If every time someone saw an unattended car they would just jump in an drive away you might start seeing cars that needed "permission" to be driven in such a restrictive manner as it would be like calling the dealer or the manufacturer for permission.
Similarly, if every time someone saw a purse they thought "JACKPOT" and ran over to grab it, it might be nice if they were locked and needed permission to be opened. Think of high-security buildings where you get let in to a man-trap where you identify yourself and ask to be let in. If you aren't authorized the outside door opens and the police take you away.
So we have software that everyone seems to want but only a few (usually around 5%) are willing to pay for. The solution seems to be to just take it, don't pay and so what... If you have a software product that has 100,000 users then anything you can do to change that 5% number to 6% is a huge win. It can mean someone's job.
The problem with software today is in many places pirated software (not paid for) vastly exceeds the paid-for kind. If an individual who dedicates his time to putting out free software, that is probably OK. When a company has employees that are getting their jobs cut because of lack of income, well, I suppose if you asked those employees they wouldn't say piracy was just fine. Now, if the publisher has accepted this and decided that their products are free (to pirate) but they will be compensated by ads it is fine - until of course the pirates also disable those nasty ads.
In many cases the point is to remove revenue from digital goods - see, they're free to make so they should be free to take, right? Except that isn't how the world of the 1900s works and many of us are stuck using this completely outmoded concept called "money". Thet want it at the grocery store, they want it at the gas station and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it. Maybe when the rest of the world catches up to the 21st Century we can get rid of money completely. Until then, my employees want to get paid and if you take stuff without paying you are literally pushing them out onto the street.
What you are describing (fully parallel hardware) is fine if the budget is unlimited.
I suspect UbiSoft isn't running their servers as the primary source of revenue and the budget for this migration is very limited. So limited that they aren't duplicating the hardware but physically tearing it down in one location and moving it to a new location. Not very nice, but it if you can't afford to replace 100% of the hardware it is what you are looking at doing.
It is nice to work with a huge operation where the external-facing server farm is the primary revenue source for the company and the budget for such a migration is unlimited. But, not everyone gets to work like that.
The one problem with that is the player with the biggest distribution channel wins every time.
Imagine a world where anytime anything was released Sony would grab it up, relabel it and release it through their sales channels. Everything would be Sony-branded. Or WalMart. Or any other huge company. Likely as not they would simply stake out turf that was exclusive so Sony would take software and consumer electronics and GM would take cars. Amazon would be the source for anything textual - and any other publisher could just go pound sand.
Sure, a small fraction of people might understand this was happening and try to "go to the source". They would eventually fail because nobody would win out in this world except the mega-distributors. Why produce anything when you aren't going to get anything for it? Oh, because your ego commands you to? Yes, then we end up with everything sounding like Darwin Reedy or the Shaytards - search on YouTube for some classic ego-driven user contributions.
Sure, it would be fun to try for a week. But I think a week is about all the planet could stand.
Beethoven died a pauper mostly because he refused to fit his work within the confines of the patronage system that existed at the time. While other composers were doing exactly what their patrons wanted, Beethoven apparently did not.
Hence, no money while all around him the music world was filled with people having plenty.
Sure, we are all better off thanks to Beethoven's going his own way, but how likely is that today? If your boss comes up to you and says he wants you do to X and X is ugly, repulsive and offensive to you, do you do it anyway or get fired? Are your artistic expression and principals worth more than some money? The answer for the most part today is "No way, I gotta eat.".
Sorry, but we have pretty much done this to ourselves.
Right now most people under 30 that are thinking about "shopping" are comparing prices online. Price is king and everything else is secondary. So if you walk into a store they expect to be rated on two things: price and availability. If they don't have it, there is nothing they can do - you are going to walk out. If they do have it and are much more expensive than the price you have already seen online, you aren't going to buy there either.
So where does "customer service" enter into this? It doesn't. You can't judge customer service online, so therefore it is unimportant.
The few times when someone actually wants to made a purchasing decision based on something other than price and availability is rare enough that the stores don't care about it. If 10 people come in and one leaves in a huff because the salesperson was rude to them it really doesn't matter because it is all about the numbers today.
I'd say the whole idea of customer service is pretty much dead, killed because of easy price comparisons. All that matters is the price and whether or not you can grab what you want right now.
It is important to understand that while the jobs are gone, the people aren't. Over the last few years most larger companies have had to cut back on staff one way or another, mostly through just laying off people. The result has been lots of pressure on the folks left to do the same volume of work. The result? The remaining folks have stepped up to the plate and taken on the challange - because it was either that or the company would go under. Or maybe if somone was clearly underperforming they were simply replaced.
The end of this story is that with a little less demand everyone knows now they can indeed make do with less staff. The jobs aren't coming back, probably not ever. They simply aren't needed. There might be a big push to hire more people if there was a sudden spike in demand across the board, but that is extremely unlikely given that where this demand would come from (consumers buying stuff) just isn't going to happen.
What we are likely to see after the re-election of Mr. Obama is an attempt to restart consumer demand by reinstatating welfare on a huge scale. If we gave every non-worker (somewhere around 30% of the US isn't working for one reason or another) $50,000 a year there might be some hope for consumer demand. Think Obama can pull that off? I doubt it, but a convincing case can be made for it being the only way out. Will China finance it for us? Maybe. This might be the first real test of how strong the control China has over the US really is.
The problem is, you wouldn't have the dedicated team of workers laboring under the lash to work faster and faster. You wouldn't have the workers putting in 12 hour days thankful to be spending a little more time out of the cell they get to sit in when not working.
What you would have is OSHA inspectors coming through every few months and getting paid to not see the conditions. You would also have 100% of the worker's wages going towards compliance monitoring, insurance, and worker's comp. Then another 100% of the wages going to taxes and benefits. That $70 would be fine if it stopped there, as it would in China. In the US it would cost at least three times that $70 in other associated costs.
And still you would have a workforce that has been conditioned to complain and just not get the job done. What would happen if Apple had to move manufacturing back to the US is that it would be an automated factory with maybe 10 workers. Spending millions (even tens of millions) on robotic systems is a one-time cost whereas workers are a never-ending cost. The robots would work 24x7 without complaining and don't need constant supervision and "quality checks".
Sorry, but we have built a workforce in the US that isn't used to the idea of actually working. So companies are very reluctant to have lots of people that don't really want to work working for them. Hence the current situation - they figured out they don't need so many workers and are doing just fine.
I would offer that the answer in well over 90% of the cases is that your digital music is worth exactly what you paid for it. Nothing.
Now, in the small fraction of cases where someone has spent $10,000 filling up their iPod and is wondering how to (a) insure this against loss and (b) if this can be considered a valuable asset which is appreciating in value I think the answers to most of the world are pretty clear: no and heck no.
Apple built a very successful business out of selling digital music players that could potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars to use if people were paying for digital music downloads. The number of people that could afford to do this is very small - but instead of being a rich person's toy the iPod has become a major facet of popular culture.
If people were really spending $1 per song (and they aren't), these would be important questions. However, what we have created is an environment where a huge percentage of the population is (a) using digital music and (b) downloading it for free in spite of laws and successful lawsuits. It isn't right, it isn't good but it is currently a fact of life. The legal sales of digital music occupies such a small piece of the pie of digital music downloads that it is nearly irrelevant. And so we have someone that believes they can build a business on the back of this. Unlikely. And sounds like it is going to require considerable litigation to even see light of day.
I think the question of reselling digital music is absurd in the face of reality. It would take someone deeply convinced that people are buying digital music and spending tens of thousands of dollars on it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Quite an ability to delude themselves it what it would take. It probably says something about a lawyer willing to take on such a client as well.
Really, I was under the impression that legal music sales on the Internet accounted for maybe 3% of total music downloads. Now I don't know where that figure comes from and I would think it would be a very slippery number to come by - after all, there is no real tracking and nobody is volunteering that they downloaded 1000 songs last month. However, it does sort of put iTunes propaganda in perspective. iTunes is irrelevent for music sales, is pretty much what it means even if the numbers are pretty far off.
Amazon is a joke and the rest of music sales isn't even worth a snicker.
However, once you get someone who believes they can build a business on top of something where we have proven over and over through the years that downloadable music has ZERO value, you better believe they are going to defend their right to make ZERO dollars over their new-found business model.
OK, for the rest of us living in the real world, this is irrelevant.
People pirate software (and you can't stop them) and people use free alternatives (and you can't stop them)
Ah, but I think Apple has proven that you can stop them. The number of iPads, iPhones and iPods running pirated software is less than a few percent. It isn't impossible to do, it is just hard enough and risky enough that nobody is going to do it without a really good reason. And that lets out 97% of the people of the world. Also, when was the last time you thought about anti-virus or anti-malware software for an iPhone or iPad? Never - the problem doesn't exist for these platforms. So we have two bugbears of the PC (and Mac) world killed dead.
Can you understand why Microsoft and everyone else is trying to build an App Store model? Of course it isn't going to work quite as well. Windows 8 might be a step in the right direction, but probably not. But the walled-garden, locked-down appliance model is the one that works for most of the people most of the time. There are a few people in the world that really need a general-purpose programmable computer that will accept any software the owner wishes to put on it without limitation - but these machines need administration and need to be protected from folks that would like to steal from you, do you harm and just cause mayhem for the fun of it. Clearly for the rest of the world the appliance model is the winner.
Except in very unusual cases jury nullification is going about things the wrong way.
Let's say there is a law against driving a car on Sundays in Indiana. OK, it is a stupid law, but it is only in Indiana after all. First case comes to trial and everyone is saying what a stupid law it is - but the case results in a conviction. After that it seems that about 60% of the time the jury just decides it is too stupid a law and refuses - against instructions - to convict.
What we have instead of getting the law repealed is 40% of the time the law is still enforced and results in a conviction. Maybe the penalty is a $10 fine but that is irrelevent. The point is that what is needed is repeal of laws, not juries independently and inconsistently ignoring them. It might have this effect if 100% of the time the jury refused to convict in spite of obvious and clear evidence to the contrary. But this is the US and nothing is ever 100%.
The problem is the answer to this question is a secret. Nobody is talking about it.
More than one (nameless) FBI folks I have talked to have said there have been multiple incidents where TSA stopped someone actively bringing harmful materials onto an airplane. Obviously, they might have been making it all up, but probably not. So where are the news reports on this? How come the TSA didn't shout this from the rooftops about what a great job they are doing?
The story seems to be that the TSA (and a lot of other law enforcement agencies) feel that if this information were made public it would assist people in understanding how these people got caught and be able to more easily evade detection. As we have not had a successful terrorist incident since 9/11 in the US the question is really whether it is such a bang-up job being done by law enforcement at all levels that is preventing things from being successful or is it that there have simply been zero competent attemps? Right now, the folks that know aren't talking for the record.
I think this is extremely damaging. Either the TSA is a complete and utter waste of time because there is nobody there - other than grandmothers and small children being harrassed in the name of Political Correctness, or the TSA is keeping its role a secret and allowing people to think it is useless and pointless. In the latter case the only proof we will ever have is after the TSA is shut down and disbanded and aircraft start falling out of the sky. Kind of a rough way to prove a point, wouldn't you say?
What is absolutely needed is a lot more disclosure.
Two things here come immediately to mind. Let's assume that whatever is running in this system is non-trivial. If it was 1000 lines of code it could be validated the way they used to validate the Shuttle programming - mathematically. So it is probably 30,000 lines of code or more.
First thing is how would anyone "look" at that volume of code without spending months going through it and learn anything from it? What sort of interrupt-driven race conditions can exist and how would you even begin to understand them without some kind of hardware simulation platform? This sounds like someone that heard something about programming in college 10 years ago and thinks this would be really cool.
Second thing is probably why this company would not want to participate: very likely a pacemaker is pretty much down to commodity hardware and the only thing that differentiates one from another is the software. If they allow their software (the only thing of any value in the whole company), they stand to lose control of it. Once it gets into Chinese hands their product will be duplicated cheaply and they will be out of business forever. Sure. they could sue for the whole capitalization of the company - but they wouldn't get it.
If it is impossible for sites like YouTube to keep pirated materials off their site, well maybe they should not be operating.
The problem with YouTube is they are actively making money (lots and lots of money) from materials that other people have uploaded. When these people have the rights to upload that content, fine. When they do not and the content creators/owners have their materials usurped from them and used to make some disconnected third party money there is a problem. Saying this cannot be prevented that people MUST be allowed to post copyrighted content without permission, without compensation and without the right to do so means something is broken.
I do not understand entirely how Google got away with this other than the rather misguided DMCA seems to allow it. This is pretty much the same as someone "borrowing" your daughter, selling her services for a few hours and then giving her back when you finally notice she never came home from school. After all, no real harm was done and nothing was really stolen, was it?
Poaching is completely legal in an employment sense. Google got to steal people from Microsoft to prevent them from developing a search engine earlier and while they got sued nothing really happened. I think Microsoft has done the same thing to Google as well. And I know Apple has been on both sides in the past.
There are no laws that say company B cannot directly contact company A's employees and offer them higher paying jobs. Of course, once you start down that road there are few limits as to what can happen. So you end up with a situation where anyone that has been at the same job for more than a couple of years is considered to be deadwood and undesirable - because they haven't changed jobs. Funny, but this starts hurting everyone's business and it doesn't take too many years before people figure this out.
Happened in the 1970s and while it was fun to be fought over when it ended it wasn't so great.
The problem is trying to negotiate for a raise but what was happening in the 1970s - you work for company A for six months and company B comes along and offers you 25% more. Six months later, company C offers 20% more. Six months after that, company A offers the same person another 25% raise to come back. Yes, this gets out of hand quickly and is something that just about everyone - including the employees - hate. Sure, it is nice to be wanted but sooner or later it is going to catch up to you. It also changes the focus of companies where the biggest expense is already salary to one where salary and headcount are the only things that matter and they will do anything to trim people.
This sort of thing lasted for at least five years in most parts of the country in the 1970s. In some places it was closer to 10 years. A few people made out pretty well, but I think the overall result was more harm than good.
Most of these companies also had major problems with real solicited poaching - where external reps or the HR department directly would call people working for their neighbor to hire people away. Sometimes this is done just to sabotage a project - hire half the team working on it and the project gets delayed or cancelled, thus eliminating some competitive problem. Ever been offered $100 for a company phone directory? I have. I have heard of people being offered much more in some places. It is to make the soliciting of employees easier.
This is not something government can regulate because there is always a way around any sort of enforceable regulation. What is needed is an understanding that this is going to lead to a MAD situation and the escalation is going to get out of hand. That's what ended the job-hopping salary roulette in the 70s - companies realized that the end result was everybody got hurt. The problem today is how much can you really hurt Microsoft, Google or Apple? Not very much. And the minute you have one company that is immune all bets are off.
No, I don't see anything the government can do about this, mostly because it is the right thing to be happening. Sure, there might be some hands that get slapped because there are actual documents lying around. OK, so everyone learns the same thing their predecessors learned a long time ago - don't write stuff like that down or in an email. Great. Now how does the government get involved? Unless you want a Department of Employment that has to approve every hire and fire it isn't going to happen.
The key problem with the Internet today is law enforcement. It has taken 15 years, since the dawn of the web age, to get international agreement on clamping down on exploitation of children for sex. For the most part, it has only been in the last few years that some of the last countries have signed on to this. This is not something controversial - pretty much everyone agrees that selling a six-year-old for sex is wrong and selling movies of a six-year-old being raped isn't much better. And yet it took 15 years.
There has been international agreement with most countries about extraditiion for murder for perhaps 100 years. And yet, there are still havens to which a murderer can flee from which there will be no extradition. And how long has most of the world recognized murder as a crime?
Today anyone can find themselves or their business being attacked from foreign locations. If your business is the selling of creative works digitally you can be completely put out of business by web sites offering your materials for free or at low, low cost. Even if you are sellling physical goods, you can find your business impacted severely by someone selling look-alikes at 1/10th of your price. Sure, they are fake but how does anyone know until they hold it in their hand that the quality is low? Today, in the Internet age price rules the marketplace and quality has little or no part in things because you can "see" the price but the quality is invisible. As it is with customer service - if you don't need any service, you will never find out it is bad.
Today the selling of pirated or fake goods cannot be stopped. All it takes is to base the business in a place that just doesn't care and there are many. If the purpose is clearly to separate comparatively rich Americans from their money there are many supposedly lawful places that will make it easy for scammers to operate simply because the current government agrees with ripping off Americans. Same goes for Western Europe. Yes, the scammers are breaking the local laws but the local law enforcement isn't interested. Trying to recoup money through a lawsuit will simply be a waste of time - again, the deck is stacked against foreigners in their courts.
So for all the clamoring of "due process" there can be no due process for these scammers. The countries they are based in have no "due process" of any sort for foreigners against their people and they do not recognize any laws against anything done "virtually" - because it is all virtual. Sure, maybe in 50 years they will catch up to the Internet age - but it could just as easily take 500 years. Anything that is going to be done is going to be very unilateral without any cooperation from a foreign government or foreign law enforcement.
Yes, SOPA and PIPA have major flaws. But the Internet isn't going to exist as a law-free zone for the lucky ones that can operate from law-free havens much longer. The alternative to law enforcement from US and Western Europe on a unilateral basis will be enforcement from Master Card, Visa and Sony. Their way will be quite different but the effect will be two Internets - one for crime and one for entertainment. Locked down, supervised entertainment. And you can be that no Apple device will access the "crime" Internet at all. Neither will your US-based ISP support such access. It isn't going to take much to have the corporations figure out how to implement this and do it in spite of government wishes to the contrary.
So we can either figure out unilateral law enforcement against scammers and crooks or we can let the corporations do it for us. Failure to choose will be choosing the latter.
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family
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A Copyright Nightmare
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It is simple - we can choose financially reward creativity through the market, we could choose to financially reward creativity through mandated government subsidies, or we can simply choose not to reward it at all. After all, creativity could be its own reward.
Obviously with the introduction of digital goods the Internet has made rewarding creativity through the marketplace is failing. I know plenty of people that will never, ever pay for any music or movie as they are all available for free. As the non-Internet savvy population ages out of being relevant the younger people replacing them will more than likely have this view as well - why pay when it is all there for the taking? That pretty much dooms the marketplace for creativity. With fewer and fewer people paying there will be no reward.
We have tried the government-supported way. Patronage was a big experiment and while it worked it also lead to stagnation. Look at the difference in music and performance styles between 1500 and 1700 - see much difference? Compare this against 1700 and 1900. This difference is not simply a matter of technology and population density but is instead a reflection of the difference between patronage and the marketplace. Also, with the current state of the US and EU government finances I can just see a new program to support artists and writers. Personally I think it would be great if the government would just write a check to everyone expressing creativity to encourage it and all of these works could be available for free. I think $100,000 a year would be OK with just about everyone.
This brings us to the last alternative - make creativity be something that only the most crass ego-driven people can afford. If you are the sort that craves being the #1 watched video on YouTube and are willing to do anything to acheive that, you might be the sort that would find this attractive. Obviously there is no money in it for anyone - copyright could just be eliminated. Anything good would be snapped up by multinational corporations and distributed. Obviously, their distribution would drive huge ad campaigns and would really define what "popular culture" means. Like the idea of the Moon having a giant Pepsi symbol painted on it. Everything would be an ad, making money for someone. Imagine each sheet of toilet paper being printed with a stiff, non-absorbent ad for some new product, new music, new video. Yes, we can go there and we are a goodly way along this path today - check out Google sometime.
I'd say we can either bring back the marketplace or we can pretty much hang it up.
Google has little, if any, financial interest in map data. They buy all of it from sources like NavTeq and GDI. I suspect Google could replace these sources with their own collection efforts - if they wanted to. It is a huge task and to do quality work takes a lot of effort. It would appear that Google would rather buy than build.
Now, if someone found NavTeq screwing with someone's map data I could understand. They have a huge financial interest (as in the whole company) in map data and being the primary vendor of routable map data for the US.
So, I can't imagine any purpose behind Google or Google's employees having anything to do with this intentionally.
Who would recycle metal under those terms? As what is keeping a lot of scrap metal dealers in business is stolen property, what are you trying to do? Put them all out of business?
Education has been shown to be vastly overrated, especially with a popular culture that makes it clear that only nerds get good grades or pay attention to the superannuated teacher.
The end result is we have a hip-hop rap-listening, crime-worshipping culture that has decided education is irrelevant. And for these folks, it probably is. We have finally entered a point where there are a lot more people than jobs, so the people without jobs aren't going to be needed. Ever. The labor market is sufficiently automated that what took 10 people to do 50 years ago now takes one. And the factory that employed 10,000 workers closed and moved to China. The US simply doesn't need all the people working any longer.
Now, the tax base the government has been running on has pretty much collapsed because of this. The government isn't bringing in the revenue from those millions of laid-off workers and it shows. There isn't the money to provide a nice comfy lifestyle for those millions of workers. It is unclear how this will be resolved, but it is clear they aren't going to be supported by the government the way things are today. A massive reduction in the US population - perhaps by disease or violent revolution - is probably where things are headed. We don't need all those people anymore, so someone will figure out a way to get rid of them.
Sadly, violent revolution seems to be the least likely. Nobody since around 1970 has actually taken the concept of violent revolution seriously. And Patty Hearst wasn't a role model for anyone.
I see, so you would be expecting that "the medical records" would have lots of backup and distribution? I would expect in the US that this would not be the case. If there is a copy of "the medical records" then it is likely the only existing copy and there is not a good way to check the veracity of such records. Calling up the previous health care provider and hoping they have either corroborating records or personal knowledge isn't going to work out very well in today's health care environment. At least in the US.
This puts records in the possession of the patient into a situation where some people may trust them and others will not. Sort of makes the whole thing useless in my opinion. Where we are today is pretty much the transfer of records from doctor to doctor is pretty useless today because either the records aren't usable (no standards) or the records aren't trusted. Lack of trust is probably the biggest block which means even in a standardized environment there would be little point in such record exchanges.
Does this make for a lot of waste, duplication of effort and hardship for the patient? Absolutely. But the alternative in the US seems to be the point made above - patient comes in with something that says they should have a prescription for X that is highly desirable and the doctor (and staff) has to either trust the records or ignore them. In today's litigeous environment and having the DEA being very interested in prescribed drugs the usual process seems to be to ignore any and all "foreign" records.
The key for some people is not simply being able to read but to alter their medical records. Especially when their medical records contain damaging information that will affect their ability to get care in the future - and sometimes prevent them from getting the sort of care they want.
The best example of this is a notation that someone is "drug seeking". This will limit your ability to score drugs from reputable medical professionals. For persons that are indeed drug-seeking and trying to use the health care system as a way to get high it would be extremely valuable if they carried their medical records with them and could alter them to eliminate such pesky notations.
There is also the fixation that people get that they have some medical condition even when all evidence is to the contrary. It would be helpful and convenient for them to simply be able to enter a diagnosis of what they believe they have.
If you want access to medical records - read only access - that is one thing. But what health care professionals have to deal with is the consideration that access may not be limited to read-only access and there are more than a small number of people that would find such access very helpful. Why do we not have access and/or control over medical records? Because some people would abuse this for their own benefit.
There are probably an extremely small number of people that the ability to edit their medical records would be helpful because of errors the health care community has made with them. This is fortunately an incredibly small number and when compared against the number of people that would abuse read-write access makes the issue of people correcting mistakes irrelevant.
Unless you limit such financing to "qualified candidates", this doesn't work because it becomes a huge Welfare program for anyone with the brains to be a candidate. Once you limit it to "qualified candidates" you have just insured the incumbents will stay on and nobody else will ever become "qualified" unless they are hand-picked by the incumbent and/or party bosses. It makes the parties far more powerful, like they were in the beginning of the 20th century.
Of course, if you don't limit it to any sort of qualifications we have a full employment program for the US. I think I would like to run for office, any office, endlessly and get my campaign financed by the government. Of course, it means I have to live on whatever leaks out around the edges of the campaign financing but that shouldnt' be too difficult. My guess is we can get 8-9% of the population to sign on to this sort of program as well. It would make elections much more interesting.
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If every time someone saw an unattended car they would just jump in an drive away you might start seeing cars that needed "permission" to be driven in such a restrictive manner as it would be like calling the dealer or the manufacturer for permission.
Similarly, if every time someone saw a purse they thought "JACKPOT" and ran over to grab it, it might be nice if they were locked and needed permission to be opened. Think of high-security buildings where you get let in to a man-trap where you identify yourself and ask to be let in. If you aren't authorized the outside door opens and the police take you away.
So we have software that everyone seems to want but only a few (usually around 5%) are willing to pay for. The solution seems to be to just take it, don't pay and so what... If you have a software product that has 100,000 users then anything you can do to change that 5% number to 6% is a huge win. It can mean someone's job.
The problem with software today is in many places pirated software (not paid for) vastly exceeds the paid-for kind. If an individual who dedicates his time to putting out free software, that is probably OK. When a company has employees that are getting their jobs cut because of lack of income, well, I suppose if you asked those employees they wouldn't say piracy was just fine. Now, if the publisher has accepted this and decided that their products are free (to pirate) but they will be compensated by ads it is fine - until of course the pirates also disable those nasty ads.
In many cases the point is to remove revenue from digital goods - see, they're free to make so they should be free to take, right? Except that isn't how the world of the 1900s works and many of us are stuck using this completely outmoded concept called "money". Thet want it at the grocery store, they want it at the gas station and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it. Maybe when the rest of the world catches up to the 21st Century we can get rid of money completely. Until then, my employees want to get paid and if you take stuff without paying you are literally pushing them out onto the street.
What you are describing (fully parallel hardware) is fine if the budget is unlimited.
I suspect UbiSoft isn't running their servers as the primary source of revenue and the budget for this migration is very limited. So limited that they aren't duplicating the hardware but physically tearing it down in one location and moving it to a new location. Not very nice, but it if you can't afford to replace 100% of the hardware it is what you are looking at doing.
It is nice to work with a huge operation where the external-facing server farm is the primary revenue source for the company and the budget for such a migration is unlimited. But, not everyone gets to work like that.
The one problem with that is the player with the biggest distribution channel wins every time.
Imagine a world where anytime anything was released Sony would grab it up, relabel it and release it through their sales channels. Everything would be Sony-branded. Or WalMart. Or any other huge company. Likely as not they would simply stake out turf that was exclusive so Sony would take software and consumer electronics and GM would take cars. Amazon would be the source for anything textual - and any other publisher could just go pound sand.
Sure, a small fraction of people might understand this was happening and try to "go to the source". They would eventually fail because nobody would win out in this world except the mega-distributors. Why produce anything when you aren't going to get anything for it? Oh, because your ego commands you to? Yes, then we end up with everything sounding like Darwin Reedy or the Shaytards - search on YouTube for some classic ego-driven user contributions.
Sure, it would be fun to try for a week. But I think a week is about all the planet could stand.
Beethoven died a pauper mostly because he refused to fit his work within the confines of the patronage system that existed at the time. While other composers were doing exactly what their patrons wanted, Beethoven apparently did not.
Hence, no money while all around him the music world was filled with people having plenty.
Sure, we are all better off thanks to Beethoven's going his own way, but how likely is that today? If your boss comes up to you and says he wants you do to X and X is ugly, repulsive and offensive to you, do you do it anyway or get fired? Are your artistic expression and principals worth more than some money? The answer for the most part today is "No way, I gotta eat.".
Sorry, but we have pretty much done this to ourselves.
Right now most people under 30 that are thinking about "shopping" are comparing prices online. Price is king and everything else is secondary. So if you walk into a store they expect to be rated on two things: price and availability. If they don't have it, there is nothing they can do - you are going to walk out. If they do have it and are much more expensive than the price you have already seen online, you aren't going to buy there either.
So where does "customer service" enter into this? It doesn't. You can't judge customer service online, so therefore it is unimportant.
The few times when someone actually wants to made a purchasing decision based on something other than price and availability is rare enough that the stores don't care about it. If 10 people come in and one leaves in a huff because the salesperson was rude to them it really doesn't matter because it is all about the numbers today.
I'd say the whole idea of customer service is pretty much dead, killed because of easy price comparisons. All that matters is the price and whether or not you can grab what you want right now.
It is important to understand that while the jobs are gone, the people aren't. Over the last few years most larger companies have had to cut back on staff one way or another, mostly through just laying off people. The result has been lots of pressure on the folks left to do the same volume of work. The result? The remaining folks have stepped up to the plate and taken on the challange - because it was either that or the company would go under. Or maybe if somone was clearly underperforming they were simply replaced.
The end of this story is that with a little less demand everyone knows now they can indeed make do with less staff. The jobs aren't coming back, probably not ever. They simply aren't needed. There might be a big push to hire more people if there was a sudden spike in demand across the board, but that is extremely unlikely given that where this demand would come from (consumers buying stuff) just isn't going to happen.
What we are likely to see after the re-election of Mr. Obama is an attempt to restart consumer demand by reinstatating welfare on a huge scale. If we gave every non-worker (somewhere around 30% of the US isn't working for one reason or another) $50,000 a year there might be some hope for consumer demand. Think Obama can pull that off? I doubt it, but a convincing case can be made for it being the only way out. Will China finance it for us? Maybe. This might be the first real test of how strong the control China has over the US really is.
The problem is, you wouldn't have the dedicated team of workers laboring under the lash to work faster and faster. You wouldn't have the workers putting in 12 hour days thankful to be spending a little more time out of the cell they get to sit in when not working.
What you would have is OSHA inspectors coming through every few months and getting paid to not see the conditions. You would also have 100% of the worker's wages going towards compliance monitoring, insurance, and worker's comp. Then another 100% of the wages going to taxes and benefits. That $70 would be fine if it stopped there, as it would in China. In the US it would cost at least three times that $70 in other associated costs.
And still you would have a workforce that has been conditioned to complain and just not get the job done. What would happen if Apple had to move manufacturing back to the US is that it would be an automated factory with maybe 10 workers. Spending millions (even tens of millions) on robotic systems is a one-time cost whereas workers are a never-ending cost. The robots would work 24x7 without complaining and don't need constant supervision and "quality checks".
Sorry, but we have built a workforce in the US that isn't used to the idea of actually working. So companies are very reluctant to have lots of people that don't really want to work working for them. Hence the current situation - they figured out they don't need so many workers and are doing just fine.
I would offer that the answer in well over 90% of the cases is that your digital music is worth exactly what you paid for it. Nothing.
Now, in the small fraction of cases where someone has spent $10,000 filling up their iPod and is wondering how to (a) insure this against loss and (b) if this can be considered a valuable asset which is appreciating in value I think the answers to most of the world are pretty clear: no and heck no.
Apple built a very successful business out of selling digital music players that could potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars to use if people were paying for digital music downloads. The number of people that could afford to do this is very small - but instead of being a rich person's toy the iPod has become a major facet of popular culture.
If people were really spending $1 per song (and they aren't), these would be important questions. However, what we have created is an environment where a huge percentage of the population is (a) using digital music and (b) downloading it for free in spite of laws and successful lawsuits. It isn't right, it isn't good but it is currently a fact of life. The legal sales of digital music occupies such a small piece of the pie of digital music downloads that it is nearly irrelevant. And so we have someone that believes they can build a business on the back of this. Unlikely. And sounds like it is going to require considerable litigation to even see light of day.
I think the question of reselling digital music is absurd in the face of reality. It would take someone deeply convinced that people are buying digital music and spending tens of thousands of dollars on it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Quite an ability to delude themselves it what it would take. It probably says something about a lawyer willing to take on such a client as well.
Really, I was under the impression that legal music sales on the Internet accounted for maybe 3% of total music downloads. Now I don't know where that figure comes from and I would think it would be a very slippery number to come by - after all, there is no real tracking and nobody is volunteering that they downloaded 1000 songs last month. However, it does sort of put iTunes propaganda in perspective. iTunes is irrelevent for music sales, is pretty much what it means even if the numbers are pretty far off.
Amazon is a joke and the rest of music sales isn't even worth a snicker.
However, once you get someone who believes they can build a business on top of something where we have proven over and over through the years that downloadable music has ZERO value, you better believe they are going to defend their right to make ZERO dollars over their new-found business model.
OK, for the rest of us living in the real world, this is irrelevant.
People pirate software (and you can't stop them) and people use free alternatives (and you can't stop them)
Ah, but I think Apple has proven that you can stop them. The number of iPads, iPhones and iPods running pirated software is less than a few percent. It isn't impossible to do, it is just hard enough and risky enough that nobody is going to do it without a really good reason. And that lets out 97% of the people of the world. Also, when was the last time you thought about anti-virus or anti-malware software for an iPhone or iPad? Never - the problem doesn't exist for these platforms. So we have two bugbears of the PC (and Mac) world killed dead.
Can you understand why Microsoft and everyone else is trying to build an App Store model? Of course it isn't going to work quite as well. Windows 8 might be a step in the right direction, but probably not. But the walled-garden, locked-down appliance model is the one that works for most of the people most of the time. There are a few people in the world that really need a general-purpose programmable computer that will accept any software the owner wishes to put on it without limitation - but these machines need administration and need to be protected from folks that would like to steal from you, do you harm and just cause mayhem for the fun of it. Clearly for the rest of the world the appliance model is the winner.
Except in very unusual cases jury nullification is going about things the wrong way.
Let's say there is a law against driving a car on Sundays in Indiana. OK, it is a stupid law, but it is only in Indiana after all. First case comes to trial and everyone is saying what a stupid law it is - but the case results in a conviction. After that it seems that about 60% of the time the jury just decides it is too stupid a law and refuses - against instructions - to convict.
What we have instead of getting the law repealed is 40% of the time the law is still enforced and results in a conviction. Maybe the penalty is a $10 fine but that is irrelevent. The point is that what is needed is repeal of laws, not juries independently and inconsistently ignoring them. It might have this effect if 100% of the time the jury refused to convict in spite of obvious and clear evidence to the contrary. But this is the US and nothing is ever 100%.
The problem is the answer to this question is a secret. Nobody is talking about it.
More than one (nameless) FBI folks I have talked to have said there have been multiple incidents where TSA stopped someone actively bringing harmful materials onto an airplane. Obviously, they might have been making it all up, but probably not. So where are the news reports on this? How come the TSA didn't shout this from the rooftops about what a great job they are doing?
The story seems to be that the TSA (and a lot of other law enforcement agencies) feel that if this information were made public it would assist people in understanding how these people got caught and be able to more easily evade detection. As we have not had a successful terrorist incident since 9/11 in the US the question is really whether it is such a bang-up job being done by law enforcement at all levels that is preventing things from being successful or is it that there have simply been zero competent attemps? Right now, the folks that know aren't talking for the record.
I think this is extremely damaging. Either the TSA is a complete and utter waste of time because there is nobody there - other than grandmothers and small children being harrassed in the name of Political Correctness, or the TSA is keeping its role a secret and allowing people to think it is useless and pointless. In the latter case the only proof we will ever have is after the TSA is shut down and disbanded and aircraft start falling out of the sky. Kind of a rough way to prove a point, wouldn't you say?
What is absolutely needed is a lot more disclosure.
Two things here come immediately to mind. Let's assume that whatever is running in this system is non-trivial. If it was 1000 lines of code it could be validated the way they used to validate the Shuttle programming - mathematically. So it is probably 30,000 lines of code or more.
First thing is how would anyone "look" at that volume of code without spending months going through it and learn anything from it? What sort of interrupt-driven race conditions can exist and how would you even begin to understand them without some kind of hardware simulation platform? This sounds like someone that heard something about programming in college 10 years ago and thinks this would be really cool.
Second thing is probably why this company would not want to participate: very likely a pacemaker is pretty much down to commodity hardware and the only thing that differentiates one from another is the software. If they allow their software (the only thing of any value in the whole company), they stand to lose control of it. Once it gets into Chinese hands their product will be duplicated cheaply and they will be out of business forever. Sure. they could sue for the whole capitalization of the company - but they wouldn't get it.
If it is impossible for sites like YouTube to keep pirated materials off their site, well maybe they should not be operating.
The problem with YouTube is they are actively making money (lots and lots of money) from materials that other people have uploaded. When these people have the rights to upload that content, fine. When they do not and the content creators/owners have their materials usurped from them and used to make some disconnected third party money there is a problem. Saying this cannot be prevented that people MUST be allowed to post copyrighted content without permission, without compensation and without the right to do so means something is broken.
I do not understand entirely how Google got away with this other than the rather misguided DMCA seems to allow it. This is pretty much the same as someone "borrowing" your daughter, selling her services for a few hours and then giving her back when you finally notice she never came home from school. After all, no real harm was done and nothing was really stolen, was it?
Poaching is completely legal in an employment sense. Google got to steal people from Microsoft to prevent them from developing a search engine earlier and while they got sued nothing really happened. I think Microsoft has done the same thing to Google as well. And I know Apple has been on both sides in the past.
There are no laws that say company B cannot directly contact company A's employees and offer them higher paying jobs. Of course, once you start down that road there are few limits as to what can happen. So you end up with a situation where anyone that has been at the same job for more than a couple of years is considered to be deadwood and undesirable - because they haven't changed jobs. Funny, but this starts hurting everyone's business and it doesn't take too many years before people figure this out.
Happened in the 1970s and while it was fun to be fought over when it ended it wasn't so great.
The problem is trying to negotiate for a raise but what was happening in the 1970s - you work for company A for six months and company B comes along and offers you 25% more. Six months later, company C offers 20% more. Six months after that, company A offers the same person another 25% raise to come back. Yes, this gets out of hand quickly and is something that just about everyone - including the employees - hate. Sure, it is nice to be wanted but sooner or later it is going to catch up to you. It also changes the focus of companies where the biggest expense is already salary to one where salary and headcount are the only things that matter and they will do anything to trim people.
This sort of thing lasted for at least five years in most parts of the country in the 1970s. In some places it was closer to 10 years. A few people made out pretty well, but I think the overall result was more harm than good.
Most of these companies also had major problems with real solicited poaching - where external reps or the HR department directly would call people working for their neighbor to hire people away. Sometimes this is done just to sabotage a project - hire half the team working on it and the project gets delayed or cancelled, thus eliminating some competitive problem. Ever been offered $100 for a company phone directory? I have. I have heard of people being offered much more in some places. It is to make the soliciting of employees easier.
This is not something government can regulate because there is always a way around any sort of enforceable regulation. What is needed is an understanding that this is going to lead to a MAD situation and the escalation is going to get out of hand. That's what ended the job-hopping salary roulette in the 70s - companies realized that the end result was everybody got hurt. The problem today is how much can you really hurt Microsoft, Google or Apple? Not very much. And the minute you have one company that is immune all bets are off.
No, I don't see anything the government can do about this, mostly because it is the right thing to be happening. Sure, there might be some hands that get slapped because there are actual documents lying around. OK, so everyone learns the same thing their predecessors learned a long time ago - don't write stuff like that down or in an email. Great. Now how does the government get involved? Unless you want a Department of Employment that has to approve every hire and fire it isn't going to happen.
Yeah, right. Like it doesn't interfere with $1500+ GPS devices but totally messes with the ones people actually buy.
The key problem with the Internet today is law enforcement. It has taken 15 years, since the dawn of the web age, to get international agreement on clamping down on exploitation of children for sex. For the most part, it has only been in the last few years that some of the last countries have signed on to this. This is not something controversial - pretty much everyone agrees that selling a six-year-old for sex is wrong and selling movies of a six-year-old being raped isn't much better. And yet it took 15 years.
There has been international agreement with most countries about extraditiion for murder for perhaps 100 years. And yet, there are still havens to which a murderer can flee from which there will be no extradition. And how long has most of the world recognized murder as a crime?
Today anyone can find themselves or their business being attacked from foreign locations. If your business is the selling of creative works digitally you can be completely put out of business by web sites offering your materials for free or at low, low cost. Even if you are sellling physical goods, you can find your business impacted severely by someone selling look-alikes at 1/10th of your price. Sure, they are fake but how does anyone know until they hold it in their hand that the quality is low? Today, in the Internet age price rules the marketplace and quality has little or no part in things because you can "see" the price but the quality is invisible. As it is with customer service - if you don't need any service, you will never find out it is bad.
Today the selling of pirated or fake goods cannot be stopped. All it takes is to base the business in a place that just doesn't care and there are many. If the purpose is clearly to separate comparatively rich Americans from their money there are many supposedly lawful places that will make it easy for scammers to operate simply because the current government agrees with ripping off Americans. Same goes for Western Europe. Yes, the scammers are breaking the local laws but the local law enforcement isn't interested. Trying to recoup money through a lawsuit will simply be a waste of time - again, the deck is stacked against foreigners in their courts.
So for all the clamoring of "due process" there can be no due process for these scammers. The countries they are based in have no "due process" of any sort for foreigners against their people and they do not recognize any laws against anything done "virtually" - because it is all virtual. Sure, maybe in 50 years they will catch up to the Internet age - but it could just as easily take 500 years. Anything that is going to be done is going to be very unilateral without any cooperation from a foreign government or foreign law enforcement.
Yes, SOPA and PIPA have major flaws. But the Internet isn't going to exist as a law-free zone for the lucky ones that can operate from law-free havens much longer. The alternative to law enforcement from US and Western Europe on a unilateral basis will be enforcement from Master Card, Visa and Sony. Their way will be quite different but the effect will be two Internets - one for crime and one for entertainment. Locked down, supervised entertainment. And you can be that no Apple device will access the "crime" Internet at all. Neither will your US-based ISP support such access. It isn't going to take much to have the corporations figure out how to implement this and do it in spite of government wishes to the contrary.
So we can either figure out unilateral law enforcement against scammers and crooks or we can let the corporations do it for us. Failure to choose will be choosing the latter.
It is simple - we can choose financially reward creativity through the market, we could choose to financially reward creativity through mandated government subsidies, or we can simply choose not to reward it at all. After all, creativity could be its own reward.
Obviously with the introduction of digital goods the Internet has made rewarding creativity through the marketplace is failing. I know plenty of people that will never, ever pay for any music or movie as they are all available for free. As the non-Internet savvy population ages out of being relevant the younger people replacing them will more than likely have this view as well - why pay when it is all there for the taking? That pretty much dooms the marketplace for creativity. With fewer and fewer people paying there will be no reward.
We have tried the government-supported way. Patronage was a big experiment and while it worked it also lead to stagnation. Look at the difference in music and performance styles between 1500 and 1700 - see much difference? Compare this against 1700 and 1900. This difference is not simply a matter of technology and population density but is instead a reflection of the difference between patronage and the marketplace. Also, with the current state of the US and EU government finances I can just see a new program to support artists and writers. Personally I think it would be great if the government would just write a check to everyone expressing creativity to encourage it and all of these works could be available for free. I think $100,000 a year would be OK with just about everyone.
This brings us to the last alternative - make creativity be something that only the most crass ego-driven people can afford. If you are the sort that craves being the #1 watched video on YouTube and are willing to do anything to acheive that, you might be the sort that would find this attractive. Obviously there is no money in it for anyone - copyright could just be eliminated. Anything good would be snapped up by multinational corporations and distributed. Obviously, their distribution would drive huge ad campaigns and would really define what "popular culture" means. Like the idea of the Moon having a giant Pepsi symbol painted on it. Everything would be an ad, making money for someone. Imagine each sheet of toilet paper being printed with a stiff, non-absorbent ad for some new product, new music, new video. Yes, we can go there and we are a goodly way along this path today - check out Google sometime.
I'd say we can either bring back the marketplace or we can pretty much hang it up.
Google has little, if any, financial interest in map data. They buy all of it from sources like NavTeq and GDI. I suspect Google could replace these sources with their own collection efforts - if they wanted to. It is a huge task and to do quality work takes a lot of effort. It would appear that Google would rather buy than build.
Now, if someone found NavTeq screwing with someone's map data I could understand. They have a huge financial interest (as in the whole company) in map data and being the primary vendor of routable map data for the US.
So, I can't imagine any purpose behind Google or Google's employees having anything to do with this intentionally.
Who would recycle metal under those terms? As what is keeping a lot of scrap metal dealers in business is stolen property, what are you trying to do? Put them all out of business?
Education has been shown to be vastly overrated, especially with a popular culture that makes it clear that only nerds get good grades or pay attention to the superannuated teacher.
The end result is we have a hip-hop rap-listening, crime-worshipping culture that has decided education is irrelevant. And for these folks, it probably is. We have finally entered a point where there are a lot more people than jobs, so the people without jobs aren't going to be needed. Ever. The labor market is sufficiently automated that what took 10 people to do 50 years ago now takes one. And the factory that employed 10,000 workers closed and moved to China. The US simply doesn't need all the people working any longer.
Now, the tax base the government has been running on has pretty much collapsed because of this. The government isn't bringing in the revenue from those millions of laid-off workers and it shows. There isn't the money to provide a nice comfy lifestyle for those millions of workers. It is unclear how this will be resolved, but it is clear they aren't going to be supported by the government the way things are today. A massive reduction in the US population - perhaps by disease or violent revolution - is probably where things are headed. We don't need all those people anymore, so someone will figure out a way to get rid of them.
Sadly, violent revolution seems to be the least likely. Nobody since around 1970 has actually taken the concept of violent revolution seriously. And Patty Hearst wasn't a role model for anyone.
I see, so you would be expecting that "the medical records" would have lots of backup and distribution? I would expect in the US that this would not be the case. If there is a copy of "the medical records" then it is likely the only existing copy and there is not a good way to check the veracity of such records. Calling up the previous health care provider and hoping they have either corroborating records or personal knowledge isn't going to work out very well in today's health care environment. At least in the US.
This puts records in the possession of the patient into a situation where some people may trust them and others will not. Sort of makes the whole thing useless in my opinion. Where we are today is pretty much the transfer of records from doctor to doctor is pretty useless today because either the records aren't usable (no standards) or the records aren't trusted. Lack of trust is probably the biggest block which means even in a standardized environment there would be little point in such record exchanges.
Does this make for a lot of waste, duplication of effort and hardship for the patient? Absolutely. But the alternative in the US seems to be the point made above - patient comes in with something that says they should have a prescription for X that is highly desirable and the doctor (and staff) has to either trust the records or ignore them. In today's litigeous environment and having the DEA being very interested in prescribed drugs the usual process seems to be to ignore any and all "foreign" records.
The key for some people is not simply being able to read but to alter their medical records. Especially when their medical records contain damaging information that will affect their ability to get care in the future - and sometimes prevent them from getting the sort of care they want.
The best example of this is a notation that someone is "drug seeking". This will limit your ability to score drugs from reputable medical professionals. For persons that are indeed drug-seeking and trying to use the health care system as a way to get high it would be extremely valuable if they carried their medical records with them and could alter them to eliminate such pesky notations.
There is also the fixation that people get that they have some medical condition even when all evidence is to the contrary. It would be helpful and convenient for them to simply be able to enter a diagnosis of what they believe they have.
If you want access to medical records - read only access - that is one thing. But what health care professionals have to deal with is the consideration that access may not be limited to read-only access and there are more than a small number of people that would find such access very helpful. Why do we not have access and/or control over medical records? Because some people would abuse this for their own benefit.
There are probably an extremely small number of people that the ability to edit their medical records would be helpful because of errors the health care community has made with them. This is fortunately an incredibly small number and when compared against the number of people that would abuse read-write access makes the issue of people correcting mistakes irrelevant.
Unless you limit such financing to "qualified candidates", this doesn't work because it becomes a huge Welfare program for anyone with the brains to be a candidate. Once you limit it to "qualified candidates" you have just insured the incumbents will stay on and nobody else will ever become "qualified" unless they are hand-picked by the incumbent and/or party bosses. It makes the parties far more powerful, like they were in the beginning of the 20th century.
Of course, if you don't limit it to any sort of qualifications we have a full employment program for the US. I think I would like to run for office, any office, endlessly and get my campaign financed by the government. Of course, it means I have to live on whatever leaks out around the edges of the campaign financing but that shouldnt' be too difficult. My guess is we can get 8-9% of the population to sign on to this sort of program as well. It would make elections much more interesting.