Sure, cable TV packaging today involves both bundling up of channels as well as bundling of services.
In part, there is a reason for this. I'm not going to address the bundling of channels as we already know why that is done and what the financial ramifications would be if they stopped doing it. Instead, a far less obvious factor here needs to be mentioned. Cable Internet generally doesn't pay for itself. What? You mean there is a service that is being provided at a loss? Well, not really. You see, it was assumed from about 1980 on that if you could get cable TV, you would have it. The folks way out in bumble that could not get it were of course envious of their closer-in friends but the logistics and economics of wiring rural communities made it impractical. It still is impractical in many places.
So the pricing of cable Internet services was done for market-building reasons and for competitive reasons. The idea that someone would have Internet without Cable TV supporting the physical plant aspects of the connection was foreign to everyone. Nobody would do that. So cable Internet services were priced with the idea that the physical plant was supported by the TV service charge and the Internet could be priced really low to attract more customers - and bundling the services makes it even more attractive to just have all of them together.
Now you have people dropping the cable TV portion of the service and just going with the Internet connection. Admittedly, 400,000 subscribers nationwide is a drop in the bucket and isn't going to really affect anything. Should this number expand we might see some real changes being forced upon us. Changes like:
Cable Internet prices doubling, at least. With a huge credit if you bundle it with cable TV service. Because one way or other, the physical plant has to be fed.
Some cable systems just dropping the Internet service completely because they can't be competitive with the $14.95 DSL service. If cable is $99 a month and you can get DSL for $15, who would do that, really?
Some really creative billing systems that are usage-based. The idea would be to make any sort of IPTV service extremely unattractive pushing the customer base back to broadcast TV.
Now a lot of cable systems are going to be faced with capacity problems if more than a small fraction of their customers are trying to use IPTV streaming services. The systems were never designed for that kind of load and there is almost nothing that can be done without huge increases in bandwidth to the nodes that serve 500-1,000 homes at a time. Huge increases, like trying to deliver 10GB/sec. The other alternatives are replacing the entire cable infrastructure with fiber and eliminating the neighborhood node concept entirely. Both of these are extremely costly, so costly that it may seem foolish to embark on that course for any but the strongest players. Pushing back on IPTV delays that decision - because in many cases the decision will be to just turn it off.
So as more and more people move away from broadcast TV to IPTV services we can expect to see cable systems hit very, very hard and reacting in some unexpected ways. While the Internet of 1995 was interesting and a low-cost service to be provided, today's connections are pretty pricy for the cable company without a lot of payback. Tomorrow's Internet connections are going to cost them a bloody fortune to supply and many may simply choose not to make that kind of investment.
You can always get a T-1 connection anywhere in the US and probably anywhere in Canada.
You can expect a WTO decision on this and the tariffs rescinded. Now that we let the Chinese into the WTO you better believe we are going to be paying for that decision for many, many years to come.
High speed is a joke unless they lay new rails owned by the passenger rail company. The basic problem with rail travel in the US today is Amtrak sold almost all the rail lines off to freight companies so now passenger trains sit on sidings waiting for freight to open the rails up.
The problem with new rails is that it is going to cost a lot of money to tear down homes to make a new rail corridor. The existing ones are pretty much full of tracks and other stuff so there is no room for a new set of rails, especially a high speed track.
So we can look forward to high speed rail being put in, say, from Lodi to Modesto but not going anywhere near LA or SanFran. It will be a wonderful proof of concept, but it is never going to have any riders. And putting in a new rail corridor through LA or SanFran suburbs isn't going to happen.
The thing you should be interested in is what isn't being said. The government budget projections are based (still) on the idea that businesses will pay for employee insurance after 2014. Guess what? Every conference I've been to says the plug gets pulled January 1st 2014 or thereabouts. Sure, companies will have to pay around a $2500 penalty - compared with $20,000 per employee for insurance, which is about double of what it is today.
Why? Well, mostly that in 2014 all insurance plans in the US have to cover some government-mandated set of things. Right now it is controlled by each state so in California they have to cover acupuncture but in New York they don't. That ends in 2014 - one nationwide set of minimum standards for all insurance plans that are federally qualified. Today, insurance is more expensive in California than it is in, say, Iowa, because of the individual state requirements. So we all end up with one set and basically one price - a higher one. There are also other things that will be required and they are adding to the individual cost for group plans.
But none of this really matters because if the employer doesn't offer coverage the employee gets a subsidized plan from the government. It is the cost of those subsidies that isn't being factored in because of the assumption that employer-provided insurance will continue. With the government subsidies the spector of massive numbers of uninsured people is lifted from the employers, the costs go up and the penalties are a joke. End result is as I said, the plug gets pulled right around the beginning of 2014 because no employer wants to be on the hook for what is likely to be a set of ever increasing employer costs - and if they step back the government is going to step up and give it to everyone. So, nobody loses, right?
The problem for anyone with a job is that this is "single payer" that got passed by Congress without every knowing it was a single payer plan. Nobody voted on the government taking over health care through a program of mandated minimum standards and subsidies. But when the employers drop insurance - and everyone in business says they are going to do just that - it will turn into sort of an ass-backwards single payer system with the government picking up the tab through insurance companies and the entire system we have today. No benefits of eliminating the paperwork or having only one administrator for everything.
Have a house? If so, good - better keep it. January 1st there is a 3.8% tax on home sales which will introduce some significant changes in the housing market - as it will be drying up. Someone selling a $200,000 home will be paying out nearly $8000 at closing as a result of this tax. This can mean the difference between having enough of a down payment for the next house or not.
This is what the revolution of the prolitariate was supposed to do - Marx thought in like 1850 that England would be taken over by workers because they were being exploited by the business owners. Well, it didn't work out the way he envisioned, and his concept of how things should work just doesn't work either.
To some extent I can agree with you that the two classes of people you are discussing aren't all that far apart. However, the owner(s) have taken more risks and probably had a significant part of their lives affected by nearly random chance or the benefit of some kind of network effect. We can look back upon Italian, Jewish and Indian immigrants and see powerful network effects that supported business startups. Nearly everyone knows someone that tried and failed at some business startup - and perhaps after a couple of tries actually got something that is working. Literally, what most small businesses have relied upon for several hundred years is one guy or at most a very small group that risks just about everything in the hopes that things will fall into place so their business gets paid. Historically, over the past several hundred years the way it has worked out is the guy or guys that risk it all usually fail but one in ten or twenty actually makes it and is "successful". Yup, they get the 10 million income. Their friends that failed lose their house, their car, often their marriage and everything else.
Can you actually blame the workers for being willing to take a pittance with no risk to themselves vs. that kind of risk and possibility of reward?
That is pretty much what it comes down to. You take the risks and maybe you get lucky and people buy from you, but more often than not you take the risks and end up with nothing.
Don't feel too bad for the losers in this game though. More often than not they borrow money from anyone they can and end up trying again in a year or two. Most of the people playing the new business game are doing it because they really like the odds being against them and feel really good when they win. So good that it makes up for all the times it failed.
Is there some reason why there isn't scrambled broadcast TV?
We've tried that already and it didn't work all that well. Now, with the far smaller range of television stations, it would be even less practical.
Back in the 1980s in Chicago we had Channel 44 which was scrambled movies and adult content in the evenings. You needed a really good UHF antenna to get their signal clearly outside of the city limits, which is maybe 25% of the population or less. Because the signal was broadcast there was a proliferation of "Channel 44 Decoder" boxes that were available and at that time it was not illegal to decode the signal because it was broadcast. This predated the Al Gore-led Satellite Home Viewers act which transformed the landscape of signal reception in the US and for the first time made receiving and decoding a signal illegal if you were not "authorized". The introduction of this act led to the immediate demise of C-band satellite dishes and carved out a niche that allowed DirecTV to operate.
Without this act, neither DirecTV nor Dish Network could operate. However, we would also not have fairly silly laws on the books making it illegal to decode signals that are broadcast and can be received by everyone.
As far as I know neither Dish or DirecTV operates in Canada. I am pretty sure it has to do with satellite "footprint" where the signal can be received reliably. Sure, there are plenty of people getting DirecTV along the southern edge of Canada, but they can't advertise their service there because it doesn't work even over the lower provinces. I am not sure Canada would let them get away with saying that if you can receive the signal then fine, otherwise too bad.
The problem is it has been proven that airline managed screening is defective - 9/11 happened on their watch. No airline is going to be insured without there being screening that has so far not been proven to be defective.
Sure, it is hard to justify in a vacuum. Problem is, without insurance the airlines don't fly. The government might be able to take over the liability protection completely, but so far the US government has never done anything like that. I don't think the flying public would be too happy to have the airlines granted immunity from getting sued either, which the US government has done and could do again.
So we are likely faced with the airlines having to have insurance for passenger deaths. I'd be happy to not have the TSA in place, but what else are we going to do so insurance companies will cover the airlines?
So why do we have the TSA? Simple - airline insurance. 9/11 proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the airline security screening was worthless as far as keeping planes from crashing. Therefore the insurance confidence was shaken and what we would have seen as a followup was revocation of the policies for airlines.
Airlines don't fly without insurance. You can bank on that. So what would have happened if the TSA hadn't come along? Well, some type of far more invasive screening would have been required by the airline insurance companies. What I believe they got was the government told them "we're taking care of it, just be a little patient." I believe TSA was in place and screening passengers within a couple of months after 9/11 and I suppose the FAA, airlines and other government agencies convinced the insurance companies to keep coverage in place - even in the face of no confidence - for that couple of months.
So, we want to get rid of the TSA now. Fine, step 2 after deciding to get rid of the TSA is to put something in place that the airline insurance companies will accept as valid screening to prevent planes from being crashed. Failure to have this in place on day 1 post-TSA means no airlines will fly.
No, the airlines aren't going to be allowed by their insurance companies to resume screening independently. It was "proven" that they can't handle the job. And no airline is going to fly anywhere with the potential for a bankrupting event to happen without insurance coverage. One accident, even a minor one that most of the passengers walked away from would likely bankrupt an airline without insurance coverage.
So the first problem is to figure out how the airlines keep flying. Figure that out and you have the problem solved.
The problem with this sort of app is it is delivering information based on some probing and some guesses but has no idea what is being done with the information. Not knowing anything about Clueful I can only guess they are looking for API calls that would tend to indicate certain behaviors are present in an app.
The first caution therefore is that because an API call is present in an app there is nothing whatsoever to indicate when or how it is being used, if it is being used at all. Therefore we are talking about possibilities and potentialialities, not facts.
Some of the other "information" that is being dredged up seems questionable as well. How the heck does this outside app know what is being encrypted or not? API call search again? Examination of the data being sent to see if it "looks" encrypted? I don't know how you do that in an accurate and reliable manner. So again it is guesswork with perhaps some foundation to it but certainly not accurate.
Encryption of information on the device itself is again tough to determine accurately. If an app is storing a binary file in the Documents folder does that count as encrypted? What if it is a text file in the Cache folder that is data scraped from a public web site? Does that count as storing unencrypted information?
I can think of about 100 reasons why this app is misleading and simply some kind of scareware. It has some foundation for the information it is displaying but this information cannot be trusted to be reliable. With all the stuff in the Apple App Store I can imagine there are a few that have significant funding behind them with people that would be plenty pissed about Clueful misidentifying their app's behavior. And that is going to go right back to Apple in a big way. No doubt someone already called them on it and this is why it was pulled.
You are looking for a refutation that the climate isn't changing... well, the climate has never been all that stable except for maybe the last 300-400 years or so.
OK, let's say it is human induced. What is needed now is general acceptance that one of two things is likely:
The continuation of CO2 emissions makes things much worse, perhaps even in an expotential manner.
That cessation of CO2 emissions will remediate the climate and bring back stability.
IF either one of these is true anyone that believes this needs to band together with fellow believers and start destroying CO2 emitting infrastructure. One power plant, one airliner, heck one truck at a time. We are talking about a fairly fragile infrastructure that is well within the capabilities of the average person to sabotage in very effective ways. Also, there is the indirect method - cut a rail line and no more coal can be delivered to the power plant, therefore it shuts down. Or, knock down a bridge and no more trucks can pass that way - if the detour is impractical maybe no more truck service through that area, period.
Sure, if you are caught using a carbide saw on a railroad track you will probably go to jail for a while. So? If there are 20 people that commit to never allowing a single coal delivery to their neighborhood power plant it is possible to shut the plant down, forever. If a few people start a bonfire at a substation (roast transformers, anyone?) it is going to have a similar effect. There are lots of other ways as well to stamp out the CO2 infrastructure and I'm not going to list them all here.
Look, the economic impact of trying to pass along carbon taxes will pretty much wipe out what is left of the US GDP. If electricity was $1 per KWh instead of $0.11 the impact would be huge. So huge that it will be fought at every level from the homeless person to Senators. What would Google do if their electricity cost 10x as much? They would not be building new data centers, that is for sure. Would the average homeowner run their air conditioning 24x7 or would they sit in the 100 degree heat - and turn off the PC because it crapped out due to high temperatures?
The impact is so huge that no government will ever force this issue. So the only options are for people that are really serious about this to take direct action themselves. Just the fact that nobody has yet is telling. It says to me there is a serious lack of conviction. People are willing to blow themselves up in the name of disrupting things for political and religious gains - but nobody is willing to go to jail in the face of climate instability?
We are still in a mode in many areas where ISPs are trying to build market share, especially with DSL. DSL took a big hit when the equal-access provisions were found to be unworkable - technology passed them by and nobody noticed - but you still see offers for $14.99 DSL service.
Look at "business rates" for DSL or cable and you will see what the real costs are. Nobody is interested in competing on price for business customers, so they do not. The result is the prices are 3-4 times the residential rates and in many areas they will not give you a "residential" (i.e., cheap) plan at a business address.
On the residential front, most of the ISPs are trying to compete on price because the service is pretty well known. What is the difference with business service? Certainly nothing that changes the real cost structure, in fact things are added which cost more for the ISP.
Where most of the "network neutrality" flap has come from is the ISPs are offering below-cost service to residential customers in an effort to still build market share. Of course, any residential user that is doing more than web surfing and reading email is costing them more in peering than they are getting from the customer on an Internet-only plan. Should be obvious why they want you on a bundled plan with cable TV and phone service. The business customer is in a market-building mode so they are charged full cost plus.
So why are the ISPs screaming? Because they boxed themselves in with below-cost pricing for residential customers. The same residential customers that are doing much more than just web surfing and reading email. They can't raise prices to their customers - they are building market share. So where are they going to recoup their real costs? You guessed it - the other end of the connection, the one with no options and the one with the deep pockets.
Could Google come in an offer service to residential customers? Maybe, but they are far more likely to offer service on their own terms to ISPs - perhaps with no peering charges at all. Google is paying nothing or almost nothing for the existing fiber - they bought it already. So their costs are already sunk into it. Would an ISP sign on with Google? If the other option is to continue to pay someone else for traffic to Google... maybe it makes sense.
Could Google compete on a residential service level? Sure, I suppose. But they would have the same costs as the ISP does for customer service (script readers in India) and physical plant maintenance (outsourced to independent contractors) and they would have to make a huge investment into local terminations - nodes where the connections to homes would be. It makes much more sense for them to offer independent Google connections bypassing the current peering arrangements to save the ISPs rather than paying the ISPs for the privilege of having eyeballs.
The advantage for Google is with a completely independent pipe to each and every ISP they can do a much better job of geographic data mining. And traffic analysis so they know the Detroit suburbs aren't going to Amazon as much as the folks in Scottsdale. There are probably hundreds of other things they can collect this way with a tap into every ISP. Probably with a router running custom Google code to facilitate this tap. It makes paying for the fiber a rounding error on the balance sheet compared with the value of the information they can collect.
You are missing the point. There is a simple way to deal with all of this. Bury the electronic item and in 500,000 years the gold and other materials will have been recycled and available as ore again.
This potentially leads to a boom-and-bust cycle where all the ore is extracted and made into nifty devices over a 200 year period and then everyone gets to sit and wait for the natual recycling processes to result in ore again - in 499,800 years.
The reason the consumer is the enemy is very simple - they put software on their computers that put the computer under someone else's control. Maybe they lose some important information, maybe they just annoy the rest of the world with sending spam. Either way, the lack of skilful administration of computers has come to bite just about everyone on the Internet.
So, one way of dealing with this is to go the Apple App Store route. Nothing gets in without validation and the amount of malware on iPads and iPhones is insiginificantly small - somewhere around zero infected devices. Android isn't quite as good, but nearly so. Microsoft wants to have an App Store with approved and validated software but it is going to take a huge effort to get there. And it is probably too late.
Today's consumer when faced with trojans, malware, viruses, phishing and the like has a clear choice at the electronics store. They can buy a PC that is subject to these things or they can buy a tablet which is not. Guess what? Tablets are the overwhelming choice for right now. Imagine that, people giving up freedom to run alternative operating systems and unvalidated applications just so they don't have to spend time and money cleaning up after the malware that seems to infect everything they have ever owned.
Sorry, but the idiocy of this entire train of thought comes crashing down when it becomes standard procedure for police to treat all persons as if they are going to attack them, previously handcuffed or not.
In military situations when you have a potentially unruly prisoner it may just be simpiler to disable or kill the "prisoner" rather than bother with trying to control the prisoner. In civil police matters this hasn't been an option. Today's police have it beaten into them from the first day at the academy about establishing control of the prisoner and maintaining that control. Combining the idea that handcuffing a prisoner isn't going to control the prisoner with the need to maintain control at all costs is just going to lead to an escalation - one that is not going to be good for people interacting with the police.
Understand that the police today are faced with a pretty much impossible task. You have people that are committed to create mayhem and take down as many people - police and bystanders - as they can. You have the drugged-out people that are stronger than any three normal men that can't focus enough to even hear simple instructions. Then you have the average Joe stopped for running a traffic light. It is obviously the officer's duty to figure out which sort of person Joe might be and treat him accordingly. Problem is, if he makes a mistake in categorizing Joe then Officer Friendly is dead. This is an inescapable fact and one that isn't missed in officer training.
And people want to make it simple and easy for people to be less controllable and more threatening to police?
In most states in the US there is such a thing as "no fault divorce". The problem is, if one person wants to screw over the other and get as much money and assets as possible "no fault" doesn't really accomplish that goal. What you need is dirt and plenty of it to threaten to drag out - or even actually drag out - to make the other person look as bad as possible. The reward for doing this is perhaps getting enough as a settlement to never have to work again, ever.
Sure, it would be nice if people could just walk away, but after devoting years of their life to a failed relationship a lot of times someone wants something out of it. Or just wants to make the other person suffer as much as possible.
This doesn't really work if there are no assets or cash because there isn't anything to go after. Unless there are children. Then things get really nasty because unless you want your child to be raised by someone you hate you have to prove in court they are unfit. So, plenty of time the "child molester" card gets brought up as in "if you contest my having full custody you will be shown in court to be a child molester." Often this is enough to make the husband go away. But there is always the defense of showing the drug habits of the wife and how much she sleeps around and how this makes her unfit.
End result is of course that in many cases both parents end up proving they should never have had children in the first place and the world would be better off if the children were sent to a foreign country and told their parents died.
You are assuming Manning was completely aware of the content he was distributing. As in he reviewed it and found things that he felt should not be secret. I cannot imagine this course of action because the volume of material was just too great. What I'm sure he did was grab a huge pile of stuff he had no knowledge about and dumped it on someone else with the thought "there must be something juicy in here".
If, however, he had picked out three or ten or even fifty documents and disclosed them he might have an argument for disclosing bad things that were improperly being kept secret. But millions of items? No, sorry, that was blind malicious behavior.
If the person who got a copy free was going to buy it in the first place, and if them getting it doesn't result in someone else purchasing it who wouldn't have otherwise, then sure it is a lost sale. That doesn't change that it can be sold to other people though, so it can still be sold to someone else.
Did you know that there is a substantial number of people who engage in piracy are also "evangelical" about it? By this I mean that they tell all their friends about the great stuff they got for free and make sure their friends know how to get it for free. Some of these people even go so far as believing that if they can destroy the revenue model for software, music, movies, books, whatever that it will somehow just be free for everyone. Therefore, there is the strong desire to make stuff available to the widest audience possible and make sure that anyone that knows how to use BitTorrent and Google will be able to get it for free just like they did.
End result of this process is once someone acquires a copy of said item it will be redistributed. It was a very old believe that in the mid-1980s every game for Apple computers sold exactly two copies - one on the East coast and one on the West. It was then uploaded to BBS systems and that is where everyone else, including reviewers, got their copy. Very few titles were produced around 1986 for Apple because of this.
Today I don't really see the need for that second copy to be sold. Distribution is much more efficient these days.
In no way does one person pirating something affect other sales. Unless they tell all their friends about it and pass around free copies. Which maybe 50% of the folks pirating stuff do.
Looking at Walmart's web site is a waste of time - unless you are prepared to buy the item online and pay their often outrageous shipping prices.
Why? Because of their little disclaimer that prices in stores may be completely different. Last time I went through this the item was $18 online and $34 in the store. No, I didn't buy it in the store and resolved to never ever visit the walmart.com web site for anything ever again.
This is true, but it is highly undesirable. People generally don't give up life willingly when they realize they are unneeded. They turn to crime, taking the fruits of the labor of the needed or even worse they turn actively against the 'needed' population in either terrorism or outright war. War is a terribly inefficient method of reducing population because it tends to kill more then the 'unneeded' and it destroys a lot of the resources and capital that could be used in more useful human endeavors.
Well, the challange of the next few US governments will be to convince people it is their duty to just give up and die quietly. If the environmentalists win with forcing a "sustainable" level of population we need to eliminate about 90% of the people currently living and make sure that population levels never again rise as they have been. Even without the sustainable requirement, a population reduction of around 50% is needed anyway and much of this in the poor sections of the Western world... for instance in the inner cities of the US. How we get there will determine much in the coming years because a population reduction like that through a civil war and revolution is entirely possible - but the surviviors would probably not have much self respect left.
I do not see any possibility for a war killing significant numbers of people. The days when the US could have quietly suggested to Russian leaders that they should jointly start a war to kill off "excess" people are long gone. China isn't going to attack the US except to defend its trade position and even then it would likely be just a negotiation with the US begging to continue to have a stream of cheap imports while foisting our debt onto rich Chinese.
So can Mr. Obama convice people it is their duty to die? How about Romney? How about Ms. Palin? I'd say no current candidate possesses the ability to do this and there are none coming up. The alternative is probably civil war and revolution. Too bad, really. It was a nice time while it lasted, but it certainly isn't going to last much longer.
So what do low, low, low consumer prices mean in the face of 30% or more of the country unemployed? Well, it means they are going to have to be supported by the government and the relatively few workers there are getting paid well are just going to have to be supporting the rest of the country.
Today around 30% of the population of the US is either unemployed or vastly underemployed (think Phd working as a shelf stocker). This has little to do with the government unemployment numbers which only reflect those that are actively seeking work today. It completely ignores the idea of people being "aged out" of work or that some people will just become a stay-at-home-mom rather than put up with a minimum wage job that really doesn't help because of child care or transportation. With more and more jobs closing up because of lack of demand this 30% is growing. In a few years it may be 40% or even 50%.
By the way, Social Security was designed to work with a growing workforce and more people working than living on Social Security benefits. This is clearly not the case today and will not be for the foreseeable future.
The government needs to make it clear to the population of the US what is happening and how much this is going to cost. Sweeping it under the rug isn't going to work for much longer.
Copyright has nothing to do with sharing ideas. In fact, copyright specifically does not affect "ideas", only the specific embodyment of something. You can't copyright the idea of a boy wizard but you can copyright a novel written about a boy wizard. Similarly, you can't copyright the idea of displaying a calendar in a program but you can copyright the code that displays a calendar. If someone else writes code that displays a calendar in exactly the same manner copyright does not apply.
Patents are quite different and everything you are describing in your post has to do with patents, not copyright.
There are two purposes to patenting everything in sight for a company - increasing barriers to competition and as a defense against patent infringement. You might object to the idea of increasing barriers to competition, but in many businesses if there are not significant barriers to entry by competitors the result is very simple - nobody is interested and there is no investment. Anyone who personally puts money into such businesses generally loses everything because if it looks good a competitor pops up out of nowhere and does whatever is necessary to dominate the marketplace.
Elvis and copyright is again completely different - Elvis might have sung a lot of songs but without strong copyright he might have been limited to singing in bars in the American South and nobody would have ever heard of him. Promoting Elvis and putting him out in front of the public in movies, TV shows, radio programs, magazines, etc. cost a lot of money that someone wanted to get back, likely over a period of over 10 years. Heck, people are still investing in "Elvis" by buying rights to republish his songs and people are still buying them making those investments pay off.
What quantity is this costing based on? Something tells me that Samsung gets different prices that some Joe on the street, especially when buying something in millions of units at a time. Sure, a processor chip might cost $50 if you buy one and $10 if you buy 1000. What happens when Samsung buys a million of them, which could be the entire output of the manufacturer for several months? At those quantities you also have fun things like the buyer demanding that they get the right to go to other fabs so they can get the quantity they need - they essentially license the rights to produce the chip themselves.
Of course, it is then a short hop down the road to the manufacturer simply being added to the stable of companies owned by Samsung. Or not quite owned but invested in such that the manufacturer can produce the quantities that Samsung desires.
Such cost estimates are garbage because Samsung isn't talking about what they are really paying for parts. So all you have is guesswork based on public information. I would offer that neither Amazon nor Samsung is paying the sort of prices that are publicly available and special deals are being cut in exchange for who-knows-what.
In electronics there are three quantity levels that count: one, 1000 and the entire output of the manufacturer for months. When you scale up to the last one, the buyer gets to dictate what the price is going to be and the seller is pretty much at the mercy of the buyer.
We are quickly heading towards a situation in the US where the government position is that we need all the Mexicans that can live through the desert to come here, right now!
Labor costs in the US have been offset by people willing to work for less and less. A subsistance farmer in Mexico has a annual income of maybe $10 USD. If they can make that in one day on a job (any job at all is going to pay that), they are going to come here. Right now there is probably a 5% chance they will see a dead body or skeleton of someone that didn't make it through the desert on their way to that job in the US - and it doesn't stop them. There are signs in Arizona that say in no uncertain terms (in Spanish) that if they continue on their way north they will die - and it doesn't stop them.
Unskilled labor in the US is now pretty much dedicated to Spanish-speaking immigrants and there is no hope of any person of European descent getting one of those jobs. We better figure out how to deal with that - permanently - because it isn't going to change any time soon. That means permanent Welfare for the unemployable.
The government needs to make it clear that through immigration policies it is making taxpayer support for the permanently unemployed a necessity. It doesn't matter what the policy is or who's elected President - in only matters that the people are informed of the side effects of the policy so they can vote on it in an informed manner. Right now, people are not being informed and the future cost is being hidden from them.
My comment about this is very simple. If we are to accept the idea that current climate change is due to human generated CO2 and that we have complete control over this, then we have to ask what the real effects are going to be? According to current sources, the effects are pretty bad.
So, if humans are doing this and we can stop doing it which may slow down, reduce or eliminate these bad effects, why aren't we doing something?
You cannot convince me that "evil people" want to destroy the planet and they are blocking all attempts to the contrary. What you can convince me of is that there are insufficient numbers of people that believe this is happening and believe that if we turn off the CO2 tap that things will "go back to normal". Off hand, I would say virtually nobody really believes that it is both human induced and we can turn it off.
Why? Because stopping the output of CO2 is pretty simple. Destructive on any of a number of fronts, but simple. You want to reduce CO2 emissions? Well, how about stopping all passenger air travel.. tomorrow. That would have a huge economic impact but it would have an equally huge impact on CO2 emissions. Ah, but you say only the government and the airlines can do this. Wrong - a small group of people suitably convinced that it was necessary could eliminate passenger air travel for at least a year and do it in two weeks or less. How? Convince the airline CEO's? No, much simpler - knock over anything that looks like a radar antenna near FAA facilities and near airports. No traffic radar = no passenger air travel, period. It would take a long time to rebuild these facilities and even a small group could continue knocking things down until they were all caught.
Here's another one for you - coal fired power plants. These are incredibly complex machines that take coal in at one end and send out electricity at the other. In the middle is a huge amount of finely balanced turbines and generators as well as a lot of coal handling machinery. And a lot of steam piping. All of this is very, very fragile and could be ruined by application of ordinary demolition-grade explosives. Nothing military would be needed. Knock out half the coal fired generating plants across the country and this would have a huge effect on CO2 emissions.
Destroying bridges would similarly halt the progress of cars and trucks, eliminating their emissions at least in limited areas. With enough action it could be possible to make long-distance trucking of freight unreliable and impractical, and once this becomes the rule it isn't going to change quickly. Once businesses know they cannot rely on "just in time" inventory management a lot of what we see today on the highway will change. While there would be great resistance to this change, once changed it would be equally resistant to returning to the old ways. Just think, long distance trucking could be history within a matter of months.
There are plenty of other things like this that could be done. Make fuel supplies unreliable and people will be forced to find other ways of getting to work. If you cannot count on getting gas for the car you are less and less likely to buy a new gasoline powered car, even if there is a 2 or 3x premium on an electric car - at least it could be relied upon.
So, why haven't we seen any of these things happening? Is it because people believe that if we continue on this road of CO2 emissions millions of people will die, much of the planet will be desert or otherwise a wasteland, etc. but they are too afraid of offending those in power to take action? I doubt it. We can see from Muslim "homicide bombers" that if someone's beliefs are strong enough that even knowledge of certain death is insufficient to block their actions. Would people blowing up power plants go to jail? Sure. Could they just be shot on sight? Sure. Would I expect that to stop someone that knew for an absolute fact they were saving millions and possibly the planet itself? No, it would not stop most peopl
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, cable TV packaging today involves both bundling up of channels as well as bundling of services.
In part, there is a reason for this. I'm not going to address the bundling of channels as we already know why that is done and what the financial ramifications would be if they stopped doing it. Instead, a far less obvious factor here needs to be mentioned. Cable Internet generally doesn't pay for itself. What? You mean there is a service that is being provided at a loss? Well, not really. You see, it was assumed from about 1980 on that if you could get cable TV, you would have it. The folks way out in bumble that could not get it were of course envious of their closer-in friends but the logistics and economics of wiring rural communities made it impractical. It still is impractical in many places.
So the pricing of cable Internet services was done for market-building reasons and for competitive reasons. The idea that someone would have Internet without Cable TV supporting the physical plant aspects of the connection was foreign to everyone. Nobody would do that. So cable Internet services were priced with the idea that the physical plant was supported by the TV service charge and the Internet could be priced really low to attract more customers - and bundling the services makes it even more attractive to just have all of them together.
Now you have people dropping the cable TV portion of the service and just going with the Internet connection. Admittedly, 400,000 subscribers nationwide is a drop in the bucket and isn't going to really affect anything. Should this number expand we might see some real changes being forced upon us. Changes like:
Now a lot of cable systems are going to be faced with capacity problems if more than a small fraction of their customers are trying to use IPTV streaming services. The systems were never designed for that kind of load and there is almost nothing that can be done without huge increases in bandwidth to the nodes that serve 500-1,000 homes at a time. Huge increases, like trying to deliver 10GB/sec. The other alternatives are replacing the entire cable infrastructure with fiber and eliminating the neighborhood node concept entirely. Both of these are extremely costly, so costly that it may seem foolish to embark on that course for any but the strongest players. Pushing back on IPTV delays that decision - because in many cases the decision will be to just turn it off.
So as more and more people move away from broadcast TV to IPTV services we can expect to see cable systems hit very, very hard and reacting in some unexpected ways. While the Internet of 1995 was interesting and a low-cost service to be provided, today's connections are pretty pricy for the cable company without a lot of payback. Tomorrow's Internet connections are going to cost them a bloody fortune to supply and many may simply choose not to make that kind of investment.
You can always get a T-1 connection anywhere in the US and probably anywhere in Canada.
You can expect a WTO decision on this and the tariffs rescinded. Now that we let the Chinese into the WTO you better believe we are going to be paying for that decision for many, many years to come.
Both with money and jobs.
High speed is a joke unless they lay new rails owned by the passenger rail company. The basic problem with rail travel in the US today is Amtrak sold almost all the rail lines off to freight companies so now passenger trains sit on sidings waiting for freight to open the rails up.
The problem with new rails is that it is going to cost a lot of money to tear down homes to make a new rail corridor. The existing ones are pretty much full of tracks and other stuff so there is no room for a new set of rails, especially a high speed track.
So we can look forward to high speed rail being put in, say, from Lodi to Modesto but not going anywhere near LA or SanFran. It will be a wonderful proof of concept, but it is never going to have any riders. And putting in a new rail corridor through LA or SanFran suburbs isn't going to happen.
The thing you should be interested in is what isn't being said. The government budget projections are based (still) on the idea that businesses will pay for employee insurance after 2014. Guess what? Every conference I've been to says the plug gets pulled January 1st 2014 or thereabouts. Sure, companies will have to pay around a $2500 penalty - compared with $20,000 per employee for insurance, which is about double of what it is today.
Why? Well, mostly that in 2014 all insurance plans in the US have to cover some government-mandated set of things. Right now it is controlled by each state so in California they have to cover acupuncture but in New York they don't. That ends in 2014 - one nationwide set of minimum standards for all insurance plans that are federally qualified. Today, insurance is more expensive in California than it is in, say, Iowa, because of the individual state requirements. So we all end up with one set and basically one price - a higher one. There are also other things that will be required and they are adding to the individual cost for group plans.
But none of this really matters because if the employer doesn't offer coverage the employee gets a subsidized plan from the government. It is the cost of those subsidies that isn't being factored in because of the assumption that employer-provided insurance will continue. With the government subsidies the spector of massive numbers of uninsured people is lifted from the employers, the costs go up and the penalties are a joke. End result is as I said, the plug gets pulled right around the beginning of 2014 because no employer wants to be on the hook for what is likely to be a set of ever increasing employer costs - and if they step back the government is going to step up and give it to everyone. So, nobody loses, right?
The problem for anyone with a job is that this is "single payer" that got passed by Congress without every knowing it was a single payer plan. Nobody voted on the government taking over health care through a program of mandated minimum standards and subsidies. But when the employers drop insurance - and everyone in business says they are going to do just that - it will turn into sort of an ass-backwards single payer system with the government picking up the tab through insurance companies and the entire system we have today. No benefits of eliminating the paperwork or having only one administrator for everything.
Have a house? If so, good - better keep it. January 1st there is a 3.8% tax on home sales which will introduce some significant changes in the housing market - as it will be drying up. Someone selling a $200,000 home will be paying out nearly $8000 at closing as a result of this tax. This can mean the difference between having enough of a down payment for the next house or not.
So, do we keep going down this road?
This is what the revolution of the prolitariate was supposed to do - Marx thought in like 1850 that England would be taken over by workers because they were being exploited by the business owners. Well, it didn't work out the way he envisioned, and his concept of how things should work just doesn't work either.
To some extent I can agree with you that the two classes of people you are discussing aren't all that far apart. However, the owner(s) have taken more risks and probably had a significant part of their lives affected by nearly random chance or the benefit of some kind of network effect. We can look back upon Italian, Jewish and Indian immigrants and see powerful network effects that supported business startups. Nearly everyone knows someone that tried and failed at some business startup - and perhaps after a couple of tries actually got something that is working. Literally, what most small businesses have relied upon for several hundred years is one guy or at most a very small group that risks just about everything in the hopes that things will fall into place so their business gets paid. Historically, over the past several hundred years the way it has worked out is the guy or guys that risk it all usually fail but one in ten or twenty actually makes it and is "successful". Yup, they get the 10 million income. Their friends that failed lose their house, their car, often their marriage and everything else.
Can you actually blame the workers for being willing to take a pittance with no risk to themselves vs. that kind of risk and possibility of reward?
That is pretty much what it comes down to. You take the risks and maybe you get lucky and people buy from you, but more often than not you take the risks and end up with nothing.
Don't feel too bad for the losers in this game though. More often than not they borrow money from anyone they can and end up trying again in a year or two. Most of the people playing the new business game are doing it because they really like the odds being against them and feel really good when they win. So good that it makes up for all the times it failed.
Is there some reason why there isn't scrambled broadcast TV?
We've tried that already and it didn't work all that well. Now, with the far smaller range of television stations, it would be even less practical.
Back in the 1980s in Chicago we had Channel 44 which was scrambled movies and adult content in the evenings. You needed a really good UHF antenna to get their signal clearly outside of the city limits, which is maybe 25% of the population or less. Because the signal was broadcast there was a proliferation of "Channel 44 Decoder" boxes that were available and at that time it was not illegal to decode the signal because it was broadcast. This predated the Al Gore-led Satellite Home Viewers act which transformed the landscape of signal reception in the US and for the first time made receiving and decoding a signal illegal if you were not "authorized". The introduction of this act led to the immediate demise of C-band satellite dishes and carved out a niche that allowed DirecTV to operate.
Without this act, neither DirecTV nor Dish Network could operate. However, we would also not have fairly silly laws on the books making it illegal to decode signals that are broadcast and can be received by everyone.
As far as I know neither Dish or DirecTV operates in Canada. I am pretty sure it has to do with satellite "footprint" where the signal can be received reliably. Sure, there are plenty of people getting DirecTV along the southern edge of Canada, but they can't advertise their service there because it doesn't work even over the lower provinces. I am not sure Canada would let them get away with saying that if you can receive the signal then fine, otherwise too bad.
The problem is it has been proven that airline managed screening is defective - 9/11 happened on their watch. No airline is going to be insured without there being screening that has so far not been proven to be defective.
Sure, it is hard to justify in a vacuum. Problem is, without insurance the airlines don't fly. The government might be able to take over the liability protection completely, but so far the US government has never done anything like that. I don't think the flying public would be too happy to have the airlines granted immunity from getting sued either, which the US government has done and could do again.
So we are likely faced with the airlines having to have insurance for passenger deaths. I'd be happy to not have the TSA in place, but what else are we going to do so insurance companies will cover the airlines?
So why do we have the TSA? Simple - airline insurance. 9/11 proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the airline security screening was worthless as far as keeping planes from crashing. Therefore the insurance confidence was shaken and what we would have seen as a followup was revocation of the policies for airlines.
Airlines don't fly without insurance. You can bank on that. So what would have happened if the TSA hadn't come along? Well, some type of far more invasive screening would have been required by the airline insurance companies. What I believe they got was the government told them "we're taking care of it, just be a little patient." I believe TSA was in place and screening passengers within a couple of months after 9/11 and I suppose the FAA, airlines and other government agencies convinced the insurance companies to keep coverage in place - even in the face of no confidence - for that couple of months.
So, we want to get rid of the TSA now. Fine, step 2 after deciding to get rid of the TSA is to put something in place that the airline insurance companies will accept as valid screening to prevent planes from being crashed. Failure to have this in place on day 1 post-TSA means no airlines will fly.
No, the airlines aren't going to be allowed by their insurance companies to resume screening independently. It was "proven" that they can't handle the job. And no airline is going to fly anywhere with the potential for a bankrupting event to happen without insurance coverage. One accident, even a minor one that most of the passengers walked away from would likely bankrupt an airline without insurance coverage.
So the first problem is to figure out how the airlines keep flying. Figure that out and you have the problem solved.
The problem with this sort of app is it is delivering information based on some probing and some guesses but has no idea what is being done with the information. Not knowing anything about Clueful I can only guess they are looking for API calls that would tend to indicate certain behaviors are present in an app.
The first caution therefore is that because an API call is present in an app there is nothing whatsoever to indicate when or how it is being used, if it is being used at all. Therefore we are talking about possibilities and potentialialities, not facts.
Some of the other "information" that is being dredged up seems questionable as well. How the heck does this outside app know what is being encrypted or not? API call search again? Examination of the data being sent to see if it "looks" encrypted? I don't know how you do that in an accurate and reliable manner. So again it is guesswork with perhaps some foundation to it but certainly not accurate.
Encryption of information on the device itself is again tough to determine accurately. If an app is storing a binary file in the Documents folder does that count as encrypted? What if it is a text file in the Cache folder that is data scraped from a public web site? Does that count as storing unencrypted information?
I can think of about 100 reasons why this app is misleading and simply some kind of scareware. It has some foundation for the information it is displaying but this information cannot be trusted to be reliable. With all the stuff in the Apple App Store I can imagine there are a few that have significant funding behind them with people that would be plenty pissed about Clueful misidentifying their app's behavior. And that is going to go right back to Apple in a big way. No doubt someone already called them on it and this is why it was pulled.
You are looking for a refutation that the climate isn't changing... well, the climate has never been all that stable except for maybe the last 300-400 years or so.
OK, let's say it is human induced. What is needed now is general acceptance that one of two things is likely:
IF either one of these is true anyone that believes this needs to band together with fellow believers and start destroying CO2 emitting infrastructure. One power plant, one airliner, heck one truck at a time. We are talking about a fairly fragile infrastructure that is well within the capabilities of the average person to sabotage in very effective ways. Also, there is the indirect method - cut a rail line and no more coal can be delivered to the power plant, therefore it shuts down. Or, knock down a bridge and no more trucks can pass that way - if the detour is impractical maybe no more truck service through that area, period.
Sure, if you are caught using a carbide saw on a railroad track you will probably go to jail for a while. So? If there are 20 people that commit to never allowing a single coal delivery to their neighborhood power plant it is possible to shut the plant down, forever. If a few people start a bonfire at a substation (roast transformers, anyone?) it is going to have a similar effect. There are lots of other ways as well to stamp out the CO2 infrastructure and I'm not going to list them all here.
Look, the economic impact of trying to pass along carbon taxes will pretty much wipe out what is left of the US GDP. If electricity was $1 per KWh instead of $0.11 the impact would be huge. So huge that it will be fought at every level from the homeless person to Senators. What would Google do if their electricity cost 10x as much? They would not be building new data centers, that is for sure. Would the average homeowner run their air conditioning 24x7 or would they sit in the 100 degree heat - and turn off the PC because it crapped out due to high temperatures?
The impact is so huge that no government will ever force this issue. So the only options are for people that are really serious about this to take direct action themselves. Just the fact that nobody has yet is telling. It says to me there is a serious lack of conviction. People are willing to blow themselves up in the name of disrupting things for political and religious gains - but nobody is willing to go to jail in the face of climate instability?
We are still in a mode in many areas where ISPs are trying to build market share, especially with DSL. DSL took a big hit when the equal-access provisions were found to be unworkable - technology passed them by and nobody noticed - but you still see offers for $14.99 DSL service.
Look at "business rates" for DSL or cable and you will see what the real costs are. Nobody is interested in competing on price for business customers, so they do not. The result is the prices are 3-4 times the residential rates and in many areas they will not give you a "residential" (i.e., cheap) plan at a business address.
On the residential front, most of the ISPs are trying to compete on price because the service is pretty well known. What is the difference with business service? Certainly nothing that changes the real cost structure, in fact things are added which cost more for the ISP.
Where most of the "network neutrality" flap has come from is the ISPs are offering below-cost service to residential customers in an effort to still build market share. Of course, any residential user that is doing more than web surfing and reading email is costing them more in peering than they are getting from the customer on an Internet-only plan. Should be obvious why they want you on a bundled plan with cable TV and phone service. The business customer is in a market-building mode so they are charged full cost plus.
So why are the ISPs screaming? Because they boxed themselves in with below-cost pricing for residential customers. The same residential customers that are doing much more than just web surfing and reading email. They can't raise prices to their customers - they are building market share. So where are they going to recoup their real costs? You guessed it - the other end of the connection, the one with no options and the one with the deep pockets.
Could Google come in an offer service to residential customers? Maybe, but they are far more likely to offer service on their own terms to ISPs - perhaps with no peering charges at all. Google is paying nothing or almost nothing for the existing fiber - they bought it already. So their costs are already sunk into it. Would an ISP sign on with Google? If the other option is to continue to pay someone else for traffic to Google... maybe it makes sense.
Could Google compete on a residential service level? Sure, I suppose. But they would have the same costs as the ISP does for customer service (script readers in India) and physical plant maintenance (outsourced to independent contractors) and they would have to make a huge investment into local terminations - nodes where the connections to homes would be. It makes much more sense for them to offer independent Google connections bypassing the current peering arrangements to save the ISPs rather than paying the ISPs for the privilege of having eyeballs.
The advantage for Google is with a completely independent pipe to each and every ISP they can do a much better job of geographic data mining. And traffic analysis so they know the Detroit suburbs aren't going to Amazon as much as the folks in Scottsdale. There are probably hundreds of other things they can collect this way with a tap into every ISP. Probably with a router running custom Google code to facilitate this tap. It makes paying for the fiber a rounding error on the balance sheet compared with the value of the information they can collect.
You are missing the point. There is a simple way to deal with all of this. Bury the electronic item and in 500,000 years the gold and other materials will have been recycled and available as ore again.
This potentially leads to a boom-and-bust cycle where all the ore is extracted and made into nifty devices over a 200 year period and then everyone gets to sit and wait for the natual recycling processes to result in ore again - in 499,800 years.
I guess you just have to take the long view.
The reason the consumer is the enemy is very simple - they put software on their computers that put the computer under someone else's control. Maybe they lose some important information, maybe they just annoy the rest of the world with sending spam. Either way, the lack of skilful administration of computers has come to bite just about everyone on the Internet.
So, one way of dealing with this is to go the Apple App Store route. Nothing gets in without validation and the amount of malware on iPads and iPhones is insiginificantly small - somewhere around zero infected devices. Android isn't quite as good, but nearly so. Microsoft wants to have an App Store with approved and validated software but it is going to take a huge effort to get there. And it is probably too late.
Today's consumer when faced with trojans, malware, viruses, phishing and the like has a clear choice at the electronics store. They can buy a PC that is subject to these things or they can buy a tablet which is not. Guess what? Tablets are the overwhelming choice for right now. Imagine that, people giving up freedom to run alternative operating systems and unvalidated applications just so they don't have to spend time and money cleaning up after the malware that seems to infect everything they have ever owned.
Sorry, but the idiocy of this entire train of thought comes crashing down when it becomes standard procedure for police to treat all persons as if they are going to attack them, previously handcuffed or not.
In military situations when you have a potentially unruly prisoner it may just be simpiler to disable or kill the "prisoner" rather than bother with trying to control the prisoner. In civil police matters this hasn't been an option. Today's police have it beaten into them from the first day at the academy about establishing control of the prisoner and maintaining that control. Combining the idea that handcuffing a prisoner isn't going to control the prisoner with the need to maintain control at all costs is just going to lead to an escalation - one that is not going to be good for people interacting with the police.
Understand that the police today are faced with a pretty much impossible task. You have people that are committed to create mayhem and take down as many people - police and bystanders - as they can. You have the drugged-out people that are stronger than any three normal men that can't focus enough to even hear simple instructions. Then you have the average Joe stopped for running a traffic light. It is obviously the officer's duty to figure out which sort of person Joe might be and treat him accordingly. Problem is, if he makes a mistake in categorizing Joe then Officer Friendly is dead. This is an inescapable fact and one that isn't missed in officer training.
And people want to make it simple and easy for people to be less controllable and more threatening to police?
In most states in the US there is such a thing as "no fault divorce". The problem is, if one person wants to screw over the other and get as much money and assets as possible "no fault" doesn't really accomplish that goal. What you need is dirt and plenty of it to threaten to drag out - or even actually drag out - to make the other person look as bad as possible. The reward for doing this is perhaps getting enough as a settlement to never have to work again, ever.
Sure, it would be nice if people could just walk away, but after devoting years of their life to a failed relationship a lot of times someone wants something out of it. Or just wants to make the other person suffer as much as possible.
This doesn't really work if there are no assets or cash because there isn't anything to go after. Unless there are children. Then things get really nasty because unless you want your child to be raised by someone you hate you have to prove in court they are unfit. So, plenty of time the "child molester" card gets brought up as in "if you contest my having full custody you will be shown in court to be a child molester." Often this is enough to make the husband go away. But there is always the defense of showing the drug habits of the wife and how much she sleeps around and how this makes her unfit.
End result is of course that in many cases both parents end up proving they should never have had children in the first place and the world would be better off if the children were sent to a foreign country and told their parents died.
You are assuming Manning was completely aware of the content he was distributing. As in he reviewed it and found things that he felt should not be secret. I cannot imagine this course of action because the volume of material was just too great. What I'm sure he did was grab a huge pile of stuff he had no knowledge about and dumped it on someone else with the thought "there must be something juicy in here".
If, however, he had picked out three or ten or even fifty documents and disclosed them he might have an argument for disclosing bad things that were improperly being kept secret. But millions of items? No, sorry, that was blind malicious behavior.
If the person who got a copy free was going to buy it in the first place, and if them getting it doesn't result in someone else purchasing it who wouldn't have otherwise, then sure it is a lost sale. That doesn't change that it can be sold to other people though, so it can still be sold to someone else.
Did you know that there is a substantial number of people who engage in piracy are also "evangelical" about it? By this I mean that they tell all their friends about the great stuff they got for free and make sure their friends know how to get it for free. Some of these people even go so far as believing that if they can destroy the revenue model for software, music, movies, books, whatever that it will somehow just be free for everyone. Therefore, there is the strong desire to make stuff available to the widest audience possible and make sure that anyone that knows how to use BitTorrent and Google will be able to get it for free just like they did.
End result of this process is once someone acquires a copy of said item it will be redistributed. It was a very old believe that in the mid-1980s every game for Apple computers sold exactly two copies - one on the East coast and one on the West. It was then uploaded to BBS systems and that is where everyone else, including reviewers, got their copy. Very few titles were produced around 1986 for Apple because of this.
Today I don't really see the need for that second copy to be sold. Distribution is much more efficient these days.
In no way does one person pirating something affect other sales. Unless they tell all their friends about it and pass around free copies. Which maybe 50% of the folks pirating stuff do.
Looking at Walmart's web site is a waste of time - unless you are prepared to buy the item online and pay their often outrageous shipping prices.
Why? Because of their little disclaimer that prices in stores may be completely different. Last time I went through this the item was $18 online and $34 in the store. No, I didn't buy it in the store and resolved to never ever visit the walmart.com web site for anything ever again.
This is true, but it is highly undesirable. People generally don't give up life willingly when they realize they are unneeded. They turn to crime, taking the fruits of the labor of the needed or even worse they turn actively against the 'needed' population in either terrorism or outright war. War is a terribly inefficient method of reducing population because it tends to kill more then the 'unneeded' and it destroys a lot of the resources and capital that could be used in more useful human endeavors.
Well, the challange of the next few US governments will be to convince people it is their duty to just give up and die quietly. If the environmentalists win with forcing a "sustainable" level of population we need to eliminate about 90% of the people currently living and make sure that population levels never again rise as they have been. Even without the sustainable requirement, a population reduction of around 50% is needed anyway and much of this in the poor sections of the Western world ... for instance in the inner cities of the US. How we get there will determine much in the coming years because a population reduction like that through a civil war and revolution is entirely possible - but the surviviors would probably not have much self respect left.
I do not see any possibility for a war killing significant numbers of people. The days when the US could have quietly suggested to Russian leaders that they should jointly start a war to kill off "excess" people are long gone. China isn't going to attack the US except to defend its trade position and even then it would likely be just a negotiation with the US begging to continue to have a stream of cheap imports while foisting our debt onto rich Chinese.
So can Mr. Obama convice people it is their duty to die? How about Romney? How about Ms. Palin? I'd say no current candidate possesses the ability to do this and there are none coming up. The alternative is probably civil war and revolution. Too bad, really. It was a nice time while it lasted, but it certainly isn't going to last much longer.
So what do low, low, low consumer prices mean in the face of 30% or more of the country unemployed? Well, it means they are going to have to be supported by the government and the relatively few workers there are getting paid well are just going to have to be supporting the rest of the country.
Today around 30% of the population of the US is either unemployed or vastly underemployed (think Phd working as a shelf stocker). This has little to do with the government unemployment numbers which only reflect those that are actively seeking work today. It completely ignores the idea of people being "aged out" of work or that some people will just become a stay-at-home-mom rather than put up with a minimum wage job that really doesn't help because of child care or transportation. With more and more jobs closing up because of lack of demand this 30% is growing. In a few years it may be 40% or even 50%.
By the way, Social Security was designed to work with a growing workforce and more people working than living on Social Security benefits. This is clearly not the case today and will not be for the foreseeable future.
The government needs to make it clear to the population of the US what is happening and how much this is going to cost. Sweeping it under the rug isn't going to work for much longer.
Copyright has nothing to do with sharing ideas. In fact, copyright specifically does not affect "ideas", only the specific embodyment of something. You can't copyright the idea of a boy wizard but you can copyright a novel written about a boy wizard. Similarly, you can't copyright the idea of displaying a calendar in a program but you can copyright the code that displays a calendar. If someone else writes code that displays a calendar in exactly the same manner copyright does not apply.
Patents are quite different and everything you are describing in your post has to do with patents, not copyright.
There are two purposes to patenting everything in sight for a company - increasing barriers to competition and as a defense against patent infringement. You might object to the idea of increasing barriers to competition, but in many businesses if there are not significant barriers to entry by competitors the result is very simple - nobody is interested and there is no investment. Anyone who personally puts money into such businesses generally loses everything because if it looks good a competitor pops up out of nowhere and does whatever is necessary to dominate the marketplace.
Elvis and copyright is again completely different - Elvis might have sung a lot of songs but without strong copyright he might have been limited to singing in bars in the American South and nobody would have ever heard of him. Promoting Elvis and putting him out in front of the public in movies, TV shows, radio programs, magazines, etc. cost a lot of money that someone wanted to get back, likely over a period of over 10 years. Heck, people are still investing in "Elvis" by buying rights to republish his songs and people are still buying them making those investments pay off.
What quantity is this costing based on? Something tells me that Samsung gets different prices that some Joe on the street, especially when buying something in millions of units at a time. Sure, a processor chip might cost $50 if you buy one and $10 if you buy 1000. What happens when Samsung buys a million of them, which could be the entire output of the manufacturer for several months? At those quantities you also have fun things like the buyer demanding that they get the right to go to other fabs so they can get the quantity they need - they essentially license the rights to produce the chip themselves.
Of course, it is then a short hop down the road to the manufacturer simply being added to the stable of companies owned by Samsung. Or not quite owned but invested in such that the manufacturer can produce the quantities that Samsung desires.
Such cost estimates are garbage because Samsung isn't talking about what they are really paying for parts. So all you have is guesswork based on public information. I would offer that neither Amazon nor Samsung is paying the sort of prices that are publicly available and special deals are being cut in exchange for who-knows-what.
In electronics there are three quantity levels that count: one, 1000 and the entire output of the manufacturer for months. When you scale up to the last one, the buyer gets to dictate what the price is going to be and the seller is pretty much at the mercy of the buyer.
We are quickly heading towards a situation in the US where the government position is that we need all the Mexicans that can live through the desert to come here, right now!
Labor costs in the US have been offset by people willing to work for less and less. A subsistance farmer in Mexico has a annual income of maybe $10 USD. If they can make that in one day on a job (any job at all is going to pay that), they are going to come here. Right now there is probably a 5% chance they will see a dead body or skeleton of someone that didn't make it through the desert on their way to that job in the US - and it doesn't stop them. There are signs in Arizona that say in no uncertain terms (in Spanish) that if they continue on their way north they will die - and it doesn't stop them.
Unskilled labor in the US is now pretty much dedicated to Spanish-speaking immigrants and there is no hope of any person of European descent getting one of those jobs. We better figure out how to deal with that - permanently - because it isn't going to change any time soon. That means permanent Welfare for the unemployable.
The government needs to make it clear that through immigration policies it is making taxpayer support for the permanently unemployed a necessity. It doesn't matter what the policy is or who's elected President - in only matters that the people are informed of the side effects of the policy so they can vote on it in an informed manner. Right now, people are not being informed and the future cost is being hidden from them.
My comment about this is very simple. If we are to accept the idea that current climate change is due to human generated CO2 and that we have complete control over this, then we have to ask what the real effects are going to be? According to current sources, the effects are pretty bad.
So, if humans are doing this and we can stop doing it which may slow down, reduce or eliminate these bad effects, why aren't we doing something?
You cannot convince me that "evil people" want to destroy the planet and they are blocking all attempts to the contrary. What you can convince me of is that there are insufficient numbers of people that believe this is happening and believe that if we turn off the CO2 tap that things will "go back to normal". Off hand, I would say virtually nobody really believes that it is both human induced and we can turn it off.
Why? Because stopping the output of CO2 is pretty simple. Destructive on any of a number of fronts, but simple. You want to reduce CO2 emissions? Well, how about stopping all passenger air travel.. tomorrow. That would have a huge economic impact but it would have an equally huge impact on CO2 emissions. Ah, but you say only the government and the airlines can do this. Wrong - a small group of people suitably convinced that it was necessary could eliminate passenger air travel for at least a year and do it in two weeks or less. How? Convince the airline CEO's? No, much simpler - knock over anything that looks like a radar antenna near FAA facilities and near airports. No traffic radar = no passenger air travel, period. It would take a long time to rebuild these facilities and even a small group could continue knocking things down until they were all caught.
Here's another one for you - coal fired power plants. These are incredibly complex machines that take coal in at one end and send out electricity at the other. In the middle is a huge amount of finely balanced turbines and generators as well as a lot of coal handling machinery. And a lot of steam piping. All of this is very, very fragile and could be ruined by application of ordinary demolition-grade explosives. Nothing military would be needed. Knock out half the coal fired generating plants across the country and this would have a huge effect on CO2 emissions.
Destroying bridges would similarly halt the progress of cars and trucks, eliminating their emissions at least in limited areas. With enough action it could be possible to make long-distance trucking of freight unreliable and impractical, and once this becomes the rule it isn't going to change quickly. Once businesses know they cannot rely on "just in time" inventory management a lot of what we see today on the highway will change. While there would be great resistance to this change, once changed it would be equally resistant to returning to the old ways. Just think, long distance trucking could be history within a matter of months.
There are plenty of other things like this that could be done. Make fuel supplies unreliable and people will be forced to find other ways of getting to work. If you cannot count on getting gas for the car you are less and less likely to buy a new gasoline powered car, even if there is a 2 or 3x premium on an electric car - at least it could be relied upon.
So, why haven't we seen any of these things happening? Is it because people believe that if we continue on this road of CO2 emissions millions of people will die, much of the planet will be desert or otherwise a wasteland, etc. but they are too afraid of offending those in power to take action? I doubt it. We can see from Muslim "homicide bombers" that if someone's beliefs are strong enough that even knowledge of certain death is insufficient to block their actions. Would people blowing up power plants go to jail? Sure. Could they just be shot on sight? Sure. Would I expect that to stop someone that knew for an absolute fact they were saving millions and possibly the planet itself? No, it would not stop most peopl