Pricing software is not trivial. There is certainly an upper limit as to the value provided by the software. Charging more than that will result in very few, if any sales. So there is an upper bound. But this upper bound is pretty high, way higher than you would normally see anything priced at.
What it cost to produce is a very difficult number to arrive at in a large company. Not much simpler in a small company either. And how do you amortize that? Generally, this is a fruitless exercise that might give you a lower bound on price but more often is going to just frustrate the heck out of everyone. Yes, I have worked places with timesheets where they tried to track time spent by developers and analysts.
The range in the middle is pretty wide open. You can look at competition, but that is often misleading because once again, nobody has the right answer. Lots of people undervalue their worth and the worth of their creations. Alternatively, you don't want to be 10x what could be considered to be competition.
So you end up with a guess and are usually stuck with that guess for a long time. But I would say today that in no way is software priced relative to the cost of production. The real cost is very hard to arrive at and isn't useful. Software needs to be priced around its value to the customer that really buys it. The people that think it is priced too high aren't your customers. The people that pirate it because they think it costs too much (usually anything over zero) aren't your customers. Trying to include either group into pricing is a mistake.
So what where these people smoking with a "Patent Tax"?
OK, so they sell you a printer. What do they do for money next year? See, printers have pretty much reached the saturation point and they last for a while. Right now, the only thing that is supporting the printing business is sales of ink and toner. The cheap inkjet printers are worth less than the ink in them so there is no money there.
And why is the neighborhood drug store stocking ink? Is it because everyone needs ink at 8 PM on Sunday night? No, it is because the margins are very good so stores can afford to stock it.
There is no point to having a loyal customer that buys something from you once every 10 years. You will sell one and be out of business before they need another one. This worked fine before the age of big distribution. Back in 1980 everyone wanted a better, newer and faster printer but they cost too much. Today, everyone already has a newer, faster, cheaper printer. They might need a new one in five years.
Oh, and you can just buy ink from cheaper places, by the way. Lots of them and some refill the cartridges while you wait in their store.
Problem is, how do you stay in business? Printer penetration in the US (and I would presume most of Europe too) is 100%. Nobody that wants a printer does not have a printer.
You can make the printers cheaper and more likely to break (check, done that) and they won't last as long, but this still doesn't amount to much in the way of sales.
While I don't necessarily think this is the way to stay in business, the alternative is there is one or two printer companies and they hand-make the 10 they sell each year. For $50,000 each.
There are very few ways to maintain a business where there is 100% penetration and the life of the product exceeds one year.
Young people are also trained to think that they may want a newer, better, more feature rich washing machine in five years. So, spending money today on a better washing machine simply means that the money is being wasted because in five years they will want a new one anyway.
I ran into this with office furniture recently. Some desks that were quite well constructed needed to be gotten rid of because we didn't have space in the office. The responses I got were "I can buy a desk at Ikea for $100 and when it breaks, by another new one. Always having a new desk is worth more than spending $400 for your desk."
This is where we have come to. Quality beyond a certain level is pointless now. It is pointless for the company because they will not be selling replacements and pointless for the consumer because they don't understand the point.
Worse, making things that can be repaired is viewed as pointless. Today most television sets cannot be meaningfully repaired. There are only a few functional unit assemblies and parts are sold as these assemblies only, when the parts are available. So you find yourself with a $1000 HDTV that if something breaks it is a $800 part plus labor to repair it. It might be a blown fuse on the board that cost $0.39. In 1960 this was handled by skilled technicians that would find the bad part on the board and replace it. Today it is handled by a semi-skilled parts replacer that convinces you that you just need to buy a new TV because the repair is more than the unit cost new.
This makes a certain amount of sense in a high labor cost environment because the cost of the skilled technician's time is more than $1000. There are some pretty severe side effects of this. We blow through a lot more trash because most things just cannot be repaired and must be replaced. Manufacturers are rewarded not for quality but features.
It is certainly almost impossible to compete today on quality. The overwhelming signal that is sent out on the Internet are (a) prices and (b) uninformed customer reviews. The pricing means lowest price wins most of the time and to hell with customer service or product quality. The uninformed customer reviews are worthless but because they seem to be from "peers" they are given great weight. Of course, happy people are rarely motivated to write positive reviews but angry people want to let people know. So most reviews are negative, to the extent that an expensive, high quality product with some usability issues will accumulate negative reviews while a cheap, low quality product may not. Especially if the low quality product is sold to consumers that are willing to write off their cheap purchase as a learning experience without trying to broadcast it to the world.
The Internet invariable creates a race-to-the-bottom situation because of this. Low prices and few reviews beat out high prices and negative reviews, even when the reviews reflect a small percentage of the customers.
OK, we can either have a safe, happy Internet where people have rules of conduct, or we can have the Wild Wild West. Today, we have the Wild Wild West.
I have an account with an ISP. This account is provably used to send fraudulent requests to people, death threats to public figures, and is used with a phishing scam. I can easily claim that someone else was using my account and this apparently absolves me of any responsibility whatsoever according to the system today.
Yeah, the account probably gets cancelled and I have to sign up again with the same ISP. They are in it for the customer base and the money, so they probably don't care.
Is this reasonable? I certainly don't think so. But that appears to be the climate today.
I can look at the prices of Kosher hot dogs when compared with others and see the Kosher ones cost more. Now, I think Kosher hot dogs are a lot better, but they cost more. If the difference was the difference between skipping a meal or not, I might not want the extra cost.
What a government mandated label, inspection, certification and all that goes with it means is that all products have the added expense. You see, whether or not some product is from a cloned animal, it would still need to be certified one way or the other. These costs are going to be passed on to the consumer, and not just consumers in California. So this is California passing a law that affects everyone.
And, the whole point of this is to bring to light a rather unscientific paranoia. If this is really the point, why not just a label that says all such products may be unsafe for consumption and have unknown, possibly cancer-causing effects? I know it keeps people out of stores when they see these new California labels.
We all know the that the real reason for the Real ID act was to clamp down on citizens and have a nationwide database of drivers information for all sorts of evil purposes.
But one fact that might have escaped some folks is how states like Illinois have been quietly giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and just about anyone else often with their bogus SSN right there on the state government-sponsored ID card. Of course, this enables all sorts of things. How about a driver's license with my picture on it and YOUR SSN just in case I want to get a loan down at the bank?
This doesn't solve the immigration problem, it just makes it worse. It is clearly throwing open the door saying "Come on in and make labor cheaper in the US!!!"
It also pretty much invalidates the idea that there is a photo ID that means anything at all. So, I can go down to my neighborhood Illinois DMV and get a license that pretty much says whatever I need it to. So we have a state making a mockery out of a number of federal programs.
How does the government fix this? Well, until the Real ID act, driver's licenses were exclusively the domain of the states. A state could have a non-photo ID. A state could freely issue licenses to anyone. One way to change this is the Real ID act, to make a driver's license mean something else in addition to a simple tax on driving. Alternatively, you will get your Federal Citizen Identification Badge that will be required for employment, banking, travel and who knows what else.
So piracy is OK? How about if they just bite the bullet and say "we cannot afford Windows" and switch to something cheaper... say Linux?
No, instead they use Windows, send WIndows-centric files to their business associates and encourage them to believe the world revolves around Windows. Whether this helps or hurts Microsoft is not really relevant.
What is relevant is they discover they need a software product produced in the US and decide that, just like with Windows, they can pirate it. This certainly ends up hurting that publisher of that product. And it teaches a general disrespect for everything so when your nice GPL application gets "borrowed" and put into some embedded consumer electronic device the attitude is again "So?"
You've discovered that outside of a pretty rabid minority spam doesn't factor into most people's lives. If they see it, they delete it and move on with their lives. There are a few, very few, that turn this into an all-encompassing passion.
Also, anti-spam laws are meaningless. As the author of this discovered, the legal system has better things to do than get involved with things that are so many shades of gray. No, there isn't a good legal definition of spam that will hold up in court. No, it isn't possible to track down the sender of the spam. No, it isn't possible to differentiate between someone paying for leads in a disinterested manner and someone that sets out to hire a spammer.
Small claims court judges get through the day by not deciding against people where there is doubt about their intent or culpability. Yes, you can win something when the defendant doesn't even bother to show up because that says to the judge that no matter how little he or she thinks of your case, the defendant has less respect for his office.
If you really think you have the time and resources to waste in Federal court, by all means try. But you are likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to prove intent of the other party. Or validate a definition of spam and show how their mailings meet that definition in accordance with both the Washington state law and CAN-SPAM.
There are two problems with this. The first and most severe is exchanging a know "bad" for an unknown. Historically we have seen most of these exchanges come down on the unknown being a much worse bad in ways undreamed of at the time. The problems with PBDE is nowhere near as bad as some folks are making out. Any replacement at this point is unknown, with unknown risks.
The other problem is, well, everything is toxic. I can probably sit down and convince you that water is toxic using the same formula that was used to show that cyclamates were toxic. It is not possible to avoid everything that is not "natural" and "organic". Even so, you can die of an overdose of organic carrots.
Enacting regulations on the margins of what is measurable - where most of this stuff is shown to be carcinogenic or toxic - doesn't make sense.
This will also create more jobs in Washington state as consumers discover it is not possible to ship a chair made out of baked clay for a reasonable price. This will inspire a great number of new startup companies producing furniture in Washington state that compiles with both regulations banning chemicals whlie preserving the fireproof nature of chairs, couches and bedding.
Look for that distinctive reddish color of new Washington state approved furniture.
Movers will not be pleased with this, but the home improvement companies will have all the work they can handle - reinforcing floors to hold the new furniture.
The problem is that Vonage was using Verizon's own DSL lines to compete with them and not paying Verizon (or anybody else) as a supplier. General rule about competition is you better have your own supplier, independent of your competitors. Trying to go into business leeching on your competitor is not a smart strategy.
Leeching? You see, Vonage (and all the other sell-you-a-box VOIP folks) are utterly dependent on their customer having a broadband Internet connection now from someone that competes with their service. OK, fine. But then on the back end of the call they are also dependent on the telephone carrier to deliver the call at either a greatly reduced rate or free depending on the infrastructure.
So, for Verizon it was providing the DSL (or whatever) connection for a substantial portion of Vonage's customers and also providing the telephone network to complete the call. And, for being involved on both ends of the call they got... often nothing at all.
Look, you can set up a burger stand outside a McDonalds and sell hamburgers you buy at McDonalds at a quantity discount - but don't be surprised when McDonalds finds a way to either cut you off or raise the price so you can't compete. This is exactly what is happening with Vonage - Verizon found a way to cut them off. The other VOIP services are either too small or next in line for the same sort of treatment. There is nothing that says Verizon has to be a supplier to their competition.
And Vonage was doomed from day one. To build a business that depends on your competitor not noticing you are stealing customers away while at the same time using their infrastructure to service your customers is interesting. It is likely just a Ponzi scheme that the principals knew would collapse eventually but allowed them to get rich while it lasted.
It has nothing to do with reasoning or intellectual capacity. The teacher has a lesson plan that has been either handed down or approved. This calls for certain milestones to be reached. So when the end of the term comes around everyone can happily say that the milestones were completed.
Once you start down the "reasoned explanations" trail in a classroom with open ended questions and following where the discussion leads, you end up at the end of the day with "where did the day go?" While this may be entertaining and even beneficial once in a while, it doesn't get the job done.
While the children might actually learn some useful information from such a format, it doesn't result in their being able to do long division by the end of the year, or whatever was on the schedule originally. You can say "but it would be so much more meaningful and beneficial", and yes it might be - but some kids are going end up in the end without some pretty fundamental building blocks, like long division and the like.
Holding kids back has been pretty much pushed out of the school system because it causes social problems. The kid that is held back ends up with a bunch of younger, smaller kids that know he was a failure and he feels like a failure. Then, because he is bigger and stronger he can take it out on his new classmates. Happened a lot. Enough that schools pretty much just don't do it anymore. Period. Certainly not in the US - it would destroy their poor little feelings and scar them for life.
Vocational school? Ha. We are busily purging the economy of those sorts of jobs. If the job involves manual labor, it is done by cheap immigrants paid 50% of what anyone from that country would ever get. All other jobs are "knowledge worker" jobs where you need a college degree to get in the door. What happened to factory jobs and welder, plumber and such skilled trades? They were outsourced or outmoded.
Besides, what everyone wants to hear is how their child is above average. All children deserve the right to be above average, right? No parent wants to hear how their child can grow up to be a welder when held out in front of them are successful "knowledge workers" every day. How many television shows are about factor workers or welders? How many television shows are about lawyers, doctors, and other highly educated folks?
You misunderstand how this works. Please take some time and read some of the 9/11 "truth" documents or information about how there is proof that the Germans didn't exterminate any Jews. See how nicely rational the arguments are and how any naysayers are classed as either "tool of the other side" or "misguided and uninformed".
Once you start down the road of having an argument with someone that believes you don't understand the facts that he possesses and these facts trump everything, you are wasting your time.
The KKK has all the proof they need to support their knowledge that black people are inferior. And they can cite learned people that you've never heard of.
Ever tried getting in a discussion about the Bible with a Jehovah's Witness? They know more about your arguments than you do, because they are trained. Muslims are trained from birth that Jews are going to turn into pigs and apes one day Real Soon Now. They can show you pictures of Jews turning into pigs. They can show you American university professors that have proven Jews are genetically closer to pigs and apes than Muslims are. And you know what? They are right - such people do exist. Your rational arguments are pointless because they know more about the arguments than you do. Training works.
As a note aside, why do you think Gitmo is being used as a prison camp rather than running these people through the US court system? Because their apparently logical and rational arguments would get get 24x7 news coverage and give them a much wider platform than they have now. And these arguments sound reasonable to people that don't know any better. Yes, it is utter insanity but it sounds really good.
Reason vs. insanity fails 100% of the time because it is insanity. Do you understand? You cannot fight insanity by appealing to someone's reasoning - their reasoning isn't at play here. This is the one message that people seem to fail to understand.
And until we understand that people who think it is a valid form of political expression to behead schoolgirls cannot be reasoned with in any manner we will have people beheading schoolgirls. And stoning women to death. And killing people that wake up one day and feel their religion is no longer the driving force in their life.
You are trying to shout back a tidal wave. The water doesn't care but you are going to get washed away.
If you have to wonder why Muslim youths are pissed off and ready at the drop of a hat to blow themselves and others up, you need to get a clue about life in many Islamic countries.
Their religion teaches that life is worthless and nothing counts until the afterlife. Pushing things up a bit to reach the afterlife earlier seems harmless or a benefit.
The UN and Palestinian leaders have been keeping Palestinians bottled up in "refugee camps" with somehow the hope that these people will be able to eventually displace Israel and return home. The conditions in the camps and the teachings of the imams lead young people to the conclusion that there isn't any point to not reaching the afterlife right away - where things count.
We aren't doing anything but putting off a Christian-Islamic war today. The Islamic side has nothing to lose and they know it - the afterlife is all that counts. We are laboring under the mistaken impression that life here counts for something and has value. These two views are diametrically opposed and until there is a some way of reconciling these beliefs there isn't going to be anything but war. It may not be possible to reconcil these beliefs and the world no longer works in the manner where they can have their territory and we can have ours.
If the objective is to have broadcasting over the Internet, then there is no effective difference and the royalties should be identical. Saying that Internet Radio does not need to pay royalties because it is too immature a market or because it is somehow different from other radio broadcasting seems to have been rejected.
So, why should there be no royalties for Internet radio when both play the same music?
The problem has nothing to do with production and everything to do with trials and testing. Inbetween someone getting a bright idea and figuring out that a compound in tree bark can help with certain types of cancer and a drug being available comes years of testing and trials.
These are not done by governments or educational institutions even through that may be the source of the original idea.
Why would it cost anything to take a drug from Australia and produce it in the USA? Again, after some drug issues in the 1960's the USA does its own pharmaceutical trials. Period. So no matter where the drug comes from, someone is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on trials.
The problem is that after the trials are completed what is being proposed would throw open the doors to "production companies" that invested nothing in the trials or research and have everything to gain from simply producing the drug. This is always a bad idea because the production company with no investment has nothing to lose from bad or carelessly made products.
100 years ago, it was all about industrial capacity. Today, it is distribution. The large pharmaceutical companies have a distribution channel that requires products to be fed in. It doesn't matter if they don't have some new wonder drug ready, they need a product.
Just making lots of asprin doesn't cut it anymore.
The "solution" of making patents on drugs disappear means the distribution channel is still there and needs to be fed. Unfortunately, all there would be are the same versions of existing drugs. Why would anyone create something new to stock up someone else's distribution channel?
The penetration of high-speed broadband Internet connections is not 100%. Trying to download even music on dial-up is painful enough that people would rather go to the store and pay money for a CD rather than downloading. One side effect is I know a number of people that have gone from $10-20 a month dial-up service to $20-$60 broadband connections just so they can download music and other stuff.
There are people that believe (however wrongly) that breaking the law is somehow "wrong" and should not be done. Rather than download music for free they go to the store and buy.
Another group are the folks that simply do not know how to download stuff. Commercial software to download movies and music is coming and it will sell because there are significant numbers of people that are not familiar enough with what is available for free and too afraid to just download some random unknown program that promises free music and movies.
Both of the first two groups are rapidly dwindling. The first group because of increased penetration and loss-leader pricing to garner marketshare. When you have DSL connections priced at $14.95 per month, you will displace dial-up if the customer can get DSL.
The "old farts" that believe there is a law against downloading stuff are getting old and dying. When they are gone, almost nobody will be paying for music, movies or anything else that can be downloaded.
The clueless folks will be handled by commerical software that will be sold in stores, at least for a while. We've seen movie copying software in stores, why not music stealing software?
Yes, the media companies are going to have a problem. Soon. Why would anyone that believes (a) there is nothing wrong with downloading and (b) better get yours before the door closes buy music, movies or anything else that can be downloaded?
Better hope you live someplace without a police force, like Serbia or Iraq. Because if you are in Western Europe the US Secret Service will have all of the power of your local federal police right there with them.
Worse, in Europe you get your wireless connection borrowed to send an email to some fun body like the UN, NATO, EU Commission or something like that saying you're with Al Queda and going to set off a nuke under them and they have 12 hours to evacuate.
Japan? I would recommend using a threat with the words Sarin and subway in it.
Good luck proving it isn't you. Most places take bomb threats really, really seriously.
Yes, I would say having an open or easily hackable wireless connection (WEP) means that you have nothing the world over but admiring friends that love you. Easiest way to get someone in plenty of trouble is through their Internet account these days. Probably more trouble than they can handle.
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Pricing software is not trivial. There is certainly an upper limit as to the value provided by the software. Charging more than that will result in very few, if any sales. So there is an upper bound. But this upper bound is pretty high, way higher than you would normally see anything priced at.
What it cost to produce is a very difficult number to arrive at in a large company. Not much simpler in a small company either. And how do you amortize that? Generally, this is a fruitless exercise that might give you a lower bound on price but more often is going to just frustrate the heck out of everyone. Yes, I have worked places with timesheets where they tried to track time spent by developers and analysts.
The range in the middle is pretty wide open. You can look at competition, but that is often misleading because once again, nobody has the right answer. Lots of people undervalue their worth and the worth of their creations. Alternatively, you don't want to be 10x what could be considered to be competition.
So you end up with a guess and are usually stuck with that guess for a long time. But I would say today that in no way is software priced relative to the cost of production. The real cost is very hard to arrive at and isn't useful. Software needs to be priced around its value to the customer that really buys it. The people that think it is priced too high aren't your customers. The people that pirate it because they think it costs too much (usually anything over zero) aren't your customers. Trying to include either group into pricing is a mistake.
So what where these people smoking with a "Patent Tax"?
How long does a printer last?
OK, so they sell you a printer. What do they do for money next year? See, printers have pretty much reached the saturation point and they last for a while. Right now, the only thing that is supporting the printing business is sales of ink and toner. The cheap inkjet printers are worth less than the ink in them so there is no money there.
And why is the neighborhood drug store stocking ink? Is it because everyone needs ink at 8 PM on Sunday night? No, it is because the margins are very good so stores can afford to stock it.
There is no point to having a loyal customer that buys something from you once every 10 years. You will sell one and be out of business before they need another one. This worked fine before the age of big distribution. Back in 1980 everyone wanted a better, newer and faster printer but they cost too much. Today, everyone already has a newer, faster, cheaper printer. They might need a new one in five years.
Oh, and you can just buy ink from cheaper places, by the way. Lots of them and some refill the cartridges while you wait in their store.
Problem is, how do you stay in business? Printer penetration in the US (and I would presume most of Europe too) is 100%. Nobody that wants a printer does not have a printer.
You can make the printers cheaper and more likely to break (check, done that) and they won't last as long, but this still doesn't amount to much in the way of sales.
While I don't necessarily think this is the way to stay in business, the alternative is there is one or two printer companies and they hand-make the 10 they sell each year. For $50,000 each.
There are very few ways to maintain a business where there is 100% penetration and the life of the product exceeds one year.
Young people are also trained to think that they may want a newer, better, more feature rich washing machine in five years. So, spending money today on a better washing machine simply means that the money is being wasted because in five years they will want a new one anyway.
I ran into this with office furniture recently. Some desks that were quite well constructed needed to be gotten rid of because we didn't have space in the office. The responses I got were "I can buy a desk at Ikea for $100 and when it breaks, by another new one. Always having a new desk is worth more than spending $400 for your desk."
This is where we have come to. Quality beyond a certain level is pointless now. It is pointless for the company because they will not be selling replacements and pointless for the consumer because they don't understand the point.
Worse, making things that can be repaired is viewed as pointless. Today most television sets cannot be meaningfully repaired. There are only a few functional unit assemblies and parts are sold as these assemblies only, when the parts are available. So you find yourself with a $1000 HDTV that if something breaks it is a $800 part plus labor to repair it. It might be a blown fuse on the board that cost $0.39. In 1960 this was handled by skilled technicians that would find the bad part on the board and replace it. Today it is handled by a semi-skilled parts replacer that convinces you that you just need to buy a new TV because the repair is more than the unit cost new.
This makes a certain amount of sense in a high labor cost environment because the cost of the skilled technician's time is more than $1000. There are some pretty severe side effects of this. We blow through a lot more trash because most things just cannot be repaired and must be replaced. Manufacturers are rewarded not for quality but features.
It is certainly almost impossible to compete today on quality. The overwhelming signal that is sent out on the Internet are (a) prices and (b) uninformed customer reviews. The pricing means lowest price wins most of the time and to hell with customer service or product quality. The uninformed customer reviews are worthless but because they seem to be from "peers" they are given great weight. Of course, happy people are rarely motivated to write positive reviews but angry people want to let people know. So most reviews are negative, to the extent that an expensive, high quality product with some usability issues will accumulate negative reviews while a cheap, low quality product may not. Especially if the low quality product is sold to consumers that are willing to write off their cheap purchase as a learning experience without trying to broadcast it to the world.
The Internet invariable creates a race-to-the-bottom situation because of this. Low prices and few reviews beat out high prices and negative reviews, even when the reviews reflect a small percentage of the customers.
OK, we can either have a safe, happy Internet where people have rules of conduct, or we can have the Wild Wild West. Today, we have the Wild Wild West.
I have an account with an ISP. This account is provably used to send fraudulent requests to people, death threats to public figures, and is used with a phishing scam. I can easily claim that someone else was using my account and this apparently absolves me of any responsibility whatsoever according to the system today.
Yeah, the account probably gets cancelled and I have to sign up again with the same ISP. They are in it for the customer base and the money, so they probably don't care.
Is this reasonable? I certainly don't think so. But that appears to be the climate today.
I can look at the prices of Kosher hot dogs when compared with others and see the Kosher ones cost more. Now, I think Kosher hot dogs are a lot better, but they cost more. If the difference was the difference between skipping a meal or not, I might not want the extra cost.
What a government mandated label, inspection, certification and all that goes with it means is that all products have the added expense. You see, whether or not some product is from a cloned animal, it would still need to be certified one way or the other. These costs are going to be passed on to the consumer, and not just consumers in California. So this is California passing a law that affects everyone.
And, the whole point of this is to bring to light a rather unscientific paranoia. If this is really the point, why not just a label that says all such products may be unsafe for consumption and have unknown, possibly cancer-causing effects? I know it keeps people out of stores when they see these new California labels.
What would be wrong with requiring a label on all such products that has a skull and crossbones with the words "DO NOT EAT"?
Probably have the same effect, wouldn't you think?
We all know the that the real reason for the Real ID act was to clamp down on citizens and have a nationwide database of drivers information for all sorts of evil purposes.
But one fact that might have escaped some folks is how states like Illinois have been quietly giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and just about anyone else often with their bogus SSN right there on the state government-sponsored ID card. Of course, this enables all sorts of things. How about a driver's license with my picture on it and YOUR SSN just in case I want to get a loan down at the bank?
This doesn't solve the immigration problem, it just makes it worse. It is clearly throwing open the door saying "Come on in and make labor cheaper in the US!!!"
It also pretty much invalidates the idea that there is a photo ID that means anything at all. So, I can go down to my neighborhood Illinois DMV and get a license that pretty much says whatever I need it to. So we have a state making a mockery out of a number of federal programs.
How does the government fix this? Well, until the Real ID act, driver's licenses were exclusively the domain of the states. A state could have a non-photo ID. A state could freely issue licenses to anyone. One way to change this is the Real ID act, to make a driver's license mean something else in addition to a simple tax on driving. Alternatively, you will get your Federal Citizen Identification Badge that will be required for employment, banking, travel and who knows what else.
So piracy is OK? How about if they just bite the bullet and say "we cannot afford Windows" and switch to something cheaper... say Linux?
No, instead they use Windows, send WIndows-centric files to their business associates and encourage them to believe the world revolves around Windows. Whether this helps or hurts Microsoft is not really relevant.
What is relevant is they discover they need a software product produced in the US and decide that, just like with Windows, they can pirate it. This certainly ends up hurting that publisher of that product. And it teaches a general disrespect for everything so when your nice GPL application gets "borrowed" and put into some embedded consumer electronic device the attitude is again "So?"
You've discovered that outside of a pretty rabid minority spam doesn't factor into most people's lives. If they see it, they delete it and move on with their lives. There are a few, very few, that turn this into an all-encompassing passion.
Also, anti-spam laws are meaningless. As the author of this discovered, the legal system has better things to do than get involved with things that are so many shades of gray. No, there isn't a good legal definition of spam that will hold up in court. No, it isn't possible to track down the sender of the spam. No, it isn't possible to differentiate between someone paying for leads in a disinterested manner and someone that sets out to hire a spammer.
Small claims court judges get through the day by not deciding against people where there is doubt about their intent or culpability. Yes, you can win something when the defendant doesn't even bother to show up because that says to the judge that no matter how little he or she thinks of your case, the defendant has less respect for his office.
If you really think you have the time and resources to waste in Federal court, by all means try. But you are likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to prove intent of the other party. Or validate a definition of spam and show how their mailings meet that definition in accordance with both the Washington state law and CAN-SPAM.
There are two problems with this. The first and most severe is exchanging a know "bad" for an unknown. Historically we have seen most of these exchanges come down on the unknown being a much worse bad in ways undreamed of at the time. The problems with PBDE is nowhere near as bad as some folks are making out. Any replacement at this point is unknown, with unknown risks.
The other problem is, well, everything is toxic. I can probably sit down and convince you that water is toxic using the same formula that was used to show that cyclamates were toxic. It is not possible to avoid everything that is not "natural" and "organic". Even so, you can die of an overdose of organic carrots.
Enacting regulations on the margins of what is measurable - where most of this stuff is shown to be carcinogenic or toxic - doesn't make sense.
This will also create more jobs in Washington state as consumers discover it is not possible to ship a chair made out of baked clay for a reasonable price. This will inspire a great number of new startup companies producing furniture in Washington state that compiles with both regulations banning chemicals whlie preserving the fireproof nature of chairs, couches and bedding.
Look for that distinctive reddish color of new Washington state approved furniture.
Movers will not be pleased with this, but the home improvement companies will have all the work they can handle - reinforcing floors to hold the new furniture.
The problem is that Vonage was using Verizon's own DSL lines to compete with them and not paying Verizon (or anybody else) as a supplier. General rule about competition is you better have your own supplier, independent of your competitors. Trying to go into business leeching on your competitor is not a smart strategy.
... often nothing at all.
Leeching? You see, Vonage (and all the other sell-you-a-box VOIP folks) are utterly dependent on their customer having a broadband Internet connection now from someone that competes with their service. OK, fine. But then on the back end of the call they are also dependent on the telephone carrier to deliver the call at either a greatly reduced rate or free depending on the infrastructure.
So, for Verizon it was providing the DSL (or whatever) connection for a substantial portion of Vonage's customers and also providing the telephone network to complete the call. And, for being involved on both ends of the call they got
Look, you can set up a burger stand outside a McDonalds and sell hamburgers you buy at McDonalds at a quantity discount - but don't be surprised when McDonalds finds a way to either cut you off or raise the price so you can't compete. This is exactly what is happening with Vonage - Verizon found a way to cut them off. The other VOIP services are either too small or next in line for the same sort of treatment. There is nothing that says Verizon has to be a supplier to their competition.
And Vonage was doomed from day one. To build a business that depends on your competitor not noticing you are stealing customers away while at the same time using their infrastructure to service your customers is interesting. It is likely just a Ponzi scheme that the principals knew would collapse eventually but allowed them to get rich while it lasted.
It has nothing to do with reasoning or intellectual capacity. The teacher has a lesson plan that has been either handed down or approved. This calls for certain milestones to be reached. So when the end of the term comes around everyone can happily say that the milestones were completed.
Once you start down the "reasoned explanations" trail in a classroom with open ended questions and following where the discussion leads, you end up at the end of the day with "where did the day go?" While this may be entertaining and even beneficial once in a while, it doesn't get the job done.
While the children might actually learn some useful information from such a format, it doesn't result in their being able to do long division by the end of the year, or whatever was on the schedule originally. You can say "but it would be so much more meaningful and beneficial", and yes it might be - but some kids are going end up in the end without some pretty fundamental building blocks, like long division and the like.
Holding kids back has been pretty much pushed out of the school system because it causes social problems. The kid that is held back ends up with a bunch of younger, smaller kids that know he was a failure and he feels like a failure. Then, because he is bigger and stronger he can take it out on his new classmates. Happened a lot. Enough that schools pretty much just don't do it anymore. Period. Certainly not in the US - it would destroy their poor little feelings and scar them for life.
Vocational school? Ha. We are busily purging the economy of those sorts of jobs. If the job involves manual labor, it is done by cheap immigrants paid 50% of what anyone from that country would ever get. All other jobs are "knowledge worker" jobs where you need a college degree to get in the door. What happened to factory jobs and welder, plumber and such skilled trades? They were outsourced or outmoded.
Besides, what everyone wants to hear is how their child is above average. All children deserve the right to be above average, right? No parent wants to hear how their child can grow up to be a welder when held out in front of them are successful "knowledge workers" every day. How many television shows are about factor workers or welders? How many television shows are about lawyers, doctors, and other highly educated folks?
Ever had someone call in a bomb threat and have the bomb go off?
First time that happens people start taking bomb threats a lot more seriously. Until then it is fine to joke about it and dole out minor punishments.
You misunderstand how this works. Please take some time and read some of the 9/11 "truth" documents or information about how there is proof that the Germans didn't exterminate any Jews. See how nicely rational the arguments are and how any naysayers are classed as either "tool of the other side" or "misguided and uninformed".
Once you start down the road of having an argument with someone that believes you don't understand the facts that he possesses and these facts trump everything, you are wasting your time.
The KKK has all the proof they need to support their knowledge that black people are inferior. And they can cite learned people that you've never heard of.
Ever tried getting in a discussion about the Bible with a Jehovah's Witness? They know more about your arguments than you do, because they are trained. Muslims are trained from birth that Jews are going to turn into pigs and apes one day Real Soon Now. They can show you pictures of Jews turning into pigs. They can show you American university professors that have proven Jews are genetically closer to pigs and apes than Muslims are. And you know what? They are right - such people do exist. Your rational arguments are pointless because they know more about the arguments than you do. Training works.
As a note aside, why do you think Gitmo is being used as a prison camp rather than running these people through the US court system? Because their apparently logical and rational arguments would get get 24x7 news coverage and give them a much wider platform than they have now. And these arguments sound reasonable to people that don't know any better. Yes, it is utter insanity but it sounds really good.
Have you, personally, held a placenta? How about a not-particularly fresh one?
I'd vote for pixllation for the same reason that they don't show cattle being disembowled on network television. It's gross.
Reason vs. insanity fails 100% of the time because it is insanity. Do you understand? You cannot fight insanity by appealing to someone's reasoning - their reasoning isn't at play here. This is the one message that people seem to fail to understand.
And until we understand that people who think it is a valid form of political expression to behead schoolgirls cannot be reasoned with in any manner we will have people beheading schoolgirls. And stoning women to death. And killing people that wake up one day and feel their religion is no longer the driving force in their life.
You are trying to shout back a tidal wave. The water doesn't care but you are going to get washed away.
If you have to wonder why Muslim youths are pissed off and ready at the drop of a hat to blow themselves and others up, you need to get a clue about life in many Islamic countries.
Their religion teaches that life is worthless and nothing counts until the afterlife. Pushing things up a bit to reach the afterlife earlier seems harmless or a benefit.
The UN and Palestinian leaders have been keeping Palestinians bottled up in "refugee camps" with somehow the hope that these people will be able to eventually displace Israel and return home. The conditions in the camps and the teachings of the imams lead young people to the conclusion that there isn't any point to not reaching the afterlife right away - where things count.
We aren't doing anything but putting off a Christian-Islamic war today. The Islamic side has nothing to lose and they know it - the afterlife is all that counts. We are laboring under the mistaken impression that life here counts for something and has value. These two views are diametrically opposed and until there is a some way of reconciling these beliefs there isn't going to be anything but war. It may not be possible to reconcil these beliefs and the world no longer works in the manner where they can have their territory and we can have ours.
#1: How many people in the world are taught Jews are the devil, have horns and can turn into all sorts of nasty creatures?
#2: How many people are taught that Jews are (or will soon turn into) pigs and apes and deserve nothing more than to be killed?
Answer to #1: Damn few.
Answer to #2: Every single Muslim. They might not believe it, but they have been exposed to it, probably from childhood.
Why is Internet Radio different from Radio Radio?
If the objective is to have broadcasting over the Internet, then there is no effective difference and the royalties should be identical. Saying that Internet Radio does not need to pay royalties because it is too immature a market or because it is somehow different from other radio broadcasting seems to have been rejected.
So, why should there be no royalties for Internet radio when both play the same music?
The problem has nothing to do with production and everything to do with trials and testing. Inbetween someone getting a bright idea and figuring out that a compound in tree bark can help with certain types of cancer and a drug being available comes years of testing and trials.
These are not done by governments or educational institutions even through that may be the source of the original idea.
Why would it cost anything to take a drug from Australia and produce it in the USA? Again, after some drug issues in the 1960's the USA does its own pharmaceutical trials. Period. So no matter where the drug comes from, someone is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on trials.
The problem is that after the trials are completed what is being proposed would throw open the doors to "production companies" that invested nothing in the trials or research and have everything to gain from simply producing the drug. This is always a bad idea because the production company with no investment has nothing to lose from bad or carelessly made products.
100 years ago, it was all about industrial capacity. Today, it is distribution. The large pharmaceutical companies have a distribution channel that requires products to be fed in. It doesn't matter if they don't have some new wonder drug ready, they need a product.
Just making lots of asprin doesn't cut it anymore.
The "solution" of making patents on drugs disappear means the distribution channel is still there and needs to be fed. Unfortunately, all there would be are the same versions of existing drugs. Why would anyone create something new to stock up someone else's distribution channel?
Both of the first two groups are rapidly dwindling. The first group because of increased penetration and loss-leader pricing to garner marketshare. When you have DSL connections priced at $14.95 per month, you will displace dial-up if the customer can get DSL.
The "old farts" that believe there is a law against downloading stuff are getting old and dying. When they are gone, almost nobody will be paying for music, movies or anything else that can be downloaded.
The clueless folks will be handled by commerical software that will be sold in stores, at least for a while. We've seen movie copying software in stores, why not music stealing software?
Yes, the media companies are going to have a problem. Soon. Why would anyone that believes (a) there is nothing wrong with downloading and (b) better get yours before the door closes buy music, movies or anything else that can be downloaded?
Better hope you live someplace without a police force, like Serbia or Iraq. Because if you are in Western Europe the US Secret Service will have all of the power of your local federal police right there with them.
Worse, in Europe you get your wireless connection borrowed to send an email to some fun body like the UN, NATO, EU Commission or something like that saying you're with Al Queda and going to set off a nuke under them and they have 12 hours to evacuate.
Japan? I would recommend using a threat with the words Sarin and subway in it.
Good luck proving it isn't you. Most places take bomb threats really, really seriously.
Yes, I would say having an open or easily hackable wireless connection (WEP) means that you have nothing the world over but admiring friends that love you. Easiest way to get someone in plenty of trouble is through their Internet account these days. Probably more trouble than they can handle.