including the DVD player in the PS2 hurt Sony a lot. Too many people bought it to be primarily used as a DVD player, which makes Sony no profit. That is why Microsoft setup the X-Box to at least require a remote - so that they'd make *something* off customers who wanted to play DVDs. It may well be that the decision to not include DVD functionality is exactly why Nintendo is the only one of the three companies making a profit on their console.
Damn it!
"Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule."
No no no no.
Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. The only way that is "back on track" is if the trip itself will be used as a testbed for new technologies and techniques intended to support longer trips, like to Mars.
But even a trip to Mars at this point seems wasteful. I love the notion of traveling the stars and look forward to tea and danish on Alpha Centuri one day.....but not as our country is embroiled in more problems and debt that your average citizen can comprehend.
Not true. Firefox does indeed make patches available. Look at Gentoo Linux - it is currently at Firefox v1.0.6_r7. That is seven revisions (i.e. patches) since v1.0.6. It was a decision of Mozilla to only bundle prebuilt-binaries as timely groupings of these patches. This was done, as far as I know, because it seemd the most intuitive way of doing so.
Is an e-mail an acceptable form of contacting them regarding this issue? Technically the document stipulates the acceptable forms of submitting comments, and these do not include e-mail.
...with the further stipulation that it must be mailed USPS (i.e. no FedEx, UPS, etc.)
Would it perhaps be better to encourage people to print and mail in letters?
It says, if sent by mail to send the original and FIVE COPIES (wtf?) to:
Copyright GC/ I&R
P.O. Box 70400
Southwest Station, Washington, DC 20024-0400
Are you suggesting that none of the 30 or 40 games your pirated were worth it enough to fork o'er the money for them?
I roughly agree with your premise...but not with your actions. I will rip friend's CDs as MP3s and when I really enjoy the music I'll go out and buy the album, especially if it is a smaller band (like, say, MSI).
If it always worked out that piracy was done as something of a "preview" that often lead to purchases I do not think there would be much a problem. But, what seems to actually happen WAY too much of the time is that people pirate...and then pirate...and then...well...seldom buy.
I am fine with people pirating things that they never would have bought anyways. For instance, I would be fine with grabbing an MP3, even for an album you did not own, if there was just no way you were going to purchase the entire album, maybe because you just kinda liked that one song.
The problem is when people pirate games, movies, songs, and the like INSTEAD of purchasing them.
Incidentally...why the suspicion that I am in the software development business?