We are pretty much looking at a situation where nobody respects copyright. 10-15 years and it will certainly be over for the movie studios if they are releasing stuff in any sort of digital format.
If they ship materials to theaters on DVD, they will be copied. If they make DVDs for consumers, they will be copied. About the only way to continue to have a "movie studio" would be for theater releases only and only distribute the materials over a private network. Nobody gets to have a real copy, ever.
And yes, prosecute anyone making camera copies.
Otherwise, it will certainly be the end of the studio because nobody is going to pay them. Why would they, when it is all for free? And as you say, any time, any where.
This sounds like it could very well be due to RIM taking advantage of some information it got from Motorola under NDA.
RIM and Motorola had (have?) an agreement to share confidential information about some unrelated matter. RIM notices that Motorola is going to be laying off people from this information. RIM immediately starts soliciting these people that are likely to be laid off.
Now that doesn't sound entirely reasonable, does it? Especially since these people can be approached on the basis of "we're offering you a job with a 25% cut in pay because we know you are about to lose your job."
There is no denying that this is an important problem. If you can't assure your customers of your security, they will simply refuse to do business with you. That means in short order going out of business. So security is important, but so is accountability.
OK, you cannot make absolutely sure that every person that encounters a document will not give it to someone else they should not. However, you can make sure that each such legitimate access is tracked and that people with access are accountable. You can then make it clear to everyone that violating company security is grounds for immediate termination.
Simple solution is a secured web site where people have to log in to access documents. This can be tracked in logs. So you now have absolute knowledge of each and every person that accesses a document. Simply by convention you can enforce the policy that there is no distribution other than the web page. Someone violates this policy and they are canned.
Security involving humans has to involve accountability. There is no other way.
Optical media, including DVD doesn't store video on anything magnetic at all - there is no magnetism involved at all. Optical media is written with heat and read with light.
There is a really wonderful discussion in Issac Asimov's Foundation about how historians work by reading the works of others and comparing them. The speaker in the book says this leads to the truth. When the person they are explaining this to asks if they ever do any original research the answer is that there is no need, that ground has already been covered by others and there is no thing more to be learned.
I suggest finding these few paragraphs in Foundation and reading them. Over and over until it sinks in. Of course, the author is describing a decadent society in decline and one should not draw too many parallels to our own situation. It might be too depressing.
The problem is when you tell all sides equally you give equal credence to the lies.
After enough lies are told, nobody can tell what is the truth anymore. Then you have true balance, because everything sounds the same whether it is true or not. And nobody can tell the difference.
I suspect rules like that (which lead to tariffs and import duties) are against the WTO rules.
We signed onto this plan so we are pretty much stuck with it now. It mandates global free trade amoungst member countries. So you can't select preferences like this - it is called "protectionism" and isn't allowed.
Bush tried this with steel imports already and got smacked down. Bet Obama tries again, soon. He will likely suffer the same fate.
Interesting, comparing it to cable TV. What a lot of people do not know is that most of the niche cable channels (think Golf Channel) aren't very profitable. They still exist because they managed to get themselves listed with the cable company and this guarantees them revenue, regardless of actual viewing habits. The ad space is really cheap as well, and this attracts certain types of marketers.
What happens if we get total ala carte channel selection where everyone gets to decide if they can receive the Golf Channel or not? I'd expect the Golf Channel (and a bunch of other niche-market cable channels) to go away quickly because there isn't enough viewers to support the fees they have to pay for satellite distribution.
So, have people's habits changed? Not really. There may be 500 channels available, but most people watch the top 20 or 30. The bottom 100 could go away tomorrow and nobody would notice. And they likely as not will go away pretty soon. Cable is likely to be a lot more like VHF TV in the 1960's where there are 20 channels and a whole lot of empty space.
Sure, it's possible for these companies to dramatically restructure and remain relevant... Sony could have come up with a great "official" music portal site along the lines of MySpace or Facebook. BMG could have come up with a great on-line store like iTunes. They could've embraced digital distribution...but they didn't.
Sorry, but there is no possible "business" that can be conducted along the lines of "give it to me for nothing or I'll take it." That is where music is today. iTunes exists to load up iPods for stupid people - nobody in their right mind is going to spend the $20,000-$40,000 it would take buying songs at iTunes to fill up an iPod. Not saying that there aren't a lot of people in their right mind, but that is besides the point.
If you buy an iPod and have never, ever heard of "the Internet" and never opened a browser then you can still use iTunes and get music for your shiny new iPod. Later, when a friend comes by and says "What? You are paying for all this stuff? Here, let me show you how." the sales end but Apple still has a happy iPod customer. The whole point with the iPod is the hardware - iTunes is just a necessary evil, part of a marketing strategy. The iTunes store can run at a loss as far as Apple is concerned because it is really all about selling iPods.
I don't see a future where many bands put out music for everyone to download for free just for the exposure. What the heck do I care about a band in New Jersey if I am in LA? Sure, I might download their stuff but they aren't getting me to buy drinks in the bar they play at.
By the way, the other thing that dies is FM radio. When there is no music promotion, there is no FM radio as we know it today.
The problem is, you have it backwards. It is perfectly legal for you to have the copy. It was unquestionably a copyright infringement for the person (or persons) you got it from to have given it to you.
You do not have the right to get it, only to have it.
Other people have the right to have it, but not to redistribute it.
Law enforcement? Ha. Nobody gives a damn. Civil suits? Sorry, but we're putting roadblocks in the way to ensure that anonymous users on the Internet STAY anonymous and cannot be sued.
Now the down side to this is pretty clear - if I use the Internet, I can get away with anything. Either the court doesn't understand the technology or there are regulations and customs in place to prevent any real prosecution. Sure, if I run to a cop and say "I did it! Aren't I kewl!" I will find myself in trouble. But if I can contain my glee I have nothing to fear.
But the RIAA isn't going to benefit from the "downside" to this. There isn't any rescue for them - if it is in digital form, then it can be shared. They get to sell one and only one copy so it better be priced right. From then on, it is a free-for-all with everyone with high-speed Internet downloading whatever they want. Don't have a broadband connection? Too bad, you aren't included in the new economy. I guess you still have to pay. Until you wise up or we have a tax payer supported Internet Utility so everyone gets stuff for free.
Recorded music has been forced into being an ad-supported loss-leader. Sure, there are some folks that will pay iTunes to aswage their guilt. Or the latest incarnation of AllOfMP3.com. Whatever. None of this makes for a "business" to the people producing the stuff, and the more people learn about BitTorrent and other P2P tools the less traffic iTunes will have. Guilt? Well, I'm sure the guilty will always be with us, just like the poor. I don't think it will be enough to keep them in business, but there will always be people that find a store to pay 10x as much as somewhere else. Why do these stores stay in business?
But no matter what, the idea of anyone paying for recorded music will be pretty much like the idea of paying for sex from 26-year-old crack whores. Some people do it, but nobody really understands why and everyone thinks it is disgusting.
Why would you suggest replacing a system that works? If nobody knows how the system works, were there that many people already exploiting it before this information was made public?
The problem is this is a public works sort of project. If you aren't a local taxpayer, you probably have no right to even suggest they spend millions (hundreds of millions?) to replace it with something that is more secure.
Look, defeating the system is illegal. Anyone distributing information to assist in an illegal act should be treated as an accomplice when the first exploit happens. Anyone exploting the system should be prosecuted. Unfortunately, it is hard to catch the people exploiting this, so likely as not the transit agency will eat the fare loss rather than penalize the entire area by spending the money to put in a secure system.
Security costs money, and in most cases like this, it isn't necessary to do it. So the spending for real security is an waste of taxpayer money.
The problem is there was a implementation of a system with some potential exposures that nobody was exploiting. Quite possibly, no exploitation was because of a lack of knowledge rather than any impractacality of the exploit.
Sure, everything could be made more secure. Did you know that there are only about 100 unique car key "encodings"? This means that if you have a Ford the chances are excellent that your key will open the door of some other Ford in an airport parking lot. Or a mall. Why isn't this a huge problem - it sure sounds like it is a huge exposure, doesn't it. Well, partly it isn't exploited because nobody knows about it, or almost nobody.
Security by obscurity works and it is cheap to implement. Actually closing all those holes can be extremely expensive and in the physical world it probably doesn't work any better.
So how do you avoid spending millions of dollars for needless security? Well, first off you can strongly discourage security probing. Next, you can defend your obscurity because it is cheaper than fixing the holes someone discovered.
Which is better in the public interest: having a truely "secure" transit card system or preventing the disclosure of information that will certainly lead to exploits? It almost doesn't matter how much fixing the security might cost as long as it is $1 more than keeping the holes secret and defending against probing.
Do we really want public institutions spending large amounts of money to make things "secure" when exploiting holes in public infrsstructure is illegal anyway?
Paying these folks anything, even fifty cents, just encourages more people to follow in their footsteps.
Word isn't designed for book publishing, but it is the format that publishers are most comfortable in receiving material in. They are going to reformat it anyway, so the important part is getting the text to them in a comprehensible format.
Framemaker and Quark are publishing tools and likely as not one of these is going to be what the publisher is going to use in the end. Choose wrong, and you will have a mess because these are not easily convertable to each other. That is why Word works - the publisher is used to converting Word to whatever it is they are using.
Using any tool the publisher isn't familiar with is going to result in the text not coming out with the content you intended. That means either your work will not be published at all or it will be retyped with errors. You will not catch all of them. This is a disaster.
Let's see here, you click on a link and are shown a page full of ads with a video on it. You ignore the ads, but the people that think you might click on an ad pay to have it there. YouTube rakes in the money each time you click one of those links.
Free exposure? I don't think so. Those ads are paid for and are bid up to the maximum the market will bear. So where is the money in this game? It all belongs to Google and they don't feel like sharing.
And how exactly does Google deserve millions of dollars revenue from showing these videos and the creators and owners deserve nothing? Talk about leeching!
It has nothing to do with "business model", it has to do with the entire business.
If it is permitted for Google/YouTube to post content without compensating the content owner and make millions of dollars off of it through advertising revenue, what possible hope does the content owner have anyway?
Someone is going to make money off the content, but it sure isn't going to be the producers/owners of that content. It is going to be Google.
The only reasonable thing to do is to immediately stop providing free content to Google for Google to make money from. Find something that people will pay for, because it certainly isn't going to be any sort of digital content, or anything that can be distributed in digital form.
In a corporate IT department, it almost always makes sense. Hardware is usually a one-time expenditure and programming resources can consume a awful lot of money when compared to a bigger machine.
In consumer electronics the problem is completely opposite. If it takes an engineer six months to develop a solution allowing a $1 savings on something with a market life of 5 years and projected total manufacturing run of 5 million units, you are talking about a $5,000,000 savings for what, $3,000 for the Chinese engineer? Even with modest numbers where you might only sell 50,000 units having a savings of $0.10 per unit means $5,000 savings. With software engineering as cheap as it is today, there is no point in making the programmer's life easier. Make the hardware as cheap as possible and the programmers will just have to figure it out. Whatever you save on the hardware will more than make up for increased engineering costs.
This has been the way it is in consumer electronics since before there were consumers.
We have two clear choices which will determine the direction humanity takes.
The first alternative, which currently is very popular in a stealthy kind of way, is to reduce. Cut back on the emission of pollutants, reduce energy usage, have a "smaller footprint" on Planet Earth. This requires a smaller population and however we get there, it isn't going to be nice. My favority scenario (although rather unrealistic) is people marching into gas chambers while watched over by the Eco-Troops. I'd say a nuclear war is far more likely. Possibly intentionally triggered by the environmentalist movement as a way to "reduce" all at once.
The other alternative is to being exploiting resources from off-planet. Mine the moon. Mine the asteroids. Collect hydrocarbons from the atmosphere of Jupiter. And, absoutely, collect energy from the Sun directly in space. The problem is that right now, we may have actually dug ourselves into a "reduce, reuse, recycle" trap that we can't get out of. How does the US Government explain that in order to ensure an abundant lifestyle for everyone it is necessary to cut back on entitlement programs? How do we tell the welfare class that it is time to get to work to earn their bread instead of subsisting on the dole? The answer is pretty clear - Americans do not wish to be told that. The election of Mr. Obama should have made that pretty clear to everyone.
Talk about a "two chickens in every pot" kind of candidate!
OK, so which do you think is more likely to happen? A "sustainable" lifestyle is perfectly possible - sustainable in the sense where natual processes recycle wastes as fast or faster than they are created. The planet was in that condition in around 1850 and not since then. Unfortunately, even with some advanced technology, we going to be limited to around 200 million people. Total. Not in the US, but everywhere. That is larger than the population was in 1850 by a good measure, but we should be able to manage it with better technology. That means we have around 6 billion "excess lives" right now and the longer we wait to make the "sustainable" decision the worse it is going to get.
To put this in perspective, if somehow starting 1 Jan 2009 we started killing a million people a day it would take 20 years to get to a sustainable population. That is a 97% reduction. It means that out of every 100 people you know 3 would be left and you might not be one of them. I doubt any Western civilian is prepared to accept this sort of "sustainable" environment but every time you use the phrase "sustainable" that is what it means. We can't have a "sustainable economy" with 6 billion people. At least not without obtaining off-planet resources.
Today the technology is within our grasp. It is entirely possible to send humans to the moon, set up a camp there and mine it for raw materials and resources needed on Earth and in Earth orbit. It is entirely possible to send a mission to Jupiter to collect hydrocarbons from the atmosphere. It would take a long time to do this, but it could be done today. In 10 years, if all of the Western government persue a course of entitlements, handouts, bailouts and compassionate care we will not have the money, time or resources to mount a mission to the Moon, much less Jupiter. Our decendents can look up in the sky and see the limitless resources that could have been ours for the taking while they, with there constrained "reduced" lifestyle, continue to eek out an existance in the future.
We aren't getting rescued by God or other civilizations. We have to decide for ourselves, and we had better do it soon, or the decision will be made for us.
This certainly isn't the first time someone has exploited the phone system and stuck another with the bill. Maybe it's time for the phone company to get their fraud detection and prevention services at least on par with what the credit card companies have done.
The credit card companies have it very simple - they stick the merchant with the bill. Sorry, but that isn't a solution as far as I (a merchant) am concerned.
How do big businesses handle it? Simple, they have insurance that covers their losses. Because still the credit card processor sticks them with the bill.
What you don't get is people that download music aren't the RIAA's customers. Once you get a taste of free you are unlikely to go back to the music store and spend money - unless you have a $10,000 stereo system and can hear the difference between the MP3 you downloaded and the over-equalized CD version in the store. With today's iPod generation, the tinny earbuds aren't going to do any better with better source material no matter what, so what is the point of purchasing "higher quality"?
The RIAA isn't going to adapt to a business model that has zero revenue in it. The member record companies do not have anywhere to go - it isn't like they can pass out free music so people will come in and buy the expensive music. It isn't a loss leader, and the RIAA members do not generally get revenue from concert appearances. So they have one product and today it is a free product. I'd say it is pretty much over for the concept of "commercial recorded music".
It is like selling mud in the mall. You may have some of the finest mud imaginable with all sorts of supposed health benefits, but in the end it is mud. Just like what everone has in their backyard. For free. So how much mud can you sell to the average consumer that can get it for free at home?
But, just a note, that this number is likely smaller due to the constantly decreasing costs of CD production (The production costs and overhead were likely more in 2003 than what is outlined in this chart)
Why would CD costs be decreasing? If anything, with fewer CDs being made today than previously the costs are going to be higher on a per-unit basis.
If you know anything about CD production, the costs haven't really changed much in the last 10 years or so. There are single-line machines that take plastic pellets and turn out finished CDs and have been for the last 10 years or so. Where changes really come in is with huge quantities of the same disc being made over and over. So making 1,000,000 on a per-unit basis is much less costly than making 100,000. And today nobody is making 1,000,000 music discs of anything.
Yes, recordable blanks are somewhat cheaper than they were 10 years ago. This is primarily due to quantities being produced and where they are being produced. I don't have figures for last year but in 1998 there were around 10 million CD-R discs produced, whereas in 2003 there were 4 billion. I suspect 2008 has seen that number jump up to much closer to 10 billion, maybe more. In 1998 a lot of the discs were made in the US. Today almost all of the cheap CD-R and DVD-R discs are made in Asia with much lower labor and overhead costs.
Yes, they could handle everything but child porn distribution certainly. However, it would (a) cost money to do, (b) of limited benefit to the ISP, and (c) annoy some customers.
The fact that everyone worldwide would benefit isn't of much interest to ISPs. Because it would cost them money and provide very limited benefits.
Now, cutting off bulk-users of bandwidth benefits their (other) customers directly and them indirectly. So of course they will be more interested in that.
Shaver's plug gets bust? Would be nice to replace the plug and not the whole damn thing, etc. This bypasses that entirely.
Sure. Let's just use this other power adapter from something else. With a little extra force, see, it fits fine. OK, now just to plug it in...
BLAMMO!!!!
Wife comes running in and sees the disaster and, being a good American, calls a lawyer.
This is why power adapters of different voltages, different capacities and different functionalities are designed with unique connectors. The intent is to keep you from causing problems for the company via lawsuits. Lawsuits caused directly by your ability to connect two mismatched devices together. Unless this risk can be eliminated, you are not going to get rid of every device having a different and unique connector.
Now it might be nice if there was an ISO standard for connectors (like there is for mains power connections) so there would be a few thousand "standard" connectors for every given voltage, regulation mode, current and AC or DC variety. This would solve everyone's problem, wouldn't it? Until you attempt to get everyone behind the idea of the few thousand "standard" connectors. That are all unique and different from today's non-standard connectors.
Slashdot Mirror
We are pretty much looking at a situation where nobody respects copyright. 10-15 years and it will certainly be over for the movie studios if they are releasing stuff in any sort of digital format.
If they ship materials to theaters on DVD, they will be copied. If they make DVDs for consumers, they will be copied. About the only way to continue to have a "movie studio" would be for theater releases only and only distribute the materials over a private network. Nobody gets to have a real copy, ever.
And yes, prosecute anyone making camera copies.
Otherwise, it will certainly be the end of the studio because nobody is going to pay them. Why would they, when it is all for free? And as you say, any time, any where.
This sounds like it could very well be due to RIM taking advantage of some information it got from Motorola under NDA.
RIM and Motorola had (have?) an agreement to share confidential information about some unrelated matter. RIM notices that Motorola is going to be laying off people from this information. RIM immediately starts soliciting these people that are likely to be laid off.
Now that doesn't sound entirely reasonable, does it? Especially since these people can be approached on the basis of "we're offering you a job with a 25% cut in pay because we know you are about to lose your job."
There is no denying that this is an important problem. If you can't assure your customers of your security, they will simply refuse to do business with you. That means in short order going out of business. So security is important, but so is accountability.
OK, you cannot make absolutely sure that every person that encounters a document will not give it to someone else they should not. However, you can make sure that each such legitimate access is tracked and that people with access are accountable. You can then make it clear to everyone that violating company security is grounds for immediate termination.
Simple solution is a secured web site where people have to log in to access documents. This can be tracked in logs. So you now have absolute knowledge of each and every person that accesses a document. Simply by convention you can enforce the policy that there is no distribution other than the web page. Someone violates this policy and they are canned.
Security involving humans has to involve accountability. There is no other way.
Optical media, including DVD doesn't store video on anything magnetic at all - there is no magnetism involved at all. Optical media is written with heat and read with light.
There is a really wonderful discussion in Issac Asimov's Foundation about how historians work by reading the works of others and comparing them. The speaker in the book says this leads to the truth. When the person they are explaining this to asks if they ever do any original research the answer is that there is no need, that ground has already been covered by others and there is no thing more to be learned.
I suggest finding these few paragraphs in Foundation and reading them. Over and over until it sinks in. Of course, the author is describing a decadent society in decline and one should not draw too many parallels to our own situation. It might be too depressing.
The problem is when you tell all sides equally you give equal credence to the lies.
After enough lies are told, nobody can tell what is the truth anymore. Then you have true balance, because everything sounds the same whether it is true or not. And nobody can tell the difference.
This is pretty much where we are today.
I suspect rules like that (which lead to tariffs and import duties) are against the WTO rules.
We signed onto this plan so we are pretty much stuck with it now. It mandates global free trade amoungst member countries. So you can't select preferences like this - it is called "protectionism" and isn't allowed.
Bush tried this with steel imports already and got smacked down. Bet Obama tries again, soon. He will likely suffer the same fate.
Interesting, comparing it to cable TV. What a lot of people do not know is that most of the niche cable channels (think Golf Channel) aren't very profitable. They still exist because they managed to get themselves listed with the cable company and this guarantees them revenue, regardless of actual viewing habits. The ad space is really cheap as well, and this attracts certain types of marketers.
What happens if we get total ala carte channel selection where everyone gets to decide if they can receive the Golf Channel or not? I'd expect the Golf Channel (and a bunch of other niche-market cable channels) to go away quickly because there isn't enough viewers to support the fees they have to pay for satellite distribution.
So, have people's habits changed? Not really. There may be 500 channels available, but most people watch the top 20 or 30. The bottom 100 could go away tomorrow and nobody would notice. And they likely as not will go away pretty soon. Cable is likely to be a lot more like VHF TV in the 1960's where there are 20 channels and a whole lot of empty space.
Sure, it's possible for these companies to dramatically restructure and remain relevant... Sony could have come up with a great "official" music portal site along the lines of MySpace or Facebook. BMG could have come up with a great on-line store like iTunes. They could've embraced digital distribution...but they didn't.
Sorry, but there is no possible "business" that can be conducted along the lines of "give it to me for nothing or I'll take it." That is where music is today. iTunes exists to load up iPods for stupid people - nobody in their right mind is going to spend the $20,000-$40,000 it would take buying songs at iTunes to fill up an iPod. Not saying that there aren't a lot of people in their right mind, but that is besides the point.
If you buy an iPod and have never, ever heard of "the Internet" and never opened a browser then you can still use iTunes and get music for your shiny new iPod. Later, when a friend comes by and says "What? You are paying for all this stuff? Here, let me show you how." the sales end but Apple still has a happy iPod customer. The whole point with the iPod is the hardware - iTunes is just a necessary evil, part of a marketing strategy. The iTunes store can run at a loss as far as Apple is concerned because it is really all about selling iPods.
I don't see a future where many bands put out music for everyone to download for free just for the exposure. What the heck do I care about a band in New Jersey if I am in LA? Sure, I might download their stuff but they aren't getting me to buy drinks in the bar they play at.
By the way, the other thing that dies is FM radio. When there is no music promotion, there is no FM radio as we know it today.
The problem is, you have it backwards. It is perfectly legal for you to have the copy. It was unquestionably a copyright infringement for the person (or persons) you got it from to have given it to you.
You do not have the right to get it, only to have it.
Other people have the right to have it, but not to redistribute it.
It is all free now. Period. No recourse.
Law enforcement? Ha. Nobody gives a damn. Civil suits? Sorry, but we're putting roadblocks in the way to ensure that anonymous users on the Internet STAY anonymous and cannot be sued.
Now the down side to this is pretty clear - if I use the Internet, I can get away with anything. Either the court doesn't understand the technology or there are regulations and customs in place to prevent any real prosecution. Sure, if I run to a cop and say "I did it! Aren't I kewl!" I will find myself in trouble. But if I can contain my glee I have nothing to fear.
But the RIAA isn't going to benefit from the "downside" to this. There isn't any rescue for them - if it is in digital form, then it can be shared. They get to sell one and only one copy so it better be priced right. From then on, it is a free-for-all with everyone with high-speed Internet downloading whatever they want. Don't have a broadband connection? Too bad, you aren't included in the new economy. I guess you still have to pay. Until you wise up or we have a tax payer supported Internet Utility so everyone gets stuff for free.
Recorded music has been forced into being an ad-supported loss-leader. Sure, there are some folks that will pay iTunes to aswage their guilt. Or the latest incarnation of AllOfMP3.com. Whatever. None of this makes for a "business" to the people producing the stuff, and the more people learn about BitTorrent and other P2P tools the less traffic iTunes will have. Guilt? Well, I'm sure the guilty will always be with us, just like the poor. I don't think it will be enough to keep them in business, but there will always be people that find a store to pay 10x as much as somewhere else. Why do these stores stay in business?
But no matter what, the idea of anyone paying for recorded music will be pretty much like the idea of paying for sex from 26-year-old crack whores. Some people do it, but nobody really understands why and everyone thinks it is disgusting.
Why would you suggest replacing a system that works? If nobody knows how the system works, were there that many people already exploiting it before this information was made public?
The problem is this is a public works sort of project. If you aren't a local taxpayer, you probably have no right to even suggest they spend millions (hundreds of millions?) to replace it with something that is more secure.
Look, defeating the system is illegal. Anyone distributing information to assist in an illegal act should be treated as an accomplice when the first exploit happens. Anyone exploting the system should be prosecuted. Unfortunately, it is hard to catch the people exploiting this, so likely as not the transit agency will eat the fare loss rather than penalize the entire area by spending the money to put in a secure system.
Security costs money, and in most cases like this, it isn't necessary to do it. So the spending for real security is an waste of taxpayer money.
The problem is there was a implementation of a system with some potential exposures that nobody was exploiting. Quite possibly, no exploitation was because of a lack of knowledge rather than any impractacality of the exploit.
Sure, everything could be made more secure. Did you know that there are only about 100 unique car key "encodings"? This means that if you have a Ford the chances are excellent that your key will open the door of some other Ford in an airport parking lot. Or a mall. Why isn't this a huge problem - it sure sounds like it is a huge exposure, doesn't it. Well, partly it isn't exploited because nobody knows about it, or almost nobody.
Security by obscurity works and it is cheap to implement. Actually closing all those holes can be extremely expensive and in the physical world it probably doesn't work any better.
So how do you avoid spending millions of dollars for needless security? Well, first off you can strongly discourage security probing. Next, you can defend your obscurity because it is cheaper than fixing the holes someone discovered.
Which is better in the public interest: having a truely "secure" transit card system or preventing the disclosure of information that will certainly lead to exploits? It almost doesn't matter how much fixing the security might cost as long as it is $1 more than keeping the holes secret and defending against probing.
Do we really want public institutions spending large amounts of money to make things "secure" when exploiting holes in public infrsstructure is illegal anyway?
Paying these folks anything, even fifty cents, just encourages more people to follow in their footsteps.
Word isn't designed for book publishing, but it is the format that publishers are most comfortable in receiving material in. They are going to reformat it anyway, so the important part is getting the text to them in a comprehensible format.
Framemaker and Quark are publishing tools and likely as not one of these is going to be what the publisher is going to use in the end. Choose wrong, and you will have a mess because these are not easily convertable to each other. That is why Word works - the publisher is used to converting Word to whatever it is they are using.
Using any tool the publisher isn't familiar with is going to result in the text not coming out with the content you intended. That means either your work will not be published at all or it will be retyped with errors. You will not catch all of them. This is a disaster.
Arizona, where speed cameras abound, is switching to glossy paper for license plates instead of shiny metal. Kinda throws your idea out the window.
Let's see here, you click on a link and are shown a page full of ads with a video on it. You ignore the ads, but the people that think you might click on an ad pay to have it there. YouTube rakes in the money each time you click one of those links.
Free exposure? I don't think so. Those ads are paid for and are bid up to the maximum the market will bear. So where is the money in this game? It all belongs to Google and they don't feel like sharing.
And how exactly does Google deserve millions of dollars revenue from showing these videos and the creators and owners deserve nothing? Talk about leeching!
It has nothing to do with "business model", it has to do with the entire business.
If it is permitted for Google/YouTube to post content without compensating the content owner and make millions of dollars off of it through advertising revenue, what possible hope does the content owner have anyway?
Someone is going to make money off the content, but it sure isn't going to be the producers/owners of that content. It is going to be Google.
The only reasonable thing to do is to immediately stop providing free content to Google for Google to make money from. Find something that people will pay for, because it certainly isn't going to be any sort of digital content, or anything that can be distributed in digital form.
In a corporate IT department, it almost always makes sense. Hardware is usually a one-time expenditure and programming resources can consume a awful lot of money when compared to a bigger machine.
In consumer electronics the problem is completely opposite. If it takes an engineer six months to develop a solution allowing a $1 savings on something with a market life of 5 years and projected total manufacturing run of 5 million units, you are talking about a $5,000,000 savings for what, $3,000 for the Chinese engineer? Even with modest numbers where you might only sell 50,000 units having a savings of $0.10 per unit means $5,000 savings. With software engineering as cheap as it is today, there is no point in making the programmer's life easier. Make the hardware as cheap as possible and the programmers will just have to figure it out. Whatever you save on the hardware will more than make up for increased engineering costs.
This has been the way it is in consumer electronics since before there were consumers.
We have two clear choices which will determine the direction humanity takes.
The first alternative, which currently is very popular in a stealthy kind of way, is to reduce. Cut back on the emission of pollutants, reduce energy usage, have a "smaller footprint" on Planet Earth. This requires a smaller population and however we get there, it isn't going to be nice. My favority scenario (although rather unrealistic) is people marching into gas chambers while watched over by the Eco-Troops. I'd say a nuclear war is far more likely. Possibly intentionally triggered by the environmentalist movement as a way to "reduce" all at once.
The other alternative is to being exploiting resources from off-planet. Mine the moon. Mine the asteroids. Collect hydrocarbons from the atmosphere of Jupiter. And, absoutely, collect energy from the Sun directly in space. The problem is that right now, we may have actually dug ourselves into a "reduce, reuse, recycle" trap that we can't get out of. How does the US Government explain that in order to ensure an abundant lifestyle for everyone it is necessary to cut back on entitlement programs? How do we tell the welfare class that it is time to get to work to earn their bread instead of subsisting on the dole? The answer is pretty clear - Americans do not wish to be told that. The election of Mr. Obama should have made that pretty clear to everyone.
Talk about a "two chickens in every pot" kind of candidate!
OK, so which do you think is more likely to happen? A "sustainable" lifestyle is perfectly possible - sustainable in the sense where natual processes recycle wastes as fast or faster than they are created. The planet was in that condition in around 1850 and not since then. Unfortunately, even with some advanced technology, we going to be limited to around 200 million people. Total. Not in the US, but everywhere. That is larger than the population was in 1850 by a good measure, but we should be able to manage it with better technology. That means we have around 6 billion "excess lives" right now and the longer we wait to make the "sustainable" decision the worse it is going to get.
To put this in perspective, if somehow starting 1 Jan 2009 we started killing a million people a day it would take 20 years to get to a sustainable population. That is a 97% reduction. It means that out of every 100 people you know 3 would be left and you might not be one of them. I doubt any Western civilian is prepared to accept this sort of "sustainable" environment but every time you use the phrase "sustainable" that is what it means. We can't have a "sustainable economy" with 6 billion people. At least not without obtaining off-planet resources.
Today the technology is within our grasp. It is entirely possible to send humans to the moon, set up a camp there and mine it for raw materials and resources needed on Earth and in Earth orbit. It is entirely possible to send a mission to Jupiter to collect hydrocarbons from the atmosphere. It would take a long time to do this, but it could be done today. In 10 years, if all of the Western government persue a course of entitlements, handouts, bailouts and compassionate care we will not have the money, time or resources to mount a mission to the Moon, much less Jupiter. Our decendents can look up in the sky and see the limitless resources that could have been ours for the taking while they, with there constrained "reduced" lifestyle, continue to eek out an existance in the future.
We aren't getting rescued by God or other civilizations. We have to decide for ourselves, and we had better do it soon, or the decision will be made for us.
This certainly isn't the first time someone has exploited the phone system and stuck another with the bill. Maybe it's time for the phone company to get their fraud detection and prevention services at least on par with what the credit card companies have done.
The credit card companies have it very simple - they stick the merchant with the bill. Sorry, but that isn't a solution as far as I (a merchant) am concerned.
How do big businesses handle it? Simple, they have insurance that covers their losses. Because still the credit card processor sticks them with the bill.
What you don't get is people that download music aren't the RIAA's customers. Once you get a taste of free you are unlikely to go back to the music store and spend money - unless you have a $10,000 stereo system and can hear the difference between the MP3 you downloaded and the over-equalized CD version in the store. With today's iPod generation, the tinny earbuds aren't going to do any better with better source material no matter what, so what is the point of purchasing "higher quality"?
The RIAA isn't going to adapt to a business model that has zero revenue in it. The member record companies do not have anywhere to go - it isn't like they can pass out free music so people will come in and buy the expensive music. It isn't a loss leader, and the RIAA members do not generally get revenue from concert appearances. So they have one product and today it is a free product. I'd say it is pretty much over for the concept of "commercial recorded music".
It is like selling mud in the mall. You may have some of the finest mud imaginable with all sorts of supposed health benefits, but in the end it is mud. Just like what everone has in their backyard. For free. So how much mud can you sell to the average consumer that can get it for free at home?
But, just a note, that this number is likely smaller due to the constantly decreasing costs of CD production (The production costs and overhead were likely more in 2003 than what is outlined in this chart)
Why would CD costs be decreasing? If anything, with fewer CDs being made today than previously the costs are going to be higher on a per-unit basis.
If you know anything about CD production, the costs haven't really changed much in the last 10 years or so. There are single-line machines that take plastic pellets and turn out finished CDs and have been for the last 10 years or so. Where changes really come in is with huge quantities of the same disc being made over and over. So making 1,000,000 on a per-unit basis is much less costly than making 100,000. And today nobody is making 1,000,000 music discs of anything.
Yes, recordable blanks are somewhat cheaper than they were 10 years ago. This is primarily due to quantities being produced and where they are being produced. I don't have figures for last year but in 1998 there were around 10 million CD-R discs produced, whereas in 2003 there were 4 billion. I suspect 2008 has seen that number jump up to much closer to 10 billion, maybe more. In 1998 a lot of the discs were made in the US. Today almost all of the cheap CD-R and DVD-R discs are made in Asia with much lower labor and overhead costs.
Yes, they could handle everything but child porn distribution certainly. However, it would (a) cost money to do, (b) of limited benefit to the ISP, and (c) annoy some customers.
The fact that everyone worldwide would benefit isn't of much interest to ISPs. Because it would cost them money and provide very limited benefits.
Now, cutting off bulk-users of bandwidth benefits their (other) customers directly and them indirectly. So of course they will be more interested in that.
Shaver's plug gets bust? Would be nice to replace the plug and not the whole damn thing, etc. This bypasses that entirely.
Sure. Let's just use this other power adapter from something else. With a little extra force, see, it fits fine. OK, now just to plug it in...
BLAMMO!!!!
Wife comes running in and sees the disaster and, being a good American, calls a lawyer.
This is why power adapters of different voltages, different capacities and different functionalities are designed with unique connectors. The intent is to keep you from causing problems for the company via lawsuits. Lawsuits caused directly by your ability to connect two mismatched devices together. Unless this risk can be eliminated, you are not going to get rid of every device having a different and unique connector.
Now it might be nice if there was an ISO standard for connectors (like there is for mains power connections) so there would be a few thousand "standard" connectors for every given voltage, regulation mode, current and AC or DC variety. This would solve everyone's problem, wouldn't it? Until you attempt to get everyone behind the idea of the few thousand "standard" connectors. That are all unique and different from today's non-standard connectors.