Actually, when I took those Time Warner/COX/RR (I don't think we had Comcast before I quit) it was fun since all I had to do was have them power cycle the modem, reboot, and if that didn't work I would then transfer them to Time Warner/Cox/RR or whoever owned the cable system and tell them to take care of it.
So you're right, anyone who uses ELNK cable is actually on another persons network. The main reason for this is because of the Eearthlink Email servers since if Time Warner outsources the front line tech and emails servers (from what I've heard running email server for thousands of people costs more than a cable connection for thousands of people so it benefits Timewarner more to do this with ELNK but I could be wrong about that)
Also with Earthlink DSL you are mearly either with Covad or whoever your local telco happens to be (SBC, Verizon, Bellsouth) and your quality of service will be the same as either of those since most of the providers use the same equipment at least on the phone side. One you get to the ATM networks they are a bit different, but before I quit Earthlink, it was moving to a styem much like cable where they only provided support and emails servers and the entire network was owned and operated by someone else (Covad ver 2? I think they were calling it). Actually Earthlink does have their own "branded" DSL modems, but I really never knew what the deal was with them except the original non PPPoE client had some issues.
Yeah, Comcast is like the ISP that isn't bad, but isn't spectacular, but you usually don't have to worry about it being out most of time or have intermittent connections. I think that has to do with the fact that Coax connections are a bit more stable than DSL in worse case scenarios. DSL may get faster speeds, but allot more can go wrong since it's on phone lines and goes through more networks than a cable one does (trust me I was a DSL tech for a year). With Cable you usually turn it on and it works. If it doesn't... Then well it usually doesn't work at all where as DSL might work fine most of the day but when the street lights come on it might go off or if the neighbors phone line is crossed with yours and he makes a phone call. Either way Comcast is mostly transparent. I don't mind them even though if I could justify the costs I'm sure I would go with SpeakEasy or Covad DSL for the higher speeds and more IPs.
Going to mars has pretty much the same drawbacks, but more extreme. I see no point in blowing a large sum of cash to go somewhere only to discover that there's not really anything worth seeing.
Replace the word Mars with America and set our time back to 1500. Take a look around. Not much worth seeings except some trees and the Natives (although they are something of interest even more so than most people today at least to me)
Fast forward 500 years. Take a look around. Yep... How about now? Things of interest?
The European explorers didn't settle the place right away. They spent a good deal of time explorer the new world and looking for hidden treasures. After finding only a bit of gold and a great deal of emtpy land and a bunch of natives they wrote it off until the settlers came and then it became much more interesting. At least to the Europeans... (I don't know about what the Native Americans thought.)
There might not be anything on Mars right now, but if colonize it and terraform it we'll have a whole world to have interesting thing in. Personally, I almost would see mars as a place to start new nations to break away from the mother planet. Heck, don't like the new world order government of 2020 and have a few million dollars to blow? Move to mars! Make em come for you to pay taxes now!
I wish I could find a more official article, but this is the first one I found on google:
"In 1965, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 1,200 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft. It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site."
Thats the King James version. For some reason when he translated it they put Corn instead of wheat. Corn was known at the time by King James.
Here is the English Standard Version from http://bible.gospelcom.net/passage/?search=Mark%20 2:23-25;&version=47;
"3One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24And the Pharisees were saying to him, "Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?" 25And he said to them, "Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him:"
fucking idiot. it's people like you who ruin this world.
Well... I don't know about ruin the world but I can give you some examples of when this happened.
1.) French Revolution - Lots of heads chopped off. 2.) Russian Revolution - Lots of starving angry mobs there killing lots of rich people or putting them on trial. 3.) German Political Problems between 1918 to 1930s - You know the ones that brough Mr. Hitler into power. 4.) Various other food riots like Irish potato famines etc.
Now you make think such things are morally wrong, but I'm sure you have never experienced starvation. It's nasty... Trust me you will become a different person. After a while you'd find murderin a fellow man to be acceptable. And in some cases eat them! (as seen with sailors stranded in the pacific)
Now the US has never had this problem. Hopefully never will... But if we had lack of food and tons of starving angry poor people they'd riot too just like all the other angry starving mobs throughout history.
You should read 1984 sometime. It gives some good insights on why we says certain things in certain ways. In order to make certain things better or worse all you have to do is say it in a certain way.
Take these two sentences that you might find in a news headline (mind you I have no opinion on the War in Iraq or terrorism but it's the first thing that comes to mind when putting twisting on words):
A.) The freedom fighters killed 30 members of the occupying forces.
B.) The terrorists murdered 30 members of the Coallition.
Those two sentences say provide the same information. One makes one side look like the bad guy and the other looks like the good guy (Al Jazir vs Fox News).
Piracy is an evil word in a sense and entails assumption of one is no better than actual Pirates who murdered, pillaged, and raped on the high seas. "Copyright infringers" may be still criminals but you don't think of murderers when you say it.
I think it's safe to assume that pro-copyright side will continue to use the word piracy and the anti-copyright side will continue to use Copyright Infrigment.
My personal belief that the anti-copyrighter at least have some moral highground in this argument. Well... I mean they aren't calling anyone who supports pro-copyright as "fascist capitlist pig dogs". Although, I want to call members of congress that all the time.
...and most insightful post I have yet to read in any copyright debate. The whole purpose of copyright is to promote Science and Art. The way copyrights are now, it almost does the opposite. People will sit on ideas and attack others who promote similar works even though they came up with it own their own.
To make your analogy apply to modern times, the actually farmers don't own the land or their crops. The farmers (who are the musicians and artists) are actual slaves (or serfs) to the wealthy land owners (the RIAA and MPAA) who do nothing but order them around and sit comfortably in their castles.
Although the slaves are often in fear of starving to death, the land owners don't do anywork themselves (don't produce any material) and have no worry of going hungry since they own the labor of thousands of slaves.
These land owners watch from their feudal towers and see the many vagrants picking away at their crops and get all fussy. They even get a few starving slaves to go to the town square and decry these actions as pure sin when they are promised more food and better shelter (see money).
To put it bluntly, the farmer was already starving on a collective wheather you steal from him or not. In truth they make more money selling clay pottery at the market. (see Tour T-shirts.)
Btw. I run an indie record label (see my link) and we give a great deal of music away for free and as far as I can tell it helps more than hurts.
I'm in the same boat and I can't even use my hosted domains SMTP server from home because I have comcast as my ISP and they block at port 25 connections. That means my @domain.com will always be tagged under comcasts SMTP server. Oh well...
If I had a kid, I'd block MTV too and see if I could import that Candian music channel for him or maybe EuroMTV would be ok since from what I've heard they still play music. Maybe I could get him/her re-runs of Liquid Television or Amped.
I mean... My parents disaproved of me watching MTV videos back in the early 90's with those "provocative" NIN songs and various other music videos, but the shallow ass reality crap they have now just justifies people in to being whiney attention jackasses.
Seriously, there must be some conspiracy to ruin America's youth! I feel sorry for the boys who have to watch Jessica Simpson bitch about her boyfriend not paying her enough attention. Where is the angsty angry people jumping around on stage. No wonder the kids are going postal in schools!
Well if OS is the soul of the computer, then putting OS X into a Dell is like putting a female super model mind into the body of Joe Sixpack. (no offense Joe) I think the supermodel is going ot be rather in shock at the moment upon waking up and not finding it's sleek exterior and that it has extra "parts".
"Look at it this way... when those butt-ugly purple, orange and other "flavoured" iMacs first came out, how many did Apple sell? And, at the time, some clone company came out with pretty much the same thing that ran Windows. How many of those got sold?"
I might be biased because I worked in Computer repair for 5 years in a mom and pop shop, but I would say a great deal of those E-Machines got sold at Best Buy ended up at our shop for repair. They ran like crap, but they looked pretty. As far as the the pretty iMacs go, I saw a great deal here and there, but I couldn't give you my opinion on why people were buying them. My impression was the major selling point was because they looked pretty.
Latter down the road, I had a discussion with some major level people at an ISP I had gotten employed with where I had to learn Macs because of the amount of customers that needed to be supported. One of the debates that occurred to us about why people bought them (other than the fact that OS X just worked with DSL... although OS 9 was a unholy pain) was that they expected computers to be like those in the movies.
That may seem like a strange idea, but when a person who knows nothing about computers and sees something out of the future with a GUI interface that looks almost like something they saw in a movie, they are more likely to choose that because it just looks powerful.
To me or you this may seem absurd, but it's the same reason people buy lots of things that aren't really any better than their blander counterparts.
Or rather why people by fancy cars, jewrly, and other things that only real value is because they look cool or make them feel like they own something powerful or valuable.
That and the mac OS X is pretty futuristic looking compared to say even Winxp. If someone had no knowledge of any OS I'd say they would choose the one that looks the most impressive.
Personally, I'd choose the one that just works. *coughs*
well... I'm not opposed to it... I hope the fact that I said someone being opposed to people wearing furs and being opposed to free health care would tip off that I held neither of those opinions since they are mostly exclusive I would beleive.
"And if said box is stuffed under your desk and the only entry to it you have is through your monitor, who cares what it looks like?"
I would disagree. A great deal of people love to mod their PC cases. Sure for the office it doesn't matter, but at home nothing beats a PC case with neon lights, clear case, and a nice set of rims that make any Rice Rocket owner jealous.
"I love western civilization in general, but this is the one part of our culture which drives me nuts lately: the completely vicarious "us"-versus-them cheerleading... what I like to call the "sports fan" mentality."
Without conflict life would be very boring. Not to mention that having something to blame makes everyone feel better. Why did Christianity come up with the Devil after all? If not something in name, humans will come up with something to fight like a new fad disease or people wearing furs or people that believe in free health care.
Remember what they taught in school: All Fiction books must have conflict wheather that is man vs man, man vs nature, or man vs himself. Trust me... I tried to argue this with my high school teacher, but apparently all literary works must have some type of conflict. She also wouldn't accept the fact that there could be man vs machine since she said it falls under man vs nature! Arggh!
The fact of the matter is, if you don't give something to someone to fight against he or she'll randomly pick something. That's why we have sports and social stigma against the unemployed.
Even if you received bread and watched circuses all day you'd still be fighting hunger and boredom. Speaking of which... Thank god for Slashdot and Pappa Johns!
On average I probably buy around one bar of candy a week. If it was free (that's what pirated music is about, right?), I bet I'd eat more.
If candy dars are priated music, then you'd wouldn't be able to find them in a store and you'd have to spend 30 minutes looking for one (like searching multiple networks for an obscure song) and once you found one it takes forever dig through the trash to get it (the only person you found with the song is on dial up) and then when you finish getting the candy part you find that its not only not all there but tastes like poop (the song cuts off at the end and was encoded at 96kps argh!).
I don't know about the human contact part but... You know there is a thriving industry of professionally trained persons that do nothing but make sure these machines work in order so that they may function properly so that others less technically inclined persons may punch in numbers and type words. Most of the people punching in numbers and typing the words have little or no idea how to make these things properly and often spend hours trying to make them work until they get angry and contact the more skilled engineer types down at the help desk.
I don't think this is Jack's fault as much as it is the number punchers who somehow got the job doing such work and maybe those who designed the interface of the typing and number punching (Excel... *cough* Word *coughs*)
And that and the countless millions of hours of productivity lost because word ate the document or excel crashes or they number puncher saved over their own file.
Of course that is more of a software and social problem than Jack's hardware area.
Still there is a great deal of improvement to be had in all areas of the computer device..
"but the HD-DVD camp argues that lower manufacturing costs make for a cheaper, more consumer-friendly product."
I think they mean more "profit margin friendly" product. From my understanding regardless of the media costs, it's the content that costs 99% of the money the consumer pays. Otherwise CD's would cost $1.00 since they only cost a few pennies to make when you are producing hundreds of thousands of them (Trust me I know... However on my scale it costs me about $1.50 per cd since I make batches of about 1,000 per run for my record label)
Slashdot Mirror
"Or if the file depicts illegal activity, etc?"
You mean someone would actually film themselves doing something illegal and then post it on the internet just for the bragging right?
Have you ever done a 50,000 row =vlookup() formula in Excel? I kind of could have used that extra horse power waiting 10 min for it to calculate. ;)
Actually, when I took those Time Warner/COX/RR (I don't think we had Comcast before I quit) it was fun since all I had to do was have them power cycle the modem, reboot, and if that didn't work I would then transfer them to Time Warner/Cox/RR or whoever owned the cable system and tell them to take care of it. So you're right, anyone who uses ELNK cable is actually on another persons network. The main reason for this is because of the Eearthlink Email servers since if Time Warner outsources the front line tech and emails servers (from what I've heard running email server for thousands of people costs more than a cable connection for thousands of people so it benefits Timewarner more to do this with ELNK but I could be wrong about that) Also with Earthlink DSL you are mearly either with Covad or whoever your local telco happens to be (SBC, Verizon, Bellsouth) and your quality of service will be the same as either of those since most of the providers use the same equipment at least on the phone side. One you get to the ATM networks they are a bit different, but before I quit Earthlink, it was moving to a styem much like cable where they only provided support and emails servers and the entire network was owned and operated by someone else (Covad ver 2? I think they were calling it). Actually Earthlink does have their own "branded" DSL modems, but I really never knew what the deal was with them except the original non PPPoE client had some issues.
Yeah, Comcast is like the ISP that isn't bad, but isn't spectacular, but you usually don't have to worry about it being out most of time or have intermittent connections. I think that has to do with the fact that Coax connections are a bit more stable than DSL in worse case scenarios. DSL may get faster speeds, but allot more can go wrong since it's on phone lines and goes through more networks than a cable one does (trust me I was a DSL tech for a year). With Cable you usually turn it on and it works. If it doesn't... Then well it usually doesn't work at all where as DSL might work fine most of the day but when the street lights come on it might go off or if the neighbors phone line is crossed with yours and he makes a phone call. Either way Comcast is mostly transparent. I don't mind them even though if I could justify the costs I'm sure I would go with SpeakEasy or Covad DSL for the higher speeds and more IPs.
Going to mars has pretty much the same drawbacks, but more extreme. I see no point in blowing a large sum of cash to go somewhere only to discover that there's not really anything worth seeing.
Replace the word Mars with America and set our time back to 1500. Take a look around. Not much worth seeings except some trees and the Natives (although they are something of interest even more so than most people today at least to me)
Fast forward 500 years. Take a look around. Yep... How about now? Things of interest?
The European explorers didn't settle the place right away. They spent a good deal of time explorer the new world and looking for hidden treasures. After finding only a bit of gold and a great deal of emtpy land and a bunch of natives they wrote it off until the settlers came and then it became much more interesting. At least to the Europeans... (I don't know about what the Native Americans thought.)
There might not be anything on Mars right now, but if colonize it and terraform it we'll have a whole world to have interesting thing in. Personally, I almost would see mars as a place to start new nations to break away from the mother planet. Heck, don't like the new world order government of 2020 and have a few million dollars to blow? Move to mars! Make em come for you to pay taxes now!
I wish I could find a more official article, but this is the first one I found on google:
;)
"In 1965, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 1,200 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft. It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site."
From http://www.usa4id.com/ciwc/SawedOff.htm
As it is, they'd be more prepared than any Americans in space if they happened to open the gates of hell
Thats the King James version. For some reason when he translated it they put Corn instead of wheat. Corn was known at the time by King James. Here is the English Standard Version from http://bible.gospelcom.net/passage/?search=Mark%20 2:23-25;&version=47;
"3One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24And the Pharisees were saying to him, "Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?" 25And he said to them, "Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him:"
fucking idiot. it's people like you who ruin this world.
Well... I don't know about ruin the world but I can give you some examples of when this happened.
1.) French Revolution - Lots of heads chopped off.
2.) Russian Revolution - Lots of starving angry mobs there killing lots of rich people or putting them on trial.
3.) German Political Problems between 1918 to 1930s - You know the ones that brough Mr. Hitler into power.
4.) Various other food riots like Irish potato famines etc.
Now you make think such things are morally wrong, but I'm sure you have never experienced starvation. It's nasty... Trust me you will become a different person. After a while you'd find murderin a fellow man to be acceptable. And in some cases eat them! (as seen with sailors stranded in the pacific)
Now the US has never had this problem. Hopefully never will... But if we had lack of food and tons of starving angry poor people they'd riot too just like all the other angry starving mobs throughout history.
You should read 1984 sometime. It gives some good insights on why we says certain things in certain ways. In order to make certain things better or worse all you have to do is say it in a certain way.
Take these two sentences that you might find in a news headline (mind you I have no opinion on the War in Iraq or terrorism but it's the first thing that comes to mind when putting twisting on words):
A.) The freedom fighters killed 30 members of the occupying forces.
B.) The terrorists murdered 30 members of the Coallition.
Those two sentences say provide the same information. One makes one side look like the bad guy and the other looks like the good guy (Al Jazir vs Fox News).
Piracy is an evil word in a sense and entails assumption of one is no better than actual Pirates who murdered, pillaged, and raped on the high seas. "Copyright infringers" may be still criminals but you don't think of murderers when you say it.
I think it's safe to assume that pro-copyright side will continue to use the word piracy and the anti-copyright side will continue to use Copyright Infrigment.
My personal belief that the anti-copyrighter at least have some moral highground in this argument. Well... I mean they aren't calling anyone who supports pro-copyright as "fascist capitlist pig dogs". Although, I want to call members of congress that all the time.
...and most insightful post I have yet to read in any copyright debate. The whole purpose of copyright is to promote Science and Art. The way copyrights are now, it almost does the opposite. People will sit on ideas and attack others who promote similar works even though they came up with it own their own.
Parents also ignore their children.
To make your analogy apply to modern times, the actually farmers don't own the land or their crops. The farmers (who are the musicians and artists) are actual slaves (or serfs) to the wealthy land owners (the RIAA and MPAA) who do nothing but order them around and sit comfortably in their castles.
Although the slaves are often in fear of starving to death, the land owners don't do anywork themselves (don't produce any material) and have no worry of going hungry since they own the labor of thousands of slaves.
These land owners watch from their feudal towers and see the many vagrants picking away at their crops and get all fussy. They even get a few starving slaves to go to the town square and decry these actions as pure sin when they are promised more food and better shelter (see money).
To put it bluntly, the farmer was already starving on a collective wheather you steal from him or not. In truth they make more money selling clay pottery at the market. (see Tour T-shirts.)
Btw. I run an indie record label (see my link) and we give a great deal of music away for free and as far as I can tell it helps more than hurts.
If those fake limbs can rip off real ones, then I'm sure the answer is yes.
I'm in the same boat and I can't even use my hosted domains SMTP server from home because I have comcast as my ISP and they block at port 25 connections. That means my @domain.com will always be tagged under comcasts SMTP server. Oh well...
If I had a kid, I'd block MTV too and see if I could import that Candian music channel for him or maybe EuroMTV would be ok since from what I've heard they still play music. Maybe I could get him/her re-runs of Liquid Television or Amped.
I mean... My parents disaproved of me watching MTV videos back in the early 90's with those "provocative" NIN songs and various other music videos, but the shallow ass reality crap they have now just justifies people in to being whiney attention jackasses.
Seriously, there must be some conspiracy to ruin America's youth! I feel sorry for the boys who have to watch Jessica Simpson bitch about her boyfriend not paying her enough attention. Where is the angsty angry people jumping around on stage. No wonder the kids are going postal in schools!
Well if OS is the soul of the computer, then putting OS X into a Dell is like putting a female super model mind into the body of Joe Sixpack. (no offense Joe) I think the supermodel is going ot be rather in shock at the moment upon waking up and not finding it's sleek exterior and that it has extra "parts".
"Look at it this way... when those butt-ugly purple, orange and other "flavoured" iMacs first came out, how many did Apple sell? And, at the time, some clone company came out with pretty much the same thing that ran Windows. How many of those got sold?"
I might be biased because I worked in Computer repair for 5 years in a mom and pop shop, but I would say a great deal of those E-Machines got sold at Best Buy ended up at our shop for repair. They ran like crap, but they looked pretty. As far as the the pretty iMacs go, I saw a great deal here and there, but I couldn't give you my opinion on why people were buying them. My impression was the major selling point was because they looked pretty.
Latter down the road, I had a discussion with some major level people at an ISP I had gotten employed with where I had to learn Macs because of the amount of customers that needed to be supported. One of the debates that occurred to us about why people bought them (other than the fact that OS X just worked with DSL... although OS 9 was a unholy pain) was that they expected computers to be like those in the movies.
That may seem like a strange idea, but when a person who knows nothing about computers and sees something out of the future with a GUI interface that looks almost like something they saw in a movie, they are more likely to choose that because it just looks powerful.
To me or you this may seem absurd, but it's the same reason people buy lots of things that aren't really any better than their blander counterparts.
Or rather why people by fancy cars, jewrly, and other things that only real value is because they look cool or make them feel like they own something powerful or valuable.
That and the mac OS X is pretty futuristic looking compared to say even Winxp. If someone had no knowledge of any OS I'd say they would choose the one that looks the most impressive.
Personally, I'd choose the one that just works. *coughs*
well... I'm not opposed to it... I hope the fact that I said someone being opposed to people wearing furs and being opposed to free health care would tip off that I held neither of those opinions since they are mostly exclusive I would beleive.
"And if said box is stuffed under your desk and the only entry to it you have is through your monitor, who cares what it looks like?"
I would disagree. A great deal of people love to mod their PC cases. Sure for the office it doesn't matter, but at home nothing beats a PC case with neon lights, clear case, and a nice set of rims that make any Rice Rocket owner jealous.
"I love western civilization in general, but this is the one part of our culture which drives me nuts lately: the completely vicarious "us"-versus-them cheerleading... what I like to call the "sports fan" mentality."
Without conflict life would be very boring. Not to mention that having something to blame makes everyone feel better. Why did Christianity come up with the Devil after all? If not something in name, humans will come up with something to fight like a new fad disease or people wearing furs or people that believe in free health care.
Remember what they taught in school: All Fiction books must have conflict wheather that is man vs man, man vs nature, or man vs himself. Trust me... I tried to argue this with my high school teacher, but apparently all literary works must have some type of conflict. She also wouldn't accept the fact that there could be man vs machine since she said it falls under man vs nature! Arggh!
The fact of the matter is, if you don't give something to someone to fight against he or she'll randomly pick something. That's why we have sports and social stigma against the unemployed.
Even if you received bread and watched circuses all day you'd still be fighting hunger and boredom. Speaking of which... Thank god for Slashdot and Pappa Johns!
Come to think of it... I remember somewhere that the BBC website is banned in China, however I can't remember if Fox News is?
/. reader verify this?
Could a Chinese
On average I probably buy around one bar of candy a week. If it was free (that's what pirated music is about, right?), I bet I'd eat more.
If candy dars are priated music, then you'd wouldn't be able to find them in a store and you'd have to spend 30 minutes looking for one (like searching multiple networks for an obscure song) and once you found one it takes forever dig through the trash to get it (the only person you found with the song is on dial up) and then when you finish getting the candy part you find that its not only not all there but tastes like poop (the song cuts off at the end and was encoded at 96kps argh!).
Increased workload? Less human contact? Bullshit.
I don't know about the human contact part but... You know there is a thriving industry of professionally trained persons that do nothing but make sure these machines work in order so that they may function properly so that others less technically inclined persons may punch in numbers and type words. Most of the people punching in numbers and typing the words have little or no idea how to make these things properly and often spend hours trying to make them work until they get angry and contact the more skilled engineer types down at the help desk.
I don't think this is Jack's fault as much as it is the number punchers who somehow got the job doing such work and maybe those who designed the interface of the typing and number punching (Excel... *cough* Word *coughs*)
And that and the countless millions of hours of productivity lost because word ate the document or excel crashes or they number puncher saved over their own file.
Of course that is more of a software and social problem than Jack's hardware area.
Still there is a great deal of improvement to be had in all areas of the computer device..
Remember, Microsoft made its first millions selling mice.
"but the HD-DVD camp argues that lower manufacturing costs make for a cheaper, more consumer-friendly product."
I think they mean more "profit margin friendly" product. From my understanding regardless of the media costs, it's the content that costs 99% of the money the consumer pays. Otherwise CD's would cost $1.00 since they only cost a few pennies to make when you are producing hundreds of thousands of them (Trust me I know... However on my scale it costs me about $1.50 per cd since I make batches of about 1,000 per run for my record label)