Yes, but the problem is focus, promotion and marketing. You are assuming the reason things sell is they are offered. Most people in the consumer space have quite a different view - things sell because they are promoted. Just having something sitting on the shelf doesn't do much for it. Having it occupy a favorable place in the store (on an end, for instance) will significantly increase sales. People see it. They buy it.
The problem with the online world is the "favored" positions are incredibly small. Additionally, having a larger catalog just means that when someone searches for something they are bombarded with many, many more possibilities. This actually deters people from making any choice at all. So, in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, having more potential choices reduces overall sales.
There are some that can say that everything that is known about consumer marketing is utterly false in an online environment. So far, the results are mixed from what I have heard. We are certainly not seeing the sort of abandonment of B&M stores that was touted as "just around the corner" in the late 1990's. That might happen - or it might not - but it is likely to take at least a generation before it does. Old people, even those using the Internet, are very unlikely to abandon shopping habits formed over decades.
This means that for the short term, most of this "long tail" stuff is nonsense.
The problem is that once music is "sold" without restrictive DRM, it can no longer be sold - it will be redistributed on the Internet. Via web pages hosted in Eastern European countries. Via P2P applications. Via BitTorrent. Whatever. It doesn't matter - the idea of the artist being able to control distribution is pretty much dead.
The artists just aren't going to get paid, period.
We need to figure out if that is where we want society to be. I think just about everyone that has ever downloaded "free" music will agree that you can't charge people for it anymore. iTunes is the most successful and what do they have, 1% of the market?
Computers are getting so good at it that the supply of anything digital is approaching infinity, and therefore the free-market price is approaching zero.
Exactly. The problem here is that people believe the stuff has value that is being shared, especially the creator. Or they likely as not wouldn't have bothers creating it in the first place. You would like to say the value to you is zero, so reduce the cost to zero and I'll take it.
The problem is that the whole concept of "piracy" being illegal and getting something for nothing is what the attractiveness is.
321 Studios marketed a product that was blatently illegal. They sold millions of dollars worth in a couple of years until they were sued out of existance. If they had been selling a legal product they likely would have never amounted to anything. It was the illegal nature of the product that made it attractive.
Your suggested solution would provide a way for everyone to (1) respect the rights of content creators to control the distribution of their work and (2) get the lawyers out of the system. Unfortunately, it removes all of the attractiveness from getting something for nothing - because all you could get would be the stuff that people were giving away. Nobody tries to rob a soup kitchen - they will go to a store and steal a can of soup first.
Let's see here, if you ask your average farmer in Bangledesh about spending $10 million on a mission to Mars or spending $10 million on giving every Bangledeshi farmer a cup of rice, how do you think they are going to vote?
"Majority rule" is pointless when people aren't going to agree on the basics. If we had the entire planet under a single "majority rule" we would all be living like Bangledeshi farmers, knee deep in a rice paddy.
Most of the "industrial powers" these days have 110% of their revenue dedicated to maintaining the welfare state that the EU has become. They could not possibly agree to fund something in space when all of their attention is focused on providing the next meal to a 20%+ unemployed population.
We aren't going to "unite humanity" until some major economic issues are resolved. The biggest one of these is what exactly to do about the majority of humanity that lives pretty much the same way they did 300 years ago. Having them all emigrate to New York City isn't the answer. Having them all emigrate to Frankfurt Germany or Brussels isn't the answer, but that seems to be the one in current favor.
Management may feel they are being extremely generous and catering to the whims of many employees while the employees feel they are being ignored and abused. Communication? Naa. The employees in this kind of situation are sure that management isn't listening and doesn't really care.
This is the situation in probably 70-80% of the companies I have ever had any dealings with. When it gets real bad stuff develops legs - i.e., things disappear out the door seemingly all by themselves. Computers. Office supplies. Lamps. Pictures on the wall. Just about anything.
Management then realizes something is going on and needs to make drastic changes. Which, of course, piss people off even more.
At no point does either side communicate until about 80% of the staff has been replaced.
The problem is that a company that tolerated negative comments from present and former employees would quickly find themselves in a very bad situation.
First off, why would anyone post something positive? That means almost everything is going to be negative. Mostly inaccurate, but with a grain of truth to it.
Then, if you knew about such a message board and looked at it, would you want to go and find out if all of the terrible things you were reading were accurate? Or, would you just pass it on by as not being worth the effort? I suspect the latter would be almost exclusively the case.
This means that the potential candidates for any job of non-stellar proportions end up being only the people that are ignorant of such a service. If the service is popular, even wildly so, companies about whom comments are made are never going to be able to hire anyone.
At that point it is simply a question of penetrating whatever anonymity the service has. Because failing to sue the posters and threaten everyone else means the company goes under. Probably all because of lies, distortions and half-truths.
You might want to think that "Well, if they aren't perfect then they deserve it." Don't go there. Every job has people that think it is the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth and people that think they would rather clean toliets for a living. You are talking about something that has the potential to affect the lives of a large number of people and some of them might not like their employer going out of business.
You can't impose an id requirement - for those people that do not drive you have just created a "poll tax". This would be the fee charged by the state for the "state id" card that you can get in place of a drivers license. A poll tax is designed to prevent poor people from voting by charging them for the privilege. Any mechanism which requires something, anything from a person in order to vote immediately disenfranchises some and is open to being called a poll tax.
Morning? I don't know where you live, but the news services are going to announce a winner by 10PM Eastern time come hell or high water. They announced Gore the winner in 2000. This will happen again.
What this means is that some polling places will be open on the west coast when the winner is announced.
The real problem is that stem cell therapy is going to be genotype-specific. That means you need stem cells that match your DNA pretty closely in order for it to work for you. So, where do we get genotype-specific stem cells when someone needs them?
There are currently two ways: cloning (human) and made-to-order babies. Right now, we do not know how to to clone people, even just a little bit. If we could grow a new heart when you needed one, that would probably wipe out the need for a lot of stem cell research. So, it is pretty unlikily that this is going to happen any time soon. Besides, the opposition would be even greater to whole-human cloning than to just chopping up a few babies.
Made-to-order babies are almost certainly the answer. You get a close egg and a close sperm cell and combine them with standard in-vitro techniques. Maybe do 10 just to make sure. Of course, nobody is really talking about allowing them to grow much beyond the embryo stage.
So where do you get the "close (in DNA terms) egg" when you need one? Well, it might be like current organ transplants where you try for a relative first. However, unlike organs, women can sell eggs by the bucket without doing themselves any real harm. Men are already paid for sperm, so this shouldn't be a problem either. Now we have a thriving market for human materials.
Is this where you really want to go? Believe me, the so-called religious opposition to some things isn't all that far off if you understand there is more to this than "We could have saved Christopher Reeve!"
Taliban consistently was running around executing schoolteachers as "intellectuals". What they really meant to do was wipe out the "intellectual elite" which could give rise to there being some sort of other elite rather than the imam's.
I don't care how incredible your new-paradyme way to distribute music is. If iTunes is charging $0.99 a song to the consumer, a band is not going to get $150,000 from 150,000 sales through iTunes. Far from it.
While iTunes might have the best business model in the world, they aren't going to do it for free very long. Sure, at some initial point selling music at cost without expenses pushes the iPod into people's pocket. But that only goes so far. Then, reality sets in.
I think $150,000 income would require 1,500,000 downloads (or sales) because just the operational cost is going to come to nearly $0.89.
OK, I'll bite. What a lot of people say they want is to eliminate the money from elections by having all money spent come from the government. That would eliminate the need for any sort of campaign contributions. It would also open up elections to people that are not able to effectively solicit contributions.
There is a problem with this idea, however. One that I think you will see pretty quickly.
You see, I am all for this idea. I figure that a state election in a major state like Illinois costs today 5-10 million dollars all together. Let's assume (for no particular reason) that there would be an immediate savings of 25%, so it would cost no more than about $7.5 million for an election. This money would be coming from the state instead of private contributions.
Today it is a requirement to get a large number of signatures on petitions to get your name on the ballot. This might be continued to qualify people but it would be much better if you just had to apply for the money. This would then open elections up to a lot more people and make things generally fairer.
So, I figure if I participated in an election every two years - perhaps different offices but always in some sort of election - I should be able to syphon off a little bit of this money, say $200,000 out of $7,000,000, for various expenses. This would mean that I have a $100,000 a year income for trying to get elected. Sounds like a pretty good part-time job to me. Pays a lot better for less hours than anything I have been doing lately.
Why shouldn't we just support people that would like to try to get elected?
Problem is, the "paying customers" are being offered a loss-leader service to build market share. If you were paying the $60-$70 a month for DSL service, there wouldn't be quite some many people on it. Unfortunately, in major markets the subscriber cost is more like $15 a month. In my opinion, this doesn't count as a "paying customer" - it is a statistic that lets the DSL companies fight over how many customers they have.
Of course, in this kind of a price-war environment it is impossible for any DSL provider to raise their prices. They would just lose customers - the people would flock to the $15 a month service. There is no way the average user can tell "quality" or "better service" so all they can judge is the price per month. So the providers are in a trap - they can't raise prices.
Most of the "extort money from Google" seems to come from thinking about a way out of the trap. It looks that that idea isn't going to work. You may not like the next round of creative thinking any better than the first, but you can be assured there is going to be some shakeup in DSL costs over the next couple of years.
Hydroelectric generation is not "renewable" over long term use.
If you are limiting your examination to it not using the water up, that is correct. However, the energy that generates electricity come from the water moving from a higher elevation to a lower elevation. Long term, hydroelectric generation will mean there is less water at higher elevations. Less water = less generating capacity and also commesurate climate and ecological changes.
Hardly "renewable" or "self-renewing". Like all so-called "renewable" technologies, this works fine in small quantities with a small population. With the population we have today, almost nothing is climate or ecology neutral. And certainly almost nothing, not even solar photovoltaic is really "renewable".
If you want the planet to operate as a closed system, the first step is to identify the maximum population that such a system could support without everyone drowning in waste products in 1000 years. My take is about 200 million people total.
The majority of Americans did not vote for the president. Of any party. The majority stayed home and let other people vote. Maybe if that changes we will not have quite so many people complaining about who other people elected.
The average slashdotter that has no respect for IP laws expects others to respect their property. Very, very funny.
What is wrong with an oppressed, unemployed and starving person who comes across someone displaying a token of obvious wealth simply taking it? The iPod is probably worth more in a pawn shop than this person normally sees in a month of panhandling. If they take a wallet as well, they are likely to be able to rip off some merchants until the credit card gets canceled. Which if you are kind, you will wait a couple of days to report. After all, you aren't going to lose anything on it - just the merchants.
It isn't like these people were ever going to be able to go out an buy and iPod so we can't count this as a lost sales opportunity. Besides, they are helping the local economy by trading with local merchants after exchanging the iPod for cash at the pawn shop.
What about the victim? Well, you have insurance, right? If you are silly enough to put up a struggle, remember that to you it is an iPod and to them it is eating for the next week. Who is more motivated here? So you better not put up a fight because they will win. They likely as not have nothing to lose other than maybe a few years more of living as an oppressed, unemployed starving street person. You, on the other hand have everything to lose.
Crime is crime, period. Teaching people to disrespect some laws teaches people to disrespect all laws in general. Besides, as some have correctly pointed out, this is how people have always lived. The rich are there to support the poor, voluntarily or involuntarily.
The problem is that "lower prices" just doesn't work, even though it is a nice idea.
Today, in the marketplace of the Internet you have a real choice: pay or not. Period. You want a copy of Adobe Photoshop - you can pay any amount from $0 to $1000. You get to choose. The fact that some people will pay $1000 but most choose something less is a fact of life. Where the rubber meets the road is when everyone (or at least nearly everyone) chooses $0.
This is where music in China has gone. Everyone chooses $0.
This is where it should go in the US as well. Because that will finally push the issue to the point where it will be a clear choice for everyone. Either support sale of creativity or not. Right now it is a mix and criminals are able to make plenty of money by paying $0 and selling for >$0 to people that think they should pay something, just not as much as "legitimate" channels. So, if we can eliminate the criminals we will be left with the $1000 and the $0 choices. Obviously, everyone will choose $0, right?
At that point I hope you like learning the inner workings of GIMP, because Adobe will be gone. Good riddance, right? They charge too much.
These are the choices we face, and I think the answer is obvious. $0 for everything. State support for artists. State support for education, medical treatment, food, housing, everything. That ends the gouging, right?
Poker legit? Maybe. We haven't passed the point yet where you can easily fake a human player with a machine that cheats.
How about blackjack? How about video poker? Slots? The machines in the US are heavily regulated and while they are "settable" for payout there is considerable oversight as to how they are set. Why would you assume you are getting a fair shake on games like that?
I have not seen anything that says this applies to poker betting only. Online casino gaming, yes. Which applies to a lot more than poker and games that are far easier to rig for the house. And much, much less easy for players to determine if they are being cheated.
I would assume any semi-anonymous entity operating "offshore" is going to stretch the limits as much as they think they can.
As long as a Canadian citizen does not import illegal substances into the US, it isn't a US problem. Assuming Extasy is legal in Amsterdam, there is no problem with it being there. Importing it into the US is the action that triggers legal problems.
There is no problem with producing Nazi replica flags in the US. I suspect if I set up a business importing them into Germany there would start to be some legal problems as soon as the first sale occurred.
There is no problem with printing Christian Bibles in Canada. Happens every day. However, should I have a obscure way of shipping them secretively into Saudi Arabia, you can bet there would be an extradition attempt. Not sure if it would get very far because the penalty for selling a Christian Bible in Saudi Arabia is death. Canada might not like sending it citizen for a death sentence. Fortunately, nobody has tested that law in recent memory.
The issue with software is also one of understanding what was happening. The difference between a 1800's era machine shop running off a common shaft and a 777 airliner is that a couple of mechanics could maintain the 1800's machine shop. Or a couple of forklifts. But could a couple of mechanics, without a support organization behind them, deal with a 777 airliner? Hardly.
The situation we have today with software - even open source software - is that even if you have the source code it is not feasible for the average joe to attempt to "maintain" it in any way. Today a moderate size software project may have 200,000 lines of code and not all of it written to be clearly understood by someone outside the project. You are looking at a huge learning curve to be able to get to the point where you could even begin to intelligently track down bugs.
If there was no other choice at all, it might be worth making that kind of investment. But, it would require making that investment over and over again due to staff turnover and such. And the rule of off-the-shelf software is there is always another choice. Most commercial IT establishments have figured this out - if some application is discontinued you choose another one. Generally just as cheap and has whatever small subset of functionality that you really need.
Back in the 1970's companies actually did pay in-house staff to write things like word processing applications, accounting programs and the like. The focus in the last 20 years or so has been to eliminate that kind of staff dependency and just buy solutions.
I'm not sure open source helps in that environment at all.
What is so hard is that is EXACTLY what they do not want to do. Everyone in the ISP business is worried that if they jack up the prices on consumers they will get left holding the bag, the last one without a chair, etc.
What they want to do is have a hidden (from the consumer) revenue increase without raising consumer prices.
This means they can still offer their $14.99 DSL package that doesn't even pay for the leased copper line much less the bandwidth, support or anything else. But they get to keep their increasing market share.
Sure, this has to collapse someday when the value of the market share is no longer higher than the costs associated with keeping it. But it is the current ISP game to push that ate further and further out.
If ClearPlay's entire value is with their supplying time codes, then what possible business would they have if they opened this up? The result would be they would have some stock of modified DVD players sold at cost - or even below cost and nothing else.
Yes, content is king. In this case the content is the editing time codes, not the movie.
Let's see here... you download a TV show or 10 of them and discover you like it. So, you run out and buy a copy of exactly what you downloaded for free.
Why? Why did you bother? You already had it.
I suppose the excuse is that the downloaded versions weren't as good quality, but this is a temporary situation that will be fixed soon. You could say that you really liked the box the DVDs came in and just had to have it, but that would be silly also.
So why did you buy the DVD?
Piracy, as viewed by content producers, is the end itself. There is no "try before buy" - shareware works the same way and 5% of the people (if you are lucky) pay. It is just "try". There is no "buy" and there should not be. If the pirated material isn't up to your standards, find another source. There are plenty out there. I am sure someone bought and uploaded the DVD you purchased. Just get that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the problem is focus, promotion and marketing. You are assuming the reason things sell is they are offered. Most people in the consumer space have quite a different view - things sell because they are promoted. Just having something sitting on the shelf doesn't do much for it. Having it occupy a favorable place in the store (on an end, for instance) will significantly increase sales. People see it. They buy it.
The problem with the online world is the "favored" positions are incredibly small. Additionally, having a larger catalog just means that when someone searches for something they are bombarded with many, many more possibilities. This actually deters people from making any choice at all. So, in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, having more potential choices reduces overall sales.
There are some that can say that everything that is known about consumer marketing is utterly false in an online environment. So far, the results are mixed from what I have heard. We are certainly not seeing the sort of abandonment of B&M stores that was touted as "just around the corner" in the late 1990's. That might happen - or it might not - but it is likely to take at least a generation before it does. Old people, even those using the Internet, are very unlikely to abandon shopping habits formed over decades.
This means that for the short term, most of this "long tail" stuff is nonsense.
The problem is that once music is "sold" without restrictive DRM, it can no longer be sold - it will be redistributed on the Internet. Via web pages hosted in Eastern European countries. Via P2P applications. Via BitTorrent. Whatever. It doesn't matter - the idea of the artist being able to control distribution is pretty much dead.
The artists just aren't going to get paid, period.
We need to figure out if that is where we want society to be. I think just about everyone that has ever downloaded "free" music will agree that you can't charge people for it anymore. iTunes is the most successful and what do they have, 1% of the market?
Exactly. The problem here is that people believe the stuff has value that is being shared, especially the creator. Or they likely as not wouldn't have bothers creating it in the first place. You would like to say the value to you is zero, so reduce the cost to zero and I'll take it.
Who the heck gives you that right?
The problem is that the whole concept of "piracy" being illegal and getting something for nothing is what the attractiveness is.
321 Studios marketed a product that was blatently illegal. They sold millions of dollars worth in a couple of years until they were sued out of existance. If they had been selling a legal product they likely would have never amounted to anything. It was the illegal nature of the product that made it attractive.
Your suggested solution would provide a way for everyone to (1) respect the rights of content creators to control the distribution of their work and (2) get the lawyers out of the system. Unfortunately, it removes all of the attractiveness from getting something for nothing - because all you could get would be the stuff that people were giving away. Nobody tries to rob a soup kitchen - they will go to a store and steal a can of soup first.
Let's see here, if you ask your average farmer in Bangledesh about spending $10 million on a mission to Mars or spending $10 million on giving every Bangledeshi farmer a cup of rice, how do you think they are going to vote?
"Majority rule" is pointless when people aren't going to agree on the basics. If we had the entire planet under a single "majority rule" we would all be living like Bangledeshi farmers, knee deep in a rice paddy.
Most of the "industrial powers" these days have 110% of their revenue dedicated to maintaining the welfare state that the EU has become. They could not possibly agree to fund something in space when all of their attention is focused on providing the next meal to a 20%+ unemployed population.
We aren't going to "unite humanity" until some major economic issues are resolved. The biggest one of these is what exactly to do about the majority of humanity that lives pretty much the same way they did 300 years ago. Having them all emigrate to New York City isn't the answer. Having them all emigrate to Frankfurt Germany or Brussels isn't the answer, but that seems to be the one in current favor.
Problem of course is the definition of "shit".
Management may feel they are being extremely generous and catering to the whims of many employees while the employees feel they are being ignored and abused. Communication? Naa. The employees in this kind of situation are sure that management isn't listening and doesn't really care.
This is the situation in probably 70-80% of the companies I have ever had any dealings with. When it gets real bad stuff develops legs - i.e., things disappear out the door seemingly all by themselves. Computers. Office supplies. Lamps. Pictures on the wall. Just about anything.
Management then realizes something is going on and needs to make drastic changes. Which, of course, piss people off even more.
At no point does either side communicate until about 80% of the staff has been replaced.
The problem is that a company that tolerated negative comments from present and former employees would quickly find themselves in a very bad situation.
First off, why would anyone post something positive? That means almost everything is going to be negative. Mostly inaccurate, but with a grain of truth to it.
Then, if you knew about such a message board and looked at it, would you want to go and find out if all of the terrible things you were reading were accurate? Or, would you just pass it on by as not being worth the effort? I suspect the latter would be almost exclusively the case.
This means that the potential candidates for any job of non-stellar proportions end up being only the people that are ignorant of such a service. If the service is popular, even wildly so, companies about whom comments are made are never going to be able to hire anyone.
At that point it is simply a question of penetrating whatever anonymity the service has. Because failing to sue the posters and threaten everyone else means the company goes under. Probably all because of lies, distortions and half-truths.
You might want to think that "Well, if they aren't perfect then they deserve it." Don't go there. Every job has people that think it is the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth and people that think they would rather clean toliets for a living. You are talking about something that has the potential to affect the lives of a large number of people and some of them might not like their employer going out of business.
You can't impose an id requirement - for those people that do not drive you have just created a "poll tax". This would be the fee charged by the state for the "state id" card that you can get in place of a drivers license. A poll tax is designed to prevent poor people from voting by charging them for the privilege. Any mechanism which requires something, anything from a person in order to vote immediately disenfranchises some and is open to being called a poll tax.
Morning? I don't know where you live, but the news services are going to announce a winner by 10PM Eastern time come hell or high water. They announced Gore the winner in 2000. This will happen again.
What this means is that some polling places will be open on the west coast when the winner is announced.
The real problem is that stem cell therapy is going to be genotype-specific. That means you need stem cells that match your DNA pretty closely in order for it to work for you. So, where do we get genotype-specific stem cells when someone needs them?
There are currently two ways: cloning (human) and made-to-order babies. Right now, we do not know how to to clone people, even just a little bit. If we could grow a new heart when you needed one, that would probably wipe out the need for a lot of stem cell research. So, it is pretty unlikily that this is going to happen any time soon. Besides, the opposition would be even greater to whole-human cloning than to just chopping up a few babies.
Made-to-order babies are almost certainly the answer. You get a close egg and a close sperm cell and combine them with standard in-vitro techniques. Maybe do 10 just to make sure. Of course, nobody is really talking about allowing them to grow much beyond the embryo stage.
So where do you get the "close (in DNA terms) egg" when you need one? Well, it might be like current organ transplants where you try for a relative first. However, unlike organs, women can sell eggs by the bucket without doing themselves any real harm. Men are already paid for sperm, so this shouldn't be a problem either. Now we have a thriving market for human materials.
Is this where you really want to go? Believe me, the so-called religious opposition to some things isn't all that far off if you understand there is more to this than "We could have saved Christopher Reeve!"
Taliban consistently was running around executing schoolteachers as "intellectuals". What they really meant to do was wipe out the "intellectual elite" which could give rise to there being some sort of other elite rather than the imam's.
I don't care how incredible your new-paradyme way to distribute music is. If iTunes is charging $0.99 a song to the consumer, a band is not going to get $150,000 from 150,000 sales through iTunes. Far from it.
While iTunes might have the best business model in the world, they aren't going to do it for free very long. Sure, at some initial point selling music at cost without expenses pushes the iPod into people's pocket. But that only goes so far. Then, reality sets in.
I think $150,000 income would require 1,500,000 downloads (or sales) because just the operational cost is going to come to nearly $0.89.
OK, I'll bite. What a lot of people say they want is to eliminate the money from elections by having all money spent come from the government. That would eliminate the need for any sort of campaign contributions. It would also open up elections to people that are not able to effectively solicit contributions.
There is a problem with this idea, however. One that I think you will see pretty quickly.
You see, I am all for this idea. I figure that a state election in a major state like Illinois costs today 5-10 million dollars all together. Let's assume (for no particular reason) that there would be an immediate savings of 25%, so it would cost no more than about $7.5 million for an election. This money would be coming from the state instead of private contributions.
Today it is a requirement to get a large number of signatures on petitions to get your name on the ballot. This might be continued to qualify people but it would be much better if you just had to apply for the money. This would then open elections up to a lot more people and make things generally fairer.
So, I figure if I participated in an election every two years - perhaps different offices but always in some sort of election - I should be able to syphon off a little bit of this money, say $200,000 out of $7,000,000, for various expenses. This would mean that I have a $100,000 a year income for trying to get elected. Sounds like a pretty good part-time job to me. Pays a lot better for less hours than anything I have been doing lately.
Why shouldn't we just support people that would like to try to get elected?
Problem is, the "paying customers" are being offered a loss-leader service to build market share. If you were paying the $60-$70 a month for DSL service, there wouldn't be quite some many people on it. Unfortunately, in major markets the subscriber cost is more like $15 a month. In my opinion, this doesn't count as a "paying customer" - it is a statistic that lets the DSL companies fight over how many customers they have.
Of course, in this kind of a price-war environment it is impossible for any DSL provider to raise their prices. They would just lose customers - the people would flock to the $15 a month service. There is no way the average user can tell "quality" or "better service" so all they can judge is the price per month. So the providers are in a trap - they can't raise prices.
Most of the "extort money from Google" seems to come from thinking about a way out of the trap. It looks that that idea isn't going to work. You may not like the next round of creative thinking any better than the first, but you can be assured there is going to be some shakeup in DSL costs over the next couple of years.
If you are limiting your examination to it not using the water up, that is correct. However, the energy that generates electricity come from the water moving from a higher elevation to a lower elevation. Long term, hydroelectric generation will mean there is less water at higher elevations. Less water = less generating capacity and also commesurate climate and ecological changes.
Hardly "renewable" or "self-renewing". Like all so-called "renewable" technologies, this works fine in small quantities with a small population. With the population we have today, almost nothing is climate or ecology neutral. And certainly almost nothing, not even solar photovoltaic is really "renewable".
If you want the planet to operate as a closed system, the first step is to identify the maximum population that such a system could support without everyone drowning in waste products in 1000 years. My take is about 200 million people total.
The majority of Americans did not vote for the president. Of any party. The majority stayed home and let other people vote. Maybe if that changes we will not have quite so many people complaining about who other people elected.
What is wrong with an oppressed, unemployed and starving person who comes across someone displaying a token of obvious wealth simply taking it? The iPod is probably worth more in a pawn shop than this person normally sees in a month of panhandling. If they take a wallet as well, they are likely to be able to rip off some merchants until the credit card gets canceled. Which if you are kind, you will wait a couple of days to report. After all, you aren't going to lose anything on it - just the merchants.
It isn't like these people were ever going to be able to go out an buy and iPod so we can't count this as a lost sales opportunity. Besides, they are helping the local economy by trading with local merchants after exchanging the iPod for cash at the pawn shop.
What about the victim? Well, you have insurance, right? If you are silly enough to put up a struggle, remember that to you it is an iPod and to them it is eating for the next week. Who is more motivated here? So you better not put up a fight because they will win. They likely as not have nothing to lose other than maybe a few years more of living as an oppressed, unemployed starving street person. You, on the other hand have everything to lose.
Crime is crime, period. Teaching people to disrespect some laws teaches people to disrespect all laws in general. Besides, as some have correctly pointed out, this is how people have always lived. The rich are there to support the poor, voluntarily or involuntarily.
The problem is that "lower prices" just doesn't work, even though it is a nice idea.
Today, in the marketplace of the Internet you have a real choice: pay or not. Period. You want a copy of Adobe Photoshop - you can pay any amount from $0 to $1000. You get to choose. The fact that some people will pay $1000 but most choose something less is a fact of life. Where the rubber meets the road is when everyone (or at least nearly everyone) chooses $0.
This is where music in China has gone. Everyone chooses $0.
This is where it should go in the US as well. Because that will finally push the issue to the point where it will be a clear choice for everyone. Either support sale of creativity or not. Right now it is a mix and criminals are able to make plenty of money by paying $0 and selling for >$0 to people that think they should pay something, just not as much as "legitimate" channels. So, if we can eliminate the criminals we will be left with the $1000 and the $0 choices. Obviously, everyone will choose $0, right?
At that point I hope you like learning the inner workings of GIMP, because Adobe will be gone. Good riddance, right? They charge too much.
These are the choices we face, and I think the answer is obvious. $0 for everything. State support for artists. State support for education, medical treatment, food, housing, everything. That ends the gouging, right?
Poker legit? Maybe. We haven't passed the point yet where you can easily fake a human player with a machine that cheats.
How about blackjack? How about video poker? Slots? The machines in the US are heavily regulated and while they are "settable" for payout there is considerable oversight as to how they are set. Why would you assume you are getting a fair shake on games like that?
I have not seen anything that says this applies to poker betting only. Online casino gaming, yes. Which applies to a lot more than poker and games that are far easier to rig for the house. And much, much less easy for players to determine if they are being cheated.
I would assume any semi-anonymous entity operating "offshore" is going to stretch the limits as much as they think they can.
As long as a Canadian citizen does not import illegal substances into the US, it isn't a US problem. Assuming Extasy is legal in Amsterdam, there is no problem with it being there. Importing it into the US is the action that triggers legal problems.
There is no problem with producing Nazi replica flags in the US. I suspect if I set up a business importing them into Germany there would start to be some legal problems as soon as the first sale occurred.
There is no problem with printing Christian Bibles in Canada. Happens every day. However, should I have a obscure way of shipping them secretively into Saudi Arabia, you can bet there would be an extradition attempt. Not sure if it would get very far because the penalty for selling a Christian Bible in Saudi Arabia is death. Canada might not like sending it citizen for a death sentence. Fortunately, nobody has tested that law in recent memory.
So, is the proper way to move people from Windows to Linux is to destroy the ability to use Windows as a computing platform?
The issue with software is also one of understanding what was happening. The difference between a 1800's era machine shop running off a common shaft and a 777 airliner is that a couple of mechanics could maintain the 1800's machine shop. Or a couple of forklifts. But could a couple of mechanics, without a support organization behind them, deal with a 777 airliner? Hardly.
The situation we have today with software - even open source software - is that even if you have the source code it is not feasible for the average joe to attempt to "maintain" it in any way. Today a moderate size software project may have 200,000 lines of code and not all of it written to be clearly understood by someone outside the project. You are looking at a huge learning curve to be able to get to the point where you could even begin to intelligently track down bugs.
If there was no other choice at all, it might be worth making that kind of investment. But, it would require making that investment over and over again due to staff turnover and such. And the rule of off-the-shelf software is there is always another choice. Most commercial IT establishments have figured this out - if some application is discontinued you choose another one. Generally just as cheap and has whatever small subset of functionality that you really need.
Back in the 1970's companies actually did pay in-house staff to write things like word processing applications, accounting programs and the like. The focus in the last 20 years or so has been to eliminate that kind of staff dependency and just buy solutions.
I'm not sure open source helps in that environment at all.
What they want to do is have a hidden (from the consumer) revenue increase without raising consumer prices.
This means they can still offer their $14.99 DSL package that doesn't even pay for the leased copper line much less the bandwidth, support or anything else. But they get to keep their increasing market share.
Sure, this has to collapse someday when the value of the market share is no longer higher than the costs associated with keeping it. But it is the current ISP game to push that ate further and further out.
If ClearPlay's entire value is with their supplying time codes, then what possible business would they have if they opened this up? The result would be they would have some stock of modified DVD players sold at cost - or even below cost and nothing else.
Yes, content is king. In this case the content is the editing time codes, not the movie.
Let's see here... you download a TV show or 10 of them and discover you like it. So, you run out and buy a copy of exactly what you downloaded for free.
Why? Why did you bother? You already had it.
I suppose the excuse is that the downloaded versions weren't as good quality, but this is a temporary situation that will be fixed soon. You could say that you really liked the box the DVDs came in and just had to have it, but that would be silly also.
So why did you buy the DVD?
Piracy, as viewed by content producers, is the end itself. There is no "try before buy" - shareware works the same way and 5% of the people (if you are lucky) pay. It is just "try". There is no "buy" and there should not be. If the pirated material isn't up to your standards, find another source. There are plenty out there. I am sure someone bought and uploaded the DVD you purchased. Just get that.