In the places where I have lived if a business requires upgrades in the road for their business, they get to pay for them. In addition to any other taxes and fees they are paying. Nobody else cares, so of course the business gets to pay the whole load. Maybe the city isn't actively diverting traffic away from the business but they certainly are going to make it known that the problem is Business XYZ is creating all the traffic problems.
Well, yes and no. The optimum solution from a marketing perspective is to push as much of the cost to a cost-insensitive market as possible while keeping the cost-sensitive players from seeing it. This is clearly how to pass a "price increase" without the consumer understanding that it is a price increase - they aren't seeing it directly.
I agree with you 100%... except I think the bills are going up no matter what.
Scenario #1: ISP isn't able to shift costs away from consumers and the price of Internet service generally goes up.
Scenario #2: ISP is able to shift costs away from consumers, keeping their loss-leader priced low to build market share. Unfortunately, the shifted costs come right back to the consumer as higher prices for whatever. And when Google charges more for ads, don't you think the retailers are going to charge more for their stuff?
We have been living in a debt-financed dream for a while now and it is finally beginning to sink in that while you can put off paying for a while eventually someone has to pay.
Problem is, the ISPs are convinced they have to maintain low-low-low prices for the consumers or they will just be on dial-up. I know a large number of people that is true for. The "mission" is to get everyone off of dial-up and on to some other service. After dial-up is gone (because nobody uses it anymore) they can then raise the prices and nobody will have a choice. It is also once they get you hooked, they know they have you.
You don't really think the amount you are paying your ISP is anything close to what the service is really costing them to provide, do you? Look at the difference between your "home" DSL plan and a "business" DSL plan. Why are the businesses paying $80 a month and the home user is paying $14.95? It isn't because the business is getting anything additional for that price.
It is because large ISPs in the US are still building market share and holding prices to absurdly low levels to convince everyone they have to be connected to the Internet. Right now, a significant number of people want dial-up and only dial-up because it costs them next to nothing for it. Would they take something 10-20 times faster if it was free? Sure. Would they be interested at $80-100 a month? No way. So you see the teaser offers that keep getting extended in large metro areas for less than $30 a month.
Now somebody is noticing they are going to have to start saying they are losing money and either have to raise prices or get the money to cover operations somewhere else. Yes, you could say it is their own fault for getting into "building market share" instead of building something that pays for itself. But this is where we are now.
No, the issue is that in the EU you do not have people throwing credit at you. If you walk into a furniture store in the US they will immediately offer you a finance plan and discount the furniture if you take it. The furniture store doesn't administer the plan either - that is handled by a third party finance company.
I've not bought furniture in the EU or other big-ticket items but from what I understand it doesn't work that way at all. You could get a loan from a bank but that is about it. Finance companies do not exist the way they do in the US.
So if you "steal someone's identity" you don't have very much to do with it at all in the EU.
The real issue that has come out is do we let the ego of lessor students be affected by publicly showing that there are other students better than they are?
If this is allowed to happen, these children of lessor capabilities will feel badly about themselves. This is bad, so it should not be allowed to happen.
This is then carried forward to the extent that no child should be made to feel less than any other child. Therefore if one student is given an award, they must all be given awards. If one child gets an A, all students must get an A so as not to single anyone out.
Let's say that OEM Windows in Dell-size quantity is $20. I think that might be a little on the high side. It is nowhere near $50.
You have correstly figured out there is a cost to delivering a machine without Windows when every other machine has it. Unfortunately, the amount of labor to customize the machine vastly exceeds the amount they are paying for the Windows OEM license.
I would equate this to asking at the Ford dealership how much you could save by not having carpeting in your new car. They would either tell you to take a hike and ask your silly question down the street at the Buick dealership or they would tell you it would save -$500. Yup, $500 more to not have carpet in your car.
I suspect this is the same scale with a company like Dell. The cost differential of having other hard disk images to put on machines is not zero and even Dell, who is clearly customizing every machine's hard disk image to some degree is going to have some additional cost with each new image.
I would say the market is so small that it isn't worth the infrastructure to make a standard build of a machine without Windows. At least for every single major manufacturer. You can call up and buy a customized machine without Windows for lots and lots of smaller system builders. And all of these smaller guys will give you two prices for the machine - one with and one without Windows. And the Windows price is always higher by at least $50 - which is what the OEM license is costing them. Dell, HP, Sony, etc. are paying way less had having way more volume.
It's called the Internet and it enables sharing of data and software worldwide. Nobody has to pay for anything anymore if you know how to get it.
Expect the next wave of companies to start advertising they have the one true solution to informing people about how to download and get stuff for free.
I agree that simply suing for some kind of damages is going to get you nowhere. All software disclaims any consequential damages.
However, the truth is that if you have a broken system just about any software company is going to fix it, somehow. You may not like how they want to fix it, but they are going to stick with the problem until it is fixed or until you go away. MS is pretty unique in that for big customers (think 1,000+ licenses) they will drop someone in onsite to deal with it. If it is more like the 10,000-100,000 licenses range they will drop someone in that knows the source code and can fix it for real.
What would Adobe do for some place with 1,000 Acrobat licenses if it broke, badly. Well, you aren't "down" so to speak so they aren't going to send someone out but they are unlikely to say "working as designed" and forget about it.
Most Linux issues can be fixed by (a) upgrading and (b) configuring. Very, very few issues need more than that. The problem is nobody is going to work on it for free, even if you have 100,000 systems running Linux. This means potentially paying someone outside of the usual vendor relationships. Sure, the cost of paying the Linux consultant may be a fraction of the MS annual license cost but the MS licenses come from the software vendor and the consultant isn't in the system. If you don't believe this is a factor you haven't worked with large corporate purchasing departments.
Full disclosure results in announcing a bug not to the world, but only to people that are paying attention. Does this include all the users of that software? No, not even most of them. So who gets informed? People looking for ways to do bad things. The user's do not hear about the defect, the potential exploit or the fix that corrects it.
They are just left in their ignorance with the potential for being exploited.
The "I want to do bad things" community has the information and is paying attention. Their community gets advance information before there even is a fix and they get to evaluate if it is worth their efforts to exploit it.
The other group that gets to benefit from full disclosure is the media. Starved for news of any sort, bad news is certainly good news for them.
All in all, full disclosure is simply blackmail. Unfortunately, no matter what the result is the user of the product affected gets all of the negative attributes. Their instance of the product isn't fixed because unless they are paying attention they don't know. They get to lose support if the company decides to pull the product rather than kneel to the blackmail. If the bug is exploited the end user get to suffer the consequences.
You can think this would justify eliminating exclusions for damages for software products. There isn't any way this would fly in the US because while we like to think we're as consumer-friendly as the next country, the truth is this would expose everyone to unlimited liability for user errors. Certainly unlimited litigation even if it was finally shown to be a user error which is by no means certain. And do not believe for a moment that you could somehow exclude software given away for free from damages. If you have an exclusion for that you would find all software being free - except it would be costly to connect to the required server for a subscription or something like that. Excluding free software would be a loophole that you could drive a truck through.
Because the neighborhood store can't stop me from stealing packs of gum, and just a pack of gum every so often doesn't really hurt their business they might as well just adapt.
Quality was something that you had in the 1960's with high-end stereo systems. It was something your parents had, or maybe your grandparents.
The first step down the road was the transistor radio. Most of them had very small speakers and incredibly poor cases, at least as far as sound quality went. Cassette tapes generally were played on similar instruments again with tiny bass-starved speakers.
Car radios suffer from problems as well, so you weren't finding any better quality there. Some people invested large sums of money in quality audio for their car, but nobody I knew.
Then we had the "boom box". Bigger speakers, lots more bass but still nothing great. Coupled with the fact that these were used to play AM radio stations and cassette tapes. Nope, no quality there either.
CD players came along but still young people were using either the "boom box" to play them or some kind of portable player with headphones as bad as the iPod-style ear speakers.
So, where were young people ever exposed to anything of any quality? Maybe at a concert... except there they had huge speakers over 10,000 screaming fans in some venue chosen for its size rather than acoustics. No, I'd have to say that "quality" is a completely foreign concept to most people with disposible income that are purchasing music-related things.
There might be other formats than MP3 available, but MP3 is what is available for free on the Internet. The quality sucks, but so did the radio, the cassette, the speakers, the headphones and the ear speakers of today. I really don't see any difference.
And, I'm betting that neither do the people buying and downloading music. Over and over, it comes down to music not really having much value which is why it is all free today.
The fantasy is that you are paying for 10Mbit on your cable connection so therefore you should get 10Mbit 24/7. The reality is that you weren't sold dedicated bandwidth and are sharing perhaps a max of around 100Mbit with your community.
The fantasy is that you are paying for an Internet connection so therefore anything that is possible you should be able to do. The reality is what you are paying is carefully crafted not to support the service but to build market share. Other services are involved on the same wires (DSL + telephone service or Cable TV + Cable Internet) and they are sharing in the cost of the infrastructure.
The fantasy is that they telecom companies were paid to develop video on demand to compete with the cable companies. The reality is they took the money and figured out in about 1995 that there was no market at the price they would have to charge. Yes, they kept taking the money and this was probably wrong. But we, as in the states and consumer regulatory agencies, gave it to them. All they did then was take what was given to them.
Could it have been done differently? Sure, we could have scrapped the entire concept of an independent telephone company in the 1980's and had the government nationalize it. Along with the cable TV systems just in case they became valuable. That would have pretty much ended most investment in infrastructure in the US just as it has everywhere else. The infrastructure gets investment money when the state sells off the nationalized asset, just like Australia and I am sure a few other places.
The reality is that today we have a system that is vastly underbuilt to handle video on demand and other services. Currently we have absurdly low prices in some markets (DSL for $14.95) and absurdly high in others. Pricing at the low end of the scale isn't going to allow for much build-up but it sure does build market share. How do we get fiber to each home? I certainly don't know but it is certain that it is going to take a massive rebuild of the entire system - neither the cable infrastructure or the telecom copper plant is going to handle it. Both are going to require gigabit capacity to the neighborhood node and there isn't anything that does that yet.
Yes, its a problem. But endlessly ranting on and on about how you aren't getting what you think you paid for doesn't help. You aren't paying for what you would like, you are paying for what the ISP can deliver today. And you aren't paying as much as you probably are going to be - unless the ISPs get to charge the content providers at the other end. That is the only way broadband is going to remain at a "building market share" price.
Have you seen what is available on YouTube? Have you seen American Idol? People will flock to produce their own content when given the chance. Now they have the chance and a medium in which to publish it.
Of course, it is crap. But that is to be expected. All entertainment at some level is crap and we are just entering a new period where most (or all) of it will be crap.
Apple is not making money with iTunes. iTunes is not designed to make money. iTunes is the "gasoline" for the iPod "car".
For most iPod purchasors, if iTunes didn't exist they would have no convenient way to put music on their iPod. So something was needed.
The fact that it does not make money should be apparent to anyone with a merchant account. You can't sell stuff for $1, paid for with a credit card, and make much money. While they are probably not losing much money, if any, they certainly are doing iTunes to make any money at it.
In the US we spend around 90% of health care dollars for neonatal care (crack babies, preemies, etc.) and for elderly care. Most of the spending really occurs in the last year of life.
Nobody else on the planet spends money like that. Everywhere else it is far more distributed throughout the age brackets.
Any healthcare changes in the US will mean that some politician has to get up at a press conference and say something like "Yes, we are going to be encouraging anyone over 70 to die quickly rather than being supported in a hospital. It just costs too much to keep these people alive." Needless to say, they have been arguing about who is going to say this and how it is going to be phrased since around 1960. No takers yet, although Hillary got pretty close once. Until everyone realized nobody elected her and that they were going to take the heat for her suggestions.
Right now the US is the medical destination of choice for people with money all over the world.
If you work for a company that did sign such an NDA, then the company can be liable for releasing the information improperly.
If the company that owns the secret gives you the information, they are then not handling the information as trade secret and lose any possible protection.
Pretty much, if you come into contact with information that is trade secret and are not under some agreement not to disclose it, the information is being mishandled. Period. Either the information is not really trade secret because the owner is mishandling it or someone else is mishandling it and is violating several criminal statues and can be held civilly liable as well.
There is no person - there is only an id on a website. You might be able to tie this to an IP address. You cannot connect this to a person, no matter how hard you might wish for it. This ultimately means there can be no accountability.
Well, sure. Except the web site operators are the only ones with any way to even remotely identify the person behind the posting. Without their assistance, there is no way to find the poster.
Besides, all they are likely to get is an email address (probably anonymous) and an IP address. It does not lead to identifying the actual poster, just the computer used for posting.
Sorry, this is the Internet. Until there is a way to connect a person with an IP address or there is a law that says the account holder is responsible for actions on an IP address when it is given out, then there is no way to connect a real person with any of these actions. You cannot sue an IP address, so there isn't any possibility of a real lawsuit, just the threat of one.
Unless, of course, someone steps forward and blabs or brags about it.
The problem is that we now have a government agency tasked with "protection" and pre-emptive action. This in itself isn't necessarily bad, but it is very difficult to protect against a determined enemy that clearly is willing to die to achieve their objective.
Couple this with (in the media's view) a clear choice: either "do something" or take the risk that there will be another aircraft involved in everyone on board dying intentionally. And maybe a bunch of people on the ground as well. It simply isn't something anyone in the US would find acceptable to come out at a press conference and say "We've decided to disband the TSA because it isn't worth the hassle and expense. As of today no more screening. Of course this may result in everyone on one or two airplanes dying, but we feel that is preferrable to the hassle and expense of all this screening."
There is no way that anyone in any government could decide that this was an acceptable risk. It would be clearly putting dollars ahead of human lives, wouldn't it?
AllOfMP3 failed because they tried to set the price they were willing to compensate content owners at. The content owner's didn't agree to the scheme which was significantly below the level they had negotiated with others. If the content owners had any input into the process this might have been worked out with some compromise reached.
I assure you that if I took it upon myself to sell your car for you (without your knowledge or permission) that I might be able to sell it really quick. You might not be happy after I took my commission out and left you with what was left. How is what AllOfMP3 was doing any different?
Quality? Quality has nothing to do with it anymore. Most people today listen with headphones that have a very narrow frequency response or speakers that are even worse. They wouldn't know quality if it slapped them.
You seem to be laboring under the mistaken impression that when compared with the cost of the music the costs of packaging and distribution are significant. The only cost that means anything is the cost of the music. All the rest is just a wrapper that is next to free.
What is the cost of the music? There are two main items: actual production cost which involves paying the backup musicians, paying for the studio time, etc. and the cost of promotion. Promotion in most cases is probably a lot more than the actual production costs. Promotion covers radio air play, co-marketing funds for stores and advertising.
Do you honestly believe you are paying for the jewel case, booklet and physical distribution? Do you think these items have any bearing whatsoever on the value of the product?
You are paying to access the music. Period. Everything else is the wrapper it comes in and is considered to have no value whatsoever compared to the music itself.
It is like a candy bar. The wrapper has a function but no value. The candy is what you are buying and the wrapper makes it possible. If you could buy it without the wrapper it wouldn't be cheaper.
The cost of the CD, the jewel case, the booklet and whatever else there is is nothing compared to the cost of the music.
Problem is, your definition of a "decent price" is one that you are setting, not them. Right now, the price is zero. I don't think it is going to go up anytime soon.
"Decent price" is just a codeword for "give me what I want or I will take it."
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In the places where I have lived if a business requires upgrades in the road for their business, they get to pay for them. In addition to any other taxes and fees they are paying. Nobody else cares, so of course the business gets to pay the whole load. Maybe the city isn't actively diverting traffic away from the business but they certainly are going to make it known that the problem is Business XYZ is creating all the traffic problems.
Well, yes and no. The optimum solution from a marketing perspective is to push as much of the cost to a cost-insensitive market as possible while keeping the cost-sensitive players from seeing it. This is clearly how to pass a "price increase" without the consumer understanding that it is a price increase - they aren't seeing it directly.
I agree with you 100% ... except I think the bills are going up no matter what.
Scenario #1: ISP isn't able to shift costs away from consumers and the price of Internet service generally goes up.
Scenario #2: ISP is able to shift costs away from consumers, keeping their loss-leader priced low to build market share. Unfortunately, the shifted costs come right back to the consumer as higher prices for whatever. And when Google charges more for ads, don't you think the retailers are going to charge more for their stuff?
We have been living in a debt-financed dream for a while now and it is finally beginning to sink in that while you can put off paying for a while eventually someone has to pay.
Problem is, the ISPs are convinced they have to maintain low-low-low prices for the consumers or they will just be on dial-up. I know a large number of people that is true for. The "mission" is to get everyone off of dial-up and on to some other service. After dial-up is gone (because nobody uses it anymore) they can then raise the prices and nobody will have a choice. It is also once they get you hooked, they know they have you.
You don't really think the amount you are paying your ISP is anything close to what the service is really costing them to provide, do you? Look at the difference between your "home" DSL plan and a "business" DSL plan. Why are the businesses paying $80 a month and the home user is paying $14.95? It isn't because the business is getting anything additional for that price.
It is because large ISPs in the US are still building market share and holding prices to absurdly low levels to convince everyone they have to be connected to the Internet. Right now, a significant number of people want dial-up and only dial-up because it costs them next to nothing for it. Would they take something 10-20 times faster if it was free? Sure. Would they be interested at $80-100 a month? No way. So you see the teaser offers that keep getting extended in large metro areas for less than $30 a month.
Now somebody is noticing they are going to have to start saying they are losing money and either have to raise prices or get the money to cover operations somewhere else. Yes, you could say it is their own fault for getting into "building market share" instead of building something that pays for itself. But this is where we are now.
No, the issue is that in the EU you do not have people throwing credit at you. If you walk into a furniture store in the US they will immediately offer you a finance plan and discount the furniture if you take it. The furniture store doesn't administer the plan either - that is handled by a third party finance company.
I've not bought furniture in the EU or other big-ticket items but from what I understand it doesn't work that way at all. You could get a loan from a bank but that is about it. Finance companies do not exist the way they do in the US.
So if you "steal someone's identity" you don't have very much to do with it at all in the EU.
The real issue that has come out is do we let the ego of lessor students be affected by publicly showing that there are other students better than they are?
If this is allowed to happen, these children of lessor capabilities will feel badly about themselves. This is bad, so it should not be allowed to happen.
This is then carried forward to the extent that no child should be made to feel less than any other child. Therefore if one student is given an award, they must all be given awards. If one child gets an A, all students must get an A so as not to single anyone out.
This is where we are today. Do you like it?
Let's say that OEM Windows in Dell-size quantity is $20. I think that might be a little on the high side. It is nowhere near $50.
You have correstly figured out there is a cost to delivering a machine without Windows when every other machine has it. Unfortunately, the amount of labor to customize the machine vastly exceeds the amount they are paying for the Windows OEM license.
I would equate this to asking at the Ford dealership how much you could save by not having carpeting in your new car. They would either tell you to take a hike and ask your silly question down the street at the Buick dealership or they would tell you it would save -$500. Yup, $500 more to not have carpet in your car.
I suspect this is the same scale with a company like Dell. The cost differential of having other hard disk images to put on machines is not zero and even Dell, who is clearly customizing every machine's hard disk image to some degree is going to have some additional cost with each new image.
I would say the market is so small that it isn't worth the infrastructure to make a standard build of a machine without Windows. At least for every single major manufacturer. You can call up and buy a customized machine without Windows for lots and lots of smaller system builders. And all of these smaller guys will give you two prices for the machine - one with and one without Windows. And the Windows price is always higher by at least $50 - which is what the OEM license is costing them. Dell, HP, Sony, etc. are paying way less had having way more volume.
It's called the Internet and it enables sharing of data and software worldwide. Nobody has to pay for anything anymore if you know how to get it.
Expect the next wave of companies to start advertising they have the one true solution to informing people about how to download and get stuff for free.
I agree that simply suing for some kind of damages is going to get you nowhere. All software disclaims any consequential damages.
However, the truth is that if you have a broken system just about any software company is going to fix it, somehow. You may not like how they want to fix it, but they are going to stick with the problem until it is fixed or until you go away. MS is pretty unique in that for big customers (think 1,000+ licenses) they will drop someone in onsite to deal with it. If it is more like the 10,000-100,000 licenses range they will drop someone in that knows the source code and can fix it for real.
What would Adobe do for some place with 1,000 Acrobat licenses if it broke, badly. Well, you aren't "down" so to speak so they aren't going to send someone out but they are unlikely to say "working as designed" and forget about it.
Most Linux issues can be fixed by (a) upgrading and (b) configuring. Very, very few issues need more than that. The problem is nobody is going to work on it for free, even if you have 100,000 systems running Linux. This means potentially paying someone outside of the usual vendor relationships. Sure, the cost of paying the Linux consultant may be a fraction of the MS annual license cost but the MS licenses come from the software vendor and the consultant isn't in the system. If you don't believe this is a factor you haven't worked with large corporate purchasing departments.
Full disclosure results in announcing a bug not to the world, but only to people that are paying attention. Does this include all the users of that software? No, not even most of them. So who gets informed? People looking for ways to do bad things. The user's do not hear about the defect, the potential exploit or the fix that corrects it.
They are just left in their ignorance with the potential for being exploited.
The "I want to do bad things" community has the information and is paying attention. Their community gets advance information before there even is a fix and they get to evaluate if it is worth their efforts to exploit it.
The other group that gets to benefit from full disclosure is the media. Starved for news of any sort, bad news is certainly good news for them.
All in all, full disclosure is simply blackmail. Unfortunately, no matter what the result is the user of the product affected gets all of the negative attributes. Their instance of the product isn't fixed because unless they are paying attention they don't know. They get to lose support if the company decides to pull the product rather than kneel to the blackmail. If the bug is exploited the end user get to suffer the consequences.
You can think this would justify eliminating exclusions for damages for software products. There isn't any way this would fly in the US because while we like to think we're as consumer-friendly as the next country, the truth is this would expose everyone to unlimited liability for user errors. Certainly unlimited litigation even if it was finally shown to be a user error which is by no means certain. And do not believe for a moment that you could somehow exclude software given away for free from damages. If you have an exclusion for that you would find all software being free - except it would be costly to connect to the required server for a subscription or something like that. Excluding free software would be a loophole that you could drive a truck through.
Because the neighborhood store can't stop me from stealing packs of gum, and just a pack of gum every so often doesn't really hurt their business they might as well just adapt.
You know, adapt or die.
Quality was something that you had in the 1960's with high-end stereo systems. It was something your parents had, or maybe your grandparents.
The first step down the road was the transistor radio. Most of them had very small speakers and incredibly poor cases, at least as far as sound quality went. Cassette tapes generally were played on similar instruments again with tiny bass-starved speakers.
Car radios suffer from problems as well, so you weren't finding any better quality there. Some people invested large sums of money in quality audio for their car, but nobody I knew.
Then we had the "boom box". Bigger speakers, lots more bass but still nothing great. Coupled with the fact that these were used to play AM radio stations and cassette tapes. Nope, no quality there either.
CD players came along but still young people were using either the "boom box" to play them or some kind of portable player with headphones as bad as the iPod-style ear speakers.
So, where were young people ever exposed to anything of any quality? Maybe at a concert... except there they had huge speakers over 10,000 screaming fans in some venue chosen for its size rather than acoustics. No, I'd have to say that "quality" is a completely foreign concept to most people with disposible income that are purchasing music-related things.
There might be other formats than MP3 available, but MP3 is what is available for free on the Internet. The quality sucks, but so did the radio, the cassette, the speakers, the headphones and the ear speakers of today. I really don't see any difference.
And, I'm betting that neither do the people buying and downloading music. Over and over, it comes down to music not really having much value which is why it is all free today.
The fantasy is that you are paying for 10Mbit on your cable connection so therefore you should get 10Mbit 24/7. The reality is that you weren't sold dedicated bandwidth and are sharing perhaps a max of around 100Mbit with your community.
The fantasy is that you are paying for an Internet connection so therefore anything that is possible you should be able to do. The reality is what you are paying is carefully crafted not to support the service but to build market share. Other services are involved on the same wires (DSL + telephone service or Cable TV + Cable Internet) and they are sharing in the cost of the infrastructure.
The fantasy is that they telecom companies were paid to develop video on demand to compete with the cable companies. The reality is they took the money and figured out in about 1995 that there was no market at the price they would have to charge. Yes, they kept taking the money and this was probably wrong. But we, as in the states and consumer regulatory agencies, gave it to them. All they did then was take what was given to them.
Could it have been done differently? Sure, we could have scrapped the entire concept of an independent telephone company in the 1980's and had the government nationalize it. Along with the cable TV systems just in case they became valuable. That would have pretty much ended most investment in infrastructure in the US just as it has everywhere else. The infrastructure gets investment money when the state sells off the nationalized asset, just like Australia and I am sure a few other places.
The reality is that today we have a system that is vastly underbuilt to handle video on demand and other services. Currently we have absurdly low prices in some markets (DSL for $14.95) and absurdly high in others. Pricing at the low end of the scale isn't going to allow for much build-up but it sure does build market share. How do we get fiber to each home? I certainly don't know but it is certain that it is going to take a massive rebuild of the entire system - neither the cable infrastructure or the telecom copper plant is going to handle it. Both are going to require gigabit capacity to the neighborhood node and there isn't anything that does that yet.
Yes, its a problem. But endlessly ranting on and on about how you aren't getting what you think you paid for doesn't help. You aren't paying for what you would like, you are paying for what the ISP can deliver today. And you aren't paying as much as you probably are going to be - unless the ISPs get to charge the content providers at the other end. That is the only way broadband is going to remain at a "building market share" price.
Have you seen what is available on YouTube? Have you seen American Idol? People will flock to produce their own content when given the chance. Now they have the chance and a medium in which to publish it.
Of course, it is crap. But that is to be expected. All entertainment at some level is crap and we are just entering a new period where most (or all) of it will be crap.
Apple is not making money with iTunes. iTunes is not designed to make money. iTunes is the "gasoline" for the iPod "car".
For most iPod purchasors, if iTunes didn't exist they would have no convenient way to put music on their iPod. So something was needed.
The fact that it does not make money should be apparent to anyone with a merchant account. You can't sell stuff for $1, paid for with a credit card, and make much money. While they are probably not losing much money, if any, they certainly are doing iTunes to make any money at it.
In the US we spend around 90% of health care dollars for neonatal care (crack babies, preemies, etc.) and for elderly care. Most of the spending really occurs in the last year of life.
Nobody else on the planet spends money like that. Everywhere else it is far more distributed throughout the age brackets.
Any healthcare changes in the US will mean that some politician has to get up at a press conference and say something like "Yes, we are going to be encouraging anyone over 70 to die quickly rather than being supported in a hospital. It just costs too much to keep these people alive." Needless to say, they have been arguing about who is going to say this and how it is going to be phrased since around 1960. No takers yet, although Hillary got pretty close once. Until everyone realized nobody elected her and that they were going to take the heat for her suggestions.
Right now the US is the medical destination of choice for people with money all over the world.
If you work for a company that did sign such an NDA, then the company can be liable for releasing the information improperly.
If the company that owns the secret gives you the information, they are then not handling the information as trade secret and lose any possible protection.
Pretty much, if you come into contact with information that is trade secret and are not under some agreement not to disclose it, the information is being mishandled. Period. Either the information is not really trade secret because the owner is mishandling it or someone else is mishandling it and is violating several criminal statues and can be held civilly liable as well.
There is no person - there is only an id on a website. You might be able to tie this to an IP address. You cannot connect this to a person, no matter how hard you might wish for it. This ultimately means there can be no accountability.
Well, sure. Except the web site operators are the only ones with any way to even remotely identify the person behind the posting. Without their assistance, there is no way to find the poster.
Besides, all they are likely to get is an email address (probably anonymous) and an IP address. It does not lead to identifying the actual poster, just the computer used for posting.
Sorry, this is the Internet. Until there is a way to connect a person with an IP address or there is a law that says the account holder is responsible for actions on an IP address when it is given out, then there is no way to connect a real person with any of these actions. You cannot sue an IP address, so there isn't any possibility of a real lawsuit, just the threat of one.
Unless, of course, someone steps forward and blabs or brags about it.
The problem is that we now have a government agency tasked with "protection" and pre-emptive action. This in itself isn't necessarily bad, but it is very difficult to protect against a determined enemy that clearly is willing to die to achieve their objective.
Couple this with (in the media's view) a clear choice: either "do something" or take the risk that there will be another aircraft involved in everyone on board dying intentionally. And maybe a bunch of people on the ground as well. It simply isn't something anyone in the US would find acceptable to come out at a press conference and say "We've decided to disband the TSA because it isn't worth the hassle and expense. As of today no more screening. Of course this may result in everyone on one or two airplanes dying, but we feel that is preferrable to the hassle and expense of all this screening."
There is no way that anyone in any government could decide that this was an acceptable risk. It would be clearly putting dollars ahead of human lives, wouldn't it?
AllOfMP3 failed because they tried to set the price they were willing to compensate content owners at. The content owner's didn't agree to the scheme which was significantly below the level they had negotiated with others. If the content owners had any input into the process this might have been worked out with some compromise reached.
I assure you that if I took it upon myself to sell your car for you (without your knowledge or permission) that I might be able to sell it really quick. You might not be happy after I took my commission out and left you with what was left. How is what AllOfMP3 was doing any different?
Quality? Quality has nothing to do with it anymore. Most people today listen with headphones that have a very narrow frequency response or speakers that are even worse. They wouldn't know quality if it slapped them.
You seem to be laboring under the mistaken impression that when compared with the cost of the music the costs of packaging and distribution are significant. The only cost that means anything is the cost of the music. All the rest is just a wrapper that is next to free.
What is the cost of the music? There are two main items: actual production cost which involves paying the backup musicians, paying for the studio time, etc. and the cost of promotion. Promotion in most cases is probably a lot more than the actual production costs. Promotion covers radio air play, co-marketing funds for stores and advertising.
Do you honestly believe you are paying for the jewel case, booklet and physical distribution? Do you think these items have any bearing whatsoever on the value of the product?
You are paying to access the music. Period. Everything else is the wrapper it comes in and is considered to have no value whatsoever compared to the music itself.
It is like a candy bar. The wrapper has a function but no value. The candy is what you are buying and the wrapper makes it possible. If you could buy it without the wrapper it wouldn't be cheaper.
The cost of the CD, the jewel case, the booklet and whatever else there is is nothing compared to the cost of the music.
Problem is, your definition of a "decent price" is one that you are setting, not them. Right now, the price is zero. I don't think it is going to go up anytime soon.
"Decent price" is just a codeword for "give me what I want or I will take it."