Privatization, together with the FAA and EPA licensing requirements, pretty much mean there will be no launches. You can't launch anything without spending several years getting the right permits and licenses. The number of companies that could launch vs. the number that have attempted anything is about 100 to 1. Out of the three or four that have gotten permission to test-fire a launch vehicle only one - Rutan's group - has ever actually launched.
The problem is that you are describing an environment where the buyer gets to set the price rather than the seller. Sure, if we could turn commerce around on its head and walk up to someone in a store and say "I'll give you $5 for that." when the price is $10 it would be great, right?
Except in some parts of the world, that is exactly how it works already - pricing is well, flexible. Negotiable. Go to any third-world marketplace and that is how things work. How come it doesn't work that way in the US or Europe? I don't know the all the complex theory behind it, but it has to do with a maturing marketplace.
I don't think we want to go back to haggling and negotiating in neighborhood market - the supermarket and Home Depot are a lot nicer and have better hours. But that is exactly what you are proposing. And it doesn't work very well in a "mature market".
Some particularly non-techie types that enjoy taking and sharing pictures of under-18 folks have been known to save and distribute such pictures with EXIF data. Sometimes including GPS information or camera serial number data.
The camera serial number is useful if the owner registers the camera with the manufacturer. The serial number can be used to look up the registration.
The GPS information is of pretty obvious value, assuming the pictures are taken at home. Put that information into a GPS device and it will guide you right there.
Either way, the result is a visit from Officer Friendly and the charge is distributing child porn.
Probably this would be pretty useless. Maybe not, but probably.
You see, there are some common Windows files, but there are a lot more that are type-dependent. So it would be dependent on the installation type (XP Pro, XP Home, Media Center Edition, etc.) I don't know how many there are for XP, but it is more than just a few.
Next, just checking what you would like to believe is "current" isn't going to work. There are hotfixes, optional updates and various dependencies in the updates. Therefore you are going to have to have a hash for nearly every patch level of every file. That would be the real killer for this - 1000 hashes for user32.exe, 25 for cdfs.sys, 2500 for ntdll.dll. You get the idea.
This is why they haven't done that already. Just running System File Checker would be OK, and I believe this can be done from the repair console.
You now understand why iTunes has perhaps 2% of the music downloads. Everyone else is using Limewire and other P2P software.
Now 2% is a huge number in real dollars. Just the existance of iTunes also gives Apple a lot of credibility - they aren't directly encouraging piracy. Of course, every 40-year-old that buys an iPod can use the iTunes store... until someone shows them how to download for free. Because you know that nobody can afford to fill an iPod at $1 a song - something that everyone at Apple knows too.
You mentioned a key word "advertise". This is what the labels are doing and why they (correctly) need to be selective. Advertising, or more properly called promotion, is expensive. The model works fine if you promote 10 things and only get revenue from 1, as long as it is about 12x the promotion cost. It stops working when you promote 10 things and only 1 produces 8x the promotion cost.
This is the way it works with books, bands, software and just about everything in the world where there is a promotor that works this way. It might seem logical that you could promote 100 things and one of them earns 120x the promotion cost, but it doesn't work out in real life. This model has existed for a long time, probably since the late 1800s and it has seen a lot of successes and a lot of failures.
What people don't seem to get it that without the promotion, nobody ever hears about anything. There is low-cost promotion and big, expensive promotion - it can work in either environment. A lot of the middle-of-the-road promotion occurrs only at an industry level, such as making sure a buyer at Amazon knows about new releases. Or making the trip to Bensonville to get your five minutes in front of a WalMart buyer. If neither happens then whatever it is doesn't get into Amazon or WalMart, be it music, books or kitchen gadgets.
As long as the price isn't zero, nobody I know is buying. Reducing the price is one thing, but the difference between zero and $0.001 (tenth of a cent) is still infinity.
I suspect the net result for Warner is both are zero to them.
Ad-supported streaming music isn't going to generate much, if any real revenue after costs. Your carrying around a bunch of music from legally purchased CDs is probably a much better advertisement for purchasing CDs than anything that might be streamed.
A third alternative would be carrying around a lot of files from pirated music. Again, this would be a net zero for Warner.
So I would say if you aren't buying anything no matter what you do you aren't giving them any money. So it really doesn't matter what you do. If you want their attention, you need to give them money.
The problem is that the merchants have insurance and the number of fraudulent accesses is pretty small. So merchants are reluctant to spend $10,000 per terminal for a system as you describe.
They have been already forced to spend $1000-$2000 per terminal already for something that has $100 of components in it.
Sure, it could be done as you suggest. But a lot of these systems were designed to work over a 300 baud modem or with no external connection at all - just buffering stuff up until later. So now you would also require a real Internet connection from each terminal. Well, the costs just keep going up on the merchant.
The end result is that merchants just say they can't implement something like that in all locations. Or the box is too expensive and they aren't buying any of them. So instead of universal penetration it is 5 or 10 percent of the merchants.
The reason they went with a low-cost, easy-to-implement solution in the first place was to gain wide (if not universal) acceptance so these things could be at every POS location everywhere. No matter what system the merchant was using or at least minimal interface requirements. It is like credit card terminals in the US - there are still a large number of places where they put the sale information into one system and then re-key the sale into a credit card terminal because integrating is too expensive and the terminals are relatively cheap.
I have encountered credit card fraud quite a few times - maybe 7-10 times in the last 10 years or so. Everything from having a card stolen to the number being used fraudulently by someone online.
I have never experienced, nor has anyone I have ever encountered, any penalty at all. The $50 limit is an upper limit, apparently if the credit card issuer seems to think you are somehow complicit in the fraud. I've never had anything happen other than simply having the charges removed from the account. And getting a new number and card.
Now for the merchant that took the card, they get to eat the entire cost. Plus a chargeback from their processor. Hope they have insurance, like all the large merchants have.
This combination of cardholders not being penalized and large merchants having insurance is why the current rampant fraud situation and stolen credit card number market is how it is. You can make hundreds of dollars by selling credit card numbers and other information, and plenty of folks do just that. It's extra money. You didn't really think the waitress was getting by on just tips, did you?
that people seem to miss. The government of Iran isn't terribly interested in what the people want. The government is not "by the people, for the people" at all, it is far more "our own damn way". Oh, and by the way, you will like it... or else.
This is one reason that having a nuclear-armed Iran is rather concerning. If the consequences of setting off a nuke were that one of their larger cities was destroyed in the West this would be a catestrophe. Something that the government (you know, by the people and all that) would avoid at all costs. However, in Iran it could easily be viewed as simple collateral damage, accept it and move on.
The well-being of the civilian population is not critical to the leaders in Iran. These leaders do not view themselves as being part of the civilian population, nor would they suffer the same consequences as the civilian population should something bad happen. They would be comfortably secure in their isolated bunker somewhere and the civilian population would (rather unwillingly) get to ride out the consequences.
So what does the government care about Internet communications? Well, they certainly care that these communications can be seized by a foreign government and are not subject to their monitoring. If the US has conclusive proof of a strong dissident faction in Iran there might be some motivation to contact them and work with them. This obviously cannot be allowed. Similarly, next time there is a large riot in Iran it might be useful to others to know how things were going after the Iran state-controlled media shuts off the pictures. This also cannot be allowed.
Another thing that cannot be allowed is for the message Iran is sending to the West to be cycled back to the civilian population. They may want to deliver an entirely different message to their civilian population. Something on the order of "We didn't start it, but by Allah we're gonna finish it!!!"
Sounds like they are moving forward on the agenda of preventing unmonitored and unrestricted communications.
A proxy site that alters the content of the page so the proxy site can afford to operate?
This seems on its face to be an awfully spammy way to operate, and one that I would think would be easily defeated by the site owner. Just make it so that the pages can't be scraped in that manner and you are home free. Should be easy with AJAX and other tools.
Ads are not the answer. If the users absolutely will not pay for services, then the ads are a hoax anyway - you are serving ads to non-customers that never will be customers. The advertiser is going to catch on eventually and stop paying to put ads up that just annoy people who never buy.
And make no mistake about it, we aren't talking about poor oppressed people in Iran looking for a gateway to content otherwise blocked by their evil government. We are most likely talking about teenage porn surfers at the library. Or college kids trying to make a few bucks with online poker (and failing, much to Dad's dismay.)
For Iran and China and a few other places you might be able to get a real charity to support such an operation - but it would have to be able to prove it wasn't serving the porn surfers and poker addicts. Which isn't going to happen, so forget about getting any sort of sympathy for the poor oppressed people in China and Iran. This is all about the porn surfers and the like in the US and Europe.
The problem is primarily things like diction. You can "train" someone sitting in front of a computer to speak slowly and clearly with good diction. Fine.
The problem is the most useful use model for a cell phone translator would be getting a cab or walking into a store. You talk into your phone and it says something to the other person in their language - wonderful, because you have "trained" yourself to speak clearly and slowly with good diction.
Then the other person mumbles something back at you in their language that neither you or the cell phone can make heads or tails out of. You can't "train" them so it will never work for that.
From my limited experience, English has its share of strange accents and such but in large measure people can speak with good diction and pronounciation. Lots of non-English languages seem to promote far less clarity and human-to-human it doesn't really impair communication that much. Human-to-machine is a whole different story and we are very far away from being able to do speech recognition with poor pronounciation and poor diction.
Nice sentiment, but unfortunately "small" companies generally just do not have the resources to get much done. What that pretty much means is if there is any competition at all, the competitors (who are VC funded, public or much much larger) will simply walk away with the market.
Your only hope as a "small" company is to operate in a niche that others find too small to bother with. And the problem with that is you are eternally wondering if sales are going to bring in enough to make payroll this month. Can't get ahead, can't grow and can't find someone to buy you out because that niche is something nobody else thinks is worthwhile.
Partnering with a larger company today is a joke because for the most part they want total control and assume because you are small that you have no choice in the matter. If you fall into this, you are working for someone else.
There are a few things that being small and staying small makes sense for, but they all involve things nobody else wants. Janitorial services are a good example.
I suggest that this has pretty much already happened. There are rather perverse incentives today for high-IQ women to put off children as long as possible.
This hasn't escaped popular notice. As far back as Cyril M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons". The recent film "Idiocracy". The general theme of smarter people finding things to do other than having children has been with us for a long time.
It is probably something to worry about, and while the government is creating incentives for things, maybe they should be offering bigger tax breaks for children to some people. Australia, for example pays "natives" $5000 for each child, not as a tax break but as cash.
It might be a grand awakening in people all over the planet that taking stuff without paying is just somehow wrong. Unfortunately, we have been training an entire generation that taking whateve is laying around unguarded is the right thing to do. So I don't see this happening anytime soon.
It might be that worthwhile content is just not being created except in ways that make piracy impossible. The motivation to do this would come from the simple truth that people that pirate aren't going to pay, ever. And as Internet speeds increase and the breadth and depth of materials available steadily increase, more and more people will take advantage of the endless bounty that is available for free. Pirating Misha Reedy's performances probably isn't all that high on anyone's list - and besides, people like that want their materials to be distributed far and wide so everyone can appreciate their talent.
It is unlikely that the RIAA, MPAA and other organizations like them are going to be able to stamp out piracy no matter how many lawsuits they file.
However, the real possibility to look out for is government intervention. It is simple economics. Not only are there fewer sales due to piracy but even more so there are fewer taxes paid. You might be able to convince the government that less money for a record company is important and worth devoting the government's attention to through law enforcement and other means, but it is probably far more interesting to governments in general that their tax income is being reduced. Slightly, this is true, but the decrease is still there. In today's economic times do you really believe a government isn't interested in spending $10 to get $1 more in tax revenue?
So what people should be concerned about is that governments mandate ISPs and others to stamp out piracy - any way they can. With government-mandated accountability to show statistics to faceless government bureaucrats to prove that they are having an effect. This might actually accomplish the goal of eliminating piracy - along with a good portion of the so-called freedom to pirate that seems to be present with the Internet today.
Will the government do this? Quite possibly. Would it be a good thing? Hardly. But while your friends are grabbing all the free stuff they can it is something to think about.
Unfortunately, in the US we have pretty much eliminated the risk model of insurance and pushed a partial-payment plan instead. The insurance companies aren't selling insurance based on risk. They are selling a prepayment plan where you pay $1000 to $10,000 a year in advance and then they hope you don't get sick so they never have to pay anything back.
If you get sick, they get to try to deny the claim or cancel your insurance because it is the only option left to them. You haven't paid in enough to cover their expenses and you never will. If they could consider everone as part of a huge group there might be a way out of this, but they can't do that either. State laws forbid it in most cases and it would be on a state-by-state basis no matter what. So there are lots and lots of little groups. An no group is allowed to be too far in the red - again, by state regulations. So they have to balance out the small groups as required by law using whatever tools are available.
For the most part, they can't raise rates on people that have pre-existing conditions or conditions that assure everyone they are going to need treatment soon. This has been taken away from the insurance companies. They can charge older people more, but soon that will be removed and the only sensible way to resolve it is to charge everyone lots more. Then the bedriddten 70-year-old will be paying the same amount as the 24-year-old athelete. Fairer? Maybe, but hardly practical for everyone.
Today in the US there are around 40 people working and earning a living for every 100 in the country. This includes children, elderly, disabled, etc. Assuming we throw open the border to the south - which is probably a 50/50 probability, this ratio will go down to around 30 people working for every 100.
Not all of the 60 or 70 people out of that 100 are supported by the government, but at least half of them are in some way. This represents the current burden without government-funded heathcare.
The entire Social Security funding was set up with the idea that people died within a few years after retirement and there would be 10 workers for every retired person. We are rapidly reaching the point where there are 10 retired people for every worker, which makes it very difficult to continue the plan the way it is structured.
Sure, it would be nice if the government took over healthcare completely and nobody ever went hungry and the borders were open to all so that everyone could experience the bounty and benefits of living in the USA. Except it isn't going to work that way for very long, if at all. De-incentivise earning in the USA and more people will opt out in one way or another.
You would be amazed at how long you can live in Mexico or Costa Rica on $10,000. Maybe you have to learn Spanish but it is really simple to just drop out. Not really an option for anyone currently on government support, but what this will do is drop the ratio down to like 10-15 taxpayers out of 100 residents.
I was unaware of any compensation for authors that Google was proposing - the settlement leaves the door open to some type of compensation in the future as well as leaving the door open to sales of the books by Google or their authorized agents.
But any revenue derived from showing the content of the books online would be Google's compensation for scanning the books and hosting them.
I think that is one of the huge problems a lot of people have with this is that Google is simply appropriating the content and deriving revenue (ads) from it.
An open standards web based solution would do them just fine, only it would allow the less technically challenged people the capability of making a private copy for later reference.
Sure, and it therefore allows redistribution - why should the rest of the world not benefit from UCLA's movie collection? BitTorrent, anyone?
The problem is, the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up to the "pirate manifesto" which says (a) digital goods have no cost and (b) if it exists, I want a copy. When it does, great. Until then, you can expect lawsuits over distribution and redistribution where someone isn't getting paid.
If you are a User, you have no choice but to trust the entire universe of code around you. Your watch could contain a rogue program, your car radio, your cell phone, your microwave oven. Everything is enabled with microprocessors programmed by unknown and unknowable people with unknown and unknowable motivations.
All you can do is hope for the best if you are a User.
However, if you are a Programmer you can only use code that you trust and have personally verified in addition to the rest of the Programmer community. Users don't count for much in this world, because they can't help out, they can only blindly follow. Some Users will have Programmer friends and they can just follow in their footsteps, like a line of soldiers through a minefield. Only Programmers have this power.
Sadly, the way people are wired only a very few are going to be Programmers. The rest simply do not have the skills or the mental faculties. The rest of the human race are doomed to simply be Users.
Ringworld wouldn't be that hard to film. You could even do it with 1960s film techniques. Yes, it is against a really, really big backdrop, but that is what they do with matte paintings. The only hard part with 1960s film technology would be getting someone into a Puppeteer suit. Nah, it would be animitronic.
Today you could do the whole thing with CGI. Ringworld has a big backdrop, but it is actualy about the characters not the place. Characters are easy.
What you're missing is the "artificial throttling" is called editing. The publisher rejects the crap and edits the hell out of the nearly crap. The end result is a book that is readable and sells.
OK, so maybe Isaac Asimov didn't require a lot of editing. But here we are talking about a professional that was in the business of writing books and turned out maybe 20 a year for 50 years. Or more.
Stephen King probably has the book-writing game down pretty solid as well. Not a lot of editing required.
Just about every other author out there is going to need a lot of editing. And probably a lot of rejections. There's that throttling you were talking about. Without it, the book market would look like YouTube. Or worse, American Idol - everyone thinks they are the finest author ever to put words on page and even their friends can't tell them otherwise.
Sorry, but if you have been paying attention the eBook market is much, much smaller than the market for printed books. Most people want a physical book.
Besides, what the major cost in producing a book (any book) is the editing and promotion. If you decide you want to self-publish a book you can take care of all of that yourself and find out that if you will print 1000 copies it costs maybe $3 each to perfect bind them.
Of course, you will sell almost none of them - no editing and no promotion. That's where the publisher comes in. And why they want money and are pretty choosy about what books they actually take on.
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Privatization, together with the FAA and EPA licensing requirements, pretty much mean there will be no launches. You can't launch anything without spending several years getting the right permits and licenses. The number of companies that could launch vs. the number that have attempted anything is about 100 to 1. Out of the three or four that have gotten permission to test-fire a launch vehicle only one - Rutan's group - has ever actually launched.
Obama's plan is simple - no access to space.
The problem is that you are describing an environment where the buyer gets to set the price rather than the seller. Sure, if we could turn commerce around on its head and walk up to someone in a store and say "I'll give you $5 for that." when the price is $10 it would be great, right?
Except in some parts of the world, that is exactly how it works already - pricing is well, flexible. Negotiable. Go to any third-world marketplace and that is how things work. How come it doesn't work that way in the US or Europe? I don't know the all the complex theory behind it, but it has to do with a maturing marketplace.
I don't think we want to go back to haggling and negotiating in neighborhood market - the supermarket and Home Depot are a lot nicer and have better hours. But that is exactly what you are proposing. And it doesn't work very well in a "mature market".
Some particularly non-techie types that enjoy taking and sharing pictures of under-18 folks have been known to save and distribute such pictures with EXIF data. Sometimes including GPS information or camera serial number data.
The camera serial number is useful if the owner registers the camera with the manufacturer. The serial number can be used to look up the registration.
The GPS information is of pretty obvious value, assuming the pictures are taken at home. Put that information into a GPS device and it will guide you right there.
Either way, the result is a visit from Officer Friendly and the charge is distributing child porn.
Probably this would be pretty useless. Maybe not, but probably.
You see, there are some common Windows files, but there are a lot more that are type-dependent. So it would be dependent on the installation type (XP Pro, XP Home, Media Center Edition, etc.) I don't know how many there are for XP, but it is more than just a few.
Next, just checking what you would like to believe is "current" isn't going to work. There are hotfixes, optional updates and various dependencies in the updates. Therefore you are going to have to have a hash for nearly every patch level of every file. That would be the real killer for this - 1000 hashes for user32.exe, 25 for cdfs.sys, 2500 for ntdll.dll. You get the idea.
This is why they haven't done that already. Just running System File Checker would be OK, and I believe this can be done from the repair console.
You now understand why iTunes has perhaps 2% of the music downloads. Everyone else is using Limewire and other P2P software.
Now 2% is a huge number in real dollars. Just the existance of iTunes also gives Apple a lot of credibility - they aren't directly encouraging piracy. Of course, every 40-year-old that buys an iPod can use the iTunes store... until someone shows them how to download for free. Because you know that nobody can afford to fill an iPod at $1 a song - something that everyone at Apple knows too.
I guess your niece knows it too, now.
You mentioned a key word "advertise". This is what the labels are doing and why they (correctly) need to be selective. Advertising, or more properly called promotion, is expensive. The model works fine if you promote 10 things and only get revenue from 1, as long as it is about 12x the promotion cost. It stops working when you promote 10 things and only 1 produces 8x the promotion cost.
This is the way it works with books, bands, software and just about everything in the world where there is a promotor that works this way. It might seem logical that you could promote 100 things and one of them earns 120x the promotion cost, but it doesn't work out in real life. This model has existed for a long time, probably since the late 1800s and it has seen a lot of successes and a lot of failures.
What people don't seem to get it that without the promotion, nobody ever hears about anything. There is low-cost promotion and big, expensive promotion - it can work in either environment. A lot of the middle-of-the-road promotion occurrs only at an industry level, such as making sure a buyer at Amazon knows about new releases. Or making the trip to Bensonville to get your five minutes in front of a WalMart buyer. If neither happens then whatever it is doesn't get into Amazon or WalMart, be it music, books or kitchen gadgets.
As long as the price isn't zero, nobody I know is buying. Reducing the price is one thing, but the difference between zero and $0.001 (tenth of a cent) is still infinity.
I suspect the net result for Warner is both are zero to them.
Ad-supported streaming music isn't going to generate much, if any real revenue after costs. Your carrying around a bunch of music from legally purchased CDs is probably a much better advertisement for purchasing CDs than anything that might be streamed.
A third alternative would be carrying around a lot of files from pirated music. Again, this would be a net zero for Warner.
So I would say if you aren't buying anything no matter what you do you aren't giving them any money. So it really doesn't matter what you do. If you want their attention, you need to give them money.
The problem is that the merchants have insurance and the number of fraudulent accesses is pretty small. So merchants are reluctant to spend $10,000 per terminal for a system as you describe.
They have been already forced to spend $1000-$2000 per terminal already for something that has $100 of components in it.
Sure, it could be done as you suggest. But a lot of these systems were designed to work over a 300 baud modem or with no external connection at all - just buffering stuff up until later. So now you would also require a real Internet connection from each terminal. Well, the costs just keep going up on the merchant.
The end result is that merchants just say they can't implement something like that in all locations. Or the box is too expensive and they aren't buying any of them. So instead of universal penetration it is 5 or 10 percent of the merchants.
The reason they went with a low-cost, easy-to-implement solution in the first place was to gain wide (if not universal) acceptance so these things could be at every POS location everywhere. No matter what system the merchant was using or at least minimal interface requirements. It is like credit card terminals in the US - there are still a large number of places where they put the sale information into one system and then re-key the sale into a credit card terminal because integrating is too expensive and the terminals are relatively cheap.
I have encountered credit card fraud quite a few times - maybe 7-10 times in the last 10 years or so. Everything from having a card stolen to the number being used fraudulently by someone online.
I have never experienced, nor has anyone I have ever encountered, any penalty at all. The $50 limit is an upper limit, apparently if the credit card issuer seems to think you are somehow complicit in the fraud. I've never had anything happen other than simply having the charges removed from the account. And getting a new number and card.
Now for the merchant that took the card, they get to eat the entire cost. Plus a chargeback from their processor. Hope they have insurance, like all the large merchants have.
This combination of cardholders not being penalized and large merchants having insurance is why the current rampant fraud situation and stolen credit card number market is how it is. You can make hundreds of dollars by selling credit card numbers and other information, and plenty of folks do just that. It's extra money. You didn't really think the waitress was getting by on just tips, did you?
Only way that happens is to eliminate nationalism and every government except the UN. And you can imagine how that would work.
that people seem to miss. The government of Iran isn't terribly interested in what the people want. The government is not "by the people, for the people" at all, it is far more "our own damn way". Oh, and by the way, you will like it... or else.
This is one reason that having a nuclear-armed Iran is rather concerning. If the consequences of setting off a nuke were that one of their larger cities was destroyed in the West this would be a catestrophe. Something that the government (you know, by the people and all that) would avoid at all costs. However, in Iran it could easily be viewed as simple collateral damage, accept it and move on.
The well-being of the civilian population is not critical to the leaders in Iran. These leaders do not view themselves as being part of the civilian population, nor would they suffer the same consequences as the civilian population should something bad happen. They would be comfortably secure in their isolated bunker somewhere and the civilian population would (rather unwillingly) get to ride out the consequences.
So what does the government care about Internet communications? Well, they certainly care that these communications can be seized by a foreign government and are not subject to their monitoring. If the US has conclusive proof of a strong dissident faction in Iran there might be some motivation to contact them and work with them. This obviously cannot be allowed. Similarly, next time there is a large riot in Iran it might be useful to others to know how things were going after the Iran state-controlled media shuts off the pictures. This also cannot be allowed.
Another thing that cannot be allowed is for the message Iran is sending to the West to be cycled back to the civilian population. They may want to deliver an entirely different message to their civilian population. Something on the order of "We didn't start it, but by Allah we're gonna finish it!!!"
Sounds like they are moving forward on the agenda of preventing unmonitored and unrestricted communications.
A proxy site that alters the content of the page so the proxy site can afford to operate?
This seems on its face to be an awfully spammy way to operate, and one that I would think would be easily defeated by the site owner. Just make it so that the pages can't be scraped in that manner and you are home free. Should be easy with AJAX and other tools.
Ads are not the answer. If the users absolutely will not pay for services, then the ads are a hoax anyway - you are serving ads to non-customers that never will be customers. The advertiser is going to catch on eventually and stop paying to put ads up that just annoy people who never buy.
And make no mistake about it, we aren't talking about poor oppressed people in Iran looking for a gateway to content otherwise blocked by their evil government. We are most likely talking about teenage porn surfers at the library. Or college kids trying to make a few bucks with online poker (and failing, much to Dad's dismay.)
For Iran and China and a few other places you might be able to get a real charity to support such an operation - but it would have to be able to prove it wasn't serving the porn surfers and poker addicts. Which isn't going to happen, so forget about getting any sort of sympathy for the poor oppressed people in China and Iran. This is all about the porn surfers and the like in the US and Europe.
The problem is primarily things like diction. You can "train" someone sitting in front of a computer to speak slowly and clearly with good diction. Fine.
The problem is the most useful use model for a cell phone translator would be getting a cab or walking into a store. You talk into your phone and it says something to the other person in their language - wonderful, because you have "trained" yourself to speak clearly and slowly with good diction.
Then the other person mumbles something back at you in their language that neither you or the cell phone can make heads or tails out of. You can't "train" them so it will never work for that.
From my limited experience, English has its share of strange accents and such but in large measure people can speak with good diction and pronounciation. Lots of non-English languages seem to promote far less clarity and human-to-human it doesn't really impair communication that much. Human-to-machine is a whole different story and we are very far away from being able to do speech recognition with poor pronounciation and poor diction.
Nice sentiment, but unfortunately "small" companies generally just do not have the resources to get much done. What that pretty much means is if there is any competition at all, the competitors (who are VC funded, public or much much larger) will simply walk away with the market.
Your only hope as a "small" company is to operate in a niche that others find too small to bother with. And the problem with that is you are eternally wondering if sales are going to bring in enough to make payroll this month. Can't get ahead, can't grow and can't find someone to buy you out because that niche is something nobody else thinks is worthwhile.
Partnering with a larger company today is a joke because for the most part they want total control and assume because you are small that you have no choice in the matter. If you fall into this, you are working for someone else.
There are a few things that being small and staying small makes sense for, but they all involve things nobody else wants. Janitorial services are a good example.
I suggest that this has pretty much already happened. There are rather perverse incentives today for high-IQ women to put off children as long as possible.
This hasn't escaped popular notice. As far back as Cyril M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons". The recent film "Idiocracy". The general theme of smarter people finding things to do other than having children has been with us for a long time.
It is probably something to worry about, and while the government is creating incentives for things, maybe they should be offering bigger tax breaks for children to some people. Australia, for example pays "natives" $5000 for each child, not as a tax break but as cash.
Piracy will stop, eventually. One way or another.
It might be a grand awakening in people all over the planet that taking stuff without paying is just somehow wrong. Unfortunately, we have been training an entire generation that taking whateve is laying around unguarded is the right thing to do. So I don't see this happening anytime soon.
It might be that worthwhile content is just not being created except in ways that make piracy impossible. The motivation to do this would come from the simple truth that people that pirate aren't going to pay, ever. And as Internet speeds increase and the breadth and depth of materials available steadily increase, more and more people will take advantage of the endless bounty that is available for free. Pirating Misha Reedy's performances probably isn't all that high on anyone's list - and besides, people like that want their materials to be distributed far and wide so everyone can appreciate their talent.
It is unlikely that the RIAA, MPAA and other organizations like them are going to be able to stamp out piracy no matter how many lawsuits they file.
However, the real possibility to look out for is government intervention. It is simple economics. Not only are there fewer sales due to piracy but even more so there are fewer taxes paid. You might be able to convince the government that less money for a record company is important and worth devoting the government's attention to through law enforcement and other means, but it is probably far more interesting to governments in general that their tax income is being reduced. Slightly, this is true, but the decrease is still there. In today's economic times do you really believe a government isn't interested in spending $10 to get $1 more in tax revenue?
So what people should be concerned about is that governments mandate ISPs and others to stamp out piracy - any way they can. With government-mandated accountability to show statistics to faceless government bureaucrats to prove that they are having an effect. This might actually accomplish the goal of eliminating piracy - along with a good portion of the so-called freedom to pirate that seems to be present with the Internet today.
Will the government do this? Quite possibly. Would it be a good thing? Hardly. But while your friends are grabbing all the free stuff they can it is something to think about.
Unfortunately, in the US we have pretty much eliminated the risk model of insurance and pushed a partial-payment plan instead. The insurance companies aren't selling insurance based on risk. They are selling a prepayment plan where you pay $1000 to $10,000 a year in advance and then they hope you don't get sick so they never have to pay anything back.
If you get sick, they get to try to deny the claim or cancel your insurance because it is the only option left to them. You haven't paid in enough to cover their expenses and you never will. If they could consider everone as part of a huge group there might be a way out of this, but they can't do that either. State laws forbid it in most cases and it would be on a state-by-state basis no matter what. So there are lots and lots of little groups. An no group is allowed to be too far in the red - again, by state regulations. So they have to balance out the small groups as required by law using whatever tools are available.
For the most part, they can't raise rates on people that have pre-existing conditions or conditions that assure everyone they are going to need treatment soon. This has been taken away from the insurance companies. They can charge older people more, but soon that will be removed and the only sensible way to resolve it is to charge everyone lots more. Then the bedriddten 70-year-old will be paying the same amount as the 24-year-old athelete. Fairer? Maybe, but hardly practical for everyone.
Today in the US there are around 40 people working and earning a living for every 100 in the country. This includes children, elderly, disabled, etc. Assuming we throw open the border to the south - which is probably a 50/50 probability, this ratio will go down to around 30 people working for every 100.
Not all of the 60 or 70 people out of that 100 are supported by the government, but at least half of them are in some way. This represents the current burden without government-funded heathcare.
The entire Social Security funding was set up with the idea that people died within a few years after retirement and there would be 10 workers for every retired person. We are rapidly reaching the point where there are 10 retired people for every worker, which makes it very difficult to continue the plan the way it is structured.
Sure, it would be nice if the government took over healthcare completely and nobody ever went hungry and the borders were open to all so that everyone could experience the bounty and benefits of living in the USA. Except it isn't going to work that way for very long, if at all. De-incentivise earning in the USA and more people will opt out in one way or another.
You would be amazed at how long you can live in Mexico or Costa Rica on $10,000. Maybe you have to learn Spanish but it is really simple to just drop out. Not really an option for anyone currently on government support, but what this will do is drop the ratio down to like 10-15 taxpayers out of 100 residents.
I was unaware of any compensation for authors that Google was proposing - the settlement leaves the door open to some type of compensation in the future as well as leaving the door open to sales of the books by Google or their authorized agents.
But any revenue derived from showing the content of the books online would be Google's compensation for scanning the books and hosting them.
I think that is one of the huge problems a lot of people have with this is that Google is simply appropriating the content and deriving revenue (ads) from it.
An open standards web based solution would do them just fine, only it would allow the less technically challenged people the capability of making a private copy for later reference.
Sure, and it therefore allows redistribution - why should the rest of the world not benefit from UCLA's movie collection? BitTorrent, anyone?
The problem is, the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up to the "pirate manifesto" which says (a) digital goods have no cost and (b) if it exists, I want a copy. When it does, great. Until then, you can expect lawsuits over distribution and redistribution where someone isn't getting paid.
If you are a User, you have no choice but to trust the entire universe of code around you. Your watch could contain a rogue program, your car radio, your cell phone, your microwave oven. Everything is enabled with microprocessors programmed by unknown and unknowable people with unknown and unknowable motivations.
All you can do is hope for the best if you are a User.
However, if you are a Programmer you can only use code that you trust and have personally verified in addition to the rest of the Programmer community. Users don't count for much in this world, because they can't help out, they can only blindly follow. Some Users will have Programmer friends and they can just follow in their footsteps, like a line of soldiers through a minefield. Only Programmers have this power.
Sadly, the way people are wired only a very few are going to be Programmers. The rest simply do not have the skills or the mental faculties. The rest of the human race are doomed to simply be Users.
Ringworld wouldn't be that hard to film. You could even do it with 1960s film techniques. Yes, it is against a really, really big backdrop, but that is what they do with matte paintings. The only hard part with 1960s film technology would be getting someone into a Puppeteer suit. Nah, it would be animitronic.
Today you could do the whole thing with CGI. Ringworld has a big backdrop, but it is actualy about the characters not the place. Characters are easy.
What you're missing is the "artificial throttling" is called editing. The publisher rejects the crap and edits the hell out of the nearly crap. The end result is a book that is readable and sells.
OK, so maybe Isaac Asimov didn't require a lot of editing. But here we are talking about a professional that was in the business of writing books and turned out maybe 20 a year for 50 years. Or more.
Stephen King probably has the book-writing game down pretty solid as well. Not a lot of editing required.
Just about every other author out there is going to need a lot of editing. And probably a lot of rejections. There's that throttling you were talking about. Without it, the book market would look like YouTube. Or worse, American Idol - everyone thinks they are the finest author ever to put words on page and even their friends can't tell them otherwise.
Sorry, but if you have been paying attention the eBook market is much, much smaller than the market for printed books. Most people want a physical book.
Besides, what the major cost in producing a book (any book) is the editing and promotion. If you decide you want to self-publish a book you can take care of all of that yourself and find out that if you will print 1000 copies it costs maybe $3 each to perfect bind them.
Of course, you will sell almost none of them - no editing and no promotion. That's where the publisher comes in. And why they want money and are pretty choosy about what books they actually take on.