You can bet that the budget assigned to new work is figured on the basis of not only how much it will bring in the first week but also how much they will be able to continue to bring in over five or ten years.
Widespread, pervasive piracy hasn't really hit Disney yet. When we get 30-something mothers downloading (and seeding) torrents for Disney videos so their children can watch them the revenue stream will dry up and they will only be able to spend a far, far less amount producing movies.
This is beginning to be felt in Hollywood already and will only get worse. There is no point in spending 100 million on a movie that in 1990 would have brought in 150 million in theater sales and another 100 million in DVD sales when they get 60 million in theater sales and $8 in DVD sales - sell one and it is immediately pirated and available planet-wide.
It isn't that there is no more revenue, it is that the pie shrinks and the duration is vastly shortened.
The problem is that "supporting your constituents interests" means getting money for them. Money that other representatives want as well, so you have to deal with them. You support their getting money in their district for some new sewage distribution plant to spew sewage into some other district and create 50 new jobs and they support your getting money to feed junk food to mothers with small children.
If you don't go along with the sewage spewer, the mothers won't have enough junk food and they will scream they are starving and your opponent will be elected next time.
See, after all it is really better that everyone either does nothing in government and just pretends to go through the motions. The alternative is spewed sewage and obese mothers with fat little children.
Come on, tell me honestly that you would like an efficient government that was churning out new laws at a high rate?
Or would you rather have utter and complete gridlock with the government doing absolutely nothing but talking and wasting a lot of time?
Do you believe the government is going to put people to work? Might it look like a chain gang, or do you think everyone will sit in classrooms being retrained for some new highly technical jobs? I'd say neither is likely - so far the government has managed to create a few thousand jobs at a cost of about a million dollars each. These people would be better off sitting at home watching TV and getting $50,000 a year to sit there, shut up and stop being counted as "unemployed". That sound like a jobs program to you?
There is no alternative between lots of new laws, more and more every day or gridlock and UN-style endless useless talking. You get to choose one or the other.
The first go-round with the CLEC's mandated a fixed price that was below cost to the ILEC. This was a huge problem for them and put them up against a wall in a manner that they had to fight. So of course, they fought and eventually won. In the meantime, they made life as difficult as possible because anytime you put that sort of pressure on a business they are either going to fight or fold.
We can be grateful in some small way that they didn't just fold. However, this clearly led to things like the SBC takeover of the telephone system in the Midwest.
The lesson is, if the government is going to mandate access at a fixed rate, fine. Just make sure it isn't something that the ILEC/Cable Co./etc. has to fight from day one. Because that will not turn out well for us. We do not want Comcast/NBC to be the sole provider of cable and telephone service nationwide. Mandating a below-cost rate will end up doing exactly that.
Yes, but if you cut out the promoter, you lose all promotion.
Not only would this put all music on the level of the neighborhood garage band but it also would mean then end of most large concerts (they exist because of promotion), some large number of magazines that are music-industry supported and a goodly portion of what we are subjected to on radio today.
No, the world wouldn't come to an end but getting rid of music promotion would mean some very, very large changes in the way music is viewed. Nobody would finance a music video because there would be almost no way to measure the results of having one. I suppose some very rich artists could pay for it out of pocket but that just isn't the way it is done today.
Sure it would be different if there was no "music industry". But it would be so different that I doubt you can even envision how different it would be.
We have the history of "shareware" since around 1980 or so to back up piracy vs. purchase. Before there was the ability for masses of people to get stuff for free that others had to pay for we had the idea of software that was distributed for free with people being encouraged to pay, if not outright in-your-face demanded.
End result: about 5% of the people paid. This crossed the spectrum of good and bad software.
Stephen King published a book with a free download and post-pay whatever you thought it was worth. Again, around 5% of the people paid.
Today you have a choice. You can download music for free or you can pay for it. Is it any surprise that absolutely no more than about 5% of the people are paying?
Movies are getting to be almost as easy to download as music and the selection available is reaching Netflix proportions. Yes, that means that maybe 40,000 movies are available from pirate sites. However, it can take a couple of days to download some unpopular movies and that does put people off somewhat. However, with the growth in the pirate community this problem will soon be solved. And the result will be... maybe 5% of the people will be paying for movies.
I think 30 years of history before and after the Internet proves without a doubt that if there is a choice between paying and not paying 95% of the people are going to choose not paying every time. I don't care what the material is, and I don't care if you think most of the people obtaining it would never be real customers or not. The fact of the matter is that if free is an option most people - and overwhelming majority - will choose free.
Let us guess here that if there was no free option then the total distribution would drop to 25% of what it is. That still means you are capturing 20% more paying customers even if you assume that. I don't think you will find anyone that thinks the 95% non-paying group doesn't consist of at least some potential customers that are simply choosing not to pay.
Cheap downloads? Oh, you must mean the torrent sites that make you buy something to get stuff for free, right?
How do you explain "cheap downloads" to someone with a 60Gb iPod that will hold tens of thousands of songs and wants to fill it up? The expectation was always that most of the content would be pirated because people would be unwilling to put $6000 worth of purchased content on a $200 device. This has been borne out by everyone's experience. The iTunes store accounts for maybe 5% of downloaded music. Maybe. 2% is probably more realistic. Anyone that tells you they are paying for music means they are still on a dial-up connection at home or are simply ignorant.
The problem is you are viewing a single group of people as two different groups. There is no group that can be labelled as "pirates". Nobody really wants to pay but nearly everyone will pay if the desire is great enough and the alternative is simply doing without. Consequences have an effect on this as well.
An example is of course TV sets. It is theoretically possible to walk into your electronics retailer and sneak out with a TV set. If you are caught in all likelyhood you will have a police record and may face fines or even jail time. The net effect of this is that "pirated" television sets are rare and the people that find the price too high simply do without.
There are zero consequences for an individual using pirated software. Children are taught about downloading stuff for free in public schools - by both the teachers and fellow students. Clearly there is little or no need to spend money on software - it is there for the taking. There are a few people (just about everyone agrees on around 5%) that will pay even when they (clearly) do not have to. Today, with software that is about all you can hope for in the consumer marketplace.
5% is a piss poor return on investment, which for the most part makes anything that can be pirated a piss poor investment of time and resources. But there is no getting away from it - if it can be pirated (and most anything digital can be), it will be pirated and only a few people are going to pay when given the choice.
OK, there are groups of people for which piracy is simply not an option. One of these groups are the people who get their Internet access at the library - no home computer, no home Internet access. Another is old folks that never learned about free downloading and don't have any children to either show them or get stuff for them for free. We are running out of both groups pretty quickly.
How can you have a "web of trust" when there are known to be bad actors using the system? All such a web needs is a single person abusing the system and it completely breaks down.
Of course, the CAs aren't doing their job which is what they are being paid to do. That problem is somewhat simpler to solve - Microsoft, who is likely the biggest stick in the game, simply revokes CA authorization for any CA that isn't in fact doing their job of validation. You can't tell me that Firefox or Chrome are going to trust a CA that Microsoft has revoked.
OK, so we have the geeks looking for the padlock, checking the certificate fields out and so on and so forth.
Except most of the public isn't doing that. I ran across a pharmacy site that says in clear text that "256-bit encryption is use" but there is no padlock and the URL says http:. This is on a shopping cart page that is prompting for a credit card number! They have all the right Verisign seals that link to nice pages that say their site is secure. But there is no security. No SSL. Nothing.
Of course, there probably are CAs that will issue certificates to fake pharmaceutical distributors - you know, little blue sugar pills for $2 each - but it is much simpler to just bypass that whole thing and say your site is secure. They are raking in millions of dollars doing this so it is clear that most people aren't checking.
If sites are getting away with this, I'd say that is a much, much bigger problem that trying to secure SSL against folks.
Sadly, this is utterly unrealistic. If you think we could do it cheaper if the government was the sole health care provider and paid all the bills, you aren't living in America.
The first problem is the people. In no other country on Earth are the people utterly addicted to junk food and also demanding the best outcomes in health care. You visit any hospital outside the US and you find people of all ages. Go in nearly any hospital in the US and you will find old people clinging to the last few days of life.
Nowhere else on Earth is the proportion of health care spending so skewed. In the US over 90% of health care spending is for the last year of life.
The second problem is the way health care is viewed by people. Instead of being a "maintenance plan" it is an emergency service. You go to the hospital when you have a heart attack. Whereas in a lot of other places people are going to doctors to prevent them. The plans that stress a healthy lifestyle and regular checkups are ignored and underutilized in the US.
A confirmation of this is the number of old rich people that come to the US every year for treatment. Are they coming because nobody else wants them or is it because the US happens to be very good at dealing with old people whereas in other countries they would just be told it is their time and to not fret about it.
Sure, you could wave a wand and change how health care is paid for overnight. Except that doesn't change how it is used and how it is viewed. It would turn into a massive "lets kill granny" program because that is where the spending is, or it would just cost a lot more.
You might want to think about the idea that until fairly recently it wouldn't have occurred to anyone (recent immigrant, visitor or citizen) that they would actually want to kill someone, regardless of the likelyhood of consequences to themselves.
There are no real consequences to killing someone today. Only about 20% of murders are caught and convicted. The rest go free, either after never being caught or after some kind of botched trial where they get off because the police lost the evidence or some other nonsense. So why aren't people being killed all the time? Well, in fact, they are. The murder rate is is pretty darn high in most large cities and this isn't just "crimes of passion" and armed robberies gone bad.
There is another problem. We are beginning to have sizable groups of people that are focused completely on an afterlife in some spirtual relm far, far removed from the cares of what we consider to be everyday life. There are both Christians and Muslims so focused and perhaps others. I think the Moonies might count in this group, for example. I don't believe anyone has distorted Judaism in this manner, but I suppose is it possible. So it isn't just Islamic nutjobs - it is potentially any religon. And these people are indeed dangerous. One thing you can count on is a rather sane outlook that someone wants to live to instill in them a healthy fear of doing things that will put an end to their life - but someone focused on the afterlife just doesn't care at all. Anything is open to them, including things that will quite obviously kill them and perhaps others they care about. But because "life" is meaningless to them and only the "afterlife" counts, it doesn't matter.
So between limited consequences for murder in the US today - 4 out of 5 chances of not getting punished - and folks that simply don't give a rat's ass about life at all, we are in a fairly unique situation. This simply hasn't had to be faced before. I would consider fear to be a reasonable response to this - because the only other response that seems at all reasonable is living it up while you can because life is short and it is only going to get shorter. If you can't control how you are going to die or when, you might as well spend the last few days having as much fun as you can, right?
The ones that just don't care. It is beyond their ability to be interested and sometimes need to be woken up during the trial. Whatever way the wind is blowing that will be their decision - going with the flow, majority rules and must be right.
The sort that is sure there is something "wrong" in the trial and want to figure it out for themselves. For example, during a medical malpractice proceeding they are sure the anesthesiologist must be mistaken from their vast experience due to Aunt Sally having a terrible time with her last operation. So they want to spend a lot of time with WebMD and various blogs about people with anesthesia problems hoping to be able to prove their point.
Of course, what we get in the US is a predominance of both of these sorts of jurors. They watch a lot of TV and are sure they have stumbled into something interesting. Or they are there because there isn't anything else interesting to do at the rest home. Worse, they didn't want to serve, couldn't think of a way out of it and now are there and are very, very hostile about it - he must be guilty or he wouldn't have been arrested, can we go now?
The smartphone is of use to both these sorts of people and in neither case is it useful or helpful but is actually very, very damaging to the system. And if you happen to be the guy on trial with 10 of these sorts of jurors you are going to be very angry at the guilty verdict.
Sadly, the AGW debate is centered on it being carbon and only carbon and all carbon coming from human sources that are under our control - if only we had the will do stop.
The "other side" of this is certainly composed of people that do not understand and are utterly uninformed. But to dismiss everyone that has problems with "only carbon" and "all carbon is from human sources" as wacko is as silly as the people trying to say there is no climate change at all.
Right now, we can guess that human sources of carbon are contributing to changes and stand a pretty good chance of being right. Making the leap to say that climate change will stop if we stop emitting carbon is relying as much on faith as someone at a revival meeting.
Pretty much change is here and we have little choice but to accept it and deal with it. And understand it.
OK, assume that it is a given that cell phone companies have this information. When someone is killed why do the police not simply pull the information for everyone that was within, say 500 feet, at the time of the murder? This would give them not only a potential suspect list but it would also give them a list of witnesses.
Right now, if you kill someone and keep your mouth shut you stand only about a 20% chance of being caught and convicted. You can be sure that this weighs in on the decision to (a) carry a deadly force weapon and (b) use it perhaps indiscriminately. If murderers were, say 90% caught and convicted instead of only 20% the rather obnoxious murder rate in cities might drop. It is somewhere between 0.5 and 2 murders every single day in nearly every large city in the US.
If this tool exists, it isn't being used by police. They don't have to get to pushy about it, but if they had a list of people that were in the area even if the murderer didn't have a cell phone on him at the time there is a high likelyhood that someone would have seen something.
Why wouldn't a witness come forward? There is a powerful force to discourage witnesses from coming forward in cities - they even sell T-shirts saying "Stop Snitching". Nobody wants to be a witness because it means putting your life at risk. The way things stand (with a rate of 20% of murders being caught and convicted) the police cannot possibly protect witnesses and there is a strong incentive to make sure that no witness will ever speak out. Given only a 1 in 5 chance of being convicted of killing a witness there is no way to get witnesses to place their life on hold and their life at risk for the chance (much less than 20%) that the murderer will not be out on the street looking for revenge.
When we lose broadcasting, we will lose most of the viewers. The current distribution systems do not have the capacity to deliver the same content to every home in the US. The cable and DSL distribution mechanisms work on the basis of a feed from the Internet at large coming to a "node" of some sort (DSLAM or neighborhood distribution node) and then going out to individual homes. The capacity of the feed from the Internet won't handle distribution to hundreds if not thousands of homes from a single location. So many, many more nodes would be needed. For DSL it isn't that complicated - more DSLAMs in the same CO but for cable it is fatal - it is running new fiber to new locations and splitting up the neighborhood nodes. Likely it would cost tens of millions for a small city. Nationwide? Billions and take 10 years to get it done.
And don't get me started on the limitations of wireless Internet. The capacity does not exist and will never exist to serve much bandwidth to anything but a small percentage of early adopters.
Whenever someone talks about the "death of broadcast TV" they don't understand the existing infrastructure and don't understand the costs to grow it beyond where it is today. It took 10-15 years for the cable companies to build out to where we are today. There is some capability for growth but nothing like what would be required for IPTV to everyone.
I believe Cox intentionally has the "on demand" service hopelessly crippled simply because they know that if everyone jumped on that service it would collapse completely. I believe the Comcast version is more usable but there must be some limiting factor on it as well - again the system bandwidth simply doesn't allow for what IPTV fans think they want.
The way for inner city youth is to follow the rules: Stop Snitching.
If they don't pay attention to the rules, they will run afoul of folks whose livelihood they are impacting. And probably end up as another statistic on how hazardous it is for minorities in the inner city.
Of course, you are correct that the only way for law enforcement is to have snitches. If they are subsequently beaten, tortured or killed it isn't the fault of law enforcement but our own sick, twisted society. It comes down to who do you want to support, the cops or the robbers? For the most part in the US we have chosen overwhelmingly for the robbers.
The problem is that Google wasn't making the entire content of the books available for free online. They were indexing and offering up snippets and the selling the complete book.
That makes them the largest bookseller in the world overnight.
Nowhere was it said that Google would be distributing these for free. As a matter of fact, Google was planning on making quite a bit of money from the sale of these books and distributing a pittance to the original rightsholder. All part of the settlement.
It is a condition of getting a driver's license that you waive any rights you might have to not agree to any sort of DUI testing they want to subject you to on the slightest suspicion of being drunk.
If you would like to preserve your right not to be tested, don't get a driver's license. It is viewed commonly as the community's right to protect itself from drunk drivers. We had plenty of people killed by drunk drivers such that there is an impressive set of statistics from the 1960s and 1970s where drunk drivers where allowed to pretty much get off with a warning, sometimes even after being involved in accidents. The end result of this was in the 1980s a small group of people were able to exert enough pressure on state and federal governments to make drunk driving an extremely risky behavior.
So, no there is no "due process" or right to anything concerning driving while drunk anymore. If you appear to be drunk, you will be tested. If you refuse, you are treated as if you tested positively. If you test positive, regardless of the accuracy of the machine used, you will be punished. This means that if the machine says 0.08 (legal limit in most states) and a better-calibrated or more accurate machine might say 0.79 it doesn't matter, and the court isn't interested in your defense. You were legally drunk and will be punished.
This does drag some people into the system that are innocent, but apparently there was enough ruckus created in the 1980s that the governments at all levels are fine with that. There is very little controversy about the idea of perhaps convicting an innocent person of drunk driving. Very little indeed. Because it was adequately proven that drunk drivers kill people rather indiscriminately.
That had an overlap when I ended up between jobs and had a hospital visit, which sans insurance (it's tied to employment in the US) meant I suddenly owed $5000 USD for effectively a emergency room visit that didn't require any expensive tests or complex actions, just a doctor to look at me for 10 minutes and write up a prescription.
What you missed out on were the lessons on how to work the system. Sure, you had a $5000 hospital bill and they kept calling you until you paid, right? Maybe they threatened to sue you if you didn't pay?
What people miss in situations like this is two things: (a) a lot of people simply don't pay, ever, and (b) ever heard the phrase "blood from a stone"? The fact that a lot of people don't pay means the hospital has to figure out how to get paid enough from everyone that does pay. This is just cost-shifting and is the rule with medical care in the US. It means that the prices keep going up because it is spread across a smaller and smaller number of people paying full price - the rest are either paying some incredibly discounted price because of a deal with an insurance company or the government or they just are paying at all.
The "blood from a stone" concept here is very simple. You have no money, no job, nothing. OK, so what does that mean? It means you are judgement-proof. Nothing they can do to you will hurt you financially and the US does not imprison people for bankruptcy. Therefore when someone says they will sue you or ruin your credit rating it is an hollow threat. It means nothing. They will likely realize this early on and forget about suing or anything else. They may keep harrassing you, but there are actual laws against doing too much of that. End result is no more bill from the hospital. It isn't like they can actually refuse to treat you.
The one problem with this is some people's concept of dignity. It isn't considered dignified in some circles to not be able to pay your bills. People die in the US every day because they cannot offend their sense of dignity in matters like this. You need to get your head around the idea that it is a clear choice: dignity in death or survival. And there is very, very little dignity in being dead.
Physical books include with the purchase the right to redistribute. You can redistribute the book intact to a single person or you can tear out the pages and distribute them to many, many people.
Digital books do not include such rights because for the most part once you have one person redistributing that is all that is needed. Nobody else needs to buy - it is now free. As a reference for this I suggest checking out music and movies on the Internet. Both are free, both are providing pretty much zero revenue for digital sales other than streaming sites with commercials added.
With eBooks it is pretty much the same. Once it is posted somewhere, why would you buy it? Once you read it, why would you ever buy it again? It is somewhat of a unique problem because unless redistribution is restricted (through licensing rather than outright sales), there will cease to be a market very, very quickly. It is sort of the only winning move is to not play.
I don't know who you have been using as a publisher but 50% of the cost is absurd.
My book (CD and DVD Forensics is published by Syngress, now Elsivere) would have cost me around $2 to have printed myself, if I had gone a self-publishing route. That would have been for 100 copies minimum. Yes, it is perfect-bound. It costs around $0.50 to ship if you order a box of them, as any reasonable bookseller would. When I order a box I think I pay something like $10 for shipping on a case of 22. Wholesale cost on the book is around $20, with the retail being $50.
I got an advance, I got a real publishing contract and if there were 4-5,000 books sold I would get royalties.
If they are making you pay for warehousing your own book, you are self-publishing. No publisher goes that far that I have ever heard of. I think you got a vanity press contract that was disguised as a publishing deal. Yes, they are going to make you pay to store your book. They are likely to make you pay for proofreading and editing as separate items as well, and make them optional, value-added services.
You don't need to print 1,000,000 copies for cheap printing, but you do have to deal with the right people. The publishers with physical books on Amazon aren't paying 50% of the wholesale cost for printing. It is a lot closer to 10%. Maybe on cheap paperbacks it is as high as 20% - that is $1.40 on a $7 book. Even an "expensive" hardcover book is going to be $5-$6 to print and bind if is being done right.
A huge problem in the US (which is getting worse) is the "culture islands" of people that have no interest in assimilating. During previous immigration waves the people that were coming to the US wanted to be "Americans" (whatever that means) but recently the trend has been "diversity" where they want to keep their culture, language and customs - just live in the US, make lots of money and send a good bit of it home to the family.
What this does is you get attitudes that are very, very counterproductive if you are trying to assemble the people behind a common goal. Let's say that it would make sense to raise taxes in order to pay for a really spiffy Medicare benefit such as assisted living. So instead of putting Grandma in the cheapest warehouse so she can wait to die she could get some kind of home assistance. Well, the folks that are here to make money and send it home (and probably return there after working for 10-15 years) have no interest in such things. Trying to build a demographic of middle-aged people working gets all skewed because maybe 10% of the working adults in may be transients that have very little interest in anything except fatter paychecks right now.
There is certainly another factor at work as well, Fundamentalist religious beliefs, whether they are Christian or Muslim, tend to push people to focus on the afterlife rather than material things in this life. So good health care is relatively meaningless and care for Grandma is not a priority at all. Such people are going to vote for things that mystify people interested in the here and now. It isn't Sharia law that we need to worry about as much as voting for the afterlife. If you want benefits and support from your government, you are looking for things that are meaningless to someone focused on the afterlife.
It doesn't matter if these people are white, brown or green. If they are in the US (or UK) to grab some easy cash and send it back to the wife and kids somewhere else, they aren't going to have the same priorities as someone in the country for the long haul. And I'd say getting too many people not in it for the long haul is hazardous to any country.
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You can bet that the budget assigned to new work is figured on the basis of not only how much it will bring in the first week but also how much they will be able to continue to bring in over five or ten years.
Widespread, pervasive piracy hasn't really hit Disney yet. When we get 30-something mothers downloading (and seeding) torrents for Disney videos so their children can watch them the revenue stream will dry up and they will only be able to spend a far, far less amount producing movies.
This is beginning to be felt in Hollywood already and will only get worse. There is no point in spending 100 million on a movie that in 1990 would have brought in 150 million in theater sales and another 100 million in DVD sales when they get 60 million in theater sales and $8 in DVD sales - sell one and it is immediately pirated and available planet-wide.
It isn't that there is no more revenue, it is that the pie shrinks and the duration is vastly shortened.
The problem is that "supporting your constituents interests" means getting money for them. Money that other representatives want as well, so you have to deal with them. You support their getting money in their district for some new sewage distribution plant to spew sewage into some other district and create 50 new jobs and they support your getting money to feed junk food to mothers with small children.
If you don't go along with the sewage spewer, the mothers won't have enough junk food and they will scream they are starving and your opponent will be elected next time.
See, after all it is really better that everyone either does nothing in government and just pretends to go through the motions. The alternative is spewed sewage and obese mothers with fat little children.
Come on, tell me honestly that you would like an efficient government that was churning out new laws at a high rate?
Or would you rather have utter and complete gridlock with the government doing absolutely nothing but talking and wasting a lot of time?
Do you believe the government is going to put people to work? Might it look like a chain gang, or do you think everyone will sit in classrooms being retrained for some new highly technical jobs? I'd say neither is likely - so far the government has managed to create a few thousand jobs at a cost of about a million dollars each. These people would be better off sitting at home watching TV and getting $50,000 a year to sit there, shut up and stop being counted as "unemployed". That sound like a jobs program to you?
There is no alternative between lots of new laws, more and more every day or gridlock and UN-style endless useless talking. You get to choose one or the other.
The first go-round with the CLEC's mandated a fixed price that was below cost to the ILEC. This was a huge problem for them and put them up against a wall in a manner that they had to fight. So of course, they fought and eventually won. In the meantime, they made life as difficult as possible because anytime you put that sort of pressure on a business they are either going to fight or fold.
We can be grateful in some small way that they didn't just fold. However, this clearly led to things like the SBC takeover of the telephone system in the Midwest.
The lesson is, if the government is going to mandate access at a fixed rate, fine. Just make sure it isn't something that the ILEC/Cable Co./etc. has to fight from day one. Because that will not turn out well for us. We do not want Comcast/NBC to be the sole provider of cable and telephone service nationwide. Mandating a below-cost rate will end up doing exactly that.
Yes, but if you cut out the promoter, you lose all promotion.
Not only would this put all music on the level of the neighborhood garage band but it also would mean then end of most large concerts (they exist because of promotion), some large number of magazines that are music-industry supported and a goodly portion of what we are subjected to on radio today.
No, the world wouldn't come to an end but getting rid of music promotion would mean some very, very large changes in the way music is viewed. Nobody would finance a music video because there would be almost no way to measure the results of having one. I suppose some very rich artists could pay for it out of pocket but that just isn't the way it is done today.
Sure it would be different if there was no "music industry". But it would be so different that I doubt you can even envision how different it would be.
We have the history of "shareware" since around 1980 or so to back up piracy vs. purchase. Before there was the ability for masses of people to get stuff for free that others had to pay for we had the idea of software that was distributed for free with people being encouraged to pay, if not outright in-your-face demanded.
End result: about 5% of the people paid. This crossed the spectrum of good and bad software.
Stephen King published a book with a free download and post-pay whatever you thought it was worth. Again, around 5% of the people paid.
Today you have a choice. You can download music for free or you can pay for it. Is it any surprise that absolutely no more than about 5% of the people are paying?
Movies are getting to be almost as easy to download as music and the selection available is reaching Netflix proportions. Yes, that means that maybe 40,000 movies are available from pirate sites. However, it can take a couple of days to download some unpopular movies and that does put people off somewhat. However, with the growth in the pirate community this problem will soon be solved. And the result will be ... maybe 5% of the people will be paying for movies.
I think 30 years of history before and after the Internet proves without a doubt that if there is a choice between paying and not paying 95% of the people are going to choose not paying every time. I don't care what the material is, and I don't care if you think most of the people obtaining it would never be real customers or not. The fact of the matter is that if free is an option most people - and overwhelming majority - will choose free.
Let us guess here that if there was no free option then the total distribution would drop to 25% of what it is. That still means you are capturing 20% more paying customers even if you assume that. I don't think you will find anyone that thinks the 95% non-paying group doesn't consist of at least some potential customers that are simply choosing not to pay.
Cheap downloads? Oh, you must mean the torrent sites that make you buy something to get stuff for free, right?
How do you explain "cheap downloads" to someone with a 60Gb iPod that will hold tens of thousands of songs and wants to fill it up? The expectation was always that most of the content would be pirated because people would be unwilling to put $6000 worth of purchased content on a $200 device. This has been borne out by everyone's experience. The iTunes store accounts for maybe 5% of downloaded music. Maybe. 2% is probably more realistic. Anyone that tells you they are paying for music means they are still on a dial-up connection at home or are simply ignorant.
The problem is you are viewing a single group of people as two different groups. There is no group that can be labelled as "pirates". Nobody really wants to pay but nearly everyone will pay if the desire is great enough and the alternative is simply doing without. Consequences have an effect on this as well.
An example is of course TV sets. It is theoretically possible to walk into your electronics retailer and sneak out with a TV set. If you are caught in all likelyhood you will have a police record and may face fines or even jail time. The net effect of this is that "pirated" television sets are rare and the people that find the price too high simply do without.
There are zero consequences for an individual using pirated software. Children are taught about downloading stuff for free in public schools - by both the teachers and fellow students. Clearly there is little or no need to spend money on software - it is there for the taking. There are a few people (just about everyone agrees on around 5%) that will pay even when they (clearly) do not have to. Today, with software that is about all you can hope for in the consumer marketplace.
5% is a piss poor return on investment, which for the most part makes anything that can be pirated a piss poor investment of time and resources. But there is no getting away from it - if it can be pirated (and most anything digital can be), it will be pirated and only a few people are going to pay when given the choice.
OK, there are groups of people for which piracy is simply not an option. One of these groups are the people who get their Internet access at the library - no home computer, no home Internet access. Another is old folks that never learned about free downloading and don't have any children to either show them or get stuff for them for free. We are running out of both groups pretty quickly.
How can you have a "web of trust" when there are known to be bad actors using the system? All such a web needs is a single person abusing the system and it completely breaks down.
Of course, the CAs aren't doing their job which is what they are being paid to do. That problem is somewhat simpler to solve - Microsoft, who is likely the biggest stick in the game, simply revokes CA authorization for any CA that isn't in fact doing their job of validation. You can't tell me that Firefox or Chrome are going to trust a CA that Microsoft has revoked.
OK, so we have the geeks looking for the padlock, checking the certificate fields out and so on and so forth.
Except most of the public isn't doing that. I ran across a pharmacy site that says in clear text that "256-bit encryption is use" but there is no padlock and the URL says http:. This is on a shopping cart page that is prompting for a credit card number! They have all the right Verisign seals that link to nice pages that say their site is secure. But there is no security. No SSL. Nothing.
Of course, there probably are CAs that will issue certificates to fake pharmaceutical distributors - you know, little blue sugar pills for $2 each - but it is much simpler to just bypass that whole thing and say your site is secure. They are raking in millions of dollars doing this so it is clear that most people aren't checking.
If sites are getting away with this, I'd say that is a much, much bigger problem that trying to secure SSL against folks.
You don't need to import radioactive travelers in the US, the TSA will irradiate them for you.
Sadly, this is utterly unrealistic. If you think we could do it cheaper if the government was the sole health care provider and paid all the bills, you aren't living in America.
The first problem is the people. In no other country on Earth are the people utterly addicted to junk food and also demanding the best outcomes in health care. You visit any hospital outside the US and you find people of all ages. Go in nearly any hospital in the US and you will find old people clinging to the last few days of life.
Nowhere else on Earth is the proportion of health care spending so skewed. In the US over 90% of health care spending is for the last year of life.
The second problem is the way health care is viewed by people. Instead of being a "maintenance plan" it is an emergency service. You go to the hospital when you have a heart attack. Whereas in a lot of other places people are going to doctors to prevent them. The plans that stress a healthy lifestyle and regular checkups are ignored and underutilized in the US.
A confirmation of this is the number of old rich people that come to the US every year for treatment. Are they coming because nobody else wants them or is it because the US happens to be very good at dealing with old people whereas in other countries they would just be told it is their time and to not fret about it.
Sure, you could wave a wand and change how health care is paid for overnight. Except that doesn't change how it is used and how it is viewed. It would turn into a massive "lets kill granny" program because that is where the spending is, or it would just cost a lot more.
You might want to think about the idea that until fairly recently it wouldn't have occurred to anyone (recent immigrant, visitor or citizen) that they would actually want to kill someone, regardless of the likelyhood of consequences to themselves.
There are no real consequences to killing someone today. Only about 20% of murders are caught and convicted. The rest go free, either after never being caught or after some kind of botched trial where they get off because the police lost the evidence or some other nonsense. So why aren't people being killed all the time? Well, in fact, they are. The murder rate is is pretty darn high in most large cities and this isn't just "crimes of passion" and armed robberies gone bad.
There is another problem. We are beginning to have sizable groups of people that are focused completely on an afterlife in some spirtual relm far, far removed from the cares of what we consider to be everyday life. There are both Christians and Muslims so focused and perhaps others. I think the Moonies might count in this group, for example. I don't believe anyone has distorted Judaism in this manner, but I suppose is it possible. So it isn't just Islamic nutjobs - it is potentially any religon. And these people are indeed dangerous. One thing you can count on is a rather sane outlook that someone wants to live to instill in them a healthy fear of doing things that will put an end to their life - but someone focused on the afterlife just doesn't care at all. Anything is open to them, including things that will quite obviously kill them and perhaps others they care about. But because "life" is meaningless to them and only the "afterlife" counts, it doesn't matter.
So between limited consequences for murder in the US today - 4 out of 5 chances of not getting punished - and folks that simply don't give a rat's ass about life at all, we are in a fairly unique situation. This simply hasn't had to be faced before. I would consider fear to be a reasonable response to this - because the only other response that seems at all reasonable is living it up while you can because life is short and it is only going to get shorter. If you can't control how you are going to die or when, you might as well spend the last few days having as much fun as you can, right?
Of course, what we get in the US is a predominance of both of these sorts of jurors. They watch a lot of TV and are sure they have stumbled into something interesting. Or they are there because there isn't anything else interesting to do at the rest home. Worse, they didn't want to serve, couldn't think of a way out of it and now are there and are very, very hostile about it - he must be guilty or he wouldn't have been arrested, can we go now?
The smartphone is of use to both these sorts of people and in neither case is it useful or helpful but is actually very, very damaging to the system. And if you happen to be the guy on trial with 10 of these sorts of jurors you are going to be very angry at the guilty verdict.
Sadly, the AGW debate is centered on it being carbon and only carbon and all carbon coming from human sources that are under our control - if only we had the will do stop.
The "other side" of this is certainly composed of people that do not understand and are utterly uninformed. But to dismiss everyone that has problems with "only carbon" and "all carbon is from human sources" as wacko is as silly as the people trying to say there is no climate change at all.
Right now, we can guess that human sources of carbon are contributing to changes and stand a pretty good chance of being right. Making the leap to say that climate change will stop if we stop emitting carbon is relying as much on faith as someone at a revival meeting.
Pretty much change is here and we have little choice but to accept it and deal with it. And understand it.
OK, assume that it is a given that cell phone companies have this information. When someone is killed why do the police not simply pull the information for everyone that was within, say 500 feet, at the time of the murder? This would give them not only a potential suspect list but it would also give them a list of witnesses.
Right now, if you kill someone and keep your mouth shut you stand only about a 20% chance of being caught and convicted. You can be sure that this weighs in on the decision to (a) carry a deadly force weapon and (b) use it perhaps indiscriminately. If murderers were, say 90% caught and convicted instead of only 20% the rather obnoxious murder rate in cities might drop. It is somewhere between 0.5 and 2 murders every single day in nearly every large city in the US.
If this tool exists, it isn't being used by police. They don't have to get to pushy about it, but if they had a list of people that were in the area even if the murderer didn't have a cell phone on him at the time there is a high likelyhood that someone would have seen something.
Why wouldn't a witness come forward? There is a powerful force to discourage witnesses from coming forward in cities - they even sell T-shirts saying "Stop Snitching". Nobody wants to be a witness because it means putting your life at risk. The way things stand (with a rate of 20% of murders being caught and convicted) the police cannot possibly protect witnesses and there is a strong incentive to make sure that no witness will ever speak out. Given only a 1 in 5 chance of being convicted of killing a witness there is no way to get witnesses to place their life on hold and their life at risk for the chance (much less than 20%) that the murderer will not be out on the street looking for revenge.
When we lose broadcasting, we will lose most of the viewers. The current distribution systems do not have the capacity to deliver the same content to every home in the US. The cable and DSL distribution mechanisms work on the basis of a feed from the Internet at large coming to a "node" of some sort (DSLAM or neighborhood distribution node) and then going out to individual homes. The capacity of the feed from the Internet won't handle distribution to hundreds if not thousands of homes from a single location. So many, many more nodes would be needed. For DSL it isn't that complicated - more DSLAMs in the same CO but for cable it is fatal - it is running new fiber to new locations and splitting up the neighborhood nodes. Likely it would cost tens of millions for a small city. Nationwide? Billions and take 10 years to get it done.
And don't get me started on the limitations of wireless Internet. The capacity does not exist and will never exist to serve much bandwidth to anything but a small percentage of early adopters.
Whenever someone talks about the "death of broadcast TV" they don't understand the existing infrastructure and don't understand the costs to grow it beyond where it is today. It took 10-15 years for the cable companies to build out to where we are today. There is some capability for growth but nothing like what would be required for IPTV to everyone.
I believe Cox intentionally has the "on demand" service hopelessly crippled simply because they know that if everyone jumped on that service it would collapse completely. I believe the Comcast version is more usable but there must be some limiting factor on it as well - again the system bandwidth simply doesn't allow for what IPTV fans think they want.
The way for inner city youth is to follow the rules: Stop Snitching.
If they don't pay attention to the rules, they will run afoul of folks whose livelihood they are impacting. And probably end up as another statistic on how hazardous it is for minorities in the inner city.
Of course, you are correct that the only way for law enforcement is to have snitches. If they are subsequently beaten, tortured or killed it isn't the fault of law enforcement but our own sick, twisted society. It comes down to who do you want to support, the cops or the robbers? For the most part in the US we have chosen overwhelmingly for the robbers.
The problem is that Google wasn't making the entire content of the books available for free online. They were indexing and offering up snippets and the selling the complete book.
That makes them the largest bookseller in the world overnight.
Nowhere was it said that Google would be distributing these for free. As a matter of fact, Google was planning on making quite a bit of money from the sale of these books and distributing a pittance to the original rightsholder. All part of the settlement.
It is a condition of getting a driver's license that you waive any rights you might have to not agree to any sort of DUI testing they want to subject you to on the slightest suspicion of being drunk.
If you would like to preserve your right not to be tested, don't get a driver's license. It is viewed commonly as the community's right to protect itself from drunk drivers. We had plenty of people killed by drunk drivers such that there is an impressive set of statistics from the 1960s and 1970s where drunk drivers where allowed to pretty much get off with a warning, sometimes even after being involved in accidents. The end result of this was in the 1980s a small group of people were able to exert enough pressure on state and federal governments to make drunk driving an extremely risky behavior.
So, no there is no "due process" or right to anything concerning driving while drunk anymore. If you appear to be drunk, you will be tested. If you refuse, you are treated as if you tested positively. If you test positive, regardless of the accuracy of the machine used, you will be punished. This means that if the machine says 0.08 (legal limit in most states) and a better-calibrated or more accurate machine might say 0.79 it doesn't matter, and the court isn't interested in your defense. You were legally drunk and will be punished.
This does drag some people into the system that are innocent, but apparently there was enough ruckus created in the 1980s that the governments at all levels are fine with that. There is very little controversy about the idea of perhaps convicting an innocent person of drunk driving. Very little indeed. Because it was adequately proven that drunk drivers kill people rather indiscriminately.
That had an overlap when I ended up between jobs and had a hospital visit, which sans insurance (it's tied to employment in the US) meant I suddenly owed $5000 USD for effectively a emergency room visit that didn't require any expensive tests or complex actions, just a doctor to look at me for 10 minutes and write up a prescription.
What you missed out on were the lessons on how to work the system. Sure, you had a $5000 hospital bill and they kept calling you until you paid, right? Maybe they threatened to sue you if you didn't pay?
What people miss in situations like this is two things: (a) a lot of people simply don't pay, ever, and (b) ever heard the phrase "blood from a stone"? The fact that a lot of people don't pay means the hospital has to figure out how to get paid enough from everyone that does pay. This is just cost-shifting and is the rule with medical care in the US. It means that the prices keep going up because it is spread across a smaller and smaller number of people paying full price - the rest are either paying some incredibly discounted price because of a deal with an insurance company or the government or they just are paying at all.
The "blood from a stone" concept here is very simple. You have no money, no job, nothing. OK, so what does that mean? It means you are judgement-proof. Nothing they can do to you will hurt you financially and the US does not imprison people for bankruptcy. Therefore when someone says they will sue you or ruin your credit rating it is an hollow threat. It means nothing. They will likely realize this early on and forget about suing or anything else. They may keep harrassing you, but there are actual laws against doing too much of that. End result is no more bill from the hospital. It isn't like they can actually refuse to treat you.
The one problem with this is some people's concept of dignity. It isn't considered dignified in some circles to not be able to pay your bills. People die in the US every day because they cannot offend their sense of dignity in matters like this. You need to get your head around the idea that it is a clear choice: dignity in death or survival. And there is very, very little dignity in being dead.
Physical books include with the purchase the right to redistribute. You can redistribute the book intact to a single person or you can tear out the pages and distribute them to many, many people.
Digital books do not include such rights because for the most part once you have one person redistributing that is all that is needed. Nobody else needs to buy - it is now free. As a reference for this I suggest checking out music and movies on the Internet. Both are free, both are providing pretty much zero revenue for digital sales other than streaming sites with commercials added.
With eBooks it is pretty much the same. Once it is posted somewhere, why would you buy it? Once you read it, why would you ever buy it again? It is somewhat of a unique problem because unless redistribution is restricted (through licensing rather than outright sales), there will cease to be a market very, very quickly. It is sort of the only winning move is to not play.
I don't know who you have been using as a publisher but 50% of the cost is absurd.
My book (CD and DVD Forensics is published by Syngress, now Elsivere) would have cost me around $2 to have printed myself, if I had gone a self-publishing route. That would have been for 100 copies minimum. Yes, it is perfect-bound. It costs around $0.50 to ship if you order a box of them, as any reasonable bookseller would. When I order a box I think I pay something like $10 for shipping on a case of 22. Wholesale cost on the book is around $20, with the retail being $50.
I got an advance, I got a real publishing contract and if there were 4-5,000 books sold I would get royalties.
If they are making you pay for warehousing your own book, you are self-publishing. No publisher goes that far that I have ever heard of. I think you got a vanity press contract that was disguised as a publishing deal. Yes, they are going to make you pay to store your book. They are likely to make you pay for proofreading and editing as separate items as well, and make them optional, value-added services.
You don't need to print 1,000,000 copies for cheap printing, but you do have to deal with the right people. The publishers with physical books on Amazon aren't paying 50% of the wholesale cost for printing. It is a lot closer to 10%. Maybe on cheap paperbacks it is as high as 20% - that is $1.40 on a $7 book. Even an "expensive" hardcover book is going to be $5-$6 to print and bind if is being done right.
A huge problem in the US (which is getting worse) is the "culture islands" of people that have no interest in assimilating. During previous immigration waves the people that were coming to the US wanted to be "Americans" (whatever that means) but recently the trend has been "diversity" where they want to keep their culture, language and customs - just live in the US, make lots of money and send a good bit of it home to the family.
What this does is you get attitudes that are very, very counterproductive if you are trying to assemble the people behind a common goal. Let's say that it would make sense to raise taxes in order to pay for a really spiffy Medicare benefit such as assisted living. So instead of putting Grandma in the cheapest warehouse so she can wait to die she could get some kind of home assistance. Well, the folks that are here to make money and send it home (and probably return there after working for 10-15 years) have no interest in such things. Trying to build a demographic of middle-aged people working gets all skewed because maybe 10% of the working adults in may be transients that have very little interest in anything except fatter paychecks right now.
There is certainly another factor at work as well, Fundamentalist religious beliefs, whether they are Christian or Muslim, tend to push people to focus on the afterlife rather than material things in this life. So good health care is relatively meaningless and care for Grandma is not a priority at all. Such people are going to vote for things that mystify people interested in the here and now. It isn't Sharia law that we need to worry about as much as voting for the afterlife. If you want benefits and support from your government, you are looking for things that are meaningless to someone focused on the afterlife.
It doesn't matter if these people are white, brown or green. If they are in the US (or UK) to grab some easy cash and send it back to the wife and kids somewhere else, they aren't going to have the same priorities as someone in the country for the long haul. And I'd say getting too many people not in it for the long haul is hazardous to any country.