The problem is they can't enable "fair use" and format shifting without also enabling redistribution.
Not sure what space shifting has to do with this.
You can be sure that people will take advantage of redistribution. This cycles around to meaning they sell one copy, it is posted for downloading and everyone gets theirs from that one sold copy. Why would anyone pay when it is available for free?
Let's see if you can understand it put in simpler terms.
I buy a movie. I decrypt it and post it on the Internet for the entire world to download. The entire world (at least the broadband-having part of the world) then does so.
Movie is incredibly popular and everyone is talking about it. But, unlike other movies this one made $20, total. Other movies that I did not decrypt made $100,000,000.
The studio (quite rightly) considers $999,999,980 to have been stolen from their pocket.
Nobody is going to buy movies when the are available through redistribution.
Yes, but... the issue isn't making copies but making the original. Where it used to cost millions of dollars to create the original, it still costs millions of dollars. It used to be they could sell copies to people at low cost and distribute the original cost over a large number of units.
Copies are now free. The original still costs lots and lots. Nobody is going to pay a million dollars for a movie to share with the world, not even the government.
It is going to end up that movies and music get made by people that like doing it for nothing because it is fun and they have enough money not to have to worry about who is buying lunch.
It's got very little to do with keeping people from legally using content and everything to do with preventing (well, attempting to prevent) redistribution of content.
Today, anything that allows me to format-shift allows redistribution because they are really the same thing in digital form. And redistribution means the end of any revenue because the redistribution isn't "friends and family", it is world-wide.
The Apple ][ was known in the 80's for having all software sell two copies: one on the East Coast of the US and one on the West Coast. The BBS systems then had it and shared it worldwide from that point on. This is what is going to happen with music, movies, books and everything else in digital form as broadband gains more penetration.
There isn't any way to combat it. The content owners are fighting a delaying action and all it can do is intimidate some people, it can't make the problem go away. When the revenue is gone, the business will be gone as well.
Tactically, there will be some people that get stepped on. Hard. But you are right, they aren't going to win.
However, it is the entire business that is at stake, so they are going to play. They know that without protection that movies will be a zero-revenue item within years if not months from now. That there isn't any real protection doesn't matter - they can either fold up and go away now or they can see if they can fight a delaying action.
Either way, the pirates are going to win. Nobody is ever going to pay for a DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray disc or anything else within a few years. Why should they when they can download it all for free?
People keep saying the music and movie content owners are clinging to an obsolete business model. What people seem to be missing is that while you might consider the business model to be obsolete, there really isn't any other model that results in the type of revenue required to keep the current business operations going. Could you have ad-supported movies? Maybe, but I for one won't be watching. Could you have a tip-jar model? Maybe, but at most 5% of the people will pay. There just aren't that many other alternatives that will provide the same level of revenue. The result will be they go away, completely. No business is going to survive a 95% drop in revenue.
So you can't blame them for fighting on to the last dime.
That gets them to a house. A house with an account holder in it, probably. It in no way identifies the person performing the copyright infringment.
Come on, if the account holder isn't responsible then nobody is at all, ever. The Internet remains anonymous and without consequences for everyone.
Ever try to get someone to stop brute-force cracking attempts on a system? The ISP doesn't care, or at best will just warn them so they push their attempts through a proxy. Law enforcement doesn't care until there are significant damages. So any attempts to get a script kiddy to stop results in no action until they are in some serious and deep stinky stuff. Assuming they are dumb (and almost always are) and brag about it. Because once again, the Internet is anonymous and without consequences - unless you are stupid.
The answer to all of this seems to be "Wasn't me. Must have been someone else using the Internet connection. Come on, prove otherwise!"
1. Nobody is using RFID for store inventory control. They use far simpler resonators that are cheaper.
2. Not sure, but most cars aren't using RFID. They use something sort of like RFID but not RFID.
What's wrong with just using a wideband jammer, something like a spark-gap transmitter? It would block all radio signals within a one or two mile radius and completely solve any radio frequency problems.
In the US there are very, very few positions you cannot be fired from for no reason at all. There are reasons they cannot fire people for, but there are no limits on firing people for no reason at all.
The California electricity "crisis" was manufactured by the idea that you could somehow mandate that purchasing some electricity waay over there would result in being able to deliver that electricity waay over here.
It is like pouring water into the Indian ocean to fill up a cup in Lake Michigan. Sure, water is water and it is all connected, right? Wrong.
And finding out that it didn't really work that way created some interesting situations. I believe Illinois is now going down the same road of finding out that electricity is not quite as portable as money is.
The solution is Canada, Europe and the rest of the world. The are used to living with what is available even though they know it might not be the best.
Try and get that across to the American people. Just try.
You mention giving a patient a flash drive with their records on it. How do you deal with patients modifying (or attempting to modify) the data?
You know, they want to have some obscure disease and are sure they really do have it but there isn't any evidence to support them really having it. You hand them their records and when they give them to the new doctor, volia, they were being treated for disease X.
There are also the drug-seekers. Somewhat different problem but still pretty much the same thing.
Yes, this is a psychological problem and should be treated as such. Today most people are just shunted off somewhere and it doesn't do too much harm. But digital records, especially portable digital records give an opening to these kinds of people.
Almost nobody in the US pays directly for health insurance. The number is way, way less than 20% of the population. So, yes, there would be significant restructuring in costs that would shift things around.
Yes, you might get paid more and have to pay more taxes. It would eventually balance out, I'm sure - but not right away. Probably not for a long time.
And most of the Clintonesque 40 million aren't going to be paying taxes either. So their "coverage" would be about the same as it is today. You go to the publiclly funded hospital where they have to take you and get taken care of.
A significant problem with record portability is the amount of patient fraud that can be introduced. What doesn't your doctor want to give you a sheaf of paper to take to another doctor? Because you might decide to make changes.
There are many reasons why people might do this. The obvious ones are things like you are convinced you have some disease. Your doctor doesn't agree. You get some of his letterhead and write a little note saying you do have it and take it to another doctor. If you might or might not have this disease and the tests to really determine it are best done at autopsy, you might convince the new doctor you really do have it. Of course, if the treatment is Percodan you have a new alternative source of income.
Do you believe people would not do this? You'd be wrong. It goes on plenty.
Sure, your medical records are technically "yours" but at the same time they are not yours to modify or "correct". A non-technical solution for this exists today - you don't get to have the paper. Technology isn't a perfect solution to this and would generally create a situation where this type of fraud would be even easier to pull off.
Doctors are understandabily concerned about this. If you manage to do this it would be difficult today to track modified records back. When the records are digital it would be almost impossible if they are in truth portable. And who wants a centralized health care database with everyone's information in it for every doctor or healthcare worker to have access to?
Europe generally has a quite different attitude towards death and dying than folks in the US. If you are going to die, just hurry up and get it over with. Whereas in the US it is something to be put off as long as possible, even by extraordinary means.
Until you can convince folks in the US that they just need to shut up and die with dignity, there are going to be serious differences between European and US healthcare.
Of course not. There is no legitimate reason why anyone would want to contact the domain owner about some issue with the site or its content.
And your hosting company should just reject all requests and complaints. They are just a hosting company and have no need to get involved with anything else. You pay, they host, right?
If you want to post software, movies, music and child porn that should be nobody's business but yours and the rest of the world can just get stuffed. If someone has a problem with that, they can send you an email.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the prevailing attitude and current practice.
You seem to have an interesting naive view of sex. So just deal with it, right?
OK, let's assume there are four men and four women on a ship for three years. Do you assume that everone just pairs off for the duration and gets down to business? How about two people that decide they just don't like each other? How about if the other three pairs don't feel like rearranging?
Just sending an all-male (or all-female) crew doesn't solve the problem completely but it elimates that issue.
Take a read of the first chapter of "Stranger in a Strange Land" for an interesting view of sending a bunch of supposedly committed married couples to Mars. Didn't work out so well, did it?
NASA may not be the best way of dealing with space exploration but if humans are to survive Earth is but a temporary shelter with very finite resources. There are limitless resources available off Earth and we're going to need them. The alternative is forcing the human race in what can be sustained on Earth by itself and that is a lot less than what we have now. Think 100 million people, max. You want to break the news to the teeming horde?
If her husband is telling her stuff that he shouldn't and she reveals it, it will get her husband court-martialed or at the very least discharged.
And yes, they can discharge him overseas and say "Good luck finding your way back to the states." Generally without much in the way of ID and no passport.
She also may find herself visited by some civilian law enforcement folks. I don't believe the military has any jurisdiction over her. They can make her husband's life hell, but it isn't going to affect her all that much.
Come on people, is this all that hard to understand? The military has rules that everyone in the military knows and understands. These rules are different from civilian laws.
Company discovers there is an individual that created some kind of web presence. Company does not like the content or direction of said web presence. Company tries to work with individual, gets nowhere.
Today the usual outcome is a lawsuit which usually ends up going nowhere. Someone eventually gives up and throws in the towel, usually after both sides have spent plenty of money on advertising, lawyers, PR and whatnot.
How this is resolved offline is very simple because we've had a thousand years of history where Store A puts up a sign saying McDoonalds next to Store B that already had a sign saying McDonalds. There are plenty of cases to look at where this has happened and one side can claim ownership and the other side is clearly the loser.
While politicians could be considered a little different than commercial trademarks, it really isn't that much different and would be decided along similar lines in physical space. Just try to register a corporation called McDoonalds for the business of selling hamburgers in any state. Not going to happen.
Why all of this stuff has to be subjected to lengthy litigation when it happens online escapes me completely. How it is so completely messed up online is absurd. Could I register McDoonalds.com? Absolutely, if it wasn't taken. How much did it cost McDonalds to register every single misspelling of McDonalds just to prevent this from happening? Why was it necessary for them to do this when offline it couldn't have been an issue, and couldn't have been since probably 1700 AD? Maybe since 1700 BC.
In looking at the sitetruth.com web site I see that my companies web site would come up with a neutral rating. Obviously, this is intended to indicate to the user that the site cannot be involved in commerce or if it is it lacks legitimacy. I see this as a huge problem.
Check out www.infinadyne.com. There is no SLL certificate for that web page. All SSL activity is done through a third party merchant which absorbs all of the credit card fraud we are subjected to - which is considerable. Were we to host our own credit card processing we would have to independently process 10-15% fraudulent orders to prevent them from being processed. We found a third party to do this for extremely low cost but that doesn't meet up with your expectations of a commercial web site.
Since most people believe good companies get placed higher in search rankings and bad companies (with bad feedback from customers and poor customer service) get placed lower, how exactly do you function without search engine placement?
There are businesses which aren't dealing with people who are searching, but for the most part today if you want customers you need to be in the top 3-4 of a search for your products. This might be more important than pricing, but more and more internet shoppers are using price gathering tools to the exclusion of all else. So you either have the lowest price or you lose.
How else do the crappy photo/electronics dealers in NY City get by with their practices? Price, price, price. When the three lowest prices are all from folks like that and your shopper is focused on paying less, they win.
Is it right? Not really, but that is where we have landed. Low prices beat out great service online. Low prices and high shipping will usually win out also, but some of the pricing tools have caught onto that.
Paid advertising doesn't buy you anywhere near what search engine placement gets you. With pay-for-placement (Overture), the difference between the bottom of the list and the top is everything.
Most people don't click ads to buy things. Adwords as advertising is almost pointless once you get to the point where you are paying over $1 per impression. Search engine placement - how ever it is done - is what most people are looking at. It can depend on the product, but if you are selling "NASCAR Dad" sorts of products there is a clear connection between product/site quality and search engine placement in these folks minds. That connection seems to exist for other products as well, where people equate high placement with good feedback/good reviews/etc.
Probably it is the lack of support, future upgrades and bug fixes. If you fall behind too much you lose all of this and get to pay more for the same upgrade later.
Alternatively, you can hope you never need any of the above (esp. support and bug fixes) and stick with the old product.
Even simpler - give your money to the Russian Mob and buy an "OEM Disc" that is really just a pirated version pre-downloaded for you. Force Adobe to compete with the folks selling their $700 product for $29.99.
"those who wants to earn money from these potential customers have to adept an acceptable technology"
How? Let's see here, there is free and unencumbered allowing free redistribution and there is everything else. If it can be redistributed, it will be for free. Thus ends any possible revenue.
How long until people post their iTunes DRM-free purchases for P2P sharing? Tomorrow. Maybe the next day at the most. Why would anyone purchase from iTunes when you can get the same, identical product for free elsewhere?
That's the point of this. There cannot possibly be any revenue from music any longer. Yes, they are competing with free but they are also competing with their customers sharing their purchases. Maybe everything gets bought once. Maybe. And then it joins the world-wide music catalog of P2P.
As soon as the last person gets over the idea that stealing music is wrong and illegal, there will be no more revenue from recorded music. And we are doing an excellent job of training youth today, so that day is coming Real Soon Now.
There should be no question by now that if you expose a vulnerable/suggestable person to the right kind of stimulus that you can get them to do things. Clear example is the "Stockholm Syndrome". It should not be surprising that by repeatedly play-acting killing people and creating general mayhem that some people are going to be influenced to go out and kill people.
The real question is if this affects more than just particularly suggestable people or if over time people become more open to this kind of influence. Right now, the jury is out. Some folks would rather take precautions against this sort of thing happening. Whether or not this is a paranoid delusion or simply common sense has yet to be worked out.
I have no doubt that if you took a three year old male child and had them do nothing but play GTA 3 all day long until they were 16 you would have a seriously screwed up person at the end of this experiment. But until that experiment is actually performed it is really difficult to say how screwed up they would be. So far, parents have been reluctant to volunteer their three-year-olds.
We have seen some people kill over games already. They become so deeply involved in the game and are unable to discern a life outside of the game world.
So perhaps there is a question of degree here as well. Obviously, with enough exposure you can have problems. Heck, with enough exposure to ice cream you will die. Saying the danger level for exposure is zero is just as silly as saying it is infinite. But, there are no facts currently available to say what sort of people are at risk and what levels of exposure might be risky.
Are you somehow under the impression that a cell tower and supporting equipment isn't connected to the landline network?
A cell tower is not an isolated telephone switch. It cannot route calls between cell phones by itself. It certainly does not communicate with nearby towers in any fashion other than its ATM connection. Yes, that is a big, rather fragile fiberoptic cable.
The telephone network works because there is so damn much of it. Evidently whole parts of it that you aren't familiar with. Quite a lot of it the average Joe doesn't see much of.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is they can't enable "fair use" and format shifting without also enabling redistribution.
Not sure what space shifting has to do with this.
You can be sure that people will take advantage of redistribution. This cycles around to meaning they sell one copy, it is posted for downloading and everyone gets theirs from that one sold copy. Why would anyone pay when it is available for free?
Let's see if you can understand it put in simpler terms.
I buy a movie. I decrypt it and post it on the Internet for the entire world to download. The entire world (at least the broadband-having part of the world) then does so.
Movie is incredibly popular and everyone is talking about it. But, unlike other movies this one made $20, total. Other movies that I did not decrypt made $100,000,000.
The studio (quite rightly) considers $999,999,980 to have been stolen from their pocket.
Nobody is going to buy movies when the are available through redistribution.
Yes, but... the issue isn't making copies but making the original. Where it used to cost millions of dollars to create the original, it still costs millions of dollars. It used to be they could sell copies to people at low cost and distribute the original cost over a large number of units.
Copies are now free. The original still costs lots and lots. Nobody is going to pay a million dollars for a movie to share with the world, not even the government.
It is going to end up that movies and music get made by people that like doing it for nothing because it is fun and they have enough money not to have to worry about who is buying lunch.
It's got very little to do with keeping people from legally using content and everything to do with preventing (well, attempting to prevent) redistribution of content.
Today, anything that allows me to format-shift allows redistribution because they are really the same thing in digital form. And redistribution means the end of any revenue because the redistribution isn't "friends and family", it is world-wide.
The Apple ][ was known in the 80's for having all software sell two copies: one on the East Coast of the US and one on the West Coast. The BBS systems then had it and shared it worldwide from that point on. This is what is going to happen with music, movies, books and everything else in digital form as broadband gains more penetration.
There isn't any way to combat it. The content owners are fighting a delaying action and all it can do is intimidate some people, it can't make the problem go away. When the revenue is gone, the business will be gone as well.
Tactically, there will be some people that get stepped on. Hard. But you are right, they aren't going to win.
However, it is the entire business that is at stake, so they are going to play. They know that without protection that movies will be a zero-revenue item within years if not months from now. That there isn't any real protection doesn't matter - they can either fold up and go away now or they can see if they can fight a delaying action.
Either way, the pirates are going to win. Nobody is ever going to pay for a DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray disc or anything else within a few years. Why should they when they can download it all for free?
People keep saying the music and movie content owners are clinging to an obsolete business model. What people seem to be missing is that while you might consider the business model to be obsolete, there really isn't any other model that results in the type of revenue required to keep the current business operations going. Could you have ad-supported movies? Maybe, but I for one won't be watching. Could you have a tip-jar model? Maybe, but at most 5% of the people will pay. There just aren't that many other alternatives that will provide the same level of revenue. The result will be they go away, completely. No business is going to survive a 95% drop in revenue.
So you can't blame them for fighting on to the last dime.
That gets them to a house. A house with an account holder in it, probably. It in no way identifies the person performing the copyright infringment.
Come on, if the account holder isn't responsible then nobody is at all, ever. The Internet remains anonymous and without consequences for everyone.
Ever try to get someone to stop brute-force cracking attempts on a system? The ISP doesn't care, or at best will just warn them so they push their attempts through a proxy. Law enforcement doesn't care until there are significant damages. So any attempts to get a script kiddy to stop results in no action until they are in some serious and deep stinky stuff. Assuming they are dumb (and almost always are) and brag about it. Because once again, the Internet is anonymous and without consequences - unless you are stupid.
The answer to all of this seems to be "Wasn't me. Must have been someone else using the Internet connection. Come on, prove otherwise!"
1. Nobody is using RFID for store inventory control. They use far simpler resonators that are cheaper.
2. Not sure, but most cars aren't using RFID. They use something sort of like RFID but not RFID.
What's wrong with just using a wideband jammer, something like a spark-gap transmitter? It would block all radio signals within a one or two mile radius and completely solve any radio frequency problems.
What settlement would that be? Unemployment?
In the US there are very, very few positions you cannot be fired from for no reason at all. There are reasons they cannot fire people for, but there are no limits on firing people for no reason at all.
The California electricity "crisis" was manufactured by the idea that you could somehow mandate that purchasing some electricity waay over there would result in being able to deliver that electricity waay over here.
It is like pouring water into the Indian ocean to fill up a cup in Lake Michigan. Sure, water is water and it is all connected, right? Wrong.
And finding out that it didn't really work that way created some interesting situations. I believe Illinois is now going down the same road of finding out that electricity is not quite as portable as money is.
The solution is Canada, Europe and the rest of the world. The are used to living with what is available even though they know it might not be the best.
Try and get that across to the American people. Just try.
You mention giving a patient a flash drive with their records on it. How do you deal with patients modifying (or attempting to modify) the data?
You know, they want to have some obscure disease and are sure they really do have it but there isn't any evidence to support them really having it. You hand them their records and when they give them to the new doctor, volia, they were being treated for disease X.
There are also the drug-seekers. Somewhat different problem but still pretty much the same thing.
Yes, this is a psychological problem and should be treated as such. Today most people are just shunted off somewhere and it doesn't do too much harm. But digital records, especially portable digital records give an opening to these kinds of people.
Almost nobody in the US pays directly for health insurance. The number is way, way less than 20% of the population. So, yes, there would be significant restructuring in costs that would shift things around.
Yes, you might get paid more and have to pay more taxes. It would eventually balance out, I'm sure - but not right away. Probably not for a long time.
And most of the Clintonesque 40 million aren't going to be paying taxes either. So their "coverage" would be about the same as it is today. You go to the publiclly funded hospital where they have to take you and get taken care of.
A significant problem with record portability is the amount of patient fraud that can be introduced. What doesn't your doctor want to give you a sheaf of paper to take to another doctor? Because you might decide to make changes.
There are many reasons why people might do this. The obvious ones are things like you are convinced you have some disease. Your doctor doesn't agree. You get some of his letterhead and write a little note saying you do have it and take it to another doctor. If you might or might not have this disease and the tests to really determine it are best done at autopsy, you might convince the new doctor you really do have it. Of course, if the treatment is Percodan you have a new alternative source of income.
Do you believe people would not do this? You'd be wrong. It goes on plenty.
Sure, your medical records are technically "yours" but at the same time they are not yours to modify or "correct". A non-technical solution for this exists today - you don't get to have the paper. Technology isn't a perfect solution to this and would generally create a situation where this type of fraud would be even easier to pull off.
Doctors are understandabily concerned about this. If you manage to do this it would be difficult today to track modified records back. When the records are digital it would be almost impossible if they are in truth portable. And who wants a centralized health care database with everyone's information in it for every doctor or healthcare worker to have access to?
Europe generally has a quite different attitude towards death and dying than folks in the US. If you are going to die, just hurry up and get it over with. Whereas in the US it is something to be put off as long as possible, even by extraordinary means.
Until you can convince folks in the US that they just need to shut up and die with dignity, there are going to be serious differences between European and US healthcare.
Of course not. There is no legitimate reason why anyone would want to contact the domain owner about some issue with the site or its content.
And your hosting company should just reject all requests and complaints. They are just a hosting company and have no need to get involved with anything else. You pay, they host, right?
If you want to post software, movies, music and child porn that should be nobody's business but yours and the rest of the world can just get stuffed. If someone has a problem with that, they can send you an email.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the prevailing attitude and current practice.
You seem to have an interesting naive view of sex. So just deal with it, right?
OK, let's assume there are four men and four women on a ship for three years. Do you assume that everone just pairs off for the duration and gets down to business? How about two people that decide they just don't like each other? How about if the other three pairs don't feel like rearranging?
Just sending an all-male (or all-female) crew doesn't solve the problem completely but it elimates that issue.
Take a read of the first chapter of "Stranger in a Strange Land" for an interesting view of sending a bunch of supposedly committed married couples to Mars. Didn't work out so well, did it?
NASA may not be the best way of dealing with space exploration but if humans are to survive Earth is but a temporary shelter with very finite resources. There are limitless resources available off Earth and we're going to need them. The alternative is forcing the human race in what can be sustained on Earth by itself and that is a lot less than what we have now. Think 100 million people, max. You want to break the news to the teeming horde?
If her husband is telling her stuff that he shouldn't and she reveals it, it will get her husband court-martialed or at the very least discharged.
And yes, they can discharge him overseas and say "Good luck finding your way back to the states." Generally without much in the way of ID and no passport.
She also may find herself visited by some civilian law enforcement folks. I don't believe the military has any jurisdiction over her. They can make her husband's life hell, but it isn't going to affect her all that much.
Come on people, is this all that hard to understand? The military has rules that everyone in the military knows and understands. These rules are different from civilian laws.
Company discovers there is an individual that created some kind of web presence. Company does not like the content or direction of said web presence. Company tries to work with individual, gets nowhere.
Today the usual outcome is a lawsuit which usually ends up going nowhere. Someone eventually gives up and throws in the towel, usually after both sides have spent plenty of money on advertising, lawyers, PR and whatnot.
How this is resolved offline is very simple because we've had a thousand years of history where Store A puts up a sign saying McDoonalds next to Store B that already had a sign saying McDonalds. There are plenty of cases to look at where this has happened and one side can claim ownership and the other side is clearly the loser.
While politicians could be considered a little different than commercial trademarks, it really isn't that much different and would be decided along similar lines in physical space. Just try to register a corporation called McDoonalds for the business of selling hamburgers in any state. Not going to happen.
Why all of this stuff has to be subjected to lengthy litigation when it happens online escapes me completely. How it is so completely messed up online is absurd. Could I register McDoonalds.com? Absolutely, if it wasn't taken. How much did it cost McDonalds to register every single misspelling of McDonalds just to prevent this from happening? Why was it necessary for them to do this when offline it couldn't have been an issue, and couldn't have been since probably 1700 AD? Maybe since 1700 BC.
In looking at the sitetruth.com web site I see that my companies web site would come up with a neutral rating. Obviously, this is intended to indicate to the user that the site cannot be involved in commerce or if it is it lacks legitimacy. I see this as a huge problem.
Check out www.infinadyne.com. There is no SLL certificate for that web page. All SSL activity is done through a third party merchant which absorbs all of the credit card fraud we are subjected to - which is considerable. Were we to host our own credit card processing we would have to independently process 10-15% fraudulent orders to prevent them from being processed. We found a third party to do this for extremely low cost but that doesn't meet up with your expectations of a commercial web site.
I'll bet we're not the only ones doing this.
Since most people believe good companies get placed higher in search rankings and bad companies (with bad feedback from customers and poor customer service) get placed lower, how exactly do you function without search engine placement?
There are businesses which aren't dealing with people who are searching, but for the most part today if you want customers you need to be in the top 3-4 of a search for your products. This might be more important than pricing, but more and more internet shoppers are using price gathering tools to the exclusion of all else. So you either have the lowest price or you lose.
How else do the crappy photo/electronics dealers in NY City get by with their practices? Price, price, price. When the three lowest prices are all from folks like that and your shopper is focused on paying less, they win.
Is it right? Not really, but that is where we have landed. Low prices beat out great service online. Low prices and high shipping will usually win out also, but some of the pricing tools have caught onto that.
Paid advertising doesn't buy you anywhere near what search engine placement gets you. With pay-for-placement (Overture), the difference between the bottom of the list and the top is everything.
Most people don't click ads to buy things. Adwords as advertising is almost pointless once you get to the point where you are paying over $1 per impression. Search engine placement - how ever it is done - is what most people are looking at. It can depend on the product, but if you are selling "NASCAR Dad" sorts of products there is a clear connection between product/site quality and search engine placement in these folks minds. That connection seems to exist for other products as well, where people equate high placement with good feedback/good reviews/etc.
Probably it is the lack of support, future upgrades and bug fixes. If you fall behind too much you lose all of this and get to pay more for the same upgrade later.
Alternatively, you can hope you never need any of the above (esp. support and bug fixes) and stick with the old product.
Even simpler - give your money to the Russian Mob and buy an "OEM Disc" that is really just a pirated version pre-downloaded for you. Force Adobe to compete with the folks selling their $700 product for $29.99.
"those who wants to earn money from these potential customers have to adept an acceptable technology"
How? Let's see here, there is free and unencumbered allowing free redistribution and there is everything else. If it can be redistributed, it will be for free. Thus ends any possible revenue.
How long until people post their iTunes DRM-free purchases for P2P sharing? Tomorrow. Maybe the next day at the most. Why would anyone purchase from iTunes when you can get the same, identical product for free elsewhere?
That's the point of this. There cannot possibly be any revenue from music any longer. Yes, they are competing with free but they are also competing with their customers sharing their purchases. Maybe everything gets bought once. Maybe. And then it joins the world-wide music catalog of P2P.
As soon as the last person gets over the idea that stealing music is wrong and illegal, there will be no more revenue from recorded music. And we are doing an excellent job of training youth today, so that day is coming Real Soon Now.
Silly.
There should be no question by now that if you expose a vulnerable/suggestable person to the right kind of stimulus that you can get them to do things. Clear example is the "Stockholm Syndrome". It should not be surprising that by repeatedly play-acting killing people and creating general mayhem that some people are going to be influenced to go out and kill people.
The real question is if this affects more than just particularly suggestable people or if over time people become more open to this kind of influence. Right now, the jury is out. Some folks would rather take precautions against this sort of thing happening. Whether or not this is a paranoid delusion or simply common sense has yet to be worked out.
I have no doubt that if you took a three year old male child and had them do nothing but play GTA 3 all day long until they were 16 you would have a seriously screwed up person at the end of this experiment. But until that experiment is actually performed it is really difficult to say how screwed up they would be. So far, parents have been reluctant to volunteer their three-year-olds.
We have seen some people kill over games already. They become so deeply involved in the game and are unable to discern a life outside of the game world.
So perhaps there is a question of degree here as well. Obviously, with enough exposure you can have problems. Heck, with enough exposure to ice cream you will die. Saying the danger level for exposure is zero is just as silly as saying it is infinite. But, there are no facts currently available to say what sort of people are at risk and what levels of exposure might be risky.
Are you somehow under the impression that a cell tower and supporting equipment isn't connected to the landline network?
A cell tower is not an isolated telephone switch. It cannot route calls between cell phones by itself. It certainly does not communicate with nearby towers in any fashion other than its ATM connection. Yes, that is a big, rather fragile fiberoptic cable.
The telephone network works because there is so damn much of it. Evidently whole parts of it that you aren't familiar with. Quite a lot of it the average Joe doesn't see much of.