To some extent, it all depends on how easy it is to enter any particular market segment/industry. The ISP industry is, of course, one which has particularly high barriers to entry - it's rather difficult to get permission, and expensive, to run physical cabling to many homes and businesses, and maintain that cabling through storms, fires, earthquakes, car accidents, whatever. Which is why even in the *most competitive* markets you will only have maybe 3 or 4 ISPs.
Other industries, where the barriers to entry are low, this free market approach really does work - because there's always new players offering you that 'time limited' deal to get you in - but when it expires, there's always gonna be another 'new company', so you just jump from deal to deal to deal. The established players, by the constant influx of new players, are forced, to a certain extent, to never put too high a premium on their products or services (a well known, trusted brand with a good reputation certainly can still get away with charging a small premium, because customers are willing to pay a premium for the assurance of a known level of quality/service, compared to the risk of doing business with an unknown/unproven newcomer), and to offer good service - because it's very easy for their customers to leave. But in an industry with high barriers to entry, and few competitors, companies know their customers will have a hard time (or impossible) leaving.
Regulation is particularly important in such low-competition industries/markets.
Government regulation also creates an economic 'level playing field'. Typically, one of the biggest problems of the laissez faire model of the free market is that, once someone figures out a way to get an economic advantage by business practices which are harmful, but save money or increase revenue, it will eventually force most other players in the market to adopt the same practices - because either the ones getting the advantage from the harmful practices are able to undercut the competition on price, substantially, or because they make enough money that they start cornering the market on resources that are necessary to stay in business (think of very large successful companies cornering the market on commodities, oil fields, skilled labor, equipment, etc - there's many ways for companies, outside of regulation, to make it extremely difficult or impossible for other companies to compete with them, and it all starts with inflating profits enough to have the capital to begin those types of strategies).
Yes, many of those strategies are illegal, but if we followed the logic of the guy quoted in the article, that's right where we'd be.
I mean, really, why should there be laws against fraud? I mean, someone rips you off, you just go do business with someone else (who also rips you off, because it's legal). False advertising? I mean, if companies use false advertising, it'll catch up to them and you'll do business with someone else. Your roof caves in on your family's heads because the contractor cut corners on material or workmanship, and didn't build the supporting structures right? Do business with a different contractor next time. Airlines don't maintain their planes right, and kill or disable passengers? Well, people will just do business with other airlines, right?
Maybe your employer should be free to expose you to hazardous materials or unsafe working conditions? I mean, you can always quit and go work for someone else, right?
I'm sorry, but there's some business practices which businesses should never be free to do. I'm sure there is room for disagreement on whether Net non-neutrality rises to that standard, but my point is, just saying that people can take their business elsewhere is A) not always true - as others have mentioned, in some localities, there is basically a monopoly on broadband Internet, and B) dodges the issue of whether anybody should ever be allowed to implement such network management policies, to begin with.
Net non-neutrality will, over time, seriously degrade what the Internet is for many customers. It will lead to a lot of anti-competitive behaviors wherein ISPs disadvantage some content providers over other content providers (or their own in-house content). It will do so in such a way that customers will have *no idea* that their ISP is to blame (in some cases), and will wrongly blame the content provider, or in some other cases (prohibitively small/overpriced bandwidth caps, for example, where it would be more expensive to upgrade to a useful 'tier' of bandwidth allotment so they could use Netflix, Hulu, or something similar to get TV programming and movies, instead of subscribing/upgrading to the ISPs own cable-TV packages for the same or similar content), the customers might know the ISP is to blame, but not have much or any recourse to correct the problem.
No. I realized you were just wisecracking. But, people make such wisecracks quite often, and I thought it was as good an opportunity to address it as any.
Please, define "useful" in the context of arts and sciences. Would you suggest that the fine arts are not useful? Oh, but pop art certainly isn't useful, right? I mean, pop art has never helped anybody in a time when they were depressed, or angry, or lonely. Pop art has never helped anyone resolve conflict in their own lives, or simply made them a bit happier at a time when they needed it, right? Pop art can't possibly have any redeeming value, right? It's derivative, formulaic garbage, all of it, isn't that so? It's definitely not *useful*.
My understanding is, during the drafting of the Constitution, there was at least a significant number of the drafters who favored an approach of writing and constructing the Constitution in a way that any power not explicitely granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution was forbidden to it. So, that might be way it's not "just federal law" - because if you believe that Congress has no power to pass laws not related to some specific power granted in the Constitution, and if you think that nationwide copyright law makes more sense than a State-By-State patchwork of copyright laws, then you grant that power in the Constitution.
Note that the Constitution doesn't actually create any copyright laws - it grants congress the Power to enact copyright laws. Which they have done.
"...and you've just gotten the government to subsidize premium wifi for your customers."
There, fixed it for you. The only thing better than getting the government to provide a free service to your customers is to get the government to provide a free service to [b]you[/b] that you turn around and charge your customers $25/hr for. I mean, these are *limos*. . . you don't think people riding around NYC in limos would pay $25/hr for Wifi in the car? More to the point, you don't think the limo companies wouldn't charge them for it?
I see how this solution would work for customers of Saudi mobile operators, whose phones would be pre-configured to use the 'local' BB server. What about travellers from other countries - would they have to go into their phone and manually re-configure it to contact the Saudi BB Server? Would that basically be the same steps as if you were setting up to use a corporate-owned BB Server? What if you already use a corporate BB Server? Will your messages be blocked? If the email account you are trying to check is your company email account, and the only way to access it is through the company-owned Enterprise BB Server, are you S.O.L.?
Congratulations. You sir (or madam) are smarter than some investors.
Yes, that is the fundamental question to always ask about any energy proposal - where does the energy ultimately enter the system? Any system that proposes a 100% or near 100% 'recycling' of energy for perpetual motion has pretty much always been a fraud. People on slashdot and other geeky sites will often talk about the Laws of Thermodynamics, and that's basically the principle they are talking about too (along with a few other things like the fact that Entropy always increases, which is one reason you can't recycle 100 percent of your energy - you are are constantly losing energy to things like drag, friction, etc, so you need energy at a lower Entropic state added to the system).
But, yes, good for you for remembering that basic principle of energy - it has to come from somewhere, since it cannot be created or destroyed. It can come from the sun, it can come from chemical reactions (but, any chemical reaction which releases energy results in a 'waste product' which is at a lower state of energy, so you can't turn it back into a higher-state-of-energy product like turning air into gasoline without *inputting* energy somewhere in the process), it can come from wind, hydro, or it can come from fission/fusion.
Oh, I'm quite sure it would not be that difficult for someone to trace my pseudonym back to my real identity - although I've also not really been that careful about it. I suppose I could have been more careful.
I suppose if I really needed to, I could create another, more secure, psuedonym, but in the end, I think someone could figure out some clever way to re-identify me.
So, in the end, I don't think we can really hide behind pseudonyms - if you put the information out there, it's out there, and someone will (probably) figure out a way to 'link' it back to your real identity. Although there are certainly ways to try to make it more difficult.
Just an additional thought - there is one additional problem that the more 'social' Internet of today brings up - even if you don't share information about yourself, it's entirely possible that someone else shares information about you (like friends posting photos which include you, or writing about you in their blog/wall, etc). Not really sure what you can do about that - friends blabbing about you has been a problem, I think, for as long as mankind has had speech. Unfortunately, now, instead of just one or a small number of people having access to that speech, as in traditional spoken word communication, the Internet does mean that once it's up, everyone in the world has access to it.
There are certain problems that strike me as inherently logically contradictory. One of them is the concept of DRM. I believe, as I suppose many on slashdot would agree, that DRM will never ultimately work, because it contains within itself a fundamental logical contradiction: you want to give your customers access to something without giving them access. You can deny someone access, you can grant someone access, but in the end, if you grant them access, they have access. All someone who is determined enough needs is for your software to decrypt the content once, and they can capture the decrypted content. You can't really stop them (though that doesn't stop companies from trying).
I see the same problem with user privacy: it's quite possible to have privacy on the Internet: never send (unencrypted) email, never post to any kind of public forums, mailing lists, don't setup myspace or facebook pages, don't twitter, don't post photos of yourself on flickr or whatever other service.
Of course, if you actually want to share information about yourself, then you can't also have privacy. You either choose to have privacy, or share information about yourself. You can't really do both simultaneously.
Or some kind of wierd, rare CPU bug. (I was going to mention ram bits getting flipped by cosmic rays and not error corrected, but you've basically covered that with the faulty RAM thing). Oh, you could also have a faulty sector on a hard drive/NAS that you are saving the result too. Or maybe a random network error that corrupts the data (if it gets transmitted over any kind of network). Maybe some wierd glitch in the Front Side Bus (or other hardware on the MoBo which interconnects things).
There's all sorts of room for different kinds of hardware errors, basically.
After RTFA, I'm not sure, but it seems to me that at least part of the reason Apple did what it did was that it wanted to violate the USB spec without causing damage to other USB hardware the user might plug in. Which seems reasonable. That is, what I got from the linked site is that the USB Spec says that devices are supposed to negotiate on the data lines when they draw power - but almost nobody wants to include expensive USB chips in their chargers to implement the negotiation the right way. So, I think, Apple decided that since their phone could draw (relatively) large amperage (up to 1 amp), without negotiating over the USB data, they would use a 'simpler' negotiation protocol - the charger and the device could negotiate a mutually supported charging rate by having the charger set the two data lines at specified voltages.
If Apple *hadn't* done that, and an iPhone tried to draw 1Amp off that person's "MintyBoost" charger, it sounds like it could have caused the device to possibly damage itself, or possibly cause the batteries to overheat or something.
Seems Apple took a somewhat reasonable step to protect against such accidents (and the resulting lawsuits). It's *not so nice* that Apple didn't freely share that information, but the technical step of not drawing power off devices which don't negotiate the charging rate, doesn't seem completely unreasonable.
A slight correction - I wrote "atomic weight" where it would have been more accurate to write "atomic mass", but of course, the weight derives from the mass so my main point, I think, is still valid.
I think I *might* have an explanation for one of the points - I'm not sure if this is why you put (???) at the end of this point, but let's look at it:
"each vehicle reduces use of gasoline 864 tons and green house gas 2640 tons"
How can the amount of "green house gas" reduced be that much *greater* than the amount of gasoline reduction? I think it's because CO2 combines 1 Carbon from the fuel with 2 Oxygen from the atmosphere, (also, hydrogen in the fuel gets combined with oxygen to form water vapor, I think, but I'm not sure that counts as a 'greenhouse gas').
Anyhow, atomic weight of Carbon-12 (I believe the most abundant isotope) is 12, atomic weight of Oxygen-16 (most abundant isotope) is approx 16. I believe the atomic weight of CO2, then, would be about 44, making CO2 about 3.66 times 'heavier' than the carbon in the fuel. Of course, the fuel isn't completely carbon, but it certainly has a high percentage of its weight as carbon. I think that is how 864 tons of gasoline can become 2640 tons of "greenhouse gas", but not sure about that.
Hard to say. Some of the renderings of the buses seem to show some sort of 'arms' sticking up out of the top of the buses, similar to some electric train designs I've seen which use such arms to get power from overhead wires/bars, so it might be powered that way. Alternatively, it looks like the 'buses' ride on some sort of rails, so they could possibly electrify the rails the way some electric passenger train systems are designed.
That line of reasoning seems to be a little self-limiting, particularly when you are talking about advances from a single company. What I mean is, although sometimes you might decide to 'skip a generation' (I think perhaps in this case, maybe Intel should skip Lightpeak and move straight to the faster tech from the get-go), in general, no one can afford to never have any revenue generating products on the market because they are always just 2 or 3 months from releasing the next product. That's a fast way to go bankrupt. At some point, you have to just sell a product for awhile, perhaps even intentionally delay the next generation of a tech if it's ready 'too soon', so that you can recoup your costs from developing the previous generation.
There's also the issue of standardization - 'standards' that are obselete in three months, were never really standards. For a common interconnect that can be used with TVs, monitors, home theater systems, video game systems, recording devices (TiVo, etc), Camcorders, etc, stability/longevity of the standard is just as important as technical specs - after all, it doesn't do you any good that there's a technically superior cabling system if all of your current devices use the old cables and connectors. Sure, people are willing, eventually, to replace things, but they don't want to do it within a year of the previous standard being adopted. Honestly, I think it's still way too soon to be replacing HDMI.
Slashdot Mirror
To some extent, it all depends on how easy it is to enter any particular market segment/industry. The ISP industry is, of course, one which has particularly high barriers to entry - it's rather difficult to get permission, and expensive, to run physical cabling to many homes and businesses, and maintain that cabling through storms, fires, earthquakes, car accidents, whatever. Which is why even in the *most competitive* markets you will only have maybe 3 or 4 ISPs.
Other industries, where the barriers to entry are low, this free market approach really does work - because there's always new players offering you that 'time limited' deal to get you in - but when it expires, there's always gonna be another 'new company', so you just jump from deal to deal to deal. The established players, by the constant influx of new players, are forced, to a certain extent, to never put too high a premium on their products or services (a well known, trusted brand with a good reputation certainly can still get away with charging a small premium, because customers are willing to pay a premium for the assurance of a known level of quality/service, compared to the risk of doing business with an unknown/unproven newcomer), and to offer good service - because it's very easy for their customers to leave. But in an industry with high barriers to entry, and few competitors, companies know their customers will have a hard time (or impossible) leaving.
Regulation is particularly important in such low-competition industries/markets.
There was a movie about 10 years ago, called Idiocracy, which envisions a future pretty close to what you describe.
Government regulation also creates an economic 'level playing field'. Typically, one of the biggest problems of the laissez faire model of the free market is that, once someone figures out a way to get an economic advantage by business practices which are harmful, but save money or increase revenue, it will eventually force most other players in the market to adopt the same practices - because either the ones getting the advantage from the harmful practices are able to undercut the competition on price, substantially, or because they make enough money that they start cornering the market on resources that are necessary to stay in business (think of very large successful companies cornering the market on commodities, oil fields, skilled labor, equipment, etc - there's many ways for companies, outside of regulation, to make it extremely difficult or impossible for other companies to compete with them, and it all starts with inflating profits enough to have the capital to begin those types of strategies).
Yes, many of those strategies are illegal, but if we followed the logic of the guy quoted in the article, that's right where we'd be.
I mean, really, why should there be laws against fraud? I mean, someone rips you off, you just go do business with someone else (who also rips you off, because it's legal). False advertising? I mean, if companies use false advertising, it'll catch up to them and you'll do business with someone else. Your roof caves in on your family's heads because the contractor cut corners on material or workmanship, and didn't build the supporting structures right? Do business with a different contractor next time. Airlines don't maintain their planes right, and kill or disable passengers? Well, people will just do business with other airlines, right?
Maybe your employer should be free to expose you to hazardous materials or unsafe working conditions? I mean, you can always quit and go work for someone else, right?
I'm sorry, but there's some business practices which businesses should never be free to do. I'm sure there is room for disagreement on whether Net non-neutrality rises to that standard, but my point is, just saying that people can take their business elsewhere is A) not always true - as others have mentioned, in some localities, there is basically a monopoly on broadband Internet, and B) dodges the issue of whether anybody should ever be allowed to implement such network management policies, to begin with.
Net non-neutrality will, over time, seriously degrade what the Internet is for many customers. It will lead to a lot of anti-competitive behaviors wherein ISPs disadvantage some content providers over other content providers (or their own in-house content). It will do so in such a way that customers will have *no idea* that their ISP is to blame (in some cases), and will wrongly blame the content provider, or in some other cases (prohibitively small/overpriced bandwidth caps, for example, where it would be more expensive to upgrade to a useful 'tier' of bandwidth allotment so they could use Netflix, Hulu, or something similar to get TV programming and movies, instead of subscribing/upgrading to the ISPs own cable-TV packages for the same or similar content), the customers might know the ISP is to blame, but not have much or any recourse to correct the problem.
No. I realized you were just wisecracking. But, people make such wisecracks quite often, and I thought it was as good an opportunity to address it as any.
Please, define "useful" in the context of arts and sciences. Would you suggest that the fine arts are not useful? Oh, but pop art certainly isn't useful, right? I mean, pop art has never helped anybody in a time when they were depressed, or angry, or lonely. Pop art has never helped anyone resolve conflict in their own lives, or simply made them a bit happier at a time when they needed it, right? Pop art can't possibly have any redeeming value, right? It's derivative, formulaic garbage, all of it, isn't that so? It's definitely not *useful*.
My understanding is, during the drafting of the Constitution, there was at least a significant number of the drafters who favored an approach of writing and constructing the Constitution in a way that any power not explicitely granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution was forbidden to it. So, that might be way it's not "just federal law" - because if you believe that Congress has no power to pass laws not related to some specific power granted in the Constitution, and if you think that nationwide copyright law makes more sense than a State-By-State patchwork of copyright laws, then you grant that power in the Constitution.
Note that the Constitution doesn't actually create any copyright laws - it grants congress the Power to enact copyright laws. Which they have done.
WTF Am I gonna do with a barn, in NYC?
Maybe I could convert it into some sort of yuppie antiques shop, or a novelty restaurant. . .
"...and you've just gotten the government to subsidize premium wifi for your customers."
There, fixed it for you. The only thing better than getting the government to provide a free service to your customers is to get the government to provide a free service to [b]you[/b] that you turn around and charge your customers $25/hr for. I mean, these are *limos*. . . you don't think people riding around NYC in limos would pay $25/hr for Wifi in the car? More to the point, you don't think the limo companies wouldn't charge them for it?
"Time to buy . . . a full metal jacket."
Yeah, I bet having Ammo in your pockets or bags will really expedite your trip.
You know, they're the people that run those "AIM" servers that you can access with Pidgin, Trillian, etc.
I see how this solution would work for customers of Saudi mobile operators, whose phones would be pre-configured to use the 'local' BB server. What about travellers from other countries - would they have to go into their phone and manually re-configure it to contact the Saudi BB Server? Would that basically be the same steps as if you were setting up to use a corporate-owned BB Server? What if you already use a corporate BB Server? Will your messages be blocked? If the email account you are trying to check is your company email account, and the only way to access it is through the company-owned Enterprise BB Server, are you S.O.L.?
Congratulations. You sir (or madam) are smarter than some investors.
Yes, that is the fundamental question to always ask about any energy proposal - where does the energy ultimately enter the system? Any system that proposes a 100% or near 100% 'recycling' of energy for perpetual motion has pretty much always been a fraud. People on slashdot and other geeky sites will often talk about the Laws of Thermodynamics, and that's basically the principle they are talking about too (along with a few other things like the fact that Entropy always increases, which is one reason you can't recycle 100 percent of your energy - you are are constantly losing energy to things like drag, friction, etc, so you need energy at a lower Entropic state added to the system).
But, yes, good for you for remembering that basic principle of energy - it has to come from somewhere, since it cannot be created or destroyed. It can come from the sun, it can come from chemical reactions (but, any chemical reaction which releases energy results in a 'waste product' which is at a lower state of energy, so you can't turn it back into a higher-state-of-energy product like turning air into gasoline without *inputting* energy somewhere in the process), it can come from wind, hydro, or it can come from fission/fusion.
Or, E=mc**2 (if you're into fortran-style notation)
Oh, I'm quite sure it would not be that difficult for someone to trace my pseudonym back to my real identity - although I've also not really been that careful about it. I suppose I could have been more careful.
I suppose if I really needed to, I could create another, more secure, psuedonym, but in the end, I think someone could figure out some clever way to re-identify me.
So, in the end, I don't think we can really hide behind pseudonyms - if you put the information out there, it's out there, and someone will (probably) figure out a way to 'link' it back to your real identity. Although there are certainly ways to try to make it more difficult.
Just an additional thought - there is one additional problem that the more 'social' Internet of today brings up - even if you don't share information about yourself, it's entirely possible that someone else shares information about you (like friends posting photos which include you, or writing about you in their blog/wall, etc). Not really sure what you can do about that - friends blabbing about you has been a problem, I think, for as long as mankind has had speech. Unfortunately, now, instead of just one or a small number of people having access to that speech, as in traditional spoken word communication, the Internet does mean that once it's up, everyone in the world has access to it.
There are certain problems that strike me as inherently logically contradictory. One of them is the concept of DRM. I believe, as I suppose many on slashdot would agree, that DRM will never ultimately work, because it contains within itself a fundamental logical contradiction: you want to give your customers access to something without giving them access. You can deny someone access, you can grant someone access, but in the end, if you grant them access, they have access. All someone who is determined enough needs is for your software to decrypt the content once, and they can capture the decrypted content. You can't really stop them (though that doesn't stop companies from trying).
I see the same problem with user privacy: it's quite possible to have privacy on the Internet: never send (unencrypted) email, never post to any kind of public forums, mailing lists, don't setup myspace or facebook pages, don't twitter, don't post photos of yourself on flickr or whatever other service.
Of course, if you actually want to share information about yourself, then you can't also have privacy. You either choose to have privacy, or share information about yourself. You can't really do both simultaneously.
Or some kind of wierd, rare CPU bug. (I was going to mention ram bits getting flipped by cosmic rays and not error corrected, but you've basically covered that with the faulty RAM thing). Oh, you could also have a faulty sector on a hard drive/NAS that you are saving the result too. Or maybe a random network error that corrupts the data (if it gets transmitted over any kind of network). Maybe some wierd glitch in the Front Side Bus (or other hardware on the MoBo which interconnects things).
There's all sorts of room for different kinds of hardware errors, basically.
After RTFA, I'm not sure, but it seems to me that at least part of the reason Apple did what it did was that it wanted to violate the USB spec without causing damage to other USB hardware the user might plug in. Which seems reasonable. That is, what I got from the linked site is that the USB Spec says that devices are supposed to negotiate on the data lines when they draw power - but almost nobody wants to include expensive USB chips in their chargers to implement the negotiation the right way. So, I think, Apple decided that since their phone could draw (relatively) large amperage (up to 1 amp), without negotiating over the USB data, they would use a 'simpler' negotiation protocol - the charger and the device could negotiate a mutually supported charging rate by having the charger set the two data lines at specified voltages.
If Apple *hadn't* done that, and an iPhone tried to draw 1Amp off that person's "MintyBoost" charger, it sounds like it could have caused the device to possibly damage itself, or possibly cause the batteries to overheat or something.
Seems Apple took a somewhat reasonable step to protect against such accidents (and the resulting lawsuits). It's *not so nice* that Apple didn't freely share that information, but the technical step of not drawing power off devices which don't negotiate the charging rate, doesn't seem completely unreasonable.
So, we have Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/NetBSD, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Does this mean we'll have Debian GNU/Illumos next?
A slight correction - I wrote "atomic weight" where it would have been more accurate to write "atomic mass", but of course, the weight derives from the mass so my main point, I think, is still valid.
I think I *might* have an explanation for one of the points - I'm not sure if this is why you put (???) at the end of this point, but let's look at it:
"each vehicle reduces use of gasoline 864 tons and green house gas 2640 tons"
How can the amount of "green house gas" reduced be that much *greater* than the amount of gasoline reduction? I think it's because CO2 combines 1 Carbon from the fuel with 2 Oxygen from the atmosphere, (also, hydrogen in the fuel gets combined with oxygen to form water vapor, I think, but I'm not sure that counts as a 'greenhouse gas').
Anyhow, atomic weight of Carbon-12 (I believe the most abundant isotope) is 12, atomic weight of Oxygen-16 (most abundant isotope) is approx 16. I believe the atomic weight of CO2, then, would be about 44, making CO2 about 3.66 times 'heavier' than the carbon in the fuel. Of course, the fuel isn't completely carbon, but it certainly has a high percentage of its weight as carbon. I think that is how 864 tons of gasoline can become 2640 tons of "greenhouse gas", but not sure about that.
Hard to say. Some of the renderings of the buses seem to show some sort of 'arms' sticking up out of the top of the buses, similar to some electric train designs I've seen which use such arms to get power from overhead wires/bars, so it might be powered that way. Alternatively, it looks like the 'buses' ride on some sort of rails, so they could possibly electrify the rails the way some electric passenger train systems are designed.
Whenever I hear the name "Christian Science", I think of the old Mike Meyers/SNL "Coffee Talk" skits. . .
I'm getting verklempt. I'll give you a topic. . .
Christian Science is neither Christian, or Science. Discuss amongst yourselves.
That line of reasoning seems to be a little self-limiting, particularly when you are talking about advances from a single company. What I mean is, although sometimes you might decide to 'skip a generation' (I think perhaps in this case, maybe Intel should skip Lightpeak and move straight to the faster tech from the get-go), in general, no one can afford to never have any revenue generating products on the market because they are always just 2 or 3 months from releasing the next product. That's a fast way to go bankrupt. At some point, you have to just sell a product for awhile, perhaps even intentionally delay the next generation of a tech if it's ready 'too soon', so that you can recoup your costs from developing the previous generation.
There's also the issue of standardization - 'standards' that are obselete in three months, were never really standards. For a common interconnect that can be used with TVs, monitors, home theater systems, video game systems, recording devices (TiVo, etc), Camcorders, etc, stability/longevity of the standard is just as important as technical specs - after all, it doesn't do you any good that there's a technically superior cabling system if all of your current devices use the old cables and connectors. Sure, people are willing, eventually, to replace things, but they don't want to do it within a year of the previous standard being adopted. Honestly, I think it's still way too soon to be replacing HDMI.