Right now, for some pretty thin markets, I think 100% of the customers are online. Techno Trance, for example.
For more mainstream music, no, I don't believe anywhere near 100% are online, willing to spend money for music, or are able to download music quickly. When the CD section at WalMart closes down, then I will beileve that the music promotion business is no longer needed or useful. I have no idea what their demongraphics are, but I can guess that they are dial-up Internet users that are currently still spending money for music.
Most of the people I know haven't spent a dime on music in the last five years, will never spend a dime on it again and have high speed Internet connections. There is no possibility of selling them music ever again because they know how to download and where to download from.
The problem was that the lender was given a ticket that said if they make bad loans they could sell them to the government-backed mortgage guarantee houses. So no matter what they did, they got extra money for making as many loans as possible with the government-backed players picking up all the risk.
All in the name of increasing home ownership by unqualified people.
It was a stupid game to get into but nobody - except the government-backed mortgage guarantee houses - had any risk in the game. Oh, maybe the home buyer had some risk because they were going to get booted out on the street in the end, but for a while it looked really, really nice.
As for the lenders, well, if someone says to you they will give you $100 a day for the rest of the year are you going to say no? Some really high-minded person might have looked at this and said the end result of this will be people getting thrown out of their house so maybe I better not do this. But I don't think I know anybody that would turn down their $100 a day because it might come to an end.
If in 1890 there was a group of dedicated people that made buggy whips and passed them out on streetcorners you would be roughly correct.
Today, most people that take advantage of downloadable materials do so for no personal gain and really are quite neutral on the subject. The people providing those materials do have goals and objectives - the elimination of the possibility of deriving revenue from digital goods. There is no possibility of "competing against it".
If someone comes to your place of work tomorrow and says to your boss they will do your job for half your pay, are they competing with you? If someone in Romania offers to do your job for nothing, are they competing with you? It is difficult, if not impossible to compete with "free".
If you do not examine the source, how can you trust any piece of software? You are in effect agreeing to trust the unknown people that have looked at the source. Except in the case of a smallish distribution nobody may have actually looked into that particular distribution in any detail at all.
Of course, there is a greater issue of trust. If you accept chips made by unknown fabricators, do you know what microcode has been implemented? If you cannot examine the "source code" of the chips being used how can you actually trust that these chips are not doing things behind your back to reveal your identity and files?
So without a truly "open" computer, you are trusting a whole raft of unknown individuals and companies with your identity, your data, your reputation.
Moreover, if you are not knowledgeable about programming languages, using any computer is an act of utter faith with plenty of reason to not be so trusting. It is like climbing a mountain with a guide that only lost "a few" parties last year.
You would see a bill overnight with the title "Fair Gas Treatment for All Workers" whereby anyone that didn't actually pay taxes would get their $5000 mailed to them some other way.
While it is true that if the initial border zone on a DVD becomes unreadable the disc cannot be accessed normally, there are recovery techniques that will allow the data to be read from the disc. No, there isn't any way to "demand" access to the data - you have to go through the drive's normal protocol. But you can play some tricks.
No, there aren't any "alternate forms" of DVD encoding. DVD discs are rather complicated and the drive and chipset are very, very much required as an intermediary. And the drive only works one way. Completely different than a hard drive.
And finally, an "ISO image file" contains only the most basic information from DVDs. There is lots and lots of other stuff on the disc that isn't represented there at all. The idea that you can represent a CD or DVD completely as an ISO image file is utterly false. Sure, you can get the basics, but that is all.
I have a Windows application that I used for many years that is technologically the same as any other Windows application today - both run on the x86 processor. However, for some reason that is a complete mystery it does not work today. Funny, it worked fine in 1995. Could there be some subtle difference, other than the base underlying technology between windows 3.1 and Windows Vista?
That is pretty much what you are saying. CDMA has been heavily customized by the carriers so there is no carrier-to-carrier compatibility once you leave the lowest level of specifications. Attempting to activate a CDMA phone on anything other than the carrier the phone's software is loaded for is an exercise in frustration. It isn't going to work.
GSM is different. Quite different. There have been far fewer carrier specific changes for phones. You can claim that the carriers should not have made the CDMA extensions they did, but the time for that has past. The question now should be will carriers in the US make carrier-specific extensions to GSM that require custom carrier-specific software in the phones? If the CDMA/TDMA rollout in the US is any indication, they will do so to differentiate network services and provide additional features to customers. Of course, this will completely negate any ability to move phones (GSM or CDMA) between carriers in the future.
No, I do not know if the carrier-specific CDMA extensions are documented anywhere public. I suspect they are not and it is all considered trade secret. Qualcomm would know.
Too bad that the US and lots of other nations belong to something called the WTO which severely limits the sort of actions that can be taken.
Sorry, applying tariffs against things made in foreign countries isn't allowed. I suspect any application of trade barriers which would affect a company's ability to operate from overseas (from a WTO member country) would be disallowed.
This is a Clinton-era thing that was supposed to help out the world.
TV News. The problem in the US is that if a winner isn't announced by midnight, the TV News people will announce one anyway based on exit polls, tea leaves or whatever else they can pull out of a hat.
They have to. Otherwise, the next election there will be nobody watching the election results on that channel. Then the advertising revenue goes to hell and they are in trouble financially. You can say the very survival of the network television is based on them announcing a winner for the election.
This is what happened in 2000 - CBS News announced that Gore won the election just before midnight Eastern time. Sure, they retracted that around 2:00 AM or so but by then people had already gone to bed. They woke up the next morning hearing that Bush won and have been convinced ever since that he stole the election while they were sleeping.
Think about what happens if this were to happen this year. Obama is annouced as the winner and then in the morning McCain is the "real" winner based on real results. Do you think there would be riots? Nothing can be done about this other than having quick real results. You can't pass a law saying the TV News cannot announce a winner based on their exit polls, and most people are too stupid to understand that just because Walter Cronkite says it doesn't make it so.
Peaceful? I guess you haven't been watching the news. Lots of people in the US are upset that their tax dollars are supporting the war in Iraq. They will soon be upset about the war in Darfur as well, according to Mr. Biden should he become vice president.
The Americans really don't care where the company is as long as they take credit cards.
First off, that may violate WTO rules, to which the US signed on to. This was an extremely short-sighted move that literally prevents the US from taking unilateral action in terms of trade with other WTO members. It absolutely prevents the US from introducing tariffs on things like China-produced goods, which is why we are in the current pickle with China.
Secondly, do you really think that would solve anything at all? Simple solution for any company is to just cease having any US presence whatsoever. That does not prevent them from doing business in the US - it just means the US has no control, oversight or anything else. I suppose it might be attempted to prevent credit card payments to non-US companies but I doubt that would actually be feasible and might not be possible.
It is a global economy and the lowest tax, lowest labor cost, lowest price wins! And there is almost nothing that can be done about it now. Anywhere where there are labor regulations is going to lose jobs. Anywhere with a high minimum wage is going to lose jobs. Anywhere without a permanent underclass that gets paid a pittance is going to lose jobs. Because there will always be somewhere where costs are lower. And unless you are building a large building, just about anything can be done anywhere today.
Yes, this is a concern. A big one. How many large generating plants have been constructed in the US in the last 20 years? I'd guess 10 or less. New transmission lines? Zero.
The idea seems to be that if we slowly starve the population of electric power then they will get the message and cut back. This would reduce all sorts of carbon emissions and make the Earth wonderful and green again. The few humans left shivering in the dark would not be able to have much of an environmental impact.
The lease vs. own question before was, I believe, based on the disposal of the batteries. They are classed as hazardous waste in California and it was illegal to sell anything containing that much lead, acid and other toxic stuff in the state.
So, if the batteries are declared to be toxic, it is highly unlikely the cars can be sold, ever. So far, that hasn't happened. I would be willing to bet that Toyota went to the mat with the California government to ensure the batteries would not be declared so. Since current hybrid batteries are OK, then it seems like future batteries using the same materials can be treated the same way.
I do not believe any other state besides California has any rules about sale of batteries, althought there are regulations about disposal of lead-acid batteries at a national level.
How would you handle paying promoters then? Obviously, what is really needed is someone to promote the unknown band that might make lots of money. A skillful promoter will seek out bands that they feel are most suited to making lots of money in the future and, if their skill is true, then they can get paid for their efforts. Right?
Today, just about every company that works on this model either owns directly what the "band" is making or they might as well. It is the way they are guaranteed to get paid. Otherwise, likely as not, they will end up holding the bad when the "band" figures out how to rip them off.
"Band" currently applies to lots of different creative works including software development.
Respect is. Until we have that, we're not going anywhere.
The problem is, no matter what one country does, it is too easy to circumvent by going international. And no, no country is going to attempt to extradite a spammer or fraudster for ripping people off on the Internet.
Secondly, how exactly do you prosecute someone when everyone, top to bottom, wants to shield people from prosecution? If you have an IP address, a timestamp and a breaking on a server good luck getting anywhere. You will find that without at least $25,000 in damages nobody is going to pay attention. So you lost money? Too bad. Should have been smarter. Your server needed to be rebuilt? Too bad, should have been smarter. Hire a hacker and maybe he will protect you.
The problem is that property rights are meaningless right now. Your email account is my trash basket and anything I can stuff in there is my right to do so. Your server is on the Internet, so therefore it is fair game. Your creative work can make me money, so I will steal it and you can't stop me. Ha ha ha.
Repsect. It is the answer to just about everything today from spamming to child porn.
The basic problem with the idea that it is wrong to send something to someone that does not want it is that it turns the idea of an open communication medium on its ear. It is fine that with Yahoo Messenger you cannot send anything to someone until they accept you as a contact. Email was not intended to work that way.
Trying to introduce this sort of permission into email means that it can no longer be used to communicate with people prior to establishing a relationship. Should a law get passed that says it is wrong to send things to people they do not want essentially enforces this. You now have the situation where I cannot send you a receipt for your purchase because I have no idea if you want it or not. And as a commercial entity, I cannot take the chance that you don't want it without explicit permission.
And then we're back to Yahoo Messenger instead of email.
Personally, I think that email today is already broken enough that it cannot and should not be used to deliver anything of importance. Most people do not receive all the email that sent to them - it is filtered by third parties that are not interested in filtering errors. This means email is unreliable. So if I am sending you a receipt or a notification of a credit I have no idea if it is getting through to you or not. It is therefore useless.
The problem is DRM and other protection mechanisms are unpopular, but in many areas it is clear that piracy is allowed to run rampant that there will be no sales. This is especially true for "popular" software.
There are some people that claim not to pirate - but it is certain they have some software they didn't pay for. Maybe someone just gave it to them or maybe their morality is a little more flexible when it comes to certain things. The problem is that for the last 20 years or so piracy has become pretty mainstream. Why would anyone pay for something when the same thing (sometimes better) is available for free? I'm not talking about free open-source here, I am talking about pirated software. Literally everything you could ever ask for is available for free by anonymously downloading it. So why would anyone pay? It is just a little too easy today and really there is no putting the genii back in the bottle. Piracy is here to stay.
The goal of a lot of pirate web sites and such is to make it impossible to obtain revenue from music, movies, books, software and anything else that can be put in digital form. While I believe these evangelists are few in number, the Internet provides them with a strong presence. Often, the pirate sites will come up first in Google before the publisher's web site. What does that say about popular software? There are some people that will pay - shareware has run at about 5% of users paying for over 20 years. But that is as far as it goes. Name one business that can exist with 5% of the revenue they had last year.
Face it, in the near future every piece of software will be available for free. The only question will be if anyone finds it profitable to publish software. Offhand, I would say the number of players will be very limited. Most software will be a web service where the user never gets to hold anything on their computer. Open source will have a role, but probably not much larger than it is today.
Proprietary software isn't "dead" in any sense. Google is doing a good job at distracting people from the real software that runs their company - clearly it is very, very proprietary. But they throw some people at open source projects and claim to be supporting open source all the while raking in billions because of their proprietary software.
Think for a change. I know it is hard, but you might actually realize that things aren't quite how you would like them to be.
One of the biggest problems with any drawn-out emergency is going to be information control. The government is going to want to tell people to do certain things and, if they are done, it will be better for everyone.
For example, staying off the phone. Not rushing out to the WalMart SuperCenter to get the last couple of loaves of bread. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, a lot of these people are going to be looking at any "official" pronouncements as just so much self-serving BS. When some web site blog/chat forum/etc. says the government is out to kill as many people as possible so the Senators can each have 10,000 acre estates some will believe. When the same web forums say that if you don't want to starve you better join in the mob breaking into the WalMart SuperCenter, people will do so - even if the store was emptied two days before. Of course, all of the people in the mob will then catch whatever it is that is going around at the time - or just get injured further stressing the health care providers.
What are the chances of this not happening and everyone sitting at home listening to the government and doing what is best for everyone? Today, I'd say zero. I'd say that it would be better if the government said nothing at all - because lots of influential people will want to get on their soap box to dispute anything "the government" says, no matter how much sense it might make.
Avian flu coming to the US? Probably is, soon. When it hits, it is going to be a disaster and most people will follow whatever sort of "leader" they can latch onto. And the Internet is full of folks that will jump into that role. For better or worse. I'm expecting worse, myself.
The reality of the situation is much worse than that. Companies have been building their infrastructure around things like Just In Time Inventory and the like for a while. What this means is that your neighborhood shop has just enough stuff for maybe a week and then they run out.
When UPS went on strike you would have thought these folks would have learned their lesson that infrastructure is fragile and you better be ready to roll with it. Sadly, they did not. The result is any prolonged emergency that affects electricity or fuel supplies will doom many businesses, especially the smaller ones.
Also, the interdependence of our current infrastructure is incredible. We seem to have built a society on the idea that nothing bad ever happens. So that when it does everything goes at once.
All it takes is a little damage and it cripples the electric grid. Which then disables the fuel pumps for filling up the trucks needed to service the electric problems. Which then locks down all transportation in the area and makes everyone dependent on outside assistance. What? The state or federal assistance isn't coming because they are too busy elsewhere? Impossible. People will sit down and wait for help because they "know" it is coming. Real Soon Now we will all be saved. By someone. After all, someone has to help. They just have to.
Internet? I'd be a lot more worried about being trapped in a city with no food deliveries and no stockpile of food items anywhere within 300 miles.
Wow, that is a good one. Let's see here, you have most all of the US on seriously asymmetrical links and you want to share your bandwidth with large commercial providers. Ha ha ha.
DSL is slowing becoming more symmetrical, but is has a long way to go in most markets. So you have 5Mb download and 500Kb upload or worse. Cable works by allocating slots and often you have the situation where out of 100 potential slots you have 90 of them for download and 10 for upload. And yes, you are fighting with all of your neighbors for those upload slots.
Fiber potentially can be symmetrical, but average use makes nonsense out of spending the resources to do so. When 80% of the people want 10x the download speed vs. upload speed the provider tends to give it to them. So YouTube is really fast but uploading 500MB for a web site is pretty slow.
The reason we're not all being asked to share our bandwidth is we don't have much upload bandwidth to share. And until the usage habits of most users change drastically, we're not likely to get much more.
The point you are missing is that most of the people that I know who pirate music and software are evangelical about it. "Here Bob, don't buy that. Let me give you a copy." It takes an unusual person these days to say "No, I'd rather give WalMart money for it."
So just because one person pirates a game does not equal one potential sale lost. They are going to give a copy to everyone they know. They are going to post it on the Internet on some Russian warez site to increase the wealth of all those poor people that would never be able to afford the game anyway. Any anyone else that wants it without paying.
The end result is one pirate equals many, many lost potential and real sales. And the objective of the most evangelical pirates is to remove the revenue from such things. "It should all be free and trying to charge people for bits is just wrong." goes the argument.
The end result is you can either be for or against piracy. If you are for it, you use every possible means to defect the pro-revenue people trying to sue or imprison you. If you are against piracy, you try to squash the pirates any way you can.
Too bad that in the end the pirates are going to win. It is a pointless exercise in futility.
I find someone in France that bought the game. I get a copy of it and stand outside of a store where the game is sold passing out cards with a URL where the game can be downloaded for free. Anyone walking in the store to buy it gets a card and suddenly knows they don't have to spend $50.
Does it really make a difference if I charge $1 for the card?
Two points on your comments. First, doesn't the idea that piracy has some component of "wrong" to it make a difference to you? The idea that Activision could do just as much wrong as the pirates and win is silly. Your proposal falls flat on its face because no legal action would ever make it past the first 15 minutes in court.
Secondly, the objective of piracy is to make sure that nobody ever has to pay again. I don't see that Activision has much of a choice, really. They can sell a few more copies, have them pirated and everyone worldwide has their games. Or they can try to stop the piracy. Of course, they may be unsuccessful in stopping it. Same thing, either way then. They can either publish games for free or they can go out of business.
This is the sort of "new business model" the people keep talking about. Anyone that knows how to pirate gets to with no consequences. The noobs that do not know, well, they support everyone else. When the people in the know outnumber the noobs (rapidly approaching for music, a bit further off for games), publishers have to figure out some other way to get money. Maybe they can sell T-shirts.
I believe the problem comes down to respect and convenience. 40 years ago the idea of photocopying a book from a library was unheard of. Not just because of the cost and inconvenience, but because it was considered "wrong".
Today, copying music, movies, software, books, and anything else in digital form isn't considered wrong anymore. Since around 1985 with personal computers making vast inroads into young people's lives we have lived with the idea that just because you can copy something that it is OK to do so. We are now reaping the rewards that come from this.
Unfortunately, no law, law enforcement, treaty or anything else can enforce respect. It is convenient to make copies, so convenient that you will find plenty of people disagreeing that it is even wrong to do so. I do know that in this climate there is nothing that can be done to prevent redistribution of materials that the creator/rights holder belives should not be redistributed.
I think we made our decision starting in 1985 or so and have to live with the consequences. In a generation or two we might be able to reverse this decision after living with the fallout. I believe the fallout will be much wider than people expect. That doesn't mean I believe the decision that digital items can be copied freely is about to be reversed anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, for some pretty thin markets, I think 100% of the customers are online. Techno Trance, for example.
For more mainstream music, no, I don't believe anywhere near 100% are online, willing to spend money for music, or are able to download music quickly. When the CD section at WalMart closes down, then I will beileve that the music promotion business is no longer needed or useful. I have no idea what their demongraphics are, but I can guess that they are dial-up Internet users that are currently still spending money for music.
Most of the people I know haven't spent a dime on music in the last five years, will never spend a dime on it again and have high speed Internet connections. There is no possibility of selling them music ever again because they know how to download and where to download from.
The problem was that the lender was given a ticket that said if they make bad loans they could sell them to the government-backed mortgage guarantee houses. So no matter what they did, they got extra money for making as many loans as possible with the government-backed players picking up all the risk.
All in the name of increasing home ownership by unqualified people.
It was a stupid game to get into but nobody - except the government-backed mortgage guarantee houses - had any risk in the game. Oh, maybe the home buyer had some risk because they were going to get booted out on the street in the end, but for a while it looked really, really nice.
As for the lenders, well, if someone says to you they will give you $100 a day for the rest of the year are you going to say no? Some really high-minded person might have looked at this and said the end result of this will be people getting thrown out of their house so maybe I better not do this. But I don't think I know anybody that would turn down their $100 a day because it might come to an end.
If in 1890 there was a group of dedicated people that made buggy whips and passed them out on streetcorners you would be roughly correct.
Today, most people that take advantage of downloadable materials do so for no personal gain and really are quite neutral on the subject. The people providing those materials do have goals and objectives - the elimination of the possibility of deriving revenue from digital goods. There is no possibility of "competing against it".
If someone comes to your place of work tomorrow and says to your boss they will do your job for half your pay, are they competing with you? If someone in Romania offers to do your job for nothing, are they competing with you? It is difficult, if not impossible to compete with "free".
If you do not examine the source, how can you trust any piece of software? You are in effect agreeing to trust the unknown people that have looked at the source. Except in the case of a smallish distribution nobody may have actually looked into that particular distribution in any detail at all.
Of course, there is a greater issue of trust. If you accept chips made by unknown fabricators, do you know what microcode has been implemented? If you cannot examine the "source code" of the chips being used how can you actually trust that these chips are not doing things behind your back to reveal your identity and files?
So without a truly "open" computer, you are trusting a whole raft of unknown individuals and companies with your identity, your data, your reputation.
Moreover, if you are not knowledgeable about programming languages, using any computer is an act of utter faith with plenty of reason to not be so trusting. It is like climbing a mountain with a guide that only lost "a few" parties last year.
You would see a bill overnight with the title "Fair Gas Treatment for All Workers" whereby anyone that didn't actually pay taxes would get their $5000 mailed to them some other way.
While it is true that if the initial border zone on a DVD becomes unreadable the disc cannot be accessed normally, there are recovery techniques that will allow the data to be read from the disc. No, there isn't any way to "demand" access to the data - you have to go through the drive's normal protocol. But you can play some tricks.
No, there aren't any "alternate forms" of DVD encoding. DVD discs are rather complicated and the drive and chipset are very, very much required as an intermediary. And the drive only works one way. Completely different than a hard drive.
And finally, an "ISO image file" contains only the most basic information from DVDs. There is lots and lots of other stuff on the disc that isn't represented there at all. The idea that you can represent a CD or DVD completely as an ISO image file is utterly false. Sure, you can get the basics, but that is all.
I have a Windows application that I used for many years that is technologically the same as any other Windows application today - both run on the x86 processor. However, for some reason that is a complete mystery it does not work today. Funny, it worked fine in 1995. Could there be some subtle difference, other than the base underlying technology between windows 3.1 and Windows Vista?
That is pretty much what you are saying. CDMA has been heavily customized by the carriers so there is no carrier-to-carrier compatibility once you leave the lowest level of specifications. Attempting to activate a CDMA phone on anything other than the carrier the phone's software is loaded for is an exercise in frustration. It isn't going to work.
GSM is different. Quite different. There have been far fewer carrier specific changes for phones. You can claim that the carriers should not have made the CDMA extensions they did, but the time for that has past. The question now should be will carriers in the US make carrier-specific extensions to GSM that require custom carrier-specific software in the phones? If the CDMA/TDMA rollout in the US is any indication, they will do so to differentiate network services and provide additional features to customers. Of course, this will completely negate any ability to move phones (GSM or CDMA) between carriers in the future.
No, I do not know if the carrier-specific CDMA extensions are documented anywhere public. I suspect they are not and it is all considered trade secret. Qualcomm would know.
Too bad that the US and lots of other nations belong to something called the WTO which severely limits the sort of actions that can be taken.
Sorry, applying tariffs against things made in foreign countries isn't allowed. I suspect any application of trade barriers which would affect a company's ability to operate from overseas (from a WTO member country) would be disallowed.
This is a Clinton-era thing that was supposed to help out the world.
TV News. The problem in the US is that if a winner isn't announced by midnight, the TV News people will announce one anyway based on exit polls, tea leaves or whatever else they can pull out of a hat.
They have to. Otherwise, the next election there will be nobody watching the election results on that channel. Then the advertising revenue goes to hell and they are in trouble financially. You can say the very survival of the network television is based on them announcing a winner for the election.
This is what happened in 2000 - CBS News announced that Gore won the election just before midnight Eastern time. Sure, they retracted that around 2:00 AM or so but by then people had already gone to bed. They woke up the next morning hearing that Bush won and have been convinced ever since that he stole the election while they were sleeping.
Think about what happens if this were to happen this year. Obama is annouced as the winner and then in the morning McCain is the "real" winner based on real results. Do you think there would be riots? Nothing can be done about this other than having quick real results. You can't pass a law saying the TV News cannot announce a winner based on their exit polls, and most people are too stupid to understand that just because Walter Cronkite says it doesn't make it so.
Peaceful? I guess you haven't been watching the news. Lots of people in the US are upset that their tax dollars are supporting the war in Iraq. They will soon be upset about the war in Darfur as well, according to Mr. Biden should he become vice president.
The Americans really don't care where the company is as long as they take credit cards.
First off, that may violate WTO rules, to which the US signed on to. This was an extremely short-sighted move that literally prevents the US from taking unilateral action in terms of trade with other WTO members. It absolutely prevents the US from introducing tariffs on things like China-produced goods, which is why we are in the current pickle with China.
Secondly, do you really think that would solve anything at all? Simple solution for any company is to just cease having any US presence whatsoever. That does not prevent them from doing business in the US - it just means the US has no control, oversight or anything else. I suppose it might be attempted to prevent credit card payments to non-US companies but I doubt that would actually be feasible and might not be possible.
It is a global economy and the lowest tax, lowest labor cost, lowest price wins! And there is almost nothing that can be done about it now. Anywhere where there are labor regulations is going to lose jobs. Anywhere with a high minimum wage is going to lose jobs. Anywhere without a permanent underclass that gets paid a pittance is going to lose jobs. Because there will always be somewhere where costs are lower. And unless you are building a large building, just about anything can be done anywhere today.
Yes, this is a concern. A big one. How many large generating plants have been constructed in the US in the last 20 years? I'd guess 10 or less. New transmission lines? Zero.
The idea seems to be that if we slowly starve the population of electric power then they will get the message and cut back. This would reduce all sorts of carbon emissions and make the Earth wonderful and green again. The few humans left shivering in the dark would not be able to have much of an environmental impact.
The lease vs. own question before was, I believe, based on the disposal of the batteries. They are classed as hazardous waste in California and it was illegal to sell anything containing that much lead, acid and other toxic stuff in the state.
So, if the batteries are declared to be toxic, it is highly unlikely the cars can be sold, ever. So far, that hasn't happened. I would be willing to bet that Toyota went to the mat with the California government to ensure the batteries would not be declared so. Since current hybrid batteries are OK, then it seems like future batteries using the same materials can be treated the same way.
I do not believe any other state besides California has any rules about sale of batteries, althought there are regulations about disposal of lead-acid batteries at a national level.
How would you handle paying promoters then? Obviously, what is really needed is someone to promote the unknown band that might make lots of money. A skillful promoter will seek out bands that they feel are most suited to making lots of money in the future and, if their skill is true, then they can get paid for their efforts. Right?
Today, just about every company that works on this model either owns directly what the "band" is making or they might as well. It is the way they are guaranteed to get paid. Otherwise, likely as not, they will end up holding the bad when the "band" figures out how to rip them off.
"Band" currently applies to lots of different creative works including software development.
Respect is. Until we have that, we're not going anywhere.
The problem is, no matter what one country does, it is too easy to circumvent by going international. And no, no country is going to attempt to extradite a spammer or fraudster for ripping people off on the Internet.
Secondly, how exactly do you prosecute someone when everyone, top to bottom, wants to shield people from prosecution? If you have an IP address, a timestamp and a breaking on a server good luck getting anywhere. You will find that without at least $25,000 in damages nobody is going to pay attention. So you lost money? Too bad. Should have been smarter. Your server needed to be rebuilt? Too bad, should have been smarter. Hire a hacker and maybe he will protect you.
The problem is that property rights are meaningless right now. Your email account is my trash basket and anything I can stuff in there is my right to do so. Your server is on the Internet, so therefore it is fair game. Your creative work can make me money, so I will steal it and you can't stop me. Ha ha ha.
Repsect. It is the answer to just about everything today from spamming to child porn.
The basic problem with the idea that it is wrong to send something to someone that does not want it is that it turns the idea of an open communication medium on its ear. It is fine that with Yahoo Messenger you cannot send anything to someone until they accept you as a contact. Email was not intended to work that way.
Trying to introduce this sort of permission into email means that it can no longer be used to communicate with people prior to establishing a relationship. Should a law get passed that says it is wrong to send things to people they do not want essentially enforces this. You now have the situation where I cannot send you a receipt for your purchase because I have no idea if you want it or not. And as a commercial entity, I cannot take the chance that you don't want it without explicit permission.
And then we're back to Yahoo Messenger instead of email.
Personally, I think that email today is already broken enough that it cannot and should not be used to deliver anything of importance. Most people do not receive all the email that sent to them - it is filtered by third parties that are not interested in filtering errors. This means email is unreliable. So if I am sending you a receipt or a notification of a credit I have no idea if it is getting through to you or not. It is therefore useless.
The problem is DRM and other protection mechanisms are unpopular, but in many areas it is clear that piracy is allowed to run rampant that there will be no sales. This is especially true for "popular" software.
There are some people that claim not to pirate - but it is certain they have some software they didn't pay for. Maybe someone just gave it to them or maybe their morality is a little more flexible when it comes to certain things. The problem is that for the last 20 years or so piracy has become pretty mainstream. Why would anyone pay for something when the same thing (sometimes better) is available for free? I'm not talking about free open-source here, I am talking about pirated software. Literally everything you could ever ask for is available for free by anonymously downloading it. So why would anyone pay? It is just a little too easy today and really there is no putting the genii back in the bottle. Piracy is here to stay.
The goal of a lot of pirate web sites and such is to make it impossible to obtain revenue from music, movies, books, software and anything else that can be put in digital form. While I believe these evangelists are few in number, the Internet provides them with a strong presence. Often, the pirate sites will come up first in Google before the publisher's web site. What does that say about popular software? There are some people that will pay - shareware has run at about 5% of users paying for over 20 years. But that is as far as it goes. Name one business that can exist with 5% of the revenue they had last year.
Face it, in the near future every piece of software will be available for free. The only question will be if anyone finds it profitable to publish software. Offhand, I would say the number of players will be very limited. Most software will be a web service where the user never gets to hold anything on their computer. Open source will have a role, but probably not much larger than it is today.
Proprietary software isn't "dead" in any sense. Google is doing a good job at distracting people from the real software that runs their company - clearly it is very, very proprietary. But they throw some people at open source projects and claim to be supporting open source all the while raking in billions because of their proprietary software.
Think for a change. I know it is hard, but you might actually realize that things aren't quite how you would like them to be.
One of the biggest problems with any drawn-out emergency is going to be information control. The government is going to want to tell people to do certain things and, if they are done, it will be better for everyone.
For example, staying off the phone. Not rushing out to the WalMart SuperCenter to get the last couple of loaves of bread. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, a lot of these people are going to be looking at any "official" pronouncements as just so much self-serving BS. When some web site blog/chat forum/etc. says the government is out to kill as many people as possible so the Senators can each have 10,000 acre estates some will believe. When the same web forums say that if you don't want to starve you better join in the mob breaking into the WalMart SuperCenter, people will do so - even if the store was emptied two days before. Of course, all of the people in the mob will then catch whatever it is that is going around at the time - or just get injured further stressing the health care providers.
What are the chances of this not happening and everyone sitting at home listening to the government and doing what is best for everyone? Today, I'd say zero. I'd say that it would be better if the government said nothing at all - because lots of influential people will want to get on their soap box to dispute anything "the government" says, no matter how much sense it might make.
Avian flu coming to the US? Probably is, soon. When it hits, it is going to be a disaster and most people will follow whatever sort of "leader" they can latch onto. And the Internet is full of folks that will jump into that role. For better or worse. I'm expecting worse, myself.
The reality of the situation is much worse than that. Companies have been building their infrastructure around things like Just In Time Inventory and the like for a while. What this means is that your neighborhood shop has just enough stuff for maybe a week and then they run out.
When UPS went on strike you would have thought these folks would have learned their lesson that infrastructure is fragile and you better be ready to roll with it. Sadly, they did not. The result is any prolonged emergency that affects electricity or fuel supplies will doom many businesses, especially the smaller ones.
Also, the interdependence of our current infrastructure is incredible. We seem to have built a society on the idea that nothing bad ever happens. So that when it does everything goes at once.
All it takes is a little damage and it cripples the electric grid. Which then disables the fuel pumps for filling up the trucks needed to service the electric problems. Which then locks down all transportation in the area and makes everyone dependent on outside assistance. What? The state or federal assistance isn't coming because they are too busy elsewhere? Impossible. People will sit down and wait for help because they "know" it is coming. Real Soon Now we will all be saved. By someone. After all, someone has to help. They just have to.
Internet? I'd be a lot more worried about being trapped in a city with no food deliveries and no stockpile of food items anywhere within 300 miles.
Wow, that is a good one. Let's see here, you have most all of the US on seriously asymmetrical links and you want to share your bandwidth with large commercial providers. Ha ha ha.
DSL is slowing becoming more symmetrical, but is has a long way to go in most markets. So you have 5Mb download and 500Kb upload or worse. Cable works by allocating slots and often you have the situation where out of 100 potential slots you have 90 of them for download and 10 for upload. And yes, you are fighting with all of your neighbors for those upload slots.
Fiber potentially can be symmetrical, but average use makes nonsense out of spending the resources to do so. When 80% of the people want 10x the download speed vs. upload speed the provider tends to give it to them. So YouTube is really fast but uploading 500MB for a web site is pretty slow.
The reason we're not all being asked to share our bandwidth is we don't have much upload bandwidth to share. And until the usage habits of most users change drastically, we're not likely to get much more.
The point you are missing is that most of the people that I know who pirate music and software are evangelical about it. "Here Bob, don't buy that. Let me give you a copy." It takes an unusual person these days to say "No, I'd rather give WalMart money for it."
So just because one person pirates a game does not equal one potential sale lost. They are going to give a copy to everyone they know. They are going to post it on the Internet on some Russian warez site to increase the wealth of all those poor people that would never be able to afford the game anyway. Any anyone else that wants it without paying.
The end result is one pirate equals many, many lost potential and real sales. And the objective of the most evangelical pirates is to remove the revenue from such things. "It should all be free and trying to charge people for bits is just wrong." goes the argument.
The end result is you can either be for or against piracy. If you are for it, you use every possible means to defect the pro-revenue people trying to sue or imprison you. If you are against piracy, you try to squash the pirates any way you can.
Too bad that in the end the pirates are going to win. It is a pointless exercise in futility.
How is file sharing not being a crook also?
I find someone in France that bought the game. I get a copy of it and stand outside of a store where the game is sold passing out cards with a URL where the game can be downloaded for free. Anyone walking in the store to buy it gets a card and suddenly knows they don't have to spend $50.
Does it really make a difference if I charge $1 for the card?
Two points on your comments. First, doesn't the idea that piracy has some component of "wrong" to it make a difference to you? The idea that Activision could do just as much wrong as the pirates and win is silly. Your proposal falls flat on its face because no legal action would ever make it past the first 15 minutes in court.
Secondly, the objective of piracy is to make sure that nobody ever has to pay again. I don't see that Activision has much of a choice, really. They can sell a few more copies, have them pirated and everyone worldwide has their games. Or they can try to stop the piracy. Of course, they may be unsuccessful in stopping it. Same thing, either way then. They can either publish games for free or they can go out of business.
This is the sort of "new business model" the people keep talking about. Anyone that knows how to pirate gets to with no consequences. The noobs that do not know, well, they support everyone else. When the people in the know outnumber the noobs (rapidly approaching for music, a bit further off for games), publishers have to figure out some other way to get money. Maybe they can sell T-shirts.
I believe the problem comes down to respect and convenience. 40 years ago the idea of photocopying a book from a library was unheard of. Not just because of the cost and inconvenience, but because it was considered "wrong".
Today, copying music, movies, software, books, and anything else in digital form isn't considered wrong anymore. Since around 1985 with personal computers making vast inroads into young people's lives we have lived with the idea that just because you can copy something that it is OK to do so. We are now reaping the rewards that come from this.
Unfortunately, no law, law enforcement, treaty or anything else can enforce respect. It is convenient to make copies, so convenient that you will find plenty of people disagreeing that it is even wrong to do so. I do know that in this climate there is nothing that can be done to prevent redistribution of materials that the creator/rights holder belives should not be redistributed.
I think we made our decision starting in 1985 or so and have to live with the consequences. In a generation or two we might be able to reverse this decision after living with the fallout. I believe the fallout will be much wider than people expect. That doesn't mean I believe the decision that digital items can be copied freely is about to be reversed anytime soon.