Could you come with me to the Ferrari dealer? Please? I'd like to convince them that since in no way am I ever going to actually purchase a Ferrari they shouldn't mind if I take one of their extras. It wouldn't be a lost sale, because with the gas mileage they get nobody in their right mind is going to buy one today anyway. I don't have the money, so they should just give me one.
Efficency is great, but it does nothing to solve the real problem: too many humans.
Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were budding environmentalists. Hitler and Stalin had the right idea and were approaching the correct scale. Decreasing the population is the only way that humanity can treat the Earth as a closed system. If we aren't prepared to use off-planet resources then we have to reduce the number of people contributing to the waste stream. Also, we need to reduce the number of people using energy in all forms.
There really are only two solutions: prepare to collect resources from off-planat or decrease the population to the level that is "sustainable" by natual processes. This is probably less than 200 million people. Al Gore and his followers discard the first option out of hand and believe we must "live within our means." This means that we need to seriously plan on how to go from over 6 billion people to under 200 million in a short period of time.
The alternative is to either run out of resources or drown in our own wastes. Or both.
Wouldn't that tend to reduce pollution and overall resource consumption? Meaning, wouldn't that be a good thing?
Isn't the whole point to reduce pollution and resource consumption? A mass die-off would accomplish that quicker and surer than anything else, wouldn't you agree?
The only problem is of scale. What is needed is billions, not just millions.
What is needed is the type of "campaign reform" that I've heard of. Basically it consists of paying people to run for office. If you want to run, you get money. Since it takes a lot of work to campaign for office, you need a stress-free existance where you aren't worried about bills piling up. And it is pretty much a full-time job for the duration of the campaign.
Unless we want the only the idle rich lawyers to run for office, this sort of thing is required. Anybody can then go sign up to be a candidate and receive the millions of dollars it takes. No begging for contributions. No prostituting yourself in order to get money for TV ads.
With a system like this the US could be transformed overnight into a nation of campaigners. Everyone could run for office, pretty much non-stop year in and year out. If you lose, as most would, then you find a new office to run for that is coming up in a year or so. This would eliminate just about all of the problems with today's campaigning, finance and re-election nonsense. There would be a sufficient number of people for each office that term limits would be obvious as well. Why would we let any one person hog an office when there were hundreds of people trying to be elected?
Of course, there would be the problem of paying for all of this. The solution to that is obvious as well, because we would just have 100% taxation for all non-campaign related income. If you aren't running for office - and being paid by the government to do so - then any money you have is taxed at 100%.
This would eliminate all of the problems and ensure that elections are much fairer. It would completely eliminate any reelection financing and remove the "money incentive" from all legislative decisions.
Drastic measures are called for, as drastic reductions are necessary.
Re:Get Over Yourselves People!
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
Show me one airline reservations site that ranks flights by "quality of service".
Today nearly everything is all about price and be damned with anything else. You can sort things by price easily because it is an easily quantifiable number. Quality is far more subjective and it is a lot more difficult to organize things by "quality".
Therefore, in the age of the Internet we sort things by price. There are no other meaningful criteria.
If most of the people in the US lived in cities, that might make sense.
Running a raceway down a city street makes sense when there are apartments and businesses on it. Running a raceway down a suburban street with 20-30 homes on it makes almost no sense at all. In large cities, like Chicago, there are already ducts and tunnels in downtown areas that date back to the 1800's.
In older suburbs there are still alleys with telephone poles.
Most other countries do not today spend 90% of health care money in the last year of a person's life. In the US today, that is pretty much the way it works. The only way that any sort of "universal health care" works is to stop that. What everyone wants to know is how exactly do you stop that?
What else is required along the way is probably not that big a deal. But given the penchant for government programs in the US wanting to manage costs and control every little thing does make people wonder.
Problem is, the ISPs do not believe they can sell the truth. The truth is, they are at more like 30-40x overcommitted. Maybe more in suburban areas. They are still gaining market share of non-users and dial-up users at $15 a month DSL plans. Do you really believe they can get anyone at all to pay what businesses are paying?
I suspect Verizon FIOS is similarly overcommitted. You can't wire a neighborhood for 20Mb traffic to every house without a node that can handle the 200 homes at 20Mb each. Such connections exist, but they aren't cheap. Certainly nobody is going to pay for it today.
The reality is that the geographic considerations of the US suburban landscape are such that it isn't feasible to provide homes with dedicated bandwidth that might possibly be used by a fraction of the population. It is, unfortunately, next to impossible to explain a burstable connection to Grandma or Joe Sixpack. So they haven't tried to explain the details. Is this wrong? Possibly.
How do we get out of this situation? For a start, with the current gasoline prices and the natual resource mismanagement that is coming, we can close the suburbs. Pack a modern suburb of people into a group of 70-storey buildings and you can wire it all with Cat 6 cable. If everyone in the US lived like the Japanese, we'd have bandwidth like the Japanese.
While the people in the US live like it is 1950, they are going to have 1950's style communication for the most part.
AllOfMP3 "properly licensed" the music they are selling in the same way that I could "properly license" your wife by saying to you I was going to rent her for a week for $1. The, over your protests, I'd just come and get her. And when you failed to collect your $1 that it would be your fault for not accepting my valid offer.
When the trail leads from an IP address to a country that doesn't care to enforce some laws to some hapless goof that is buying stuff online where do you go? The IP address isn't anywhere - there are laws in place to protect the privacy of that information. The country that doesn't care gets some revenue since the shipments are coming from there.
I guess it all comes down on the hapless goof buying the stuff. Sure, let's put him in prison.
Unless you are an idiot or a braggart, committing crime on the Internet is perfectly safe.
Why? Do you honestly believe that some kind of "universal health care" would overnight make people not want drugs they don't need and shouldn't have? If anything, there would be more money available for people to buy drugs through various black-market channels.
It might cut down on the drug purchases where the patient really has a prescription and is just looking for something cheaper. Might. Problem is, unless everything was free, the illegal sites dispensing crap would still be cheaper.
Sorry, but the sites are run by anonymous people that the hosting company is shielding. The country they operate from doesn't believe in "child porn". They believe in money, and the web site is bringing lots of that in. The domain registrar gave up asking for real identity information to preserve privacy, so no hope there either. The payments are run through a service that doesn't care where the money comes from and is protected by data privacy laws.
The client records are protected by more data privacy laws and nobody can even agree what country might have jursidiction over the matter.
Not getting a prosecution anytime soon. When was the last time you heard about some "phisher" getting prosecuted? That sure put a stop to that practice, didn't it?
Without some major changes to both international law enforcement and the practices of domain registrars and hosting companies there will never be any prosection on a meaningful scale of Internet criminals.
I'll attack the rationale for trying to stop child porn. It is a pointless effort doomed to failure and not supported by a majority of the people on the Internet interested in child porn. The folks that are paying to access child porn today do not want to go elsewhere. They are paying enough to make it incredibly lucrative for the production of child porn that it isn't going to stop, ever.
There is no law enforcement that is stopping child porn and more than there is law enforcement stopping the drug trade. In both cases there is enough money behind it to make sure that it continues, regardless of the risk. Entire countries shelter child porn production to the extent that there can be no effective world-wide efforts to stop it.
About all you can do is try to block it from coming in. You might know of a web site that offers it, but finding the people behind it is next to impossible. Even if you found them, they likely have no fixed address and are in a place that just doesn't care. Maybe the government has bigger fish to fry. Maybe the government likes the revenue they derive from the money coming in. Who knows.
The point is, you aren't going to stop it, ever. There are no alternatives, there is no enforcement and there never will be.
Part of the problem is supply and demand. If there is a demand - and I assure you there is - then there will be a supply. It is impossible to shut off the suppliers. They are in locations where there is no law enforcement and people lend, sell or rent out children for whatever purposes will get them paid.
If you knew that you could perform a despicable act and make $100,000 would you do it? How about if you had been out of work for a year and were looking at some pretty grim alternatives? So there are two alternatives. We can track every child and try to prevent them from being used for such productions or we can make sure that nobody gets paid for it. It is pretty much a given that nobody is going to stop the production of child porn. It is way, way to lucrative today.
Turn off the demand and maybe the supply - abusing children - will stop. Unfortunately, there is no clear precedent of turning off demand, ever. It doesn't seem to work.
Why not just legalize it and hope for the best? That seems to be the solution people keep proposing for drugs.
ISPs have no such thing as "common carrier" status. There is a safe harbor provision in some child protection act that shelters them from being prosecuted today for content transiting their network.
The Center for Missing and Exploited Children likely as not knows full well about newsgroups and web sites that distribute child porn. Nothing can be done about these today if they are hosted or controlled outside of countries that have binding legal agreements with the US to take down such sites. Without similar agreements, the people behind these sites identities cannot be revealed and no prosecutions can occur.
Sure, they know about them. But exactly what would you like to happen? The Internet is pretty anonymous and web hosting companies and domain registrars are in the business today of protecting the identity of such folks. They get paid for doing this and nobody is going to stop them anytime soon.
Thus, you can try to turn off access from the other end. That is about it.
Also, how about countries where child sex is perfectly legal? There are countries where the age of consent is 14 or even 12. Having a couple of 13-year-olds in a video is perfectly legal there. Holland used to have 14 as the age of consent. I believe in South America such ages persist today. Not going to stop that, ever. All you can do is put up a fence and decide you aren't going to let that content in.
Either that or you decide that there is nothing wrong with sex between children and adults and if people are going to tape it, they might as well make money off it.
What you seem to think is that it would make sense for Apple to be a supplier of commodity hardware. Face it, there are lots of companies that can make a cell phone. The software is easy to rip off and copy, the hardware even easier.
Where Apple (was) trying to do was be a key component of a service. Evidently, they are no longer going to get money from the cell phone contract but only sell the hardware under limited conditions. This probably means they are being dragged into being a supplier to AT&T of phones, just like LG and Nokia.
There is no money in being a supplier of a commodity unless you can make it cheaper than the next guy. That is a continual battle and one unlikely to be won by an American company, or anyone with ideals and ethics. You don't build a brand name on commodities. What you do is undercut the competition, cheat on standards and try to tie your customers into long-term contracts. Don't think of it as consumer electronics, think of it as toliet paper. The more crap you can churn out for lower and lower costs the more money you make.
Compare for a moment the difference between the 1960's Trimline phone and what you can buy today. A Trimline cost a great deal of money if you had to buy one in the 1960's - I believe it was over $100. However, Trimline phones survived years of use, fires, careless handling and all sorts of things like being dunked in water.
Today you can buy the finest corded phone you can find and pay over $100 for it. The handset feels like crap (too light, wrong balance) and the phone will survive perhaps a year of indelicate use. Buy a "business phone" for $300 and it will last a little longer and is made somewhat better but not much.
Most consumers today are buying cordless phones which are made far less well and are intended to be a transitory commodity that will just be replaced every year or so.
Yes, it is likely in the US we will see a decrease in handset quality and the phones sold as commodity items. Cheaper, easier to replace and better profit margins for the companies involved.
Today you are not buying a handset, you are buying a service. The phone pretty much comes along as part of the service. The contract is the service. The quality of the handset means the company doesn't have to replace the phone very often.
Step forward to commodity handsets sold separately. This is to some extent available today. What do you find? Cheap crap that breaks when you drop it. Handsets designed to be replaced every year, if not less. Whole new profit centers springing up to supply this ever-increasing need for newer, cheaper, more fragile handsets.
You've just taken a giant step backward in product quality and exchanged flashy, useless features for utility and reliability. Yup, I agree. That is indeed where we are heading.
Actually, I believe they get more from AT&T over time through use of the phone than they do from the handset sale. It may not be a lot more, but there is a clear difference between commodity hardware and selling a service, which is where both Apple and AT&T want to be.
Apple will never make a lot of money selling commodity hardware because it can be easily copied.
It makes perfect sense. One day Bill is a guy that believes he is perfectly honest and would never, ever stoop to pirating a game, music or a movie. Then there is a product that is way beyond his disposable income that he simply must have. The advertising has worked it charm and Bill wants this product, whatever it takes. He finds a place to download it for free or someone tells him where to get it for free.
Yes, the dam is now broken. Bill suddenly realizes he has been living as a pauper in a world of plenty. Everything he has ever dreamed of possessing is available for free. The one web site he found leads to another and another. Bill spends days downloading everything he can find that he ever dream of owning.
Bill is now a convert to the pirate way of life. It happens every day.
It isn't just a fear, it is absolute proof. Check into the warez world with 1000s of servers all over the world with every application you can imagine ready for anyone to download.
Basically, an Internet connection gives you a ticket to a utterly free world with so much stuff available that you need never think about paying for any digital goods ever again. Unless you download some corrupted application that adds your machine to a botnet.
I know people that will never, ever pay for music. When broadband speeds get higher, they will never ever pay for a movie. Software? If they want it, they download it. It is all there for the taking.
This works fine for things that aren't too popular. Once you get something that is "popular" is when the pirates, crackers and reversers decide to attack.
The problem with this scheme is that it works fine when people respect you and your product. Having something popular and suddenly 90% of the potential users will find a warez copy that somebody bought with a stolen credit card. And there is a keygen or whatever it takes to use the product without paying.
Mostly, it is respect and there is damn little of it today. So companies try to force respect and that doesn't work either. Offering a good product at a realistic price doesn't work when people want to make it into a political statement.
Yes, but,... In an environment of unlimited tolerance of piracy why buy? Why become a "customer" when being a pirate offers 100% (or sometimes 110%) of the benefits?
If the software needs constant hand-holding support, it was written wrong to begin with. Selling support is an insult to the intelligence of the customer. That is like a logic bomb waiting to go off. It says basically that you will be unable to use the product unless you keep paying for support which you will desperately need.
Online games hold really the only answer where you have to pay for the subscription in order to use the game, no matter how you acquire the game itself. This is probably how most applications are going to go in the future - the web connection is essential and the only thing you have to pay for. Without the web connection to the "online" part the product is useless. It does indeed make piracy irrelevent.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you come with me to the Ferrari dealer? Please? I'd like to convince them that since in no way am I ever going to actually purchase a Ferrari they shouldn't mind if I take one of their extras. It wouldn't be a lost sale, because with the gas mileage they get nobody in their right mind is going to buy one today anyway. I don't have the money, so they should just give me one.
Right?
Efficency is great, but it does nothing to solve the real problem: too many humans.
Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were budding environmentalists. Hitler and Stalin had the right idea and were approaching the correct scale. Decreasing the population is the only way that humanity can treat the Earth as a closed system. If we aren't prepared to use off-planet resources then we have to reduce the number of people contributing to the waste stream. Also, we need to reduce the number of people using energy in all forms.
There really are only two solutions: prepare to collect resources from off-planat or decrease the population to the level that is "sustainable" by natual processes. This is probably less than 200 million people. Al Gore and his followers discard the first option out of hand and believe we must "live within our means." This means that we need to seriously plan on how to go from over 6 billion people to under 200 million in a short period of time.
The alternative is to either run out of resources or drown in our own wastes. Or both.
Wouldn't that tend to reduce pollution and overall resource consumption? Meaning, wouldn't that be a good thing?
Isn't the whole point to reduce pollution and resource consumption? A mass die-off would accomplish that quicker and surer than anything else, wouldn't you agree?
The only problem is of scale. What is needed is billions, not just millions.
Unless we want the only the idle rich lawyers to run for office, this sort of thing is required. Anybody can then go sign up to be a candidate and receive the millions of dollars it takes. No begging for contributions. No prostituting yourself in order to get money for TV ads.
With a system like this the US could be transformed overnight into a nation of campaigners. Everyone could run for office, pretty much non-stop year in and year out. If you lose, as most would, then you find a new office to run for that is coming up in a year or so. This would eliminate just about all of the problems with today's campaigning, finance and re-election nonsense. There would be a sufficient number of people for each office that term limits would be obvious as well. Why would we let any one person hog an office when there were hundreds of people trying to be elected?
Of course, there would be the problem of paying for all of this. The solution to that is obvious as well, because we would just have 100% taxation for all non-campaign related income. If you aren't running for office - and being paid by the government to do so - then any money you have is taxed at 100%.
This would eliminate all of the problems and ensure that elections are much fairer. It would completely eliminate any reelection financing and remove the "money incentive" from all legislative decisions.
Once you put the PIN on the card, then all that is needed is the card.
Elementary solution: reduce the number of humans.
Drastic measures are called for, as drastic reductions are necessary.
Show me one airline reservations site that ranks flights by "quality of service".
Today nearly everything is all about price and be damned with anything else. You can sort things by price easily because it is an easily quantifiable number. Quality is far more subjective and it is a lot more difficult to organize things by "quality".
Therefore, in the age of the Internet we sort things by price. There are no other meaningful criteria.
If most of the people in the US lived in cities, that might make sense.
Running a raceway down a city street makes sense when there are apartments and businesses on it. Running a raceway down a suburban street with 20-30 homes on it makes almost no sense at all. In large cities, like Chicago, there are already ducts and tunnels in downtown areas that date back to the 1800's.
In older suburbs there are still alleys with telephone poles.
Most other countries do not today spend 90% of health care money in the last year of a person's life. In the US today, that is pretty much the way it works. The only way that any sort of "universal health care" works is to stop that. What everyone wants to know is how exactly do you stop that?
What else is required along the way is probably not that big a deal. But given the penchant for government programs in the US wanting to manage costs and control every little thing does make people wonder.
Problem is, the ISPs do not believe they can sell the truth. The truth is, they are at more like 30-40x overcommitted. Maybe more in suburban areas. They are still gaining market share of non-users and dial-up users at $15 a month DSL plans. Do you really believe they can get anyone at all to pay what businesses are paying?
I suspect Verizon FIOS is similarly overcommitted. You can't wire a neighborhood for 20Mb traffic to every house without a node that can handle the 200 homes at 20Mb each. Such connections exist, but they aren't cheap. Certainly nobody is going to pay for it today.
The reality is that the geographic considerations of the US suburban landscape are such that it isn't feasible to provide homes with dedicated bandwidth that might possibly be used by a fraction of the population. It is, unfortunately, next to impossible to explain a burstable connection to Grandma or Joe Sixpack. So they haven't tried to explain the details. Is this wrong? Possibly.
How do we get out of this situation? For a start, with the current gasoline prices and the natual resource mismanagement that is coming, we can close the suburbs. Pack a modern suburb of people into a group of 70-storey buildings and you can wire it all with Cat 6 cable. If everyone in the US lived like the Japanese, we'd have bandwidth like the Japanese.
While the people in the US live like it is 1950, they are going to have 1950's style communication for the most part.
AllOfMP3 "properly licensed" the music they are selling in the same way that I could "properly license" your wife by saying to you I was going to rent her for a week for $1. The, over your protests, I'd just come and get her. And when you failed to collect your $1 that it would be your fault for not accepting my valid offer.
An offer doesn't make a contract.
When the trail leads from an IP address to a country that doesn't care to enforce some laws to some hapless goof that is buying stuff online where do you go? The IP address isn't anywhere - there are laws in place to protect the privacy of that information. The country that doesn't care gets some revenue since the shipments are coming from there.
I guess it all comes down on the hapless goof buying the stuff. Sure, let's put him in prison.
Unless you are an idiot or a braggart, committing crime on the Internet is perfectly safe.
Why? Do you honestly believe that some kind of "universal health care" would overnight make people not want drugs they don't need and shouldn't have? If anything, there would be more money available for people to buy drugs through various black-market channels.
It might cut down on the drug purchases where the patient really has a prescription and is just looking for something cheaper. Might. Problem is, unless everything was free, the illegal sites dispensing crap would still be cheaper.
Sorry, but the sites are run by anonymous people that the hosting company is shielding. The country they operate from doesn't believe in "child porn". They believe in money, and the web site is bringing lots of that in. The domain registrar gave up asking for real identity information to preserve privacy, so no hope there either. The payments are run through a service that doesn't care where the money comes from and is protected by data privacy laws.
The client records are protected by more data privacy laws and nobody can even agree what country might have jursidiction over the matter.
Not getting a prosecution anytime soon. When was the last time you heard about some "phisher" getting prosecuted? That sure put a stop to that practice, didn't it?
Without some major changes to both international law enforcement and the practices of domain registrars and hosting companies there will never be any prosection on a meaningful scale of Internet criminals.
Sorry, but child porn extends downward to around 2 years of age today.
Yup, its not a pull-up-the-dress kind of thing, but a pull-down-the-diaper sort. Want to legalize it? then you need to open it up to newborns.
Perverted? Maybe. But the fact is there is a market for this sort of stuff.
I'll attack the rationale for trying to stop child porn. It is a pointless effort doomed to failure and not supported by a majority of the people on the Internet interested in child porn. The folks that are paying to access child porn today do not want to go elsewhere. They are paying enough to make it incredibly lucrative for the production of child porn that it isn't going to stop, ever.
There is no law enforcement that is stopping child porn and more than there is law enforcement stopping the drug trade. In both cases there is enough money behind it to make sure that it continues, regardless of the risk. Entire countries shelter child porn production to the extent that there can be no effective world-wide efforts to stop it.
About all you can do is try to block it from coming in. You might know of a web site that offers it, but finding the people behind it is next to impossible. Even if you found them, they likely have no fixed address and are in a place that just doesn't care. Maybe the government has bigger fish to fry. Maybe the government likes the revenue they derive from the money coming in. Who knows.
The point is, you aren't going to stop it, ever. There are no alternatives, there is no enforcement and there never will be.
Part of the problem is supply and demand. If there is a demand - and I assure you there is - then there will be a supply. It is impossible to shut off the suppliers. They are in locations where there is no law enforcement and people lend, sell or rent out children for whatever purposes will get them paid.
If you knew that you could perform a despicable act and make $100,000 would you do it? How about if you had been out of work for a year and were looking at some pretty grim alternatives? So there are two alternatives. We can track every child and try to prevent them from being used for such productions or we can make sure that nobody gets paid for it. It is pretty much a given that nobody is going to stop the production of child porn. It is way, way to lucrative today.
Turn off the demand and maybe the supply - abusing children - will stop. Unfortunately, there is no clear precedent of turning off demand, ever. It doesn't seem to work.
Why not just legalize it and hope for the best? That seems to be the solution people keep proposing for drugs.
Sure, they know about them. But exactly what would you like to happen? The Internet is pretty anonymous and web hosting companies and domain registrars are in the business today of protecting the identity of such folks. They get paid for doing this and nobody is going to stop them anytime soon.
Thus, you can try to turn off access from the other end. That is about it.
Also, how about countries where child sex is perfectly legal? There are countries where the age of consent is 14 or even 12. Having a couple of 13-year-olds in a video is perfectly legal there. Holland used to have 14 as the age of consent. I believe in South America such ages persist today. Not going to stop that, ever. All you can do is put up a fence and decide you aren't going to let that content in.
Either that or you decide that there is nothing wrong with sex between children and adults and if people are going to tape it, they might as well make money off it.
What you seem to think is that it would make sense for Apple to be a supplier of commodity hardware. Face it, there are lots of companies that can make a cell phone. The software is easy to rip off and copy, the hardware even easier.
Where Apple (was) trying to do was be a key component of a service. Evidently, they are no longer going to get money from the cell phone contract but only sell the hardware under limited conditions. This probably means they are being dragged into being a supplier to AT&T of phones, just like LG and Nokia.
There is no money in being a supplier of a commodity unless you can make it cheaper than the next guy. That is a continual battle and one unlikely to be won by an American company, or anyone with ideals and ethics. You don't build a brand name on commodities. What you do is undercut the competition, cheat on standards and try to tie your customers into long-term contracts. Don't think of it as consumer electronics, think of it as toliet paper. The more crap you can churn out for lower and lower costs the more money you make.
Compare for a moment the difference between the 1960's Trimline phone and what you can buy today. A Trimline cost a great deal of money if you had to buy one in the 1960's - I believe it was over $100. However, Trimline phones survived years of use, fires, careless handling and all sorts of things like being dunked in water.
Today you can buy the finest corded phone you can find and pay over $100 for it. The handset feels like crap (too light, wrong balance) and the phone will survive perhaps a year of indelicate use. Buy a "business phone" for $300 and it will last a little longer and is made somewhat better but not much.
Most consumers today are buying cordless phones which are made far less well and are intended to be a transitory commodity that will just be replaced every year or so.
Yes, it is likely in the US we will see a decrease in handset quality and the phones sold as commodity items. Cheaper, easier to replace and better profit margins for the companies involved.
Today you are not buying a handset, you are buying a service. The phone pretty much comes along as part of the service. The contract is the service. The quality of the handset means the company doesn't have to replace the phone very often.
Step forward to commodity handsets sold separately. This is to some extent available today. What do you find? Cheap crap that breaks when you drop it. Handsets designed to be replaced every year, if not less. Whole new profit centers springing up to supply this ever-increasing need for newer, cheaper, more fragile handsets.
You've just taken a giant step backward in product quality and exchanged flashy, useless features for utility and reliability. Yup, I agree. That is indeed where we are heading.
Actually, I believe they get more from AT&T over time through use of the phone than they do from the handset sale. It may not be a lot more, but there is a clear difference between commodity hardware and selling a service, which is where both Apple and AT&T want to be.
Apple will never make a lot of money selling commodity hardware because it can be easily copied.
It makes perfect sense. One day Bill is a guy that believes he is perfectly honest and would never, ever stoop to pirating a game, music or a movie. Then there is a product that is way beyond his disposable income that he simply must have. The advertising has worked it charm and Bill wants this product, whatever it takes. He finds a place to download it for free or someone tells him where to get it for free.
Yes, the dam is now broken. Bill suddenly realizes he has been living as a pauper in a world of plenty. Everything he has ever dreamed of possessing is available for free. The one web site he found leads to another and another. Bill spends days downloading everything he can find that he ever dream of owning.
Bill is now a convert to the pirate way of life. It happens every day.
It isn't just a fear, it is absolute proof. Check into the warez world with 1000s of servers all over the world with every application you can imagine ready for anyone to download.
Basically, an Internet connection gives you a ticket to a utterly free world with so much stuff available that you need never think about paying for any digital goods ever again. Unless you download some corrupted application that adds your machine to a botnet.
I know people that will never, ever pay for music. When broadband speeds get higher, they will never ever pay for a movie. Software? If they want it, they download it. It is all there for the taking.
This works fine for things that aren't too popular. Once you get something that is "popular" is when the pirates, crackers and reversers decide to attack.
The problem with this scheme is that it works fine when people respect you and your product. Having something popular and suddenly 90% of the potential users will find a warez copy that somebody bought with a stolen credit card. And there is a keygen or whatever it takes to use the product without paying.
Mostly, it is respect and there is damn little of it today. So companies try to force respect and that doesn't work either. Offering a good product at a realistic price doesn't work when people want to make it into a political statement.
Yes, but, ... In an environment of unlimited tolerance of piracy why buy? Why become a "customer" when being a pirate offers 100% (or sometimes 110%) of the benefits?
If the software needs constant hand-holding support, it was written wrong to begin with. Selling support is an insult to the intelligence of the customer. That is like a logic bomb waiting to go off. It says basically that you will be unable to use the product unless you keep paying for support which you will desperately need.
Online games hold really the only answer where you have to pay for the subscription in order to use the game, no matter how you acquire the game itself. This is probably how most applications are going to go in the future - the web connection is essential and the only thing you have to pay for. Without the web connection to the "online" part the product is useless. It does indeed make piracy irrelevent.