The problem with this idea is that there would still need to be some kind of underclass of humans that cater to the machine's needs. You end up with a slave class that does this because they are told to (perhaps by armed force) because there is no other motivation left. The rest of the people need this done or they starve. So nobody willing goes to service the machines that everyone relies upon.
The idea behind some sort of perfect communism is that you can defeat, drive out, or suppress human nature. You can't and still have humans. Amd humans require motivation and satisfaction or they do not do things. A very few humans can be motivated by purely altruistic goals - helping mankind, etc. A somewhat larger group of humans can be motivated for so-call "spiritual" goals. But the one set of goals that is pretty much universal and has proven over very long periods of time to motivate just about all humans is competition with other humans and nature itself. Failing to recognize this is the huge mistake of people with goals of doing things like "eliminating money" or even "eliminate poverty".
Once you eliminate competition as a motivating factor, you pretty much have a bunch of people sitting around only doing what they are forced to do. So you then need some kind of overclass that does the forcing and the underclass that does whatever they are forced to do. All you want to do is dress up the Stalinist Soviet economy in some new duds.
You don't want to pay for a "dumb pipe". You want to pay for 10% of what the dumb pipe costs because the true cost is being subsidized by other people paying for other services on that dumb pipe.
A T-1 is effectively a dumb pipe and offers 1.5Mb/sec symmetric dedicated bandwidth. All day long, no matter what load is being presented, you have your dedicated bandwidth with no other services on it. It runs around $400 a month.
At home my cable modem is subsidized by all the wonderful sports channels that I don't pay for but I can get 20Mb/sec (burst) utterly undedicated download and about 1.5Mb/sec (burst) upload. This undedicated bandwidth is costing me $60 a month. I suspect if I was paying without the subsidy of other users on the cable, it would be running me $200 a month or more.
The bandwidth isn't the costly item, it is the maintenance and support of the infrastructure that is the real killer. And the costs there aren't going to be changing anytime soon.
Sadly, most people have no idea why they are paying what they are paying for and how much it is padded or lessened by other factors. This gets people in trouble all the time because they assume they are paying something related to real costs when in fact the real costs have been hidden beneath layers and layers of indirection. The objective of AT&T and Comcast is to sell you something you will buy, not price a service at a rate which is tied to what is really costs. The real costs are shifted around so much that you will never figure out how much anything really costs to deliver. This is true for oranges, Internet service and automobiles.
I don't think everyone will be happy until a court rules that downloading everything that can be is "fair use", because the quality of MP3's is only "fair" and after they are downloaded you really can't use them for very much.
Sure, just as jail terms are limited by law. The problem is, the losses are pretty much impossible to calculate.
I can rip a song from a CD or a movie from a DVD and make it available to the planet for downloading. Unless I keep some kind of records, it is impossible to know how many people have subsequently downloaded it. Let's say it is shared via some P2P software for a day - not many people could have downloaded it in only 24 hours. What if it is available for a year?
The only calculation possible is a guess, and guessing doesn't work well in court. Therefore, an extremely punitive statutory damage award is made. The point of the extreme nature of it is to make it extremely unlikely that anyone will ever consider this something reasonable to do. It isn't working, mostly because enforcement is also next to impossible.
So what are they going to do? I'd say go out of business is the most likely, after a long period of fighting every way they can to avoid it. But it is inevitable that they will fail.
No, for the most part you see people affected by political corruption supporting it. Every time you submit to any bureaucratic nonsense in a US State, like getting a driver's license, you are contributing to political corruption.
Ohio is one of my favorite examples. You need to pay (bribe) state legislators to be designated as a representative of the state so that you can pass out license plates and such. The job comes with some title like Deputy Bursar or some such - but it is by political appointment and very, very lucrative.
You don't have any choice in the matter, really. You want license plates for your car, because if you don't get them you will be endlessly harrassed by the police. So you go and get them and the money you pay funds the bribe to keep that office in business for the next year.
For the most part, everyone is contributing to political corruption. It is a requirement that they do so. It is part of the corrupt system itself.
You don't understand the motivation. The cable companies are trading analog "channels" for digital bandwidth, which is something they can pretty easily do. For the most part, this means they can accomodate more digital bandwidth from the neighborhood node to the home/STB. They need this because the more TVs that are being served by digital services, the more bandwidth they need because there is little commonality between users of digital services.
Analog channels, on the other hand have unlimited bandwidth because everyone gets the same thing.
The problem is, there is a finite amount of bandwidth on the cable and it is effectively being shared by all homes on a single drop from the neighborhood node. There are probably many drops, so it isn't all that bad, but they need to be able to provide HD bandwidth to every TV individually. This is pretty much on the edge of not being really possible unless a lot of people are all watching CBS, NBC or ABC. So they need to swap analog channel space for more bandwidth on the digital side.
No, there really isn't any way of going back because the bandwidth requirements on the digital side.
No, traps don't work on the digital side at all. The STB is more-or-less the digital trap.
Fundamentally, I don't think the bandwidth exists for a star network with many homes on a drop from the neighborhood node. Not now, not ever, at least in a mature environment. Where there are only early adopters, you can make it work. But the bandwidth doesn't exist for everyone to be watching multiple streams of HD quality video in each home. Neither does the bandwith exist for a neighborhood node to supply streaming IP TV to every home. It works fine when 1 in 100 is doing it. Not for everyone.
Analog cable can use signal traps which block specific channels, thus eliminating the need for encryption.
Digital cable cannot use such things - the information is present on the cable in packets and you can't use a simple electrical device to block some packets while passing others through. This is the function of the STB - block the content that you aren't paying for. Without the encryption, there is no blocking of premium content.
Or is it that you do understand and feel the cable company should just provide everything to everyone for one price? It would make things simpler, but given that this costs well over $100 in most locations, it might be a bit oppressive.
Huge risk? Where do you get that? A company has a policy or terms of service that says they assure everyone that they are not doing X, they will never do X and so on and so forth.
What happens when they decide to change their policy? Or, simply (gasp!) violate their policy? Is there any sort of enforcement of published company policies? Nope. Maybe a small loss of some sort of credibility. Maybe. So I don't see any legal ramifications at all.
PR ramifications? Well, maybe. If the major media decided to run with a story there might be some fallout. But far more likely is one stockholder attending the annual meeting gets up and yells about it - and is immediately ejected from the room.
Unfortunately, we have now pretty much reached the point where everyone pirates. Why not? You can't be caught - unless you are silly and decide to redistribute. Or try making an example out of yourself. Yes, trying to make a civil lawsuit into a political statement using university professors as defense counsel is probably a mistake.
The end result is that recorded music used to have value and today does not. Certainly not the value it once had. And in a few more years will clearly have zero value - because nobody will pay for it. Movies probably aren't too far behind unless something drastic changes. Software still has some clarity between "legit" and "pirated", but how much longer will that really stand? The BSA can't really enforce copyright on all software, only selected folks.
Look at it this way. If there is no clear distinction between free, pirates goods and expensive, licensed goods - and I believe there is none in nearly everyone's mind under 30 years of age - we have succeeded in taking a big stack of music, movies, books and software and transforming it from a thing of value into a thing with no value. In the US alone we are talking about billions of dollars a year going up in smoke.
Right now, there is nothing to suggest the pirates aren't going to win a complete victory. We have been training an entire generation that if it can be found on the Internet then it ought to be free. And if it isn't free at www.aaa.com but is at www.bbb.com there is nothing wrong with going to www.bbb.com and taking it. That pretty much describes the current P2P scene in a nutshell.
Today, the US and most of Western Europe are pretty much powerless to do anything about digital goods offered from folks based in Eastern Europe or Russia. So these are "safe havens" for distribution. Even some places in Western Europe have decided to turn a blind eye towards certain types of piracy.
If this continues, there will be global economic consequences. The "try before buying" idea is a joke. If I download a movie, watch it and delete it, why would I buy it? I saw it already. Same goes for just about everything else. The biggest thing the governments are worried about is not the billions (or tens or hundreds of billions) in lost revenue to companies but instead the billions lost in tax revenues from the sales of these products. Moving to an environment where entertainment is "user created" for free should be very frightening to governments as it means a huge reduction in tax revenues.
So in some ways, this can be thought of as being for the benefit of all society. Because the alternative is governments figuring out how to raise the same revenue in other ways. And don't think they won't be trying to get just a little bit extra while they are at it. In the US we are likely to be seeing 60% tax rates soon. For places like Canada and Sweden where they already have tax rates like that, look for 70% and 80% rates. Because entertainment is a huge chunk of everyone's economy and while entertainment may still exist in a zero-revenue environment, the taxes from it will be replaced. Somehow.
The "private army" idea came about as part of the "peace dividend" for the most part. The US Army was pretty famous for an extremely high ratio of support personnel vs. guys with guns. The ratio following WW II was claimed to be as high as 12 to 1. Yes, this meant that for every one man with a gun facing the enemy there were 12 supply sergents, cooks, laundry people, etc. Somewhat absurd.
Well, with the cracking of the "peace dividend" it was decided that while these people were necessary it was no longer reasonable to have them as part of the direct US Army (or other branch of the services). So these were moved to being "civilian jobs" on military bases. This greatly reduced the military headcount and made things look much better come budget time. The only problem, of course, was that they continued the cuts down to base security and every detail that could possibly be done by someone other than uniformed military.
With the Iraq War, Version 1, we have the silly situation of there simply not being enough cooks, laundry staff, supply sergents, potato peelers, etc. Unlike around a military base in the US, hiring local Saudi staff was out of the question. Contractors to the rescue! All of this was "outsourced".
Come Iraq War, Version 2 we now have the need for sentries at gates. Can we increase the military headcount for this purpose? No. So now we have contractors with guns standing sentry duty. Security details for Iraqis was next. It all makes sense, in an odd twisted way once you understand how we got there. And for the most part, it was all a budget dodge and something that was supposed to make us believe the military was leaner, cheaper and more adapted to the post-Cold War era. In reality, nothing much has changed and the military is the same size it was.
Assuming your new hardcover book selling for $27 is sold for $9.99 on the Kindle, I don't think they are making that much. The publisher was probably charging $13.50 (or maybe a little more) to Border's. And OK, for a high-quality hardcover book the production cost is maybe $3. Add another $0.50 for shipping the book (in a box with 20 others just like it). So if you remove the production costs and shipping you are now at $10.00.
Amazon probably beats up the publishers to get the price down to $8 and sells it for $10. I don't think I would call that a "killing".
The folks that think the hardcover book costs $15 to print and $5 to ship aren't aware of the realities of the printing world. It really doesn't cost that much. What does cost lots is editing and promotion, and the fact that a lot of books do not cover their costs, so the ones that do have to make up for the others. Nobody knows if a book will sell or not, but as long as they get one out of every three that sells big they are OK. A much bigger problem is trying to make sure there are no books that aren't big sellers.
Charging a price close to a paper book for an electronic book just seams wrong to me - one of the largest costs of a printed book is its paper and ink.
Your average book costs less than $2 to make in quantity. It might cost another $0.50 to ship it in a box with 20 others just like it.
You are completely wrong about the costs in the publishing business. Most of the cost is editing and promotion. The author gets a small bit and yes, the bookseller gets to add somewhere between 50% and 100% markup.
Now, I suppose you might be able to sell a book for $1 if there was no editing and no promotion. But it would be mostly unreadable garbage. I can find you some web sites where they have plenty of those sorts of books.
If you are a big publisher, you get to select if text-to-speech is disabled. I am just waiting for that to bite someone when the first "Read by a Kindle" audiobook is released for $0.50.
If you are doing self-publishing through Amazon, you do not get to elect to disable text-to-speech unless you pay Amazon to do the Kindle conversion for you. Last I heard it was a flat fee of $10,000.
If you don't believe the "Read by a Kindle" audiobook will sell, you are probably wrong. And for a major hardcover book with the "official" audiobook selling for $30 (or more), there will certainly be people that will buy up a $0.50 audiobook with the same content. Maybe not as professionally read, but still something to play in the car on the way to work.
The problem is there are hundreds of web sites you can go to and start downloading a movie. Generally this can be done within one day of release of the DVD in retail stores. If movie production companies begin to release a DVD simultaneously with the theater release, the theaters will dry up quickly.
Today, most people are pretty rude and obnoxious. The whole "theater" experience can be ruined by a single rude, obnoxious person and your likelyhood of finding someone in the same theater your are in is pretty high these days. The dedication and professionalism of the theater staff has declined over the years, such that you can usually count on a dirty, messy theater as well. Once the lights go off that may not matter much, but still unless you are paying premium prices your "theater" experience isn't likely to be that great. Therefore, anyone with a big-screen TV is likely to want to watch a movie at home rather than the theater, maybe even waiting for the DVD rather than putting up with the theater nonsense.
I'd say the only thing keeping the theaters going is a monopoly on the early release of a movie. When that changes, and it likely will, the DVD will replace the theater. Not only that, but that means the pirated, shared content will be available immediately. Free is always better than something you have to pay for. The biggest difference is on the Internet you don't have to use a gun or risk getting caught but you can still steal. There are plenty of people willing to help out there.
Yes, movie DRM helps stop casual ripping, but once the movie is ripped by someone, somewhere on the Internet the difficulty is gone. When it took a week to download a 1GB movie file that was a serious deterrent, but bandwidth for many has grown. If you can download it in a few hours it is no longer much of a deterrent.
Bye-bye movie revenue.
About the only thing that I think might save the high-revenue production of movies is to eliminate DVDs and have theater-only releases. Once it is in a digital format there is nothing to stop it from being pirated, and so it will be. However, I doubt this will happen. And "user-generated content" is just 99% crap.
At the time I believe a significant reason for the cars not being sold was the environmental regulations concerning the batteries. They contained lead. A pollutant that is tightly regulated in California. I do not believe any of the cars were disposed of in California because of this reason.
There were so many batteries in the EV1 that California called it a rolling toxic waste dump. GM wasn't allowed to sell any of them and I have no idea why this was never brought out in that documentary.
Sure, but in the US we have spent the last 70 years building the country for cars. Also, we have let the inner cities be taken over by street gangs. Walking in most parts of major cities will get you robbed, shot or both.
So at this point tearing up the cities to remake them and moving the gangs out is a pretty radical solution.
The interesting thing is that Toyota seems to just keep upping the warranty on the battery pack. There is only one reason for doing this that I can see: when the battery needs to be replaced, the cost will be more than the value of the car, so after 4 or 5 years the car will simply be junked.
Not if Toyota keeps increasing the battery warranty to keep the cars on the road. Origiunally it was a five year warranty. Last I heard they had increased it to eight years. I do not believe any Prius has reached the point of being out of warranty yet.
Most of these devices can work over VOIP with some lessened reliability.
Unfortunately, I don't think there will be a nice clean transition. When the number of analog PSTN subscribers falls below a certain point, the phone network is going to switch over to being maintained on idle - hope nothing breaks because there isn't anyone left to work on it.
This won't affect long distance trunks, but will certainly affect the millions of miles of copper in the ground and on the poles connecting homes and offices to the telephone CO. DSL, of course, becomes unusable overnight.
I do not think there is much of a way back once the subscriber minimum is reached. Nobody is going to step up and say they want to take over the maintenance of the physical plant for the few subscribers that are left - there is no money in it. And the phone company will have moved on or gone bankrupt. Some government agency might try to pressure, say SBC, into continuing to maintain the lines in exchange for being able to continue to have high-value fiber trunks, but I don't think it will work out that way.
My guess is the PSTN is over in less than 10 years. Every landline subscriber that drops service is just another nail in the coffin.
VOIP is a race to the bottom, especially for the millions of people on DSL connections. Vonage and their ilk are squeezing the profit out of the phone system while still relying on the phone system for making the connections. Without paying for it.
The end result of this is when the subscriber base falls below some minimum point the physical plant is simply going to be unmaintained. Nobody left to work on it and fix stuff. This might last for a couple of years, but once they stop maintenance it is pretty much over. Nobody is going to step in and take over the physical plant, even by government mandate. There is no profit in it at that point and would just be pointless to continue.
DSL becomes a thing of the past overnight. Vonage and their ilk are pretty much left out in the cold, because they rely on the phone network to operate - you didn't think they set up an independent network did you? Do you believe Vonage and similar companies are paying enough to the existing telco folk to maintain the physical plant and the reason the "standard" telco rates are higher is simply because they are greedy?
VOIP companies are paying state-mandated rates for connections which were plucked out of some state legislator's behind. The relevance of these rates to what real costs are is nonexistent. But today there are still enough PSTN subscribers to keep things going. Not for much longer.
Backruptcy. Extremely poor service due to lack of maintenance. General collapse of the switched telephone network.
Once the subscriber base falls to the point where the physical plant simply cannot be maintained they are unlikely to just pull the plug gracefully and go out of business. They will continue as long as they can.
Of course, what this means is all those folks on DSL lose. And the folks that get to dig up the copper wires for recycling win.
VOIP is basically a race to the bottom with the winner being the guy who goes out of business last.
Unfortunately, the sort of blocking you are describing is already happening with email. Many ISPs filter email for spam. If Person X is considered to be a spammer and Person A's ISP filters spam but Person B's does not, then Person X (regardless of their being a spammer or not) is unable to communicate with Person A but has no trouble sending to Person B.
Person X's ability to change this is pretty much zero. If their assignment to a spam list is done by irresponsible people it is viewed as the ISP's option to block or not and nobody other than the ISP has control. So what if they are using an irresponsibly maintained spam blocking list? And the argument for just switching ISPs doesn't help Person X - it isn't their ISP that is causing the problem.
So you have the problem where Person A contacts Person X with an offer of some sort. Person X replies, but their mail is sent to the bit bucket. Without notification to either party. This can reach incredible heights of humor when Person A has 50% communication with Person X and Person X can reply in every way except by email.
Nobody on Slashdot would ever think to say that an ISP, company or individual does not have the right to block email using whatever blocking techniques are available. Regardless of their taking responsibility for this or not. I don't think you can equate common carrier status with not blocking things because blocking is already happening. Badly.
Call me when you can either (a) prevent or (b) cause an iceberg melting.
The energies involved are trivial compared to the energies stored in the oceans that affect the climate. It is possible, but not proven, that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is increasing the energy stored in the ocean system.
What is certain is that slowing the rate of addition of CO2 will do nothing. Except cause a major shift in political and economic power. You want real change? How about doing something real that would actually reduce the emissions rather than reducing the rate of increase of the emissions?
In September of 2001 for a few days passenger air travel was suspended. It actually reduced the emission of CO2 for a few days. This did not cause economic collapse, nor did it kill people or change their lifestyle in a meaningful way. We could shut off passenger air travel and it would have a huge effect on CO2 emissions without a corresponding shift in political and economic power. If there was a real crisis, this would be an option that would make sense. It isn't even up for consideration, almost certainly because of the lack of there actually being a crisis and the fact that it would not cause a huge political and economic shift.
Nearly all of the art that you are referring to having been produced without copyright was bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful. An artist would get a commission from the king or the pope and produce something wonderful. And because they were paid for this, they could continue eating.
You don't think they had any choice in the artwork do you? It was strictly pay-for-play and the king got to decide what they liked. If your work wasn't up to the king's standards, you got fired or worse. If your work showed too much creativity - i.e., not following instructions - you got fired. Read up on Michangelo and his battles with the church sometime. He showed way, way too much creativity sometimes.
So, would you like it if the radio played nothing but music that old, rich white people paid to hear?
Free is always going to trump paying. The Internet today is the best example of that - there are services to help you find the lowest price without regard for product quality, customer service, shipment policy or return policy. So you get the lowest price and find out later that it is a scam and end up paying more. But that's the Internet.
Free is going to win in the end whether or not it is "stealing". The moral outrage the creators are going to feel will quickly be swept away when they realize that if their works weren't available for free they wouldn't sell anyway. The end result will be the extreme ego-driven folks will finally have a platform that they cannot be disloged from and the rest of the creative people will be forced to find something to pay the rent with.
What this means is anyone that is addicted to their own words, their own image, their own sound is going to have an unshakable platform from which to spew their garbage. And garbage is it, as can easily be seen on the tryout shows for American Idol. Look up Darwin Reedy to remind yourself how bad these people generally are. One in a thousand is OK. We are going to see millions of them.
The mission of many pirate groups is to make their product so pervasive as to displace the "legal" products. You want to download a movie and the first hit on Google is the pirate site. They get ad revenue and that is all.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this idea is that there would still need to be some kind of underclass of humans that cater to the machine's needs. You end up with a slave class that does this because they are told to (perhaps by armed force) because there is no other motivation left. The rest of the people need this done or they starve. So nobody willing goes to service the machines that everyone relies upon.
The idea behind some sort of perfect communism is that you can defeat, drive out, or suppress human nature. You can't and still have humans. Amd humans require motivation and satisfaction or they do not do things. A very few humans can be motivated by purely altruistic goals - helping mankind, etc. A somewhat larger group of humans can be motivated for so-call "spiritual" goals. But the one set of goals that is pretty much universal and has proven over very long periods of time to motivate just about all humans is competition with other humans and nature itself. Failing to recognize this is the huge mistake of people with goals of doing things like "eliminating money" or even "eliminate poverty".
Once you eliminate competition as a motivating factor, you pretty much have a bunch of people sitting around only doing what they are forced to do. So you then need some kind of overclass that does the forcing and the underclass that does whatever they are forced to do. All you want to do is dress up the Stalinist Soviet economy in some new duds.
You don't want to pay for a "dumb pipe". You want to pay for 10% of what the dumb pipe costs because the true cost is being subsidized by other people paying for other services on that dumb pipe.
A T-1 is effectively a dumb pipe and offers 1.5Mb/sec symmetric dedicated bandwidth. All day long, no matter what load is being presented, you have your dedicated bandwidth with no other services on it. It runs around $400 a month.
At home my cable modem is subsidized by all the wonderful sports channels that I don't pay for but I can get 20Mb/sec (burst) utterly undedicated download and about 1.5Mb/sec (burst) upload. This undedicated bandwidth is costing me $60 a month. I suspect if I was paying without the subsidy of other users on the cable, it would be running me $200 a month or more.
The bandwidth isn't the costly item, it is the maintenance and support of the infrastructure that is the real killer. And the costs there aren't going to be changing anytime soon.
Sadly, most people have no idea why they are paying what they are paying for and how much it is padded or lessened by other factors. This gets people in trouble all the time because they assume they are paying something related to real costs when in fact the real costs have been hidden beneath layers and layers of indirection. The objective of AT&T and Comcast is to sell you something you will buy, not price a service at a rate which is tied to what is really costs. The real costs are shifted around so much that you will never figure out how much anything really costs to deliver. This is true for oranges, Internet service and automobiles.
I don't think everyone will be happy until a court rules that downloading everything that can be is "fair use", because the quality of MP3's is only "fair" and after they are downloaded you really can't use them for very much.
Sure, just as jail terms are limited by law. The problem is, the losses are pretty much impossible to calculate.
I can rip a song from a CD or a movie from a DVD and make it available to the planet for downloading. Unless I keep some kind of records, it is impossible to know how many people have subsequently downloaded it. Let's say it is shared via some P2P software for a day - not many people could have downloaded it in only 24 hours. What if it is available for a year?
The only calculation possible is a guess, and guessing doesn't work well in court. Therefore, an extremely punitive statutory damage award is made. The point of the extreme nature of it is to make it extremely unlikely that anyone will ever consider this something reasonable to do. It isn't working, mostly because enforcement is also next to impossible.
So what are they going to do? I'd say go out of business is the most likely, after a long period of fighting every way they can to avoid it. But it is inevitable that they will fail.
No, for the most part you see people affected by political corruption supporting it. Every time you submit to any bureaucratic nonsense in a US State, like getting a driver's license, you are contributing to political corruption.
Ohio is one of my favorite examples. You need to pay (bribe) state legislators to be designated as a representative of the state so that you can pass out license plates and such. The job comes with some title like Deputy Bursar or some such - but it is by political appointment and very, very lucrative.
You don't have any choice in the matter, really. You want license plates for your car, because if you don't get them you will be endlessly harrassed by the police. So you go and get them and the money you pay funds the bribe to keep that office in business for the next year.
For the most part, everyone is contributing to political corruption. It is a requirement that they do so. It is part of the corrupt system itself.
You don't understand the motivation. The cable companies are trading analog "channels" for digital bandwidth, which is something they can pretty easily do. For the most part, this means they can accomodate more digital bandwidth from the neighborhood node to the home/STB. They need this because the more TVs that are being served by digital services, the more bandwidth they need because there is little commonality between users of digital services.
Analog channels, on the other hand have unlimited bandwidth because everyone gets the same thing.
The problem is, there is a finite amount of bandwidth on the cable and it is effectively being shared by all homes on a single drop from the neighborhood node. There are probably many drops, so it isn't all that bad, but they need to be able to provide HD bandwidth to every TV individually. This is pretty much on the edge of not being really possible unless a lot of people are all watching CBS, NBC or ABC. So they need to swap analog channel space for more bandwidth on the digital side.
No, there really isn't any way of going back because the bandwidth requirements on the digital side.
No, traps don't work on the digital side at all. The STB is more-or-less the digital trap.
Fundamentally, I don't think the bandwidth exists for a star network with many homes on a drop from the neighborhood node. Not now, not ever, at least in a mature environment. Where there are only early adopters, you can make it work. But the bandwidth doesn't exist for everyone to be watching multiple streams of HD quality video in each home. Neither does the bandwith exist for a neighborhood node to supply streaming IP TV to every home. It works fine when 1 in 100 is doing it. Not for everyone.
Analog cable can use signal traps which block specific channels, thus eliminating the need for encryption.
Digital cable cannot use such things - the information is present on the cable in packets and you can't use a simple electrical device to block some packets while passing others through. This is the function of the STB - block the content that you aren't paying for. Without the encryption, there is no blocking of premium content.
Or is it that you do understand and feel the cable company should just provide everything to everyone for one price? It would make things simpler, but given that this costs well over $100 in most locations, it might be a bit oppressive.
Huge risk? Where do you get that? A company has a policy or terms of service that says they assure everyone that they are not doing X, they will never do X and so on and so forth.
What happens when they decide to change their policy? Or, simply (gasp!) violate their policy? Is there any sort of enforcement of published company policies? Nope. Maybe a small loss of some sort of credibility. Maybe. So I don't see any legal ramifications at all.
PR ramifications? Well, maybe. If the major media decided to run with a story there might be some fallout. But far more likely is one stockholder attending the annual meeting gets up and yells about it - and is immediately ejected from the room.
In other words, nothing, nothing at all.
Unfortunately, we have now pretty much reached the point where everyone pirates. Why not? You can't be caught - unless you are silly and decide to redistribute. Or try making an example out of yourself. Yes, trying to make a civil lawsuit into a political statement using university professors as defense counsel is probably a mistake.
The end result is that recorded music used to have value and today does not. Certainly not the value it once had. And in a few more years will clearly have zero value - because nobody will pay for it. Movies probably aren't too far behind unless something drastic changes. Software still has some clarity between "legit" and "pirated", but how much longer will that really stand? The BSA can't really enforce copyright on all software, only selected folks.
Look at it this way. If there is no clear distinction between free, pirates goods and expensive, licensed goods - and I believe there is none in nearly everyone's mind under 30 years of age - we have succeeded in taking a big stack of music, movies, books and software and transforming it from a thing of value into a thing with no value. In the US alone we are talking about billions of dollars a year going up in smoke.
Right now, there is nothing to suggest the pirates aren't going to win a complete victory. We have been training an entire generation that if it can be found on the Internet then it ought to be free. And if it isn't free at www.aaa.com but is at www.bbb.com there is nothing wrong with going to www.bbb.com and taking it. That pretty much describes the current P2P scene in a nutshell.
Today, the US and most of Western Europe are pretty much powerless to do anything about digital goods offered from folks based in Eastern Europe or Russia. So these are "safe havens" for distribution. Even some places in Western Europe have decided to turn a blind eye towards certain types of piracy.
If this continues, there will be global economic consequences. The "try before buying" idea is a joke. If I download a movie, watch it and delete it, why would I buy it? I saw it already. Same goes for just about everything else. The biggest thing the governments are worried about is not the billions (or tens or hundreds of billions) in lost revenue to companies but instead the billions lost in tax revenues from the sales of these products. Moving to an environment where entertainment is "user created" for free should be very frightening to governments as it means a huge reduction in tax revenues.
So in some ways, this can be thought of as being for the benefit of all society. Because the alternative is governments figuring out how to raise the same revenue in other ways. And don't think they won't be trying to get just a little bit extra while they are at it. In the US we are likely to be seeing 60% tax rates soon. For places like Canada and Sweden where they already have tax rates like that, look for 70% and 80% rates. Because entertainment is a huge chunk of everyone's economy and while entertainment may still exist in a zero-revenue environment, the taxes from it will be replaced. Somehow.
The "private army" idea came about as part of the "peace dividend" for the most part. The US Army was pretty famous for an extremely high ratio of support personnel vs. guys with guns. The ratio following WW II was claimed to be as high as 12 to 1. Yes, this meant that for every one man with a gun facing the enemy there were 12 supply sergents, cooks, laundry people, etc. Somewhat absurd.
Well, with the cracking of the "peace dividend" it was decided that while these people were necessary it was no longer reasonable to have them as part of the direct US Army (or other branch of the services). So these were moved to being "civilian jobs" on military bases. This greatly reduced the military headcount and made things look much better come budget time. The only problem, of course, was that they continued the cuts down to base security and every detail that could possibly be done by someone other than uniformed military.
With the Iraq War, Version 1, we have the silly situation of there simply not being enough cooks, laundry staff, supply sergents, potato peelers, etc. Unlike around a military base in the US, hiring local Saudi staff was out of the question. Contractors to the rescue! All of this was "outsourced".
Come Iraq War, Version 2 we now have the need for sentries at gates. Can we increase the military headcount for this purpose? No. So now we have contractors with guns standing sentry duty. Security details for Iraqis was next. It all makes sense, in an odd twisted way once you understand how we got there. And for the most part, it was all a budget dodge and something that was supposed to make us believe the military was leaner, cheaper and more adapted to the post-Cold War era. In reality, nothing much has changed and the military is the same size it was.
Assuming your new hardcover book selling for $27 is sold for $9.99 on the Kindle, I don't think they are making that much. The publisher was probably charging $13.50 (or maybe a little more) to Border's. And OK, for a high-quality hardcover book the production cost is maybe $3. Add another $0.50 for shipping the book (in a box with 20 others just like it). So if you remove the production costs and shipping you are now at $10.00.
Amazon probably beats up the publishers to get the price down to $8 and sells it for $10. I don't think I would call that a "killing".
The folks that think the hardcover book costs $15 to print and $5 to ship aren't aware of the realities of the printing world. It really doesn't cost that much. What does cost lots is editing and promotion, and the fact that a lot of books do not cover their costs, so the ones that do have to make up for the others. Nobody knows if a book will sell or not, but as long as they get one out of every three that sells big they are OK. A much bigger problem is trying to make sure there are no books that aren't big sellers.
Charging a price close to a paper book for an electronic book just seams wrong to me - one of the largest costs of a printed book is its paper and ink.
Your average book costs less than $2 to make in quantity. It might cost another $0.50 to ship it in a box with 20 others just like it.
You are completely wrong about the costs in the publishing business. Most of the cost is editing and promotion. The author gets a small bit and yes, the bookseller gets to add somewhere between 50% and 100% markup.
Now, I suppose you might be able to sell a book for $1 if there was no editing and no promotion. But it would be mostly unreadable garbage. I can find you some web sites where they have plenty of those sorts of books.
If you are a big publisher, you get to select if text-to-speech is disabled. I am just waiting for that to bite someone when the first "Read by a Kindle" audiobook is released for $0.50.
If you are doing self-publishing through Amazon, you do not get to elect to disable text-to-speech unless you pay Amazon to do the Kindle conversion for you. Last I heard it was a flat fee of $10,000.
If you don't believe the "Read by a Kindle" audiobook will sell, you are probably wrong. And for a major hardcover book with the "official" audiobook selling for $30 (or more), there will certainly be people that will buy up a $0.50 audiobook with the same content. Maybe not as professionally read, but still something to play in the car on the way to work.
The problem is there are hundreds of web sites you can go to and start downloading a movie. Generally this can be done within one day of release of the DVD in retail stores. If movie production companies begin to release a DVD simultaneously with the theater release, the theaters will dry up quickly.
Today, most people are pretty rude and obnoxious. The whole "theater" experience can be ruined by a single rude, obnoxious person and your likelyhood of finding someone in the same theater your are in is pretty high these days. The dedication and professionalism of the theater staff has declined over the years, such that you can usually count on a dirty, messy theater as well. Once the lights go off that may not matter much, but still unless you are paying premium prices your "theater" experience isn't likely to be that great. Therefore, anyone with a big-screen TV is likely to want to watch a movie at home rather than the theater, maybe even waiting for the DVD rather than putting up with the theater nonsense.
I'd say the only thing keeping the theaters going is a monopoly on the early release of a movie. When that changes, and it likely will, the DVD will replace the theater. Not only that, but that means the pirated, shared content will be available immediately. Free is always better than something you have to pay for. The biggest difference is on the Internet you don't have to use a gun or risk getting caught but you can still steal. There are plenty of people willing to help out there.
Yes, movie DRM helps stop casual ripping, but once the movie is ripped by someone, somewhere on the Internet the difficulty is gone. When it took a week to download a 1GB movie file that was a serious deterrent, but bandwidth for many has grown. If you can download it in a few hours it is no longer much of a deterrent.
Bye-bye movie revenue.
About the only thing that I think might save the high-revenue production of movies is to eliminate DVDs and have theater-only releases. Once it is in a digital format there is nothing to stop it from being pirated, and so it will be. However, I doubt this will happen. And "user-generated content" is just 99% crap.
At the time I believe a significant reason for the cars not being sold was the environmental regulations concerning the batteries. They contained lead. A pollutant that is tightly regulated in California. I do not believe any of the cars were disposed of in California because of this reason.
There were so many batteries in the EV1 that California called it a rolling toxic waste dump. GM wasn't allowed to sell any of them and I have no idea why this was never brought out in that documentary.
Sure, but in the US we have spent the last 70 years building the country for cars. Also, we have let the inner cities be taken over by street gangs. Walking in most parts of major cities will get you robbed, shot or both.
So at this point tearing up the cities to remake them and moving the gangs out is a pretty radical solution.
The interesting thing is that Toyota seems to just keep upping the warranty on the battery pack. There is only one reason for doing this that I can see: when the battery needs to be replaced, the cost will be more than the value of the car, so after 4 or 5 years the car will simply be junked.
Not if Toyota keeps increasing the battery warranty to keep the cars on the road. Origiunally it was a five year warranty. Last I heard they had increased it to eight years. I do not believe any Prius has reached the point of being out of warranty yet.
Most of these devices can work over VOIP with some lessened reliability.
Unfortunately, I don't think there will be a nice clean transition. When the number of analog PSTN subscribers falls below a certain point, the phone network is going to switch over to being maintained on idle - hope nothing breaks because there isn't anyone left to work on it.
This won't affect long distance trunks, but will certainly affect the millions of miles of copper in the ground and on the poles connecting homes and offices to the telephone CO. DSL, of course, becomes unusable overnight.
I do not think there is much of a way back once the subscriber minimum is reached. Nobody is going to step up and say they want to take over the maintenance of the physical plant for the few subscribers that are left - there is no money in it. And the phone company will have moved on or gone bankrupt. Some government agency might try to pressure, say SBC, into continuing to maintain the lines in exchange for being able to continue to have high-value fiber trunks, but I don't think it will work out that way.
My guess is the PSTN is over in less than 10 years. Every landline subscriber that drops service is just another nail in the coffin.
VOIP is a race to the bottom, especially for the millions of people on DSL connections. Vonage and their ilk are squeezing the profit out of the phone system while still relying on the phone system for making the connections. Without paying for it.
The end result of this is when the subscriber base falls below some minimum point the physical plant is simply going to be unmaintained. Nobody left to work on it and fix stuff. This might last for a couple of years, but once they stop maintenance it is pretty much over. Nobody is going to step in and take over the physical plant, even by government mandate. There is no profit in it at that point and would just be pointless to continue.
DSL becomes a thing of the past overnight. Vonage and their ilk are pretty much left out in the cold, because they rely on the phone network to operate - you didn't think they set up an independent network did you? Do you believe Vonage and similar companies are paying enough to the existing telco folk to maintain the physical plant and the reason the "standard" telco rates are higher is simply because they are greedy?
VOIP companies are paying state-mandated rates for connections which were plucked out of some state legislator's behind. The relevance of these rates to what real costs are is nonexistent. But today there are still enough PSTN subscribers to keep things going. Not for much longer.
Backruptcy. Extremely poor service due to lack of maintenance. General collapse of the switched telephone network.
Once the subscriber base falls to the point where the physical plant simply cannot be maintained they are unlikely to just pull the plug gracefully and go out of business. They will continue as long as they can.
Of course, what this means is all those folks on DSL lose. And the folks that get to dig up the copper wires for recycling win.
VOIP is basically a race to the bottom with the winner being the guy who goes out of business last.
Unfortunately, the sort of blocking you are describing is already happening with email. Many ISPs filter email for spam. If Person X is considered to be a spammer and Person A's ISP filters spam but Person B's does not, then Person X (regardless of their being a spammer or not) is unable to communicate with Person A but has no trouble sending to Person B.
Person X's ability to change this is pretty much zero. If their assignment to a spam list is done by irresponsible people it is viewed as the ISP's option to block or not and nobody other than the ISP has control. So what if they are using an irresponsibly maintained spam blocking list? And the argument for just switching ISPs doesn't help Person X - it isn't their ISP that is causing the problem.
So you have the problem where Person A contacts Person X with an offer of some sort. Person X replies, but their mail is sent to the bit bucket. Without notification to either party. This can reach incredible heights of humor when Person A has 50% communication with Person X and Person X can reply in every way except by email.
Nobody on Slashdot would ever think to say that an ISP, company or individual does not have the right to block email using whatever blocking techniques are available. Regardless of their taking responsibility for this or not. I don't think you can equate common carrier status with not blocking things because blocking is already happening. Badly.
Call me when you can either (a) prevent or (b) cause an iceberg melting.
The energies involved are trivial compared to the energies stored in the oceans that affect the climate. It is possible, but not proven, that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is increasing the energy stored in the ocean system.
What is certain is that slowing the rate of addition of CO2 will do nothing. Except cause a major shift in political and economic power. You want real change? How about doing something real that would actually reduce the emissions rather than reducing the rate of increase of the emissions?
In September of 2001 for a few days passenger air travel was suspended. It actually reduced the emission of CO2 for a few days. This did not cause economic collapse, nor did it kill people or change their lifestyle in a meaningful way. We could shut off passenger air travel and it would have a huge effect on CO2 emissions without a corresponding shift in political and economic power. If there was a real crisis, this would be an option that would make sense. It isn't even up for consideration, almost certainly because of the lack of there actually being a crisis and the fact that it would not cause a huge political and economic shift.
Nearly all of the art that you are referring to having been produced without copyright was bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful. An artist would get a commission from the king or the pope and produce something wonderful. And because they were paid for this, they could continue eating.
You don't think they had any choice in the artwork do you? It was strictly pay-for-play and the king got to decide what they liked. If your work wasn't up to the king's standards, you got fired or worse. If your work showed too much creativity - i.e., not following instructions - you got fired. Read up on Michangelo and his battles with the church sometime. He showed way, way too much creativity sometimes.
So, would you like it if the radio played nothing but music that old, rich white people paid to hear?
Free is always going to trump paying. The Internet today is the best example of that - there are services to help you find the lowest price without regard for product quality, customer service, shipment policy or return policy. So you get the lowest price and find out later that it is a scam and end up paying more. But that's the Internet.
Free is going to win in the end whether or not it is "stealing". The moral outrage the creators are going to feel will quickly be swept away when they realize that if their works weren't available for free they wouldn't sell anyway. The end result will be the extreme ego-driven folks will finally have a platform that they cannot be disloged from and the rest of the creative people will be forced to find something to pay the rent with.
What this means is anyone that is addicted to their own words, their own image, their own sound is going to have an unshakable platform from which to spew their garbage. And garbage is it, as can easily be seen on the tryout shows for American Idol. Look up Darwin Reedy to remind yourself how bad these people generally are. One in a thousand is OK. We are going to see millions of them.
The mission of many pirate groups is to make their product so pervasive as to displace the "legal" products. You want to download a movie and the first hit on Google is the pirate site. They get ad revenue and that is all.
Yes, it is coming down to that.