In the case of any "open source" based device what is going to happen is the manufacturers learn quickly that some portion of the user community will do completely unexpected things with the device and the software on it. Often, this will violate various agreements, including potentially trade agreements governing the use of the device in places. This is especially true with cell phones - wouldn't you like to have a cell phone that **ALWAYS** gets a channel rather than competing with other phones in your area? Nevermind that the tower owner might not like this hack, there is little that can be done to stop it, especially with a more "open" phone.
The other thing that is expected - and is clearly happening - is people get confused about licensing and what is and what is not free to redistribute. The end result is again, there is no control over content. In this case the developer/distributor decided to comply with Google's request. They could have just as easily said bugger off, and if they were in a non-compliant country there would be little Google could do about it. And that is assuming they could find the person at all.
Sure, it looks obvious to manufacturers that an "open" device might be cheaper to start with. But there are other costs that are just beginning to become apparent. Most of these are mitigated by locking down the device so it might have "open" roots but is unmodifyable. As in the case of things like Tivo, Archos, Kindle, etc. the manufacturers have done quite a bit to ensure this sort of problem doesn't come up. Unfortunately, what we are going to see with "popular" devices is they will get pried open, exposed, hacked, and proprietary content redistributed and modified.
I'm just waiting for the first person that figures out a way to use the cell service with a Kindle for some other purpose. Something that costs Sprint enough that they want to cancel their agreement with Amazon. Something that doesn't involve destroying the Kindle to rip the cell modem out.
We used to have that in the US. Clearly that discriminates against poor people, so rules were implemented to ensure that poor people have equal access to housing.
France has a little problem with the underclass burning cars and rioting. Here we just have some problems with banks. I guess it all works out in the end.
Nice idea. Unfortunately there isn't really a good way to tell the difference between the customer that complains their password was stolen by some random cyber hacker and the customer giving their password to their friend in some far off country.
Let's see, either way money is taken out of their account. Either way, the bank has virtually no recourse in the matter. Either way, the customer is out the money. There is no tracing of identities on the Internet and ther is no international cooperation.
I assure you, any bank that "takes responsibility" for fraud leaves themselves wide open to being taken by their own customers. And their customers will collect madly.
Do not even begin to think "Oh, people are way to honest for this to ever happen." You know it is a silly thought even before you finish.
Yes, but the point you are missing is that the Ayatollah clearly doesn't give a crap about the civiilian population. If he and his associates are safe in their bunker I am sure he would be fine with letting the population take the heat.
This was pretty clear from the response to the election concerns. Round up the people, torture and imprison them. Protests stop, so you can let things resume their normal course.
Do you really believe this is the act of a government that values the civilian population?
Fine, on the surface. Dig a little and you find there is this organization named Hisbolla. This organization has pretty much succeeded in taking over a good portion of Lebanon and used it as a base to attack Israel. Hisbolla has ties to the Palestinian areas as well. Hisbolla is basically an Islamic non-state actor that is performing its role to take over areas in the Middle East.
And Hisbolla is funded and quite probably directed from Iran.
So I'd say that Iran has attacked neighbors and recently. The Iran-Iraq war was not purely a defenssive play on the part of Iran either. If Iran had a chance against Saddam's army, Iraq or parts of it would have been annexed. It isn't clear how much support for Iraqi insurgents is coming from Iran today, but there is clearly some level of support. A stable democracy in Iraq would be a serious threat to Iran's dictatorship and it is in Iran's interest to ensure that no such stable democracy can ever exist in Iraq.
We keep hearing about how it will take Iran months or years to obtain the knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon. OK, I suppose it might take quite a lot to duplicate the smallest, most efficient weapons in the US arsenel. But that isn't the point - they could build a huge, hugely inefficient weapon and put it in a ship to threaten anyone with, and they can use the their proxy, Hisbolla, to actually run the operation.
Further, does anyone actually believe that the A. Q. Kahn sales of weapon technology have been mopped up completely so this information isn't available to Iran? It would be a big surprise for Iran to have a duplicate of a late-model US weapon, but would it be that big a shock if they had a one-for-one copy of a Pakistani weapon?
They have been playing for time since the beginning of this. There are only a few reasons why they would do this. One of them is they believe that once they have enough weapons-grade material that they can dictate terms. The other is that they believe that until they have at least one weapon available that the US would invade with ground troops to descrate their mosques. My guess is their negotiations are going to change in tone once they have a weapon. They want to misdirect people into thinking they need to launch an efficient weapon on a missle when a detonation in the water would actually be more effective in wiping out Israel.
MAD also relies on a strong connection between the leadership of a country and its civilian population. Neither North Korea or Iran has that strong connection, as so clearly shown by the recent election riots in Iran and the response of the leadership.
I would say that MAD has no possible effect on the Iranian leadership. If they believe they would survive retaliation but 80% of the population would not I don't think this would be any deterrent at all.
I'm sure glad we have you to reassure us that "no scientist" believes anything but the human-caused and human-fixable line.
You do realize that this is as fervent a believe with as many dedicated followers as any other religion? Which is exactly how folks like you and your dedicated cadre of self-identified scientists are viewed.
The retailer is in a suprising amount of control over the price as well. They can tell the publisher they are more than happy to pay $48 to sell a game at $60, thereby making $12 per game. Should the publisher come in with a game with an MSRP of $50 the retailer will often say it is a dead price point because everything else on their shelf is $60, so why not make the price $60?
At the same time, a $50 game might be sold to the retailer for $40 with them only making $10 per sale. They might say no thanks they can sell every $60 on their shelf so why throw $2 away. There is only a finite amount of shelf space and the retailer wants to make all the money they can from filling it intelligently.
The same goes for online retailers in a different way. The "shelf space" may not be limited in the same way but the amount of attention products get and how they are promoted is finite.
What it all comes down to is that without the retailer, the game isn't going anywhere anyway except as a niche product that only a few people know about. So you have to work with the retailer and what the retailer wants.
Re:The $60 price is the #1 reason for P2P piracy
on
Why Games Cost $60
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· Score: 1
It is corporate greed and the companies conspire to all sell at the same retail price. Which is why sales are down, and companies cannot earn money. They keep raising the profit margin and that raises the retail price. If video games were reasonably priced, most people wouldn't pirate them, and video game companies will earn more money via the volume of sales.
No, they won't. Cheap games don't make as much for retailers, so cheap games will never see light of day. The space on the shelf costs the retailer the same no matter what, so they want to put the highest performing items on the shelf possible. That means volume and their margin.
Nobody in the retail world believes low prices drive volume - popularity, advertising and hype drive volume. So if you had an incredibly popular game you might find a retailer willing to take a big cut on their marginal income per sale. Might.
More likely, you have the retailer telling the publisher they have space for $60 MSRP games and will take all they can provide. Sorry, no space for $30 games at all.
One point that it seems a lot of people are missing is the retailer's end in this.
Let's say a publisher creates 5a game with an MSRP of $25. The retailer isn't ever going to get more than 30%. So that means they can make $7.50 on the game - so little that they probably aren't going to bother with taking the shelf space for it when they can get $12-$18 for some other game that occupies the same place on the shelf.
Therefore, no game for $25 is ever going to appear on retail store shelves. Or Amazon. Or anywhere else, except direct from the publisher. Which means it isn't going to sell well and won't make much money for the publisher. Therefore no $25 games ever get made.
Remember, the publishers are competing against one another for shelf space and this market is controlled by the retailer. And if you aren't in retail in one form or another, you aren't in the marketplace at all.
I would suspect the alternative would be a minimum wage job where there would be a person on each and every street corner with a ticket book. They could then just write as many tickets in a day as they could with a bonus to the person with the largest number.
The fines would have to be $1000 or more to cover these people's wages.
You do understand that this is a viable alternative?
The problem is that only by an extremely strict interpretation to red-light cameras violate the constitution. What people aren't saying here is that under the Sixth Amendment theory, all red-light cameras, speed cameras, photo radar, doppler radar and LIDAR systems violate the Sixth Amendment because you can't cross-examine a radar gun. Or a red-light camera. If that is the device that is actually accusing you of speeding, what are you supposed to do?
Well, nobody in the government actually believes in that interpretation. Try to defend yourself against a speeding ticket using this defense and you will be laughed out of court.
The problem is that if we allow the police to use any tools other than their eyes to enforce the law we will be subject to these tools having significant, if not sole, input into a prosecution. I would say you have the same problem when a mass spectrometer is used and the results clearly identify a person has having been in contact with a murder weapon. Can you cross-examine the mass spectrometer? No? Then obviously the case must be thrown out. Might as well pass a law against technology in law enforcement.
Obviously the Sixth Amendment argument is pointless.
Now, evidently in this case California state law insists on revenue sharing for red light cameras and this city wants to ignore the revenue sharing and keep all the money. This is hardly a legal matter but a state administrative issue and isn't going to affect anything except how the money is disbursed from red light camera fines. Some hearing panel in Sacramento will have to deal with this.
But if they weren't made in China, they would cost twice as much. That is a non-starter.
Sorry, but everything has to be as cheap as possible, even if it only lasts a short while. Built-in obsolesence is being replaced by built-in short life.
I am sure there has been at least one nearly successful action in the US since 2001 that is utterly classified because it would tend to cause a panic - or a violent attack on people of a certain religious faith. So we aren't going to be informed, probably for the better.
All we are going to hear about is a few misguided individuals that had maybe a 5% chance of pulling something off, if they were really lucky. And the American population just goes on thinking that (a) all this terrorist stuff is way overblown, and (b) our government is doing a really good job. Of course, neither of these is all that true.
I suspect if the truth came out about one or maybe even two close calls people would utterly freak out. So in this case, secrecy protects us all.
The US never did have any real sugar cane crop to speak of. Going back to sugar cane means importing it, with relatively few choices.
Carribean islands, Cuba being one, were a source and to some extent still are. The problem is that we get to deal with the islands poltical problems then and probably any export the size of the sugar cane crop for the US becomes a major economic factor. This was one of the things that Castro came to power over. We could try to just turn a blind eye to it all, but we would be funding despotic rulers in Cuba, Haiti and elsewhere for this. Bad option.
Hawaii used to have a substantial sugar crop, but tourism is a lot more profitable. I guess we could ask them to tear down the hotels and condos to plant sugar cane again but I don't think they would listen. And if Americans stopped going to Hawaii it wouldn't be that big an impact -more room for Japanese.
I guess you could try to build giant greenhouses for sugar cane in Texas, but the water required would be a real problem. Why do you think the US moved from sugar cane to corn-based sweeteners? Politics, economics and the realities of farming. We could certainly get Cuba and Haiti to supply us with sugar today, but at what cost?
I guess you haven't heard, but it is possible to actually keep a book rather than throwing it away after it has been read. There are stores which specifically cater to the idea of buying old books, most of them being out of print. These books are not "popular" in the current sense and therefore have obviously failed, but some places still offer them for sale.
The concept of a book is an interesting one, but if Google gets their way a "book" will be a quaint collector's item that some funny old people have whereas everyone else gets their books from Google. Together with some ads. The idea of a "used book" will become about as popular as a "used kleenex" primarily because of the actions of a single corporation. Isn't this something that we, as a society, might want to think about a little bit before doing it?
Nice idea, but it doesn't work that way. Newspapers worked in 1960 because it was there when you got up in the morning or was there when you got on the train to go to work. The "news" was there and you had some time on your hands.
Today, nobody has the time for that. I don't know anyone that gets up early enough in the morning to sit and read any part of a newspaper. And they aren't taking the train downtown, because the city centers have emptied of jobs - now everyone is driving to work. Usually in different directions.
So the "leisure time" that was spent looking at a newspaper doesn't exist anymore for most people. The end result is that the newspaper is dead. Nobody is going to spend 30 minutes sitting in the morning reading a news web site either - they might do that at work but they aren't going to be spending anywhere near as much time.
Good content isn't going to save newsmongers. For the most part, nobody cares. They get their "news" from 100 different sources in little tiny bites rather than sitting down for a full meal.
Look, Amazon gets to benefit from a stolen device in two ways: if the owner was affluent enough to buy one, they will buy two, and the end purchasor of the lost or stolen device might buy books on it after reregistering it.
Both ways, Amazon wins. Same with cell phones. Probably same with GPS receivers and just about any other electronic gadget you can think of.
This also helps out the folks finding or stealing electronics. They get to make some money along the way and maybe someday hit a big enough score to become Amazon customers. So then Amazon wins with all three people in the transaction.
Theft is away of life in the US. Even if you aren't participating, you are probably assisting others in one way or another. "Losing" stuff, buying cheap stolen property, or by just ignoring theft when it occurs - it is all helping out the folks depending on theft for their income.
The current ecconomy is partly driven by theft. People less affluent get to buy stuff on the cheap and the affluent folks just buy more stuff. The police are hardly in a position to interfere with this underground economy.
Yes, it would be nice if it became common knowledge that if you stole something like a cell phone that it could be tracked to you and you would be arrested. Or even that stealing a cell phone is useless because as soon as it is reported stolen it is useless. That sounds like it might be the case in UK. In the US it is how the poor people get cell phones.
The police are all nice and friendly about writing up a report for insurance purposes. However, nobody really cares after that. Had it happen several times and the answer is always the same from the police. The stolen items are already fenced and there is nothing that can be done.
De-registering and re-registering a Kindle can be done on the device itself, today, without any interference or assistance from Amazon or the original owner.
If I were a dealer in stolen Kindles, this makes the entire process easy, transparent and simple. With the economy the way it is today, selling discounted (at a steal, you might say) Kindles is a good thing for Amazon, as is the toll for the original owner of buying another. If they could afford one, I guess they can afford two, especially considering the price recently dropped.
If I were an irate owner of a stolen or lost Kindle, I guess I am SOL because it is almost intentionally made easier for dealers in stolen property.
Re:Why the focus on "Lethality"? What about "pain"
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A Tour of Taser HQ
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Unfortunately, criminals have evolved.
In 1930s USA we had "beat cops" that would walk through neighborhoods in cities. Their very presence deterred crime. Should someone be as unwise as to steal an apple from a box outside a market, they would often be chased down and caught by the beat cop. At least that was the idea.
The beat cop did indeed have a tough life being on their feet for their entire shift and being only lightly armed, generally a club and a small revolver. Criminals of the day would often have more substantial weapons, but the Firearms act of 1934 attempted to change that making it a Federal offense to have an unlicensed machine gun. Things pretty much went back to the same level they had been at since the late 1800s or so.
Since that time, criminals have virtually cornered the market on firepower in the cities. Your average cop has a 9mm Berreta with a 15-round clip. The folks they are going up against have at a minimum guns like the Tec DC-9 with a 30 round clip and often operates in full automatic. The end result is of course that the police have no idea what they are going up against.
And you wonder why they might like to stay back from criminals?
Sure, solar and wind are sufficient for electric consumption in the US around 1975 or so.
We are vastly consuming more electricity today than we did in 1975. In 1975 we had so much excess capacity that we didn't see the need to build anything new for quite a while. Well, we have now reached the point where we are just about out of capacity now. And still, there are no new large-scale power plants being built anywhere in the US.
I believe there are some locations that are currently the subject of permits, with the permitting process taking years. Let's assume the permits are granted by executive edict tomorrow. It would take at least five years to build a coal-fired power plant and probably more like 10 to build a nuclear power plant. And that is assuming no outside interference. It would actually probably take more like 10 years and 20 years to get a coal or nuclear plant online respectively.
I hate to break it to you, but we are likely going to be facing serious trade-offs between residential power and office/industrial power supply in a lot less than five years. You want to keep your air conditioning on during the day? Good luck with that. Hope your refrigerator is well insulated as well, because unless we find some magic way to get more base load capacity residential customers are likely getting their power turned off during the day so the lights can come on in the office. And vice-versa at night.
I suppose solar could help, but to power my house it would take $25,000 to $30,000 just for starters. Sure, I would likely get 10 years of efficient generation out of that but would still be grid-tied for times when the sun wasn't out. If you want batteries, figure a lot more money and a lot of ongoing maintenance. Hardly practical for anyone that isn't living too far out to be on the electric grid.
Wind? Supplemental only. You aren't replacing base load capacity with wind power. It has stretehed our existing supply to the point where we are today - pretty much at the end of the line.
I think electric power is likely to be far less reliable in the near future. We missed the opportunity to build more plants when we didn't desperately need them. So now we can start building but then won't be finished in anywhere near enough time. So we probably won't need them when they are ready. The utilities can see that one coming and aren't even planning on building to meet current demand. Because the demand is going to drop, suddenly and by a large amount.
The moment people figure out that electric power isn't reliable anymore, their lives will have to change to adjust to the new way of life. And they won't be in a big hurry to go back to the old power-hungry ways.
As long as we are not importing resources from off-planet, the Earth is a closed system.
As a closed system, the real number of people that the planet can support is far, far less than we have now living here. About 200 millon people is probably a lot closer to the right number than 6 billion.
We are going to have to either have a mass die-off or start importing resources. I suppose if we all lived like it was 1850 we would have enough to go around for quite a while longer.
Problem is, China is making all the stuff that people want. Countries have little choice but to import it from China - nobody wants those nasty factories in their country. Also, because of labor costs it would mean the prices would go up about 10x for literally everything if it wasn't made in China but in the USA, Germany and places like that. Nobody wants to start paying 10 times as much for stuff.
We are going to have a pretty simple choice soon. We can pay China for the stuff and they can raise prices as much as they want because they will be the sole supplier. So we might be paying 10 or 20 times as much as it costs today. Or we can decide to just do without until the Chinese economy collapses. They might start a war to get out of that hole.
Then we better start making some alternative plans that do not include resources controlled by China.
It is true that the USA probably is no longer in a position do anything about this any longer. The time has pretty much past. Other countries are going to be throwing money into uselessly trying to "solve" poverty and the like as well. Tne end result is simple, Man is stuck on Earth forever because the opportunity was missed. We gave it all away and now we get to live with the result.
Yes, this probably means an 1850s level of standard of living for first-world countries and something much, much less for third-world countries. But we aren't going to have the materials to do much beyond that.
War? Unlikely at this point. A war with China would not likely free up locked-down resources. Neither will trying to bargain with them - it is certainly going to be their way or the highway for a long time. They figured out a way to hold the whole world hostage because of limited access to new technology. Problem is, I think they seriously miscalculated on the determination of many people not to be dictated to, especially by a power that most of the world dispises.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of any "open source" based device what is going to happen is the manufacturers learn quickly that some portion of the user community will do completely unexpected things with the device and the software on it. Often, this will violate various agreements, including potentially trade agreements governing the use of the device in places. This is especially true with cell phones - wouldn't you like to have a cell phone that **ALWAYS** gets a channel rather than competing with other phones in your area? Nevermind that the tower owner might not like this hack, there is little that can be done to stop it, especially with a more "open" phone.
The other thing that is expected - and is clearly happening - is people get confused about licensing and what is and what is not free to redistribute. The end result is again, there is no control over content. In this case the developer/distributor decided to comply with Google's request. They could have just as easily said bugger off, and if they were in a non-compliant country there would be little Google could do about it. And that is assuming they could find the person at all.
Sure, it looks obvious to manufacturers that an "open" device might be cheaper to start with. But there are other costs that are just beginning to become apparent. Most of these are mitigated by locking down the device so it might have "open" roots but is unmodifyable. As in the case of things like Tivo, Archos, Kindle, etc. the manufacturers have done quite a bit to ensure this sort of problem doesn't come up. Unfortunately, what we are going to see with "popular" devices is they will get pried open, exposed, hacked, and proprietary content redistributed and modified.
I'm just waiting for the first person that figures out a way to use the cell service with a Kindle for some other purpose. Something that costs Sprint enough that they want to cancel their agreement with Amazon. Something that doesn't involve destroying the Kindle to rip the cell modem out.
We used to have that in the US. Clearly that discriminates against poor people, so rules were implemented to ensure that poor people have equal access to housing.
France has a little problem with the underclass burning cars and rioting. Here we just have some problems with banks. I guess it all works out in the end.
Nice idea. Unfortunately there isn't really a good way to tell the difference between the customer that complains their password was stolen by some random cyber hacker and the customer giving their password to their friend in some far off country.
Let's see, either way money is taken out of their account. Either way, the bank has virtually no recourse in the matter. Either way, the customer is out the money. There is no tracing of identities on the Internet and ther is no international cooperation.
I assure you, any bank that "takes responsibility" for fraud leaves themselves wide open to being taken by their own customers. And their customers will collect madly.
Do not even begin to think "Oh, people are way to honest for this to ever happen." You know it is a silly thought even before you finish.
Yes, but the point you are missing is that the Ayatollah clearly doesn't give a crap about the civiilian population. If he and his associates are safe in their bunker I am sure he would be fine with letting the population take the heat.
This was pretty clear from the response to the election concerns. Round up the people, torture and imprison them. Protests stop, so you can let things resume their normal course.
Do you really believe this is the act of a government that values the civilian population?
Fine, on the surface. Dig a little and you find there is this organization named Hisbolla. This organization has pretty much succeeded in taking over a good portion of Lebanon and used it as a base to attack Israel. Hisbolla has ties to the Palestinian areas as well. Hisbolla is basically an Islamic non-state actor that is performing its role to take over areas in the Middle East.
And Hisbolla is funded and quite probably directed from Iran.
So I'd say that Iran has attacked neighbors and recently. The Iran-Iraq war was not purely a defenssive play on the part of Iran either. If Iran had a chance against Saddam's army, Iraq or parts of it would have been annexed. It isn't clear how much support for Iraqi insurgents is coming from Iran today, but there is clearly some level of support. A stable democracy in Iraq would be a serious threat to Iran's dictatorship and it is in Iran's interest to ensure that no such stable democracy can ever exist in Iraq.
We keep hearing about how it will take Iran months or years to obtain the knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon. OK, I suppose it might take quite a lot to duplicate the smallest, most efficient weapons in the US arsenel. But that isn't the point - they could build a huge, hugely inefficient weapon and put it in a ship to threaten anyone with, and they can use the their proxy, Hisbolla, to actually run the operation.
Further, does anyone actually believe that the A. Q. Kahn sales of weapon technology have been mopped up completely so this information isn't available to Iran? It would be a big surprise for Iran to have a duplicate of a late-model US weapon, but would it be that big a shock if they had a one-for-one copy of a Pakistani weapon?
They have been playing for time since the beginning of this. There are only a few reasons why they would do this. One of them is they believe that once they have enough weapons-grade material that they can dictate terms. The other is that they believe that until they have at least one weapon available that the US would invade with ground troops to descrate their mosques. My guess is their negotiations are going to change in tone once they have a weapon. They want to misdirect people into thinking they need to launch an efficient weapon on a missle when a detonation in the water would actually be more effective in wiping out Israel.
MAD also relies on a strong connection between the leadership of a country and its civilian population. Neither North Korea or Iran has that strong connection, as so clearly shown by the recent election riots in Iran and the response of the leadership.
I would say that MAD has no possible effect on the Iranian leadership. If they believe they would survive retaliation but 80% of the population would not I don't think this would be any deterrent at all.
I'm sure glad we have you to reassure us that "no scientist" believes anything but the human-caused and human-fixable line.
You do realize that this is as fervent a believe with as many dedicated followers as any other religion? Which is exactly how folks like you and your dedicated cadre of self-identified scientists are viewed.
The retailer is in a suprising amount of control over the price as well. They can tell the publisher they are more than happy to pay $48 to sell a game at $60, thereby making $12 per game. Should the publisher come in with a game with an MSRP of $50 the retailer will often say it is a dead price point because everything else on their shelf is $60, so why not make the price $60?
At the same time, a $50 game might be sold to the retailer for $40 with them only making $10 per sale. They might say no thanks they can sell every $60 on their shelf so why throw $2 away. There is only a finite amount of shelf space and the retailer wants to make all the money they can from filling it intelligently.
The same goes for online retailers in a different way. The "shelf space" may not be limited in the same way but the amount of attention products get and how they are promoted is finite.
What it all comes down to is that without the retailer, the game isn't going anywhere anyway except as a niche product that only a few people know about. So you have to work with the retailer and what the retailer wants.
It is corporate greed and the companies conspire to all sell at the same retail price. Which is why sales are down, and companies cannot earn money. They keep raising the profit margin and that raises the retail price. If video games were reasonably priced, most people wouldn't pirate them, and video game companies will earn more money via the volume of sales.
No, they won't. Cheap games don't make as much for retailers, so cheap games will never see light of day. The space on the shelf costs the retailer the same no matter what, so they want to put the highest performing items on the shelf possible. That means volume and their margin.
Nobody in the retail world believes low prices drive volume - popularity, advertising and hype drive volume. So if you had an incredibly popular game you might find a retailer willing to take a big cut on their marginal income per sale. Might.
More likely, you have the retailer telling the publisher they have space for $60 MSRP games and will take all they can provide. Sorry, no space for $30 games at all.
One point that it seems a lot of people are missing is the retailer's end in this.
Let's say a publisher creates 5a game with an MSRP of $25. The retailer isn't ever going to get more than 30%. So that means they can make $7.50 on the game - so little that they probably aren't going to bother with taking the shelf space for it when they can get $12-$18 for some other game that occupies the same place on the shelf.
Therefore, no game for $25 is ever going to appear on retail store shelves. Or Amazon. Or anywhere else, except direct from the publisher. Which means it isn't going to sell well and won't make much money for the publisher. Therefore no $25 games ever get made.
Remember, the publishers are competing against one another for shelf space and this market is controlled by the retailer. And if you aren't in retail in one form or another, you aren't in the marketplace at all.
I would suspect the alternative would be a minimum wage job where there would be a person on each and every street corner with a ticket book. They could then just write as many tickets in a day as they could with a bonus to the person with the largest number.
The fines would have to be $1000 or more to cover these people's wages.
You do understand that this is a viable alternative?
The problem is that only by an extremely strict interpretation to red-light cameras violate the constitution. What people aren't saying here is that under the Sixth Amendment theory, all red-light cameras, speed cameras, photo radar, doppler radar and LIDAR systems violate the Sixth Amendment because you can't cross-examine a radar gun. Or a red-light camera. If that is the device that is actually accusing you of speeding, what are you supposed to do?
Well, nobody in the government actually believes in that interpretation. Try to defend yourself against a speeding ticket using this defense and you will be laughed out of court.
The problem is that if we allow the police to use any tools other than their eyes to enforce the law we will be subject to these tools having significant, if not sole, input into a prosecution. I would say you have the same problem when a mass spectrometer is used and the results clearly identify a person has having been in contact with a murder weapon. Can you cross-examine the mass spectrometer? No? Then obviously the case must be thrown out. Might as well pass a law against technology in law enforcement.
Obviously the Sixth Amendment argument is pointless.
Now, evidently in this case California state law insists on revenue sharing for red light cameras and this city wants to ignore the revenue sharing and keep all the money. This is hardly a legal matter but a state administrative issue and isn't going to affect anything except how the money is disbursed from red light camera fines. Some hearing panel in Sacramento will have to deal with this.
But if they weren't made in China, they would cost twice as much. That is a non-starter.
Sorry, but everything has to be as cheap as possible, even if it only lasts a short while. Built-in obsolesence is being replaced by built-in short life.
Sadly, we are never going to know the answers.
I am sure there has been at least one nearly successful action in the US since 2001 that is utterly classified because it would tend to cause a panic - or a violent attack on people of a certain religious faith. So we aren't going to be informed, probably for the better.
All we are going to hear about is a few misguided individuals that had maybe a 5% chance of pulling something off, if they were really lucky. And the American population just goes on thinking that (a) all this terrorist stuff is way overblown, and (b) our government is doing a really good job. Of course, neither of these is all that true.
I suspect if the truth came out about one or maybe even two close calls people would utterly freak out. So in this case, secrecy protects us all.
The US never did have any real sugar cane crop to speak of. Going back to sugar cane means importing it, with relatively few choices.
Carribean islands, Cuba being one, were a source and to some extent still are. The problem is that we get to deal with the islands poltical problems then and probably any export the size of the sugar cane crop for the US becomes a major economic factor. This was one of the things that Castro came to power over. We could try to just turn a blind eye to it all, but we would be funding despotic rulers in Cuba, Haiti and elsewhere for this. Bad option.
Hawaii used to have a substantial sugar crop, but tourism is a lot more profitable. I guess we could ask them to tear down the hotels and condos to plant sugar cane again but I don't think they would listen. And if Americans stopped going to Hawaii it wouldn't be that big an impact -more room for Japanese.
I guess you could try to build giant greenhouses for sugar cane in Texas, but the water required would be a real problem. Why do you think the US moved from sugar cane to corn-based sweeteners? Politics, economics and the realities of farming. We could certainly get Cuba and Haiti to supply us with sugar today, but at what cost?
I guess you haven't heard, but it is possible to actually keep a book rather than throwing it away after it has been read. There are stores which specifically cater to the idea of buying old books, most of them being out of print. These books are not "popular" in the current sense and therefore have obviously failed, but some places still offer them for sale.
The concept of a book is an interesting one, but if Google gets their way a "book" will be a quaint collector's item that some funny old people have whereas everyone else gets their books from Google. Together with some ads. The idea of a "used book" will become about as popular as a "used kleenex" primarily because of the actions of a single corporation. Isn't this something that we, as a society, might want to think about a little bit before doing it?
Nice idea, but it doesn't work that way. Newspapers worked in 1960 because it was there when you got up in the morning or was there when you got on the train to go to work. The "news" was there and you had some time on your hands.
Today, nobody has the time for that. I don't know anyone that gets up early enough in the morning to sit and read any part of a newspaper. And they aren't taking the train downtown, because the city centers have emptied of jobs - now everyone is driving to work. Usually in different directions.
So the "leisure time" that was spent looking at a newspaper doesn't exist anymore for most people. The end result is that the newspaper is dead. Nobody is going to spend 30 minutes sitting in the morning reading a news web site either - they might do that at work but they aren't going to be spending anywhere near as much time.
Good content isn't going to save newsmongers. For the most part, nobody cares. They get their "news" from 100 different sources in little tiny bites rather than sitting down for a full meal.
Look, Amazon gets to benefit from a stolen device in two ways: if the owner was affluent enough to buy one, they will buy two, and the end purchasor of the lost or stolen device might buy books on it after reregistering it.
Both ways, Amazon wins. Same with cell phones. Probably same with GPS receivers and just about any other electronic gadget you can think of.
This also helps out the folks finding or stealing electronics. They get to make some money along the way and maybe someday hit a big enough score to become Amazon customers. So then Amazon wins with all three people in the transaction.
Theft is away of life in the US. Even if you aren't participating, you are probably assisting others in one way or another. "Losing" stuff, buying cheap stolen property, or by just ignoring theft when it occurs - it is all helping out the folks depending on theft for their income.
The current ecconomy is partly driven by theft. People less affluent get to buy stuff on the cheap and the affluent folks just buy more stuff. The police are hardly in a position to interfere with this underground economy.
Yes, it would be nice if it became common knowledge that if you stole something like a cell phone that it could be tracked to you and you would be arrested. Or even that stealing a cell phone is useless because as soon as it is reported stolen it is useless. That sounds like it might be the case in UK. In the US it is how the poor people get cell phones.
The police are all nice and friendly about writing up a report for insurance purposes. However, nobody really cares after that. Had it happen several times and the answer is always the same from the police. The stolen items are already fenced and there is nothing that can be done.
De-registering and re-registering a Kindle can be done on the device itself, today, without any interference or assistance from Amazon or the original owner.
If I were a dealer in stolen Kindles, this makes the entire process easy, transparent and simple. With the economy the way it is today, selling discounted (at a steal, you might say) Kindles is a good thing for Amazon, as is the toll for the original owner of buying another. If they could afford one, I guess they can afford two, especially considering the price recently dropped.
If I were an irate owner of a stolen or lost Kindle, I guess I am SOL because it is almost intentionally made easier for dealers in stolen property.
Unfortunately, criminals have evolved.
In 1930s USA we had "beat cops" that would walk through neighborhoods in cities. Their very presence deterred crime. Should someone be as unwise as to steal an apple from a box outside a market, they would often be chased down and caught by the beat cop. At least that was the idea.
The beat cop did indeed have a tough life being on their feet for their entire shift and being only lightly armed, generally a club and a small revolver. Criminals of the day would often have more substantial weapons, but the Firearms act of 1934 attempted to change that making it a Federal offense to have an unlicensed machine gun. Things pretty much went back to the same level they had been at since the late 1800s or so.
Since that time, criminals have virtually cornered the market on firepower in the cities. Your average cop has a 9mm Berreta with a 15-round clip. The folks they are going up against have at a minimum guns like the Tec DC-9 with a 30 round clip and often operates in full automatic. The end result is of course that the police have no idea what they are going up against.
And you wonder why they might like to stay back from criminals?
Sure, solar and wind are sufficient for electric consumption in the US around 1975 or so.
We are vastly consuming more electricity today than we did in 1975. In 1975 we had so much excess capacity that we didn't see the need to build anything new for quite a while. Well, we have now reached the point where we are just about out of capacity now. And still, there are no new large-scale power plants being built anywhere in the US.
I believe there are some locations that are currently the subject of permits, with the permitting process taking years. Let's assume the permits are granted by executive edict tomorrow. It would take at least five years to build a coal-fired power plant and probably more like 10 to build a nuclear power plant. And that is assuming no outside interference. It would actually probably take more like 10 years and 20 years to get a coal or nuclear plant online respectively.
I hate to break it to you, but we are likely going to be facing serious trade-offs between residential power and office/industrial power supply in a lot less than five years. You want to keep your air conditioning on during the day? Good luck with that. Hope your refrigerator is well insulated as well, because unless we find some magic way to get more base load capacity residential customers are likely getting their power turned off during the day so the lights can come on in the office. And vice-versa at night.
I suppose solar could help, but to power my house it would take $25,000 to $30,000 just for starters. Sure, I would likely get 10 years of efficient generation out of that but would still be grid-tied for times when the sun wasn't out. If you want batteries, figure a lot more money and a lot of ongoing maintenance. Hardly practical for anyone that isn't living too far out to be on the electric grid.
Wind? Supplemental only. You aren't replacing base load capacity with wind power. It has stretehed our existing supply to the point where we are today - pretty much at the end of the line.
I think electric power is likely to be far less reliable in the near future. We missed the opportunity to build more plants when we didn't desperately need them. So now we can start building but then won't be finished in anywhere near enough time. So we probably won't need them when they are ready. The utilities can see that one coming and aren't even planning on building to meet current demand. Because the demand is going to drop, suddenly and by a large amount.
The moment people figure out that electric power isn't reliable anymore, their lives will have to change to adjust to the new way of life. And they won't be in a big hurry to go back to the old power-hungry ways.
As long as we are not importing resources from off-planet, the Earth is a closed system.
As a closed system, the real number of people that the planet can support is far, far less than we have now living here. About 200 millon people is probably a lot closer to the right number than 6 billion.
We are going to have to either have a mass die-off or start importing resources. I suppose if we all lived like it was 1850 we would have enough to go around for quite a while longer.
Problem is, China is making all the stuff that people want. Countries have little choice but to import it from China - nobody wants those nasty factories in their country. Also, because of labor costs it would mean the prices would go up about 10x for literally everything if it wasn't made in China but in the USA, Germany and places like that. Nobody wants to start paying 10 times as much for stuff.
We are going to have a pretty simple choice soon. We can pay China for the stuff and they can raise prices as much as they want because they will be the sole supplier. So we might be paying 10 or 20 times as much as it costs today. Or we can decide to just do without until the Chinese economy collapses. They might start a war to get out of that hole.
I don't see any nice alternatives, none at all.
Then we better start making some alternative plans that do not include resources controlled by China.
It is true that the USA probably is no longer in a position do anything about this any longer. The time has pretty much past. Other countries are going to be throwing money into uselessly trying to "solve" poverty and the like as well. Tne end result is simple, Man is stuck on Earth forever because the opportunity was missed. We gave it all away and now we get to live with the result.
Yes, this probably means an 1850s level of standard of living for first-world countries and something much, much less for third-world countries. But we aren't going to have the materials to do much beyond that.
War? Unlikely at this point. A war with China would not likely free up locked-down resources. Neither will trying to bargain with them - it is certainly going to be their way or the highway for a long time. They figured out a way to hold the whole world hostage because of limited access to new technology. Problem is, I think they seriously miscalculated on the determination of many people not to be dictated to, especially by a power that most of the world dispises.