If I can watch it on YouTube, why would it affect Viacom's ratings? I'd never watch their commercial-ridden filth. I would exclusively watch edited content with the commercials either removed or parodied.
For Viacom, it is life or death. If their content is available WITHOUT commercials, why would you ever, ever subject yourself to commercials? Also, you get the benefit from others filtering out the stuff that isn't any good that you might watch blindly without knowing.
Then, why would anyone pay to advertise on a Viacom outlet, knowing all the good stuff is available elsewhere.
So, as soon as the over-40ish people die off nobody is watching TV with commercials.
I don't know of any shareholder lawsuit that ever benefited the shareholders in general. Maybe one or two specifically made out, but usually the stock price falls and everyone loses money. Except the lawyer that started the whole mess.
This is unlikely to be anything the SEC takes an interest in, or anyone else for that matter. The specifics are almost certainly legal even if the outward appearance is shakey. Dell and Intel are unlikely to risk as much as 20% of their annual revenue on some scheme the lawyers didn't say was just fine. Now, it may not have been something that could proudly shout from the rooftops, which is why it was hidden away.
I see this turning into a lose-lose situation for everyone, except the lawyer.
If the decision was up to you, I'd say fine. Unfortunately, as things swing further and further away from any potential liability on the part of the health care system, the decision isn't yours alone.
And, should we in the US get saddled with some government-provided health care system, such decisions will no longer be in the hands of either patients or doctors. Or even insurance company paid people. They will be in the hands of government accountants.
(((Yeah, I know. Insurance company accountants vs. government accountants. Right. Except insurance company accountants don't sign checks for $40,000 toilet seats and $600 hammers.)))
What this means, in a liability-adverse environment, is that if you think you are qualified to make a decision about your health care and guess wrong the taxpayers if the country picking up the bill get to pay to correct your mistake. Because if we don't your next of kin can sue someone, and probably will. Can't have that. So, if you take the wrong pill and end up in a coma, we (taxpayers) get to foot the bill for your mistake.
Now if you took responsibility for your decisions and there was no external liability I guess I'd be all for everyone acting as their own doctor and eliminating the whole medical oversight system that is in place. You could just go and pick up whatever you wanted at probably 1/10th the price.
You know that saying about a man acting as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. Goes double for doctors.
But it would be fine if there was nobody that had to be responsible in the end. The truth of the matter is even today someone else is responsible. Someone who is going to get sued if you guess wrong. So they have to pick up the pieces and take care of any mistakes. Therefore the safest and wisest choice available is you don't get to choose. It isn't just better for you - it is better for all of us. Us that would have to pay for your mistakes.
OK, after you admit that civilization and industralization is causing the Earth problems, we need to discuss which direction is better for mankind:
Eliminate the need for mankind to rely on the resources on Earth as the sole carrying basket for mankind. Resources are elsewhere and can be exploited. Survival may depend on it in the future - we have no real understanding of how planetary climate could change in the future making it nearly impossible to live on Earth.
Remove industrialization and a good part of the population to return the "natural balance" to the planet. This would certainly have an effect on carbon emissions as well as waste heat from cities. It would eliminate strip mining and landfills. The Earth would be pristine again. There just wouldn't be so many people living on it.
Choose. Soon. Everything depends on the answer to this question.
It is clear to me that there are many on the "left" and in the environmental movement that see #2 as the only possible choice. If we want to implement this, we need to start right away reducing the population drastically before it is too late.
I thought there was "uniform concensus" among scientists that humans were responslble for climate change. Now it is only 90% certain.
It sounds like things were being distorted before with some reports claiming only 66% certainity but many folks claiming that it was certain. Sounds less certain than some would like.
Think back to 1850 or so. This is how the few remaining are going to live should we decide to save Mother Earth for the remaining species other than humans. With firm controls on technology and industrialization to prevent another resurgence.
The problem is most people would like to get something for nothing, and with the Internet it happens every day. So, you buy the game, download it and I ask you to "borrow it". You let me and I "share" it with a few more friends. Great PR for the company that made the game.
Since one of the friends is into "sharing" big time, this now gets distributed all over the planet through P2P networks. Popular game, but so far they have sold only one copy. That is all they will ever sell, because everyone is getting it for free.
Can't beat the low price of that game, can you?
This is exactly what happened in the 1980's to virtually kill off the serious game market for Apple and Atari computers. It was pretty much known you would see two copies, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast and the BBS network would then take over distribution.
Now, if people believed that this was stealing there might be a future to electronic distribution without lots of DRM. We are working up to an entire generation that believes it is just "sharing" and there is nothing wrong with sharing - after all, they were taught to share in kindergarden, right?
You somehow believe that the physical distribution is increasing costs significantly. It isn't true. A mass-produced game that is sold in a store has maybe $2.50 in manufacturing cost including the box, the disc and all other materials in the box. Shipping is negligible at maybe $2 a box, if that much. This means that on a $50 game only 9% of the cost is attributed to physical media.
Unless a game publisher prices their product for direct sale only, the price is going to be high enough for a merchant (and maybe distributor) to get their piece of the action. The publisher isn't going to undercut other merchants, so you aren't going to get a break dealing direct. And very few publishers want the hassle of direct sales to consumers so they are going to price things for distribution.
Who appointed you (or someone you believe in) as the moral authority?
Who says that it is not the firm belief of a majority of Chinese citizens that arresting people that speak out openly about revolution, social disorder and collapse of the current system is moral? Maybe they don't like things they way they are but they see proposed alternatives as much, much worse.
Again, who the heck is going to decide "moral"? Would you like it to be an imam that believes women should be uneducated and hidden away? How about the Catholic pope? I'm sure there are many that believe that one of these two is "moral" and should judge others.
Today, hardware design is meaningless. It was previously true that if you built a better hardware platform that you could sell it for a premium price and have a product. Today, that really isn't true - what counts is having software to make commodity hardware do something the competition doesn't do or do as well.
What this means is all the value in a PC hardware device is either in firmware or in the driver. The hardware can be easily copied by anyone in China and they can start churning out 10x the volume the original company can overnight. If they have the right specifications.
Similarly, getting the driver is as easy as buying one copy of the original hardware. Most average customers wouldn't think twice about installing a driver that said ATI for the half-price board they just bought that is called API. Or AIT. Or BTI. So stealing the driver is easy.
So, why is ATI in business today when their hardware could be copied by knock-off Chinese companies? Because they haven't fully described the interface and the driver won't work without the undocumented interface being the same. Now, once there is an open-source Linux driver for ATI hardware the only thing stopping the Chinese knock-offs from shipping is ethics. I don't see that as a huge hurdle.
It is already an established fact the US will allow import of such products, even while the infringed company is suing. ATI would be out of business in a month after a complete driver specification was released.
Why did you feel it was necessary to add "(with doctors assistance)"? Women since the beginning of time have found ways to deal with inconvenient pregnancies. Yes, horseback riding is out of favor right now as are coathangers, but they have been used in the past.
While it might be considered somewhat safer for the woman concerned to have a pregnancy terminated with medical assistance, be assured that "safer" hasn't always been a primary concern. Getting rid of the damned thing has often been the only concern.
The one thing that should not get too far away from the whole abortion/baby killing/euthansia debate is where there is a will, there is a way. It will be done by desparate people in what they consider to be desperate circumstances. Medical supervision is absolutely not required.
Why would you (stupidly, IMHO) use SSN for this purpose? Sounds like another misuse of a government index value that should have no other uses as was mandated by law when it was created.
Has nothing to do with fair use. It has to do with whether or not format-shifting is allowed. My understanding is that format-shifting is specifically permitted for personal use.
Well, perhaps the point is what possible control can Norway exert over a US-based company with a US-hosted Internet service?
This is like blocking US access to corrupt mob-operated gambling sites on the Internet, hosted outside the US. Can't be done.
So you think Norway should be able to determine how their citizens interact with foreign governments and foreign trade agreements? Rather than, let's say their citizens being subjected to the whims of a multinational company based somewhere else that seems to operate however they want, subject to no laws at all?
So let's understand this. You signed up for a service that you consider to be useless and are paying for it.
You then go around the service and grab the content that was posted by people intentionally violating the copyright.
Why are you bothering with the service? This is the thing that I don't get. If you are going to steal, why then go ahead and STEAL. The paid service exists partly to convice people that control the content they are doing the right thing and "See, there's all these nice law-abiding people respecting our copyright." This completely skews the demographics and leads to more paid services.
If you want it for free and to bring the idea of "intellectual property" down, STOP PAYING.
If you respect the idea of copyright and want to support the content owners, STOP STEALING.
Note, I didn't say there would be less movies made.
Just fewer people in the promotions and marketing departments and a some shrinkage in the grunts. The stars will remain because if necessary they will finance their own movies just to have something to be a "star" in. Look at who the executive producers are for a lot of the movies today and you will see a lot of big, well-known names.
But you can forget about movie posters being hawked on street corners. Billboards in Times Square for a movie will be a thing of the past. Movie theaters will exist, as will pay-per-view on cable and satellite. But promotions based around movies will die quickly. Paid-for placements is another thing that will go away because there will not be that much spare change.
Movies? Yes, absolutely. Promotions, advertising and all the whatnot that exists today because of the big movies - NO.
I suspect the number is higher. Free is very attractive. Doing something that is perceived as "criminal" and getting away with it is also very attractive.
Combine these two and you have a huge motivation for people to do this, regardless of their ever watching the movie.
It may be too late to stuff the genii back in the bottle. The result is that this becomes an "entitlement" that people expect. We are looking at a lot of people being out of work as a result. Not the "stars" but the studio grunts and the folks in the promotions and marketing departments.
You are talking about one more area where the federal government intrudes, takes over and replaces a function that is left to the states now. This is not just a little troublesome for some people. The "War Between the States" was essentially over state's rights in one form or another. You should be prepared to believe that many states do not like losing out to the federal government powers that they have held for 200 years and will call out the National Guard (a state militia) to defend their powers.
You might get it elevated from a county to a state level, but that is as far as it is going to go. Today it is that way in many states already so it wouldn't be that big a leap. But no way could it be taken away from the states.
Can you actually imagine the operational nightmare that would ensue if every machine had a unique key?
Ignoring the potential for screwups in distribution (machine ships with no key, machine ships with wrong key), you have the wonderful situation of a large county (like Cook County, IL) with 10,000 machines and 10,000 unique keys.
Of course, you cannot access the machine to do anything without the single, unique, correct key.
I am sure that unique keys would be much, much worse than one key fits all.
The money in spam isn't from people buying stuff - it is from the silly advertiser thinking they can send their ads to millions of people for $1000. They do this and get a report back that says only 0.8% of the people opened the email.
The spam-sending organization then shows them that they need to revise their message with a better subject line so more people opened the email. Another $1000 and more spam is sent, this time 0.7% of the people open the email.
Continue this until the advertiser runs out of money. If you have enough contracts for sending spam it matters not a whit if anyone buys the stuff at all. It is only important that people pay for it to be sent.
You apparently don't get it. First rule of anti-spammers is "Spammers lie". The second rule is there is no such thing as a voluntary, opt-in managed mailing list that isn't just spam.
So, you say your business is legitimate. Obviously, you are lying. Spammers lie.
But your list is opt-in and only send legitimate email? Too bad, if someone gets it that forgot they signed up, it's spam. Therefore, you are a spammer.
While this technique might hold some value, it isn't going to counter the way spam is being sent today - not from a single source but from many, many sources.
No, the problem is that Google enables these people to make a return on their "investment". If you buy some land in the hopes of selling it at a premium about all you can do is something constructive with it while you are waiting.
Instead, what Google has enabled is to turn this wasteland into a money-making opportunity for these folks. Take away the ability to put ads in this space and it will dry up overnight.
You should understand that the ISP end of the industry has been involved in building the customer base, overselling facilities and fighting all efforts at any sort of realistic pricing. Business customers are charged 10x what home customers are charged for identical service, often with the business getting capped at lower levels than home users are.
This is partly the result of the last 20 years or so of marketing hype and selling to the lowest common denominator. You buy a 21 inch display and bring it home to find out in tiny print that it isn't 21 inches but "19.8 viewable inches". There have been plenty of lawsuits over this kind of thing, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
Where we have gotten ourselves is a race to the bottom for Internet service - whoever can deliver "services" for the lowest monthly price wins, at least for 99.99% of the consumers. The fact that Plan A may be more restrictive if you do certain things vs. Plan B which costs more is lost on the average consumer - they are voting for the lowest price per month. And that is pretty much where the thinking stops.
Step forward to people actually using the oversold bandwidth and you will (any day now) see that the "service" doesn't work as it was hyped. Of course, they have your agreement to lots of fine print that really says they aren't delivering anything at all, just a vague promise for some kind of "Internet stuff" that their lawyers didn't understand when they wrote the agreement. So you really want to use that bandwidth you have been sold? Well, that is going to cost more.
Do you really think the large, consumer-focused ISPs are going to deliver a message to their customers that prices are now going to be tinged with reality? That maybe selling 1Mb of bandwidth to a business costs the same as 1Mb of bandwidth to a home user? No, I don't think you are going to see that at all. This would drive significant numbers of home users back to dial-up connections or dropping the whole think altogether.
What we are going to have instead is the folks making piles of money with advertising that these consumers are soaking up (and evidently acting upon) paying the freight so the connections are still priced unrealistically. So you can have your $14.95 a month DSL connection with free Yahoo advertising included at no additional cost. While the business down the street is paying $70-80 a month for nearly the same service, except with the word "business" in it.
It will be Google, Yahoo and MSN paying or the end user paying. I don't think they are going to make the end user pay, ever. It would kill the user base and shrink the number of eyeballs looking at all those ads. That it might shrink the folks responding to phishing and stock scams would be a good thing, but that isn't going to happen either.
You miss the point. Today, there is no reason - utterly none at all - to pay for music. Within a few years the folks without broadband access will be further marginalized and fewer in number. Their parents that dutifully paid for entertainment media will be gone from the marketplace, having been replaced by folks that know better. It is freely available on the Internet. All of it, software, music, movies, whatever.
The point of DRM is to discourage "casual copying". It doesn't make it impossible, just difficult. Piracy? No hope of cutting that off. The idea is to tell people that they have purchased something they do not have the right to redistribute to their "friends" all over the world.
It isn't working. Everyone knows that. Everyone under 40 understands that P2P is the way to get music, movies, etc. The folks over 40 are supporting the media companies with their purchases. As these folks get fewer and fewer in number the media companies will die out with them.
Girlfriend? Naked? Sure, if she is 17 that is child porn.
This got a nice Asian gentleman in trouble in Chicago recently. He had a 17-year-old runaway living with him and stealing from him. He thought he couldn't call the police because he was screwing a 17-year-old. She was holding this over his head for most of their "relationship".
Turns out screwing a 17-year-old in Illinois is legal. However, as the case turned out, taking pictures of her naked is not legal at all. He is almost certainly in jail now for a nice long stay because of sharing pictures of her with some friends and having lots of them on his computer.
Internet gambling from the US results in (a) no taxes, (b) no regulation and (c) no oversight. Gambling in the US is one of the most regulated and watched industries there is. The assumption seems to be in the US that any sort of gambling is operated by organized crime and has the objective of cheating people. Why is this assumption here? Because it is true in the US. Las Vegas was controlled completely by the mob.
So, a large part of this is the assumption that people are being cheated because there is no oversight to prove otherwise. I don't know why they don't take that approach - lots of public service announcements about how all Internet gambling is cheating. The problem is that it may not be true - irrelevent to the US mindset.
Taxation is another aspect that isn't all that easy to fix. Again, without overside it would be impossible to assess taxes. Of course, the assumption by anyone in the gsming business in the US is that the casino is cheating on the taxes as well. Why? History in the US.
We can all run around saying "The end is coming", or we can actually figure out what is happening. When climatologists believe there is a linear trend and there is evidence of an exponential trend it is clear someone hasn't figured out the system behind the observations.
We can then either make up stories about what might be happening or we can devote significant resources to learning. As of yet, I have heard of nothing being done to figure out what is going on. The entire debate is political/religious. You either "believe" in Global Warming or you do not. If you do not, you must be some right-wing Christian nutjob that thinks the Earth is 4,000 years old. If you believe in Global Warming, you must be a sandal-wearing unwashed hippy and so on and so forth. Either way, the "other side" is composed of nuts and heretics.
It is clear from the last three years that nobody has a model for what is happening. Sure, it might be human induced, but if it is nobody has a practical idea for what would make it stop. The only real solution on that would be a return to about 1850 levels of population and energy use. Unlikely we are going to really implement a plan to kill off 90% of the world's population next week. Or that the West is going return to subsistance farming real soon.
So how about some real, non-political studies where the people aren't going in to prove what they "know" is happening? I don't see this happening and I don't see any motivation for it to ever happen.
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If I can watch it on YouTube, why would it affect Viacom's ratings? I'd never watch their commercial-ridden filth. I would exclusively watch edited content with the commercials either removed or parodied.
For Viacom, it is life or death. If their content is available WITHOUT commercials, why would you ever, ever subject yourself to commercials? Also, you get the benefit from others filtering out the stuff that isn't any good that you might watch blindly without knowing.
Then, why would anyone pay to advertise on a Viacom outlet, knowing all the good stuff is available elsewhere.
So, as soon as the over-40ish people die off nobody is watching TV with commercials.
I don't know of any shareholder lawsuit that ever benefited the shareholders in general. Maybe one or two specifically made out, but usually the stock price falls and everyone loses money. Except the lawyer that started the whole mess.
This is unlikely to be anything the SEC takes an interest in, or anyone else for that matter. The specifics are almost certainly legal even if the outward appearance is shakey. Dell and Intel are unlikely to risk as much as 20% of their annual revenue on some scheme the lawyers didn't say was just fine. Now, it may not have been something that could proudly shout from the rooftops, which is why it was hidden away.
I see this turning into a lose-lose situation for everyone, except the lawyer.
If the decision was up to you, I'd say fine. Unfortunately, as things swing further and further away from any potential liability on the part of the health care system, the decision isn't yours alone.
And, should we in the US get saddled with some government-provided health care system, such decisions will no longer be in the hands of either patients or doctors. Or even insurance company paid people. They will be in the hands of government accountants.
(((Yeah, I know. Insurance company accountants vs. government accountants. Right. Except insurance company accountants don't sign checks for $40,000 toilet seats and $600 hammers.)))
What this means, in a liability-adverse environment, is that if you think you are qualified to make a decision about your health care and guess wrong the taxpayers if the country picking up the bill get to pay to correct your mistake. Because if we don't your next of kin can sue someone, and probably will. Can't have that. So, if you take the wrong pill and end up in a coma, we (taxpayers) get to foot the bill for your mistake.
Now if you took responsibility for your decisions and there was no external liability I guess I'd be all for everyone acting as their own doctor and eliminating the whole medical oversight system that is in place. You could just go and pick up whatever you wanted at probably 1/10th the price.
You know that saying about a man acting as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. Goes double for doctors.
But it would be fine if there was nobody that had to be responsible in the end. The truth of the matter is even today someone else is responsible. Someone who is going to get sued if you guess wrong. So they have to pick up the pieces and take care of any mistakes. Therefore the safest and wisest choice available is you don't get to choose. It isn't just better for you - it is better for all of us. Us that would have to pay for your mistakes.
Choose. Soon. Everything depends on the answer to this question.
It is clear to me that there are many on the "left" and in the environmental movement that see #2 as the only possible choice. If we want to implement this, we need to start right away reducing the population drastically before it is too late.
I thought there was "uniform concensus" among scientists that humans were responslble for climate change. Now it is only 90% certain.
It sounds like things were being distorted before with some reports claiming only 66% certainity but many folks claiming that it was certain. Sounds less certain than some would like.
Think back to 1850 or so. This is how the few remaining are going to live should we decide to save Mother Earth for the remaining species other than humans. With firm controls on technology and industrialization to prevent another resurgence.
Yeah, if only.
The problem is most people would like to get something for nothing, and with the Internet it happens every day. So, you buy the game, download it and I ask you to "borrow it". You let me and I "share" it with a few more friends. Great PR for the company that made the game.
Since one of the friends is into "sharing" big time, this now gets distributed all over the planet through P2P networks. Popular game, but so far they have sold only one copy. That is all they will ever sell, because everyone is getting it for free.
Can't beat the low price of that game, can you?
This is exactly what happened in the 1980's to virtually kill off the serious game market for Apple and Atari computers. It was pretty much known you would see two copies, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast and the BBS network would then take over distribution.
Now, if people believed that this was stealing there might be a future to electronic distribution without lots of DRM. We are working up to an entire generation that believes it is just "sharing" and there is nothing wrong with sharing - after all, they were taught to share in kindergarden, right?
You somehow believe that the physical distribution is increasing costs significantly. It isn't true. A mass-produced game that is sold in a store has maybe $2.50 in manufacturing cost including the box, the disc and all other materials in the box. Shipping is negligible at maybe $2 a box, if that much. This means that on a $50 game only 9% of the cost is attributed to physical media.
Unless a game publisher prices their product for direct sale only, the price is going to be high enough for a merchant (and maybe distributor) to get their piece of the action. The publisher isn't going to undercut other merchants, so you aren't going to get a break dealing direct. And very few publishers want the hassle of direct sales to consumers so they are going to price things for distribution.
Who appointed you (or someone you believe in) as the moral authority?
Who says that it is not the firm belief of a majority of Chinese citizens that arresting people that speak out openly about revolution, social disorder and collapse of the current system is moral? Maybe they don't like things they way they are but they see proposed alternatives as much, much worse.
Again, who the heck is going to decide "moral"? Would you like it to be an imam that believes women should be uneducated and hidden away? How about the Catholic pope? I'm sure there are many that believe that one of these two is "moral" and should judge others.
Today, hardware design is meaningless. It was previously true that if you built a better hardware platform that you could sell it for a premium price and have a product. Today, that really isn't true - what counts is having software to make commodity hardware do something the competition doesn't do or do as well.
What this means is all the value in a PC hardware device is either in firmware or in the driver. The hardware can be easily copied by anyone in China and they can start churning out 10x the volume the original company can overnight. If they have the right specifications.
Similarly, getting the driver is as easy as buying one copy of the original hardware. Most average customers wouldn't think twice about installing a driver that said ATI for the half-price board they just bought that is called API. Or AIT. Or BTI. So stealing the driver is easy.
So, why is ATI in business today when their hardware could be copied by knock-off Chinese companies? Because they haven't fully described the interface and the driver won't work without the undocumented interface being the same. Now, once there is an open-source Linux driver for ATI hardware the only thing stopping the Chinese knock-offs from shipping is ethics. I don't see that as a huge hurdle.
It is already an established fact the US will allow import of such products, even while the infringed company is suing. ATI would be out of business in a month after a complete driver specification was released.
While it might be considered somewhat safer for the woman concerned to have a pregnancy terminated with medical assistance, be assured that "safer" hasn't always been a primary concern. Getting rid of the damned thing has often been the only concern.
The one thing that should not get too far away from the whole abortion/baby killing/euthansia debate is where there is a will, there is a way. It will be done by desparate people in what they consider to be desperate circumstances. Medical supervision is absolutely not required.
Why would you (stupidly, IMHO) use SSN for this purpose? Sounds like another misuse of a government index value that should have no other uses as was mandated by law when it was created.
Has nothing to do with fair use. It has to do with whether or not format-shifting is allowed. My understanding is that format-shifting is specifically permitted for personal use.
Fair use is a far less clear cut.
Well, perhaps the point is what possible control can Norway exert over a US-based company with a US-hosted Internet service?
This is like blocking US access to corrupt mob-operated gambling sites on the Internet, hosted outside the US. Can't be done.
So you think Norway should be able to determine how their citizens interact with foreign governments and foreign trade agreements? Rather than, let's say their citizens being subjected to the whims of a multinational company based somewhere else that seems to operate however they want, subject to no laws at all?
So let's understand this. You signed up for a service that you consider to be useless and are paying for it.
You then go around the service and grab the content that was posted by people intentionally violating the copyright.
Why are you bothering with the service? This is the thing that I don't get. If you are going to steal, why then go ahead and STEAL. The paid service exists partly to convice people that control the content they are doing the right thing and "See, there's all these nice law-abiding people respecting our copyright." This completely skews the demographics and leads to more paid services.
If you want it for free and to bring the idea of "intellectual property" down, STOP PAYING.
If you respect the idea of copyright and want to support the content owners, STOP STEALING.
Note, I didn't say there would be less movies made.
Just fewer people in the promotions and marketing departments and a some shrinkage in the grunts. The stars will remain because if necessary they will finance their own movies just to have something to be a "star" in. Look at who the executive producers are for a lot of the movies today and you will see a lot of big, well-known names.
But you can forget about movie posters being hawked on street corners. Billboards in Times Square for a movie will be a thing of the past. Movie theaters will exist, as will pay-per-view on cable and satellite. But promotions based around movies will die quickly. Paid-for placements is another thing that will go away because there will not be that much spare change.
Movies? Yes, absolutely. Promotions, advertising and all the whatnot that exists today because of the big movies - NO.
I suspect the number is higher. Free is very attractive. Doing something that is perceived as "criminal" and getting away with it is also very attractive.
Combine these two and you have a huge motivation for people to do this, regardless of their ever watching the movie.
It may be too late to stuff the genii back in the bottle. The result is that this becomes an "entitlement" that people expect. We are looking at a lot of people being out of work as a result. Not the "stars" but the studio grunts and the folks in the promotions and marketing departments.
Yes, but...
You are talking about one more area where the federal government intrudes, takes over and replaces a function that is left to the states now. This is not just a little troublesome for some people. The "War Between the States" was essentially over state's rights in one form or another. You should be prepared to believe that many states do not like losing out to the federal government powers that they have held for 200 years and will call out the National Guard (a state militia) to defend their powers.
You might get it elevated from a county to a state level, but that is as far as it is going to go. Today it is that way in many states already so it wouldn't be that big a leap. But no way could it be taken away from the states.
Can you actually imagine the operational nightmare that would ensue if every machine had a unique key?
Ignoring the potential for screwups in distribution (machine ships with no key, machine ships with wrong key), you have the wonderful situation of a large county (like Cook County, IL) with 10,000 machines and 10,000 unique keys.
Of course, you cannot access the machine to do anything without the single, unique, correct key.
I am sure that unique keys would be much, much worse than one key fits all.
The money in spam isn't from people buying stuff - it is from the silly advertiser thinking they can send their ads to millions of people for $1000. They do this and get a report back that says only 0.8% of the people opened the email.
The spam-sending organization then shows them that they need to revise their message with a better subject line so more people opened the email. Another $1000 and more spam is sent, this time 0.7% of the people open the email.
Continue this until the advertiser runs out of money. If you have enough contracts for sending spam it matters not a whit if anyone buys the stuff at all. It is only important that people pay for it to be sent.
You apparently don't get it. First rule of anti-spammers is "Spammers lie". The second rule is there is no such thing as a voluntary, opt-in managed mailing list that isn't just spam.
So, you say your business is legitimate. Obviously, you are lying. Spammers lie.
But your list is opt-in and only send legitimate email? Too bad, if someone gets it that forgot they signed up, it's spam. Therefore, you are a spammer.
While this technique might hold some value, it isn't going to counter the way spam is being sent today - not from a single source but from many, many sources.
No, the problem is that Google enables these people to make a return on their "investment". If you buy some land in the hopes of selling it at a premium about all you can do is something constructive with it while you are waiting.
Instead, what Google has enabled is to turn this wasteland into a money-making opportunity for these folks. Take away the ability to put ads in this space and it will dry up overnight.
You should understand that the ISP end of the industry has been involved in building the customer base, overselling facilities and fighting all efforts at any sort of realistic pricing. Business customers are charged 10x what home customers are charged for identical service, often with the business getting capped at lower levels than home users are.
This is partly the result of the last 20 years or so of marketing hype and selling to the lowest common denominator. You buy a 21 inch display and bring it home to find out in tiny print that it isn't 21 inches but "19.8 viewable inches". There have been plenty of lawsuits over this kind of thing, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
Where we have gotten ourselves is a race to the bottom for Internet service - whoever can deliver "services" for the lowest monthly price wins, at least for 99.99% of the consumers. The fact that Plan A may be more restrictive if you do certain things vs. Plan B which costs more is lost on the average consumer - they are voting for the lowest price per month. And that is pretty much where the thinking stops.
Step forward to people actually using the oversold bandwidth and you will (any day now) see that the "service" doesn't work as it was hyped. Of course, they have your agreement to lots of fine print that really says they aren't delivering anything at all, just a vague promise for some kind of "Internet stuff" that their lawyers didn't understand when they wrote the agreement. So you really want to use that bandwidth you have been sold? Well, that is going to cost more.
Do you really think the large, consumer-focused ISPs are going to deliver a message to their customers that prices are now going to be tinged with reality? That maybe selling 1Mb of bandwidth to a business costs the same as 1Mb of bandwidth to a home user? No, I don't think you are going to see that at all. This would drive significant numbers of home users back to dial-up connections or dropping the whole think altogether.
What we are going to have instead is the folks making piles of money with advertising that these consumers are soaking up (and evidently acting upon) paying the freight so the connections are still priced unrealistically. So you can have your $14.95 a month DSL connection with free Yahoo advertising included at no additional cost. While the business down the street is paying $70-80 a month for nearly the same service, except with the word "business" in it.
It will be Google, Yahoo and MSN paying or the end user paying. I don't think they are going to make the end user pay, ever. It would kill the user base and shrink the number of eyeballs looking at all those ads. That it might shrink the folks responding to phishing and stock scams would be a good thing, but that isn't going to happen either.
Google or you - one of you is going to pay.
You miss the point. Today, there is no reason - utterly none at all - to pay for music. Within a few years the folks without broadband access will be further marginalized and fewer in number. Their parents that dutifully paid for entertainment media will be gone from the marketplace, having been replaced by folks that know better. It is freely available on the Internet. All of it, software, music, movies, whatever.
The point of DRM is to discourage "casual copying". It doesn't make it impossible, just difficult. Piracy? No hope of cutting that off. The idea is to tell people that they have purchased something they do not have the right to redistribute to their "friends" all over the world.
It isn't working. Everyone knows that. Everyone under 40 understands that P2P is the way to get music, movies, etc. The folks over 40 are supporting the media companies with their purchases. As these folks get fewer and fewer in number the media companies will die out with them.
Girlfriend? Naked? Sure, if she is 17 that is child porn.
This got a nice Asian gentleman in trouble in Chicago recently. He had a 17-year-old runaway living with him and stealing from him. He thought he couldn't call the police because he was screwing a 17-year-old. She was holding this over his head for most of their "relationship".
Turns out screwing a 17-year-old in Illinois is legal. However, as the case turned out, taking pictures of her naked is not legal at all. He is almost certainly in jail now for a nice long stay because of sharing pictures of her with some friends and having lots of them on his computer.
Internet gambling from the US results in (a) no taxes, (b) no regulation and (c) no oversight. Gambling in the US is one of the most regulated and watched industries there is. The assumption seems to be in the US that any sort of gambling is operated by organized crime and has the objective of cheating people. Why is this assumption here? Because it is true in the US. Las Vegas was controlled completely by the mob.
So, a large part of this is the assumption that people are being cheated because there is no oversight to prove otherwise. I don't know why they don't take that approach - lots of public service announcements about how all Internet gambling is cheating. The problem is that it may not be true - irrelevent to the US mindset.
Taxation is another aspect that isn't all that easy to fix. Again, without overside it would be impossible to assess taxes. Of course, the assumption by anyone in the gsming business in the US is that the casino is cheating on the taxes as well. Why? History in the US.
We can all run around saying "The end is coming", or we can actually figure out what is happening. When climatologists believe there is a linear trend and there is evidence of an exponential trend it is clear someone hasn't figured out the system behind the observations.
We can then either make up stories about what might be happening or we can devote significant resources to learning. As of yet, I have heard of nothing being done to figure out what is going on. The entire debate is political/religious. You either "believe" in Global Warming or you do not. If you do not, you must be some right-wing Christian nutjob that thinks the Earth is 4,000 years old. If you believe in Global Warming, you must be a sandal-wearing unwashed hippy and so on and so forth. Either way, the "other side" is composed of nuts and heretics.
It is clear from the last three years that nobody has a model for what is happening. Sure, it might be human induced, but if it is nobody has a practical idea for what would make it stop. The only real solution on that would be a return to about 1850 levels of population and energy use. Unlikely we are going to really implement a plan to kill off 90% of the world's population next week. Or that the West is going return to subsistance farming real soon.
So how about some real, non-political studies where the people aren't going in to prove what they "know" is happening? I don't see this happening and I don't see any motivation for it to ever happen.