The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist. Of course, neither will the Golf Channel, or EWTN and that might be a good thing.
The far, far bigger downside will be with consumers paying directly for programming they will be faced with a decision every month (at least!) of "is this channel worth it?" Today, these costs are hidden whereas with this model it will be clear and obvious - and most channels will fail the "worth it" test. End result? There will be far, far fewer channels if any are left at all. HBO will remain because it is already passing the "worth it" test every month for every viewer that gets it. But virtually nothing else is going to make it.
Sure, you might be willing to subsidize the SciFi channel, but just about everyone else will not. Same thing goes for the Golf Channel - where there might be hundreds of people that would easily plunk down $20 a month to receive it, that isn't enough people by far. So it dies. ESPN? They might survive, but it will be a near thing.
A far bigger question is sports in general. Today what pays for the entire college sports program, everything from golf to swimming to polo? Football television revenue. Wipe out the advertising there and there is no more television revenue or certainly not anywhere near what it is today. So most colleges will fold up their sports programs, all of them, simply for lack of funds. Was someone thinking of building a billion-dollar sports palace for a pro sports team? Ha. Without television revenue, which all comes from ads, there will be no more huge sports palaces. There will not be million-dollar contracts for NFL players either. So ESPN might survive, but there will be virtually nothing to show on it. Bye-bye ESPN.
No, without advertising revenue you are looking at a signficant remaking of American society in ways you cannot imagine. I can't either - it is too sweeping a change with television ad revenue sponsoring or supporting so many different aspects. Were this to change - and I really doubt it will - the changes will affect every single person in the country, probably in a negative manner.
There is still a normal average salery to be made as an artist, you just got to work hard, just like everyone else and not hope people will just buy your 1 good song with ten crap ones for what amounts to several times minimum wage EVEN if you had to perform it live.
Sorry, but that salary isn't there today. The problem is in the US that (1) almost nobody is actually paying for music anymore and (2) the ones that are paying are spreading their payments across thousands of artists. End result is recorded music is free and live performances are expensive to put on. Gone are the days where a bar would invite a group in to play and pay them - the expectation is they will do this for free or even pay the bar for the opportunity to be heard.
Europe has a strong tradition of supporting artists of all sorts by directly paying them from public money. So maybe in Europe you can decide to be a musician and survive. In the US it is unlikely many will choose to even learn to play an instrument in school because it is an avenue toward... nothing.
A long time ago a friend of mine told me a story about a job he created. He was interested in pipe organs and learned how to make organ pipes. He found a few places that had antique pipe organs that needed some pipes replaced and he was the only person around that could make them. He did this for several years but discovered that there simply was no market for organ pipes in the 1960s in Chicago. He could no longer do this and survive. Today, music is what pipe organs were back then - there is no market for it. Sure, there is plenty of music but it is being given away or taken for free.
I suspect the guy with the horn in the subway tunnel playing for change is getting about as much as most people from sales of their music today.
The problem with patronage is you get what you pay for. In the case of music in the 1600s and 1700s nearly all "popular" music came from patronage and overall it was very alike. So you had all the artists striving for patronage and the rich patrons were paying for a particular sort of music.
Today, the folks that are likely to be paying are over 40 and not so much into hip-hop, trance or electronica. Lots of 70s era stuff. OK, if you want two centuries of music in the mold of 1972 be my guest.
Well, you do understand that things like some AM radio stations are designated as information sources for emergencies and are required to be on the air during such emergencies, right? This means that such radio stations have to have backup power and diverse antenna systems so they really can stay on the air.
Cell phones, on the other hand, have no such requirements today. The network is pretty robust so if one cell site goes down the impact isn't all that great. But, there are no requirements for how long sites can be down, which can mean in a rural area that a cell site can be down for a couple of weeks. Unlike land lines, there are no tariff requirements for uptime. Which means that cell service is available when it is available and when it isn't,... well, it isn't. No requirements means it is completely unsuitable for emergency use.
Example - land lines are powered by 48V DC and a good part of a CO is the banks of batteries that are required for long power outages. They have backup generators as well, but I believe they are required to have TWO DAYS of battery power. Contrast this with a cell tower that might have 15 minutes on a UPS. I suppose we could expect the government to simply mandate that power outages not occur...
Once cell service is tariffed like land lines are today, then we can talk about how cell phones can be used in emergencies for informing people. Until then, it is silly to even think about such stuff - it would mean virtually cutting people off. We have lots of interesting gadgets today, but for emergencies we haven't really moved from where things were in 1960. And every proposal centered around eliminating some aspect of this support infrastructure is from people that simply do not understand the role of fairly low-tech but extremely reliable systems in emergency information and communication.
Here's another one for you. You can receive AM broadcasts with a batteryless receiver - unless of course they eliminate AM broadcast in favor of some digital technology that makes it impossible to receive such emergency broadcasts in this manner. What happens when the batteries run out? Well, better hope that doesn't happen, right?
You do understand that dial-up was $30+ a month when there was a physical modem for each possible connection and a whole bank of modems in each place an ISP wanted to make it possible for people to connect to. These modems would fail and need to be replaced requiring an ISP technician to go to the place where the modems were - not the telephone office, by the way - and replace the failed ones. Huge expense for maintenance.
What allowed the price to drop was the phone company completely took over the modems and the maintenance. You would pay to have a T-1 connection or better and have data calls routed to it. The phone switchgear actually handled the modem functions internally, without a modem being involved. This made the costs for dial-up service drop to almost nothing and allowed for a huge leap in service without any maintenance cost. This also meant that any CO with the required software (and hardware?) could now be used as a dial-in location rather than requiring each ISP have banks of modems at some location. This also ushered in the era of the 50Kbps modems because they were connecting directly to the telephone switchgear.
In short, technology caught up with modems for ISPs and made them obsolete, eliminating the maintenance costs.
You seem to be under the impression that the taxes on cable service are retained by the cable company. Sorry, but they are paid to the state and local governments that enacted the taxes. There used to be some subsidies for building out but those are long gone today.
What, do you think the content is free or something?
Ignoring the television content for the moment, just the connection to the Internet for data is going to be 100K a month, easy. We aren't talking $700 for a T1 here.
Problem is, soon there will not be sufficient "unlimited" bandwidth to go around. The way to fix this is either revamp every cable system in the country (waves wand and makes it so...) or to decrease usage through metering.
Right now in most areas there simply isn't enough bandwidth available to support more than maybe 25% of the homes using some kind of IP TV service. Once that threshold is exceeded trying to watch Netflix or Hulu - which do not buffer - will be extremely frustrating to the point of making the whole thing pointless to even try. There are plenty of smart people out there that know this and know the technical limitations aren't going to be eased overnight.
So what can happen? Well, we can let all the IP TV services slide down into the swamp of bankruptcy. Or, maybe we can figure out a way to keep the usage down to around 20-25% where the users of these services will be happy and the jobs at Netflix will continue.
I really don't think there are too many options here.
The problem with forced access in Illinois was the rate set by the utility board was below the cost of maintaining the lines. It worked for a short while, but the phone company - Ameritech then - made very sure they never had to install another competitor's DSLAM ever again. Also, technology moved beyond the copper-to-the-CO stage that made DSL possible. With a very, very crowded vault connected via fiber to the CO there was no longer any physical space for a rack of competitors DSLAM devices. This effectively ended the competitive DSL market in Illinois.
Now, if there is fair and reasonable pricing for access, such a scheme could work for cable and DSL both again. Except it will not be fair and reasonable. The folks behind this sort of thing in local and state government want to punish the wireline owners for their investment and therefore the rates are set below cost. End result is the scheme is completely unworkable with the wireline provider fighting every step of the way until either the technology passes it by or competitors are driven out of business by the wireline provider's lack of service.
Forced access is a dream, and it isn't going to happen again. It turns into the taking by force of property from one company and using it for the benefit of other companies. It doesn't take long for the company that owns the property to figure this out. They have two choices: either defeat the scheme one way or another or fold up and find something else to do. Ameritech was able to defeat the scheme by both lack of service and technology marching on.
I think the idea is to encrypt the data and not have the key stored anywhere.
This is roughly like not having a file cabinet, just a shredder. Very secure records storage with zero possibility of any sort of disclosure. It is more difficult to access, however.
It is perhaps the only way to be truely safe.
Re:Obama is really serious about global warming...
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NRC Chairman Resigns
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Unfortunately, everything that Obama has actually done shows a path to reducing energy availability and energy use rather than changing the way energy is generated in the US. He has said openly that he wants to financially destroy coal generation, and I believe him. No changes have been made in the licensing and permitting process for nuclear generation, which means a very small group of people (one, perhaps?) can block construction at any point in the process.
Obviously he believes in two things: AGW is real, and resource use in the US is out of line with the rest of the world and must be reined in.
As the Republican candidate for president can only win if people are so totally disgusted with Obama that it is "Obama Must Go" (OMG!), there is a substantial chance that we will be looking at the next four years where energy use becomes more expensive and less reliable. Reliability is the key because businesses will be forced to self-generate in some manner without a reliable external source. Homes will go the same route for people with the money to do so - how many times can you tolerate a blackout for eight or more hours? And what would it really take for you to be able go off-grid?
The real problem is going to be for people that simply do not have the disposible income to invest in solar or wind systems. For example, anyone living in an apartment complex in the northern part of the US - solar simply isn't practical for the building owners and so the tenants are going to be at the mercy of whatever is left over after commercial interests get priority on electricity during the day. You will have a remote switch on your meter to simply turn off your electricity soon.
We are certainly going to be seeing more of this. The problem is businesses have contracted for services based on at least things staying the same. We have five years now of shrinkage in the economy, jobs, everything. And it is going to continue down the same road.
A big part of the problem is expectations and perceptions. What really torpedoed the housing market was a perception that things were suddenly different. It made no difference whatsoever that a house valued at a million dollars one day hadn't changed in any way but the next day people were only willing to pay a half a million for the same house because of a perception that the housing market was crashing. This, obviously, led to a crash in most of the country. Yes, there was a possibility that people might default on some loans - and then because a lot of goods and services were no longer selling as they did a lot of people lost their jobs - and once again, perception became reality and people defaulted on loans after they lost their jobs.
Of course the Postal Service is going to try to weasel out from this contract for stuff they no longer need. They might get away with it, unlike most other businesses and individuals. A lot of the time a business will purchase equipment and hire people based on a contract that isn't really cancellable and often it is difficult to get out of those. Try signing up for a lawn service for five years and cancelling after the first year - you might get sued as well.
A far bigger problem is that there will be a ripple effect here. Northrop Grumman will fire a bunch of people that were supposed to be working on this. Then will in turn stop buying as much stuff leading to further contractions spreading out through the economy. It is what happens in a shrinking economy rather than a growing one. This has happened before, but the problem is this time there is no confidence that the government is capable of fixing things in any manner other than throwing money around like a drunken sailor. And rather than just a crisis of confidence, there is actually a great deal of confidence that things are just going to get worse and worse.
Think about it. In 5-10 years, we won't have Cable, we'll have HD Video on Demand Networks, something like Hulu or Netflix instead.
No, not everyone. A small minority will no doubt, but the infrastructure simply isn't there to support this.
For cable the way it works today is there is the "head end" where all the signals originate. This is connected to a number of neighborhood nodes with somewhere between 500 and 1000 homes connected to each node. The connection from the head end to the node is a fiber link with a capacity somewhere between 1 and 3 GB today. The homes are connected on coax from the node.
The problem is, you take 1GB and divide it by 1000 and you get 1MB - but not all of the 1GB is available because a bunch of it is used for television programming. As the analog channels are eliminated and replaced with digital and on-demand stuff the dedicated bandwidth changes, but even at the best case you are going to have maybe 800MB available for non-TV uses. That means even on a 500-home node you have 1.6MB available per home, if they are using it. Today, most are not and you can get 20MB down to a home pretty easily.
In the Phoenix area Cox believes themselves to be pretty advanced and are moving to 3GB fiber to every node and adding nodes to bring each of them down to around 500 homes. Even at that you have at best 3MB/sec deliverable to each home. That just about covers ONE Netflix stream.
DSL is operating today with about the same constraints, although there tend to be a lot more homes per node and often the connection from the DSLAM to the ISP is much less than 1GB.
To bring the reality of IP TV to the masses the entire network is going to have to be replaced with a lot more nodes. And much faster links to the head end. It is going to take at least 10 years to get there and nobody has started yet because the demand simply isn't there today. To get to where we are today it took about 15 years from start to end - from around 1996 or so until 2010. It isn't going to be any simpler to do what is going to be required.
IPTV is something for early adopters and when it maxes out the network it will be interesting to watch what happens. Clearly Netflix as a DVD distribution business will survive but the "watch instantly" is going to have to have devices that buffer or it will die.
I would offer that music piracy today is indeed willful with the clear intent to commercially destroy the publisher by giving away their works. Nearly everyone that is on the "production" side in music and movie piracy is very much interested in the destruction of the publishers by removing any revenue they might get.
It brings us all one step closer to the Roddenberry dream of the Star Trek Economy... or at least that is the thinking behind a lot of this. First you destroy any value non-material goods might have and then the material ones will have no value soon after that. Of course, it is an utterly ignorant and misguided theory, but it sounds really good on the Internet, especially late at night.
This sounds pretty good on the surface - the US government finally doing something that might positively effect the economy and workers.
Unfortunately, there is this thing the US belongs to called the WTO. And China is also a member. So, China will complain to the WTO which is all about free, tariff-free trade. WTO will come back with instructions to the US that these tariffs must be removed... or else. The "or else" part is pretty much that China will introduce their own tariffs on the few US goods imported into China - but also that other countries will be enabled to also tariff US produced goods far in excess of what they are already.
So the tariff will be removed in a couple of months at most. We all signed on to the WTO and it is an organization that is clearly focused on a race to the bottom. All manufacturing will be in third-world countries with low, low, low labor and production costs. And the sooner the US population understands that the better.
We have seen the total number of skilled workers employed in the US drop in the last five years or so but it has been on the decline for some time now. Everyone is waiting for the government to "do something" to bring back skilled worker jobs so the middle class can recover and once again spend money on US-produced goods and services. Well, it isn't happening. Companies that employed 10 people doing a particular job have found they can get the job done with four people now. Between just pushing those four people harder and a lessening of demand, four are all that is needed. The other six jobs aren't coming back, not in any realistic time frame. We are looking at what the government says is 8% unemployment but in reality it is more like 30% - when you count the people that are working part-time as Walmart greeters becase there is nothing else. The government cannot force companies to hire back the workers they shed because they simply are not needed. The government cannot create new companies to employ people, unless you really want the WPA and CCC.
First off, if your company was in business to make wrenches, would it be smart to pay someone else to make wrenches and just sell them? Or, would it make more sense to be making wrenches better than other people and sell those? See, one way you are a sales company that isn't making anything and the other is you are actually making something. Same goes for software, trust me.
For a software company you might have some old products that could be pushed off onto some other folks for maintenance. Or, you could consider outsourcing accounting and bookkeeping. But outsourcing the core product(s) that establish your identity for the future is... well, madness.
The basic problem is the folks you outsource to are looking for a paycheck and have little interest in a product. You, on the other hand, count on a product as a way of surviving into the future. To tie yourself to some folks doing this with little supervision (and don't kid yourself, there won't be anywhere near enough) for the future isn't going to work out well. I have heard of this with a number of organizations and while they can get some cheap development done, it is generally something that simply needs to be redone on a crash basis when customers start noticing defects and quality problems. Also, you will find a lot of outsourced development done exactly to specs - and done in a virtually unmaintainable manner. It does exactly what was specified, no more and no less - but to add some new feature takes a huge amount of effort because there was zero flexibility written into the code.
Yes, having developers in house is more expensive, no doubt about that. For things that are not critical to the business at hand you can outsource and get reasonable results - it may have some problems and may not be as flexible as you would like but you can live with it. Core product functionality on the other hand you better have a lot better control over and instill quality and flexibility in the development team from the start. Can't do that remotely when the team changes every week - which is common for such arrangements.
Society worked in the most part 100 years ago because everyone knew that (a) everyone was watching and (b) people cared about their environment. So if someone yelled "Stop thief!" a lot of people in the area would pay attention and grab the thief.
The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.
Today it is clear that nobody cares. They have their own lives to live and if someone wants to dump trash in a public part, so what? If one person is killing another, people walk by thinking "glad is not me" without a thought that it easily could be. In some ways it is true that most of the time most people aren't assholes. But the tendancy towards unthinkingly unkind behavior is increased when people are sure nobody is watching - hence while many will not shoplift almost everyone will pirate stuff in the privacy of their home rather than pay.
The Internet isn't helping out much here, as people hide behind pseudo-identities and handles. This means the co-worker you are trusting at work may be the asshat that is screwing with your daughter's head on the Internet. You just don't know and if done properly will never know. And the co-worker may be a great buddy in public where people can see but on the Internet feels immune and invulnerable.
Since the 1960s we have seen a great lessening of social involvement. People don't care what their neighbors are doing as long as they don't bother them with it. People will walk by panhandlers on the street - which is a good thing - but also just walk by someone injured. Women are taught from birth that if someone wants to help them they probably have an agenda that isn't good. While in 1920 Officer Friendly was the neighborhood cop today we know that cops are there to sodomize powerless people with broomsticks and do whatever it takes to get their quota of tickets, and again, nobody is watching, nobody cares and nobody is going to do anything.
The risk of getting caught is almost non-existent today. If you chase down the statistics you find that major crimes - like armed robbery - have at best a 10-20% chance of resulting in jail time. Murder is a little better, rape is a little worse. The odds are definitely in favor of the criminal and they know it. Now, on the street it works out because after 5 to 10 such crimes they certainly do end up getting caught, convicted and jailed just because the percentages work that way. But it really sucks to be told that your rapist will certainly go free this time but will be caught eventually.
Do not believe for a second that "society" is watching your back today. Your community doesn't care and isn't interested in your problems or difficulties. You might have a few friends that do, but not the community at large. And because of this each one of us is less safe and less secure. No, I don't have the answer to this because I'd say it is the result of population, immigration and just population density itself. But it is not 1950 and June Cleaver isn't interested in what your children are doing any more.
More than likely large multinational companies would simply move into the retail space, pushing their own products and working to displace others. There would be no point to research and development because anything spent there would be wasted - no return after five years. But if you can out-distribute others in the retail space you have an eternal revenue stream. A would say all R&D would end on a corporate level and be replaced by investigators and spies - to collect up the ideas of others so they could be distributed effectively.
Sort of like an acquisition strategy, only without the payment involved.
I'd say more accurately that you could buy Windows XP at Walmart without Microsoft seeing a dime. And you could get it "officially branded" in 100s of ways - like the NASCAR version of Windows XP with a built-in racing theme.
Would a few techies know they could add this theme anytime? Sure. Would that keep Walmart from putting DVDs on the shelf? No.
You are joking, right? Benefit to small companies? How? Small company S publishes a book which gets great reviews. Amazon grabs this and offers it for 50% of the price from S and offers it in a variety of formats - without consulting S about it at all. Walmart can also refuse to carry the book from S and simply print it themselves.
Sure, authors could "build upon the works of others", but anything even remotely successful gets grabbed by a few media giants and they market the heck out of it. Without having to pay anyone for the privilege.
You do understand that the only thing that keeps the publisher of the Harry Potter books from hiring out the writing of more stories in the Harry Potter world is the copyright by J. K. Rowling? I am sure the publisher would, if they could. The real interesting question would be with a successful series does the copyright on the characters continue with new books in the series or does it end with the first book's copyright period?
Well, one way to look at it is that if there was only a short copyright exclusivity period, this would be a huge boon for Amazon, Walmart and Sony. Maybe a few others, but I think those would be the biggest beneficiaries. Why? Because nearly everything they are publishing or distributing would immediately cease to have any cost ot them - they could simply produce these works for free. For Amazon the difference might only be 10-20%, but for Walmart it would be 50-70%.
Trust me, Walmart is fully capable of churning out their own copies of DVDs and CDs. Books, too. They probably wouldn't bother with magazines - who really wants a five-year-old magazine? But for everything else it would be Walmart's own brand.
Sony would take advantage of this as well with new artists getting the back position in the catalog vs. anything five years old or older. Movies as well, with everything five to ten years old being immediately republished under a new brand that didn't have to compensate Sony Pictures - meaning all the residuals contracts would be worthless.
What you are missing is once a publisher has the manuscript, why publish the book immediately? Copyright on the manuscript runs out in a few years and they can then publish the book without paying the author anything at all.
It would create a situation where old stuff is vastly more valuable to distributors than new stuff. Anything old they get 100% of the revenue on whereas with anything less than 5 years old they have to split it - even considering the cut authors get is pretty small.
There are a bunch of problems with getting the government in on pharmaceuticals, probably the two biggest are competition and exports.
Competition? There is no competition with the government. This means that where today there may be five different drugs only one would survive in a government-run environment. The other companies simply would not be offered the chance to compete as there would be no point. This would be in spite of some folks doing better with a different, competing drug.
Exports? Why would the US government send pharmaceuticals - that are subsidized presumably for the benefit of US citizens - to some other country? Oh, there might be some sales to UK and Israel in a limited fashion. Maybe Japan. But I cannot imagine such sales to, say, Venezuela. Or Saudi Arabia. This would change the world of pharmaceuticals from a few multinational companies to every nation having to produce their own or not getting anything.
Do you not suspect that if the government were in charge of pharmaceuticals there would be all sorts of export restrictions? Today, US companies are prohibited from exporting anything to Iran, Syria and North Korea but that is all. Why would the US government ship pharmaceticals to Venezeula, for instance? Or Cuba - which is permitted today, only you have to jump through some hoops. By their own rules, Cuba would certainly be out of the picture.
Similarly, the US government would pretty much have to make everything. Governments do not compete with private businesses - they simply make rules making the competition illegal. So while today in the marketplace we have asprin, ibuprofin and acetaminophen under a government-run program there would be only one.
No, I don't think that is going to work. Socialized medicine delivery is going to be enough of a mess in the US when the government finally takes over all of it in a couple of years. Socialized product creation would be entirely too much for the US government to handle in a reasonable way.
The problem with eliminating exclusive copyright rights is always pretty much the same - it might affect consumers positively in a very slight manner but it would affect the distribution of "stuff" in a huge way. All of a sudden, the biggest distributor - the one with the most cash and fattest pipeline to the consumer - wins because they can distribute EVERYTHING. They no longer need to compensate anyone else so all the money is theirs. Also, it ceases to matter if they are paying for the creation of stuff or not - they get to distribute it.
Now, delaying this boon to WalMart or Sony by five years might seem to be significant, but it isn't really. Simply what happens is the big distributor (because it would sort out quickly to be just one) is promoting five-year-old stuff. Anything new gets short shrift because the revenue picture is so distorted - 100% to the distributor for old stuff, 50% (or less) to the distributor for new stuff. The effect would be that you would have to hunt far and wide for "new" stuff but the old stuff being far more valuable would be right there in front of you.
Think about Amazon not having to pay anyone for five-year-old books but having to pay 70-90% of their revenue out for new stuff. What do you think would happen?
If the idea is to make WalMart, Sony or maybe Amazon rich, this is a great idea. If the idea is to free consumers from restrictions on redistribution, this isn't so great.
A. it isn't a reactor and does not sustain a chain reaction. It is a neutron source only. It does take a bunch of material to produce a strong, continuous neutron beam.
B. Yes, "weapons grade" is just the ratio of U328 vs. U235.
C. A common nuclear reactor that produces heat has nearly zero neutron emissions outside of the reactor vessel. Even open-core reactors where water was used as a moderator did not have strong neutron emissions. The neutrons are kept in the fissionable material (pile, rods, etc.) to keep the reaction going and excess neutrons escaping from the fissile material would just be a safety hazard.
If you are going to make a number of big, primitive bombs you need hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium. These wouldn't fit on a missle but would be something you put in the hold of a cargo ship. Yes, the US has thermonuclear warheads that weigh around 1,000 lbs or less but most of them were more in the range of 10,000 lbs - five tons. The devices dropped on Japan were 8900 lbs and 10,300 lbs to put things in perspective. Putting that kind of payload on a missile isn't a small effort but it is trivial to put in a cargo ship. And setting one off in a harbor creates a lot more damage from the water being vaporized as well so this is a huge benefit for the folks responsible for the bomb.
Of course, it is an obvious ploy and I can't imagine Israel allowing a clearly-marked Iranian ship into a Tel Aviv's harbor. Of course, nobody would ever put the wrong flag on a cargo ship, so we don't have to worry about that, right?
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The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist. Of course, neither will the Golf Channel, or EWTN and that might be a good thing.
The far, far bigger downside will be with consumers paying directly for programming they will be faced with a decision every month (at least!) of "is this channel worth it?" Today, these costs are hidden whereas with this model it will be clear and obvious - and most channels will fail the "worth it" test. End result? There will be far, far fewer channels if any are left at all. HBO will remain because it is already passing the "worth it" test every month for every viewer that gets it. But virtually nothing else is going to make it.
Sure, you might be willing to subsidize the SciFi channel, but just about everyone else will not. Same thing goes for the Golf Channel - where there might be hundreds of people that would easily plunk down $20 a month to receive it, that isn't enough people by far. So it dies. ESPN? They might survive, but it will be a near thing.
A far bigger question is sports in general. Today what pays for the entire college sports program, everything from golf to swimming to polo? Football television revenue. Wipe out the advertising there and there is no more television revenue or certainly not anywhere near what it is today. So most colleges will fold up their sports programs, all of them, simply for lack of funds. Was someone thinking of building a billion-dollar sports palace for a pro sports team? Ha. Without television revenue, which all comes from ads, there will be no more huge sports palaces. There will not be million-dollar contracts for NFL players either. So ESPN might survive, but there will be virtually nothing to show on it. Bye-bye ESPN.
No, without advertising revenue you are looking at a signficant remaking of American society in ways you cannot imagine. I can't either - it is too sweeping a change with television ad revenue sponsoring or supporting so many different aspects. Were this to change - and I really doubt it will - the changes will affect every single person in the country, probably in a negative manner.
There is still a normal average salery to be made as an artist, you just got to work hard, just like everyone else and not hope people will just buy your 1 good song with ten crap ones for what amounts to several times minimum wage EVEN if you had to perform it live.
Sorry, but that salary isn't there today. The problem is in the US that (1) almost nobody is actually paying for music anymore and (2) the ones that are paying are spreading their payments across thousands of artists. End result is recorded music is free and live performances are expensive to put on. Gone are the days where a bar would invite a group in to play and pay them - the expectation is they will do this for free or even pay the bar for the opportunity to be heard.
Europe has a strong tradition of supporting artists of all sorts by directly paying them from public money. So maybe in Europe you can decide to be a musician and survive. In the US it is unlikely many will choose to even learn to play an instrument in school because it is an avenue toward ... nothing.
A long time ago a friend of mine told me a story about a job he created. He was interested in pipe organs and learned how to make organ pipes. He found a few places that had antique pipe organs that needed some pipes replaced and he was the only person around that could make them. He did this for several years but discovered that there simply was no market for organ pipes in the 1960s in Chicago. He could no longer do this and survive. Today, music is what pipe organs were back then - there is no market for it. Sure, there is plenty of music but it is being given away or taken for free.
I suspect the guy with the horn in the subway tunnel playing for change is getting about as much as most people from sales of their music today.
The problem with patronage is you get what you pay for. In the case of music in the 1600s and 1700s nearly all "popular" music came from patronage and overall it was very alike. So you had all the artists striving for patronage and the rich patrons were paying for a particular sort of music.
Today, the folks that are likely to be paying are over 40 and not so much into hip-hop, trance or electronica. Lots of 70s era stuff. OK, if you want two centuries of music in the mold of 1972 be my guest.
Well, you do understand that things like some AM radio stations are designated as information sources for emergencies and are required to be on the air during such emergencies, right? This means that such radio stations have to have backup power and diverse antenna systems so they really can stay on the air.
Cell phones, on the other hand, have no such requirements today. The network is pretty robust so if one cell site goes down the impact isn't all that great. But, there are no requirements for how long sites can be down, which can mean in a rural area that a cell site can be down for a couple of weeks. Unlike land lines, there are no tariff requirements for uptime. Which means that cell service is available when it is available and when it isn't, ... well, it isn't. No requirements means it is completely unsuitable for emergency use.
Example - land lines are powered by 48V DC and a good part of a CO is the banks of batteries that are required for long power outages. They have backup generators as well, but I believe they are required to have TWO DAYS of battery power. Contrast this with a cell tower that might have 15 minutes on a UPS. I suppose we could expect the government to simply mandate that power outages not occur...
Once cell service is tariffed like land lines are today, then we can talk about how cell phones can be used in emergencies for informing people. Until then, it is silly to even think about such stuff - it would mean virtually cutting people off. We have lots of interesting gadgets today, but for emergencies we haven't really moved from where things were in 1960. And every proposal centered around eliminating some aspect of this support infrastructure is from people that simply do not understand the role of fairly low-tech but extremely reliable systems in emergency information and communication.
Here's another one for you. You can receive AM broadcasts with a batteryless receiver - unless of course they eliminate AM broadcast in favor of some digital technology that makes it impossible to receive such emergency broadcasts in this manner. What happens when the batteries run out? Well, better hope that doesn't happen, right?
You do understand that dial-up was $30+ a month when there was a physical modem for each possible connection and a whole bank of modems in each place an ISP wanted to make it possible for people to connect to. These modems would fail and need to be replaced requiring an ISP technician to go to the place where the modems were - not the telephone office, by the way - and replace the failed ones. Huge expense for maintenance.
What allowed the price to drop was the phone company completely took over the modems and the maintenance. You would pay to have a T-1 connection or better and have data calls routed to it. The phone switchgear actually handled the modem functions internally, without a modem being involved. This made the costs for dial-up service drop to almost nothing and allowed for a huge leap in service without any maintenance cost. This also meant that any CO with the required software (and hardware?) could now be used as a dial-in location rather than requiring each ISP have banks of modems at some location. This also ushered in the era of the 50Kbps modems because they were connecting directly to the telephone switchgear.
In short, technology caught up with modems for ISPs and made them obsolete, eliminating the maintenance costs.
You seem to be under the impression that the taxes on cable service are retained by the cable company. Sorry, but they are paid to the state and local governments that enacted the taxes. There used to be some subsidies for building out but those are long gone today.
What, do you think the content is free or something?
Ignoring the television content for the moment, just the connection to the Internet for data is going to be 100K a month, easy. We aren't talking $700 for a T1 here.
Problem is, soon there will not be sufficient "unlimited" bandwidth to go around. The way to fix this is either revamp every cable system in the country (waves wand and makes it so...) or to decrease usage through metering.
Right now in most areas there simply isn't enough bandwidth available to support more than maybe 25% of the homes using some kind of IP TV service. Once that threshold is exceeded trying to watch Netflix or Hulu - which do not buffer - will be extremely frustrating to the point of making the whole thing pointless to even try. There are plenty of smart people out there that know this and know the technical limitations aren't going to be eased overnight.
So what can happen? Well, we can let all the IP TV services slide down into the swamp of bankruptcy. Or, maybe we can figure out a way to keep the usage down to around 20-25% where the users of these services will be happy and the jobs at Netflix will continue.
I really don't think there are too many options here.
The problem with forced access in Illinois was the rate set by the utility board was below the cost of maintaining the lines. It worked for a short while, but the phone company - Ameritech then - made very sure they never had to install another competitor's DSLAM ever again. Also, technology moved beyond the copper-to-the-CO stage that made DSL possible. With a very, very crowded vault connected via fiber to the CO there was no longer any physical space for a rack of competitors DSLAM devices. This effectively ended the competitive DSL market in Illinois.
Now, if there is fair and reasonable pricing for access, such a scheme could work for cable and DSL both again. Except it will not be fair and reasonable. The folks behind this sort of thing in local and state government want to punish the wireline owners for their investment and therefore the rates are set below cost. End result is the scheme is completely unworkable with the wireline provider fighting every step of the way until either the technology passes it by or competitors are driven out of business by the wireline provider's lack of service.
Forced access is a dream, and it isn't going to happen again. It turns into the taking by force of property from one company and using it for the benefit of other companies. It doesn't take long for the company that owns the property to figure this out. They have two choices: either defeat the scheme one way or another or fold up and find something else to do. Ameritech was able to defeat the scheme by both lack of service and technology marching on.
I think the idea is to encrypt the data and not have the key stored anywhere.
This is roughly like not having a file cabinet, just a shredder. Very secure records storage with zero possibility of any sort of disclosure. It is more difficult to access, however.
It is perhaps the only way to be truely safe.
Unfortunately, everything that Obama has actually done shows a path to reducing energy availability and energy use rather than changing the way energy is generated in the US. He has said openly that he wants to financially destroy coal generation, and I believe him. No changes have been made in the licensing and permitting process for nuclear generation, which means a very small group of people (one, perhaps?) can block construction at any point in the process.
Obviously he believes in two things: AGW is real, and resource use in the US is out of line with the rest of the world and must be reined in.
As the Republican candidate for president can only win if people are so totally disgusted with Obama that it is "Obama Must Go"
(OMG!), there is a substantial chance that we will be looking at the next four years where energy use becomes more expensive and less reliable. Reliability is the key because businesses will be forced to self-generate in some manner without a reliable external source. Homes will go the same route for people with the money to do so - how many times can you tolerate a blackout for eight or more hours? And what would it really take for you to be able go off-grid?
The real problem is going to be for people that simply do not have the disposible income to invest in solar or wind systems. For example, anyone living in an apartment complex in the northern part of the US - solar simply isn't practical for the building owners and so the tenants are going to be at the mercy of whatever is left over after commercial interests get priority on electricity during the day. You will have a remote switch on your meter to simply turn off your electricity soon.
We are certainly going to be seeing more of this. The problem is businesses have contracted for services based on at least things staying the same. We have five years now of shrinkage in the economy, jobs, everything. And it is going to continue down the same road.
A big part of the problem is expectations and perceptions. What really torpedoed the housing market was a perception that things were suddenly different. It made no difference whatsoever that a house valued at a million dollars one day hadn't changed in any way but the next day people were only willing to pay a half a million for the same house because of a perception that the housing market was crashing. This, obviously, led to a crash in most of the country. Yes, there was a possibility that people might default on some loans - and then because a lot of goods and services were no longer selling as they did a lot of people lost their jobs - and once again, perception became reality and people defaulted on loans after they lost their jobs.
Of course the Postal Service is going to try to weasel out from this contract for stuff they no longer need. They might get away with it, unlike most other businesses and individuals. A lot of the time a business will purchase equipment and hire people based on a contract that isn't really cancellable and often it is difficult to get out of those. Try signing up for a lawn service for five years and cancelling after the first year - you might get sued as well.
A far bigger problem is that there will be a ripple effect here. Northrop Grumman will fire a bunch of people that were supposed to be working on this. Then will in turn stop buying as much stuff leading to further contractions spreading out through the economy. It is what happens in a shrinking economy rather than a growing one. This has happened before, but the problem is this time there is no confidence that the government is capable of fixing things in any manner other than throwing money around like a drunken sailor. And rather than just a crisis of confidence, there is actually a great deal of confidence that things are just going to get worse and worse.
Think about it. In 5-10 years, we won't have Cable, we'll have HD Video on Demand Networks, something like Hulu or Netflix instead.
No, not everyone. A small minority will no doubt, but the infrastructure simply isn't there to support this.
For cable the way it works today is there is the "head end" where all the signals originate. This is connected to a number of neighborhood nodes with somewhere between 500 and 1000 homes connected to each node. The connection from the head end to the node is a fiber link with a capacity somewhere between 1 and 3 GB today. The homes are connected on coax from the node.
The problem is, you take 1GB and divide it by 1000 and you get 1MB - but not all of the 1GB is available because a bunch of it is used for television programming. As the analog channels are eliminated and replaced with digital and on-demand stuff the dedicated bandwidth changes, but even at the best case you are going to have maybe 800MB available for non-TV uses. That means even on a 500-home node you have 1.6MB available per home, if they are using it. Today, most are not and you can get 20MB down to a home pretty easily.
In the Phoenix area Cox believes themselves to be pretty advanced and are moving to 3GB fiber to every node and adding nodes to bring each of them down to around 500 homes. Even at that you have at best 3MB/sec deliverable to each home. That just about covers ONE Netflix stream.
DSL is operating today with about the same constraints, although there tend to be a lot more homes per node and often the connection from the DSLAM to the ISP is much less than 1GB.
To bring the reality of IP TV to the masses the entire network is going to have to be replaced with a lot more nodes. And much faster links to the head end. It is going to take at least 10 years to get there and nobody has started yet because the demand simply isn't there today. To get to where we are today it took about 15 years from start to end - from around 1996 or so until 2010. It isn't going to be any simpler to do what is going to be required.
IPTV is something for early adopters and when it maxes out the network it will be interesting to watch what happens. Clearly Netflix as a DVD distribution business will survive but the "watch instantly" is going to have to have devices that buffer or it will die.
I would offer that music piracy today is indeed willful with the clear intent to commercially destroy the publisher by giving away their works. Nearly everyone that is on the "production" side in music and movie piracy is very much interested in the destruction of the publishers by removing any revenue they might get.
It brings us all one step closer to the Roddenberry dream of the Star Trek Economy... or at least that is the thinking behind a lot of this. First you destroy any value non-material goods might have and then the material ones will have no value soon after that. Of course, it is an utterly ignorant and misguided theory, but it sounds really good on the Internet, especially late at night.
This sounds pretty good on the surface - the US government finally doing something that might positively effect the economy and workers.
Unfortunately, there is this thing the US belongs to called the WTO. And China is also a member. So, China will complain to the WTO which is all about free, tariff-free trade. WTO will come back with instructions to the US that these tariffs must be removed ... or else. The "or else" part is pretty much that China will introduce their own tariffs on the few US goods imported into China - but also that other countries will be enabled to also tariff US produced goods far in excess of what they are already.
So the tariff will be removed in a couple of months at most. We all signed on to the WTO and it is an organization that is clearly focused on a race to the bottom. All manufacturing will be in third-world countries with low, low, low labor and production costs. And the sooner the US population understands that the better.
We have seen the total number of skilled workers employed in the US drop in the last five years or so but it has been on the decline for some time now. Everyone is waiting for the government to "do something" to bring back skilled worker jobs so the middle class can recover and once again spend money on US-produced goods and services. Well, it isn't happening. Companies that employed 10 people doing a particular job have found they can get the job done with four people now. Between just pushing those four people harder and a lessening of demand, four are all that is needed. The other six jobs aren't coming back, not in any realistic time frame. We are looking at what the government says is 8% unemployment but in reality it is more like 30% - when you count the people that are working part-time as Walmart greeters becase there is nothing else. The government cannot force companies to hire back the workers they shed because they simply are not needed. The government cannot create new companies to employ people, unless you really want the WPA and CCC.
First off, if your company was in business to make wrenches, would it be smart to pay someone else to make wrenches and just sell them? Or, would it make more sense to be making wrenches better than other people and sell those? See, one way you are a sales company that isn't making anything and the other is you are actually making something. Same goes for software, trust me.
For a software company you might have some old products that could be pushed off onto some other folks for maintenance. Or, you could consider outsourcing accounting and bookkeeping. But outsourcing the core product(s) that establish your identity for the future is ... well, madness.
The basic problem is the folks you outsource to are looking for a paycheck and have little interest in a product. You, on the other hand, count on a product as a way of surviving into the future. To tie yourself to some folks doing this with little supervision (and don't kid yourself, there won't be anywhere near enough) for the future isn't going to work out well. I have heard of this with a number of organizations and while they can get some cheap development done, it is generally something that simply needs to be redone on a crash basis when customers start noticing defects and quality problems. Also, you will find a lot of outsourced development done exactly to specs - and done in a virtually unmaintainable manner. It does exactly what was specified, no more and no less - but to add some new feature takes a huge amount of effort because there was zero flexibility written into the code.
Yes, having developers in house is more expensive, no doubt about that. For things that are not critical to the business at hand you can outsource and get reasonable results - it may have some problems and may not be as flexible as you would like but you can live with it. Core product functionality on the other hand you better have a lot better control over and instill quality and flexibility in the development team from the start. Can't do that remotely when the team changes every week - which is common for such arrangements.
Society worked in the most part 100 years ago because everyone knew that (a) everyone was watching and (b) people cared about their environment. So if someone yelled "Stop thief!" a lot of people in the area would pay attention and grab the thief.
The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.
Today it is clear that nobody cares. They have their own lives to live and if someone wants to dump trash in a public part, so what? If one person is killing another, people walk by thinking "glad is not me" without a thought that it easily could be. In some ways it is true that most of the time most people aren't assholes. But the tendancy towards unthinkingly unkind behavior is increased when people are sure nobody is watching - hence while many will not shoplift almost everyone will pirate stuff in the privacy of their home rather than pay.
The Internet isn't helping out much here, as people hide behind pseudo-identities and handles. This means the co-worker you are trusting at work may be the asshat that is screwing with your daughter's head on the Internet. You just don't know and if done properly will never know. And the co-worker may be a great buddy in public where people can see but on the Internet feels immune and invulnerable.
Since the 1960s we have seen a great lessening of social involvement. People don't care what their neighbors are doing as long as they don't bother them with it. People will walk by panhandlers on the street - which is a good thing - but also just walk by someone injured. Women are taught from birth that if someone wants to help them they probably have an agenda that isn't good. While in 1920 Officer Friendly was the neighborhood cop today we know that cops are there to sodomize powerless people with broomsticks and do whatever it takes to get their quota of tickets, and again, nobody is watching, nobody cares and nobody is going to do anything.
The risk of getting caught is almost non-existent today. If you chase down the statistics you find that major crimes - like armed robbery - have at best a 10-20% chance of resulting in jail time. Murder is a little better, rape is a little worse. The odds are definitely in favor of the criminal and they know it. Now, on the street it works out because after 5 to 10 such crimes they certainly do end up getting caught, convicted and jailed just because the percentages work that way. But it really sucks to be told that your rapist will certainly go free this time but will be caught eventually.
Do not believe for a second that "society" is watching your back today. Your community doesn't care and isn't interested in your problems or difficulties. You might have a few friends that do, but not the community at large. And because of this each one of us is less safe and less secure. No, I don't have the answer to this because I'd say it is the result of population, immigration and just population density itself. But it is not 1950 and June Cleaver isn't interested in what your children are doing any more.
More than likely large multinational companies would simply move into the retail space, pushing their own products and working to displace others. There would be no point to research and development because anything spent there would be wasted - no return after five years. But if you can out-distribute others in the retail space you have an eternal revenue stream. A would say all R&D would end on a corporate level and be replaced by investigators and spies - to collect up the ideas of others so they could be distributed effectively.
Sort of like an acquisition strategy, only without the payment involved.
I'd say more accurately that you could buy Windows XP at Walmart without Microsoft seeing a dime. And you could get it "officially branded" in 100s of ways - like the NASCAR version of Windows XP with a built-in racing theme.
Would a few techies know they could add this theme anytime? Sure. Would that keep Walmart from putting DVDs on the shelf? No.
You are joking, right? Benefit to small companies? How? Small company S publishes a book which gets great reviews. Amazon grabs this and offers it for 50% of the price from S and offers it in a variety of formats - without consulting S about it at all. Walmart can also refuse to carry the book from S and simply print it themselves.
Sure, authors could "build upon the works of others", but anything even remotely successful gets grabbed by a few media giants and they market the heck out of it. Without having to pay anyone for the privilege.
You do understand that the only thing that keeps the publisher of the Harry Potter books from hiring out the writing of more stories in the Harry Potter world is the copyright by J. K. Rowling? I am sure the publisher would, if they could. The real interesting question would be with a successful series does the copyright on the characters continue with new books in the series or does it end with the first book's copyright period?
Only the large companies would benefit from this.
Well, one way to look at it is that if there was only a short copyright exclusivity period, this would be a huge boon for Amazon, Walmart and Sony. Maybe a few others, but I think those would be the biggest beneficiaries. Why? Because nearly everything they are publishing or distributing would immediately cease to have any cost ot them - they could simply produce these works for free. For Amazon the difference might only be 10-20%, but for Walmart it would be 50-70%.
Trust me, Walmart is fully capable of churning out their own copies of DVDs and CDs. Books, too. They probably wouldn't bother with magazines - who really wants a five-year-old magazine? But for everything else it would be Walmart's own brand.
Sony would take advantage of this as well with new artists getting the back position in the catalog vs. anything five years old or older. Movies as well, with everything five to ten years old being immediately republished under a new brand that didn't have to compensate Sony Pictures - meaning all the residuals contracts would be worthless.
What you are missing is once a publisher has the manuscript, why publish the book immediately? Copyright on the manuscript runs out in a few years and they can then publish the book without paying the author anything at all.
It would create a situation where old stuff is vastly more valuable to distributors than new stuff. Anything old they get 100% of the revenue on whereas with anything less than 5 years old they have to split it - even considering the cut authors get is pretty small.
There are a bunch of problems with getting the government in on pharmaceuticals, probably the two biggest are competition and exports.
Competition? There is no competition with the government. This means that where today there may be five different drugs only one would survive in a government-run environment. The other companies simply would not be offered the chance to compete as there would be no point. This would be in spite of some folks doing better with a different, competing drug.
Exports? Why would the US government send pharmaceuticals - that are subsidized presumably for the benefit of US citizens - to some other country? Oh, there might be some sales to UK and Israel in a limited fashion. Maybe Japan. But I cannot imagine such sales to, say, Venezuela. Or Saudi Arabia. This would change the world of pharmaceuticals from a few multinational companies to every nation having to produce their own or not getting anything.
Do you not suspect that if the government were in charge of pharmaceuticals there would be all sorts of export restrictions? Today, US companies are prohibited from exporting anything to Iran, Syria and North Korea but that is all. Why would the US government ship pharmaceticals to Venezeula, for instance? Or Cuba - which is permitted today, only you have to jump through some hoops. By their own rules, Cuba would certainly be out of the picture.
Similarly, the US government would pretty much have to make everything. Governments do not compete with private businesses - they simply make rules making the competition illegal. So while today in the marketplace we have asprin, ibuprofin and acetaminophen under a government-run program there would be only one.
No, I don't think that is going to work. Socialized medicine delivery is going to be enough of a mess in the US when the government finally takes over all of it in a couple of years. Socialized product creation would be entirely too much for the US government to handle in a reasonable way.
And you would really hate the way it turns out.
The problem with eliminating exclusive copyright rights is always pretty much the same - it might affect consumers positively in a very slight manner but it would affect the distribution of "stuff" in a huge way. All of a sudden, the biggest distributor - the one with the most cash and fattest pipeline to the consumer - wins because they can distribute EVERYTHING. They no longer need to compensate anyone else so all the money is theirs. Also, it ceases to matter if they are paying for the creation of stuff or not - they get to distribute it.
Now, delaying this boon to WalMart or Sony by five years might seem to be significant, but it isn't really. Simply what happens is the big distributor (because it would sort out quickly to be just one) is promoting five-year-old stuff. Anything new gets short shrift because the revenue picture is so distorted - 100% to the distributor for old stuff, 50% (or less) to the distributor for new stuff. The effect would be that you would have to hunt far and wide for "new" stuff but the old stuff being far more valuable would be right there in front of you.
Think about Amazon not having to pay anyone for five-year-old books but having to pay 70-90% of their revenue out for new stuff. What do you think would happen?
If the idea is to make WalMart, Sony or maybe Amazon rich, this is a great idea. If the idea is to free consumers from restrictions on redistribution, this isn't so great.
A. it isn't a reactor and does not sustain a chain reaction. It is a neutron source only. It does take a bunch of material to produce a strong, continuous neutron beam.
B. Yes, "weapons grade" is just the ratio of U328 vs. U235.
C. A common nuclear reactor that produces heat has nearly zero neutron emissions outside of the reactor vessel. Even open-core reactors where water was used as a moderator did not have strong neutron emissions. The neutrons are kept in the fissionable material (pile, rods, etc.) to keep the reaction going and excess neutrons escaping from the fissile material would just be a safety hazard.
If you are going to make a number of big, primitive bombs you need hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium. These wouldn't fit on a missle but would be something you put in the hold of a cargo ship. Yes, the US has thermonuclear warheads that weigh around 1,000 lbs or less but most of them were more in the range of 10,000 lbs - five tons. The devices dropped on Japan were 8900 lbs and 10,300 lbs to put things in perspective. Putting that kind of payload on a missile isn't a small effort but it is trivial to put in a cargo ship. And setting one off in a harbor creates a lot more damage from the water being vaporized as well so this is a huge benefit for the folks responsible for the bomb.
Of course, it is an obvious ploy and I can't imagine Israel allowing a clearly-marked Iranian ship into a Tel Aviv's harbor. Of course, nobody would ever put the wrong flag on a cargo ship, so we don't have to worry about that, right?