The population of North Korea is probably much like other Asian countries. Unfortunately, the civilian population doesn't matter. They don't matter to their leaders, and they should not matter to us because it is the leaders we are going to have to contend with.
I seriously doubt the leaders of North Korea give a rat's ass about the children of the people starving in their country.
Do you really believe that Kim Jong Il really gives a crap whether or not some North Korean civilans suffer? If he did, he might try running the country a little differently.
As long as he, his family and his loyal retainers are safe in their bunker we can expect them to attack somewhere when the itch gets too great. I suspect the only thing that will stop an all-out response to North Korea would be other countries' concern for the well-being of the civilians. Without that concern, they probably would have been wiped out already.
My guess is that the next leader there will certainly need to demonstrate their superiority, especially over South Korea. Being the dictator in charge of a wasteland is really simple to improve - make a bigger wasteland. And that is the power they have.
The supposed reasoning behind the liquids ban was very simple - some folks found a receipe for bomb making using a binary liquid explosive. One component is hydrogen peroxide, I do know. Not sure what the other one is that was actually learned before any of this could be put into action, but the threat was real.
I understood they were going to relax the restrictions in January or something like that. Didn't happen. Probably because someone heard that was just being waited on with the original scheme just delayed. Not sure it is worth the hassle, but the alternative is clearly to lose an airliner or two a year. Maybe more.
You obviously haven't been taking advantage of all of the "Free Public WiFi" locations at airports these days. It is rare not to find several of these everywhere.
Of course, it is a fake, but it works for harnessing the rubes.
99% of Windows users don't care about perfect, predictable printing. They don't care about RGB vs. CMYK. They are interested that when they put red text in a Word document that it comes out on the color printer in red. Anything more complicated than that is the graphic arts department's problem.
Autorun came from "put in the CD, the game starts." This was introduced before there was the possibility of recordable CD-R discs so it was utterly safe, until malware folks start producing CD-ROMs by the 1,000s.
Extending it to USB devices is problematic. Anything that can be written to by a user can then be used to corrupt other machines, assuming that some users have blackness in their hearts. That pretty much means that for CDs it isn't safe anymore either.
When showing extensions, Vista behaves correctly for renaming.
Extensions were suppressed for Win95 to make it more Mac-like and user friendly. Extensions were associated with 8.3 file names and any connection there had to be eliminated.
The whole extension vs. magic number vs. file application registration issue still hasn't been resolved properly. The Mac has trouble with foreign files and don't even think about version/vendor changes for a common file format. Windows gets lost if the extension is altered or lost. Linux alternately uses extensions or not, depending on how the developer felt about it but doesn't have the application registration in the files that the Mac does.
The environmentalist idiots want to treat Earth as a closed system. No resources available from off-planet. They do not understand what that means, but they think it is a smart idea anyway.
I believe it is an important mission to teach them what is means.
When was the Earth last "sustainable", meaning that natural processes recycled wastes as fast (or faster) than they were produced? Oh, I'd say somewhere around 1800 or so. Maybe 1850. Certainly no later than that. Given that population level and a healthy level of technology, I think the carrying capacity of a sustainable Earth might be as many as 250 million. Not anywhere near 6 billion.
What does this mean? Well, it means that if you want to treat the Earth as a closed system and want to manage natural resources in a "sustainable" manner we need to reduce the population to about 250 million. Overnight. Or at least as quickly as possible. It is highly doubtful that a Islam vs. Rest of of the Planet war would kill that many people. Avian flu isn't going to kill more than a few hundred million, even by the worse estimates.
Nope, we need to offer the alternatives of use off-planet resources or start the killing. Cull 90% of the human race in the name of "sustainability" or get an active space program. One asteroid would provide resources that we haven't even considered for perhaps 25 t0 30 years. What biological and hydrocarbon resources could be gathered from cis-Jupiter space? Simple answer is lots and lots but we are short on specifics right now.
Could be the environmentalists are right. Could also be that the great culling might not really be necessary. I'd suggest giving off-planet resources a try. Sadly, I don't think very many people are going to put it to the leaders of the environmentalist movement quite this way. Where we are likely to go is having 6 billion people living on the resources of 250 million. And strong enforcement to make sure nobody uses more than their fair share.
Apollo-era NASA was not a collection of scientists and researchers. It was an engineering job, first and foremost. They took stuff that was learned in 1943 Germany and applied it on a larger scale. Big engineering job, no research at all.
What will happen is someone will notice that nearly all (over 90%) of healthcare spending is spent on the last year of life. A law will be passed saying "let 'em die" more or less and this will rescue all healthcare in the US immediately - and the costs to the taxpayer will be 10% of what is spent today.
Not so popular with anyone over 50, but immensely popular with everyone under 50. And most of the people paying taxes, unless they happen to be older. The main difference between US healthcare and the rest of the world is that spending ratio. Eliminate it, and all will be well with healthcare spending.
err, it is Two Faces of Tomorrow. A play on the name of the computer, Janus, a two-faced god.
Excellent read for anyone contemplating wider and wider distribution of data systems that can perform autonomous actions. Are you sure you want to make a self-repairing system?
Today, your computer can be turned against you. Not in a Stallmanesque fantasy about some lack of programming freedom, but in a very serious sense by people unrestrained by law enforcement of any sort. In the US and Western Europe as have service providers that, when confronted with information clearly indicating someone is using the Internet to attack and destroy, turns not only a blind eye but encourages their customer by shielding them from any possible contact or consequence.
The result is that your computer cannot be trusted. And don't bother thinking of any of that anti-Microsoft ranting. Would you leave a Linux system connected to the Internet with telnet accessible and a root password of "password"? Why not, it was done in the 1980's? Could it be because your computer can be turned against you by people that wish you, your possessions and your resources harm?
Trust me, by shielding bad actors on the Internet we are growing a faction that believes they are immune from laws and cannot be touched by any consequences. In large measure, this is a correct belief but one that is very, very dangerous for the rest of the planet.
If there was a robot (bipedal or not) that could destroy a city block in a few minutes and no force available to police could possibly stop it, do you think there might be some people that would desire to hack into it? And to set it on its way of destruction? Of course there are such people, and given the opportunity to do so would gleefully do it. Without a moment's thought as to the consequences believing they are immune through layers of proxies and Tor nodes.
Forget AI run amuck and chasing down humanity. Fear the irresponsible folks that worship destruction for destruction's sake.
Bad reviews are one thing. Competitors pounding out bad reviews are another. Legitimate bad reviews can be good - they can point out flaws in something that can be corrected. But one thing that is easy on the Internet is to get people to put in phony "reviews" that just say not to go to a restaurant or something because the food is terrible or someone got sick there.
The true power of the Internet is that it makes all reviews meaningless because phoney ones are so easy to come by. But most people don't know that. So they pay attention. And competition lives on, by hook or by crook.
Sorry, nobody ever pays for credit card fraud. It is just a cost of doing business for merchants. I've never heard of a cardholder paying for fraud.
Now the merchants don't like it much because indeed they do have to pay. Both in fines (for submitting fraudulent charges) and in merchandise they didn't get paid for.
So in this way you can say that credit card thieves are just sticking it to those nasty corporate merchants. Unless you happen to be one.
OK, since you got a copy you can "share" it with me. I would have paid, but I am cheap. I would rather download it from you (or anyone else on the planet) rather than pay.
I guess if I have to pay, I might. But I don't want to. I am cheap and I know it. The Internet today is assisting me in being cheap. Low price trumps everything, which means if I can get it for free I win.
Why would you need to pass it off as your own? WalMart sells stuff every day that they didn't make. So they could just as easily sell artists work without compensating them. No copyright law means there would be nothing to prevent this from happening.
Trust me, WalMart and Sony have already figured this part out and know exactly what to do should something like the elimination of copyright law. They will make more money than ever before.
If there was no law to prevent it, Sony or WalMart would simply grab all the music they could get and put it out on a CD you could buy. For the people that (a) don't have Internet broadband and (b) people that don't know any better this would be much more convenient. They would make millions and the artists would get nothing.
They could probably out-distribute the artists with their own work. Why not? WalMart is the biggest distribution channel in the world.
Any crime in the physical world can be ignored if it is done using the Internet. This is especially true if the victim is not wise in the ways of the Internet. Bragging about your conquest tends to void this rule.
A low price trumps all other considerations. Free is best.
Anything that can be represented digitally is viewed as fair game for the taking on the Internet. If it isn't available from one source for free, keep looking. Someone else has already stolen it and is sharing.
The lowest common denominator is the only way anything works on the Internet.
One bad apple spoils the barrel. One stupid or ruthless user on the Internet can screw things up for the entire world.
Security is the responsibility of the end user. If you haven't protected yourself, it is your own fault. The entire world is out there looking for vulnerabilities in your computer and it is their right to do so. See item 1 if you have any questions.
Attempting to invoke the rule of law on the Internet is at best a joke. It shows your imcompetence. There are no laws and no rules.
I think it can be best summed up as "I want." Yes, I want to download movies and music for free. Anything that gets in the way of that is obviously oppressive and damages my fragile psyche. There should be laws against things like that.
Up to a point, I agree with you. If you are running a 100 watt transmitter where you should only be outputting 5 watts, you are going to get a letter and not much more for a long time.
If you are running 1000 watts around 120Mhz and disabling aircraft radios you are going to get your door broken down and the equipment seized. Real soon. If you are jamming a commercial broadcaster you are going to get a visit and they will be nice, up to a point. And then your equipement will be going with them.
If you are "illegally" using a improper channel on your WiFi access point I'd say nobody will ever notice.
Sorry, but the police and courts do not enforce FCC regulations. The FCC does. Exclusively.
They aren't searching, they are shutting down and seizing. That is their job, to keep the airwaves safe from unregulated or violating transmitters. The Communications Act of 1934 gave them that power and responsibility, again exclusively. Should you interfere with their enforcement actions you will find yourself looking at a federal rap.
A good part of the reason for this is that the courts are not qualified in any respect to judge the actions of the FCC. The FCC finds a transmitter in violation of the regulations. How? Their methods, as authorized by the Communications Act of 1934. So about all they could do in front of a judge would be to say they know there is a transmitter there and they need to shut it down. Judge has virtually no recourse other than to say OK. You want to debate the point? Fine, but it will be done in front of an FCC administrative judge.
The rights you are talking about were pretty much waived in 1934. These powers were granted to the FCC because the airwaves were an unregulated mess before that. You pretty much could not count on any radio frequency being usable for any purpose. Police radios didn't exist, partly because they couldn't work - they would be jammed by other transmitters. Same with aircraft, commercial broadcasters, etc. The Communications Act finally made it something other than the Wild West. But there were still hundreds, if not thousands, of unregulated transmitters in existance that someone had to be able to enforce the new regulations upon.
You want the police to enforce these regulations? That would be the only way you would get "due process" into this. While enforcement is a very small part of the FCC today, it still exists and I suspect you are going to have to pry it out of their cold dead hands. I would also say the police, at all levels, are utterly uninterested in enforcing FCC regulations.
I am pretty sure that under 1934 rules they can come into your home, office or anywhere else and seize equipment that is in violation of the FCC regulations.
A long time ago it was fun to connect things like linear amplifiers to CB radios - this is like 1970 or so. Completely in violation of the regulations. It doesn't take long before the FCC comes around and knocks. And takes the equipment. Their mission is to prevent interference with licensed operators. Like airplanes, police and commercial broadcasters. If your transmitter interferes with aircraft communications they do not need a warrant and will forcibly shut down the transmitter as quickly as possible. Failure to do this can mean loss of an aircraft in many situations.
I suspect their authority is very simply that they are charged with enforcing the regulations and they, and only they are empowered to locate interfering transmitters and do something about them.
With a DVD player it is really quite simple. In order to not violate the DVD Forum patents, you have to license the technology from them. In order to license the technology, you pay a big fee and agree to their terms. Their terms include how a DVD player is supposed to function according to the specifications of a DVD movie.
If you violate the agreement, you are in breech of contract and they can sue to for patent infringement. If you make a DVD player without licensing the technology from DVD Forum, they can come after you for violating their patent. So you either agree to do it their way or you do not do it at all.
Macrovision has pretty much same setup for DVD players - you are required to set the "Macrovision" flag on DVDs or you are in violation of their patent. If you set the flag without licensing their patent, you are in violation. This is what finally got 321 Studios and forced them to cease operations.
Donations are a joke. What, 1% of the people donate? How does that pay for anything.
Publishers do not strike deals with new authors. Stephen King might be able to do a flat-fee publishing deal if he wanted to. Maybe. Nobody else gets to do that. So you aren't going to get paid like that. Not only that, but the publisher counts the books sold and if it reaches a certain number, you get asked back. If your book doesn't sell that well, you are part of the rest of humanity that doesn't have a book deal.
The author doesn't get to decide on e-book terms either. The author doesn't set the price, the publisher does. The author doesn't get to pick where or how the book is offered, the publisher does. So you can assume that the author writes the book and the publisher gets to do the rest. Unless you do it yourself, on your own. Good luck with that.
There are damn few ways that you have suggested that work. Maybe someday. Not anytime in the near future.
You are correct about attitudes. Nobody is going to "respect" anything that involves the Internet. If it is there, it is free for the taking. If it isn't available for free from Amazon, someone else has it for free.
The printing of the book in reasonably large quantities is dirt cheap. Maybe $5 for a 300 page book and perfect-bind cover. We get boxes of 22 books like that and the shipping is $10. That is 10/22 or about $0.46 shipping per book. Be generous and say all the physical handling of a book is $10.
How do you think they sell paperback books for $7? Do you actually believe it costs more than $1 to make the book?
The reason the book is $50 has nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with the content. If it isn't worth $50 to you, then you should not have it. Of course the Internet way is if it isn't worth $50 to you then pirate it. No, I don't see any changes in book pricing coming down anytime soon, and it would have nothing whatsoever to do with e-books if they did change.
The big difference with the library is you get to look at the book for a short time, but you cannot "have" it. It belongs to the library and they will only let you have it for a short time.
It may be that all you need it for is a short time. In that case the library is your logical choice. But the library is enough of a hassle that if you even think you might want the book for longer than you can borrow it for, you are going to buy it.
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The population of North Korea is probably much like other Asian countries. Unfortunately, the civilian population doesn't matter. They don't matter to their leaders, and they should not matter to us because it is the leaders we are going to have to contend with.
I seriously doubt the leaders of North Korea give a rat's ass about the children of the people starving in their country.
Do you really believe that Kim Jong Il really gives a crap whether or not some North Korean civilans suffer? If he did, he might try running the country a little differently.
As long as he, his family and his loyal retainers are safe in their bunker we can expect them to attack somewhere when the itch gets too great. I suspect the only thing that will stop an all-out response to North Korea would be other countries' concern for the well-being of the civilians. Without that concern, they probably would have been wiped out already.
My guess is that the next leader there will certainly need to demonstrate their superiority, especially over South Korea. Being the dictator in charge of a wasteland is really simple to improve - make a bigger wasteland. And that is the power they have.
The supposed reasoning behind the liquids ban was very simple - some folks found a receipe for bomb making using a binary liquid explosive. One component is hydrogen peroxide, I do know. Not sure what the other one is that was actually learned before any of this could be put into action, but the threat was real.
I understood they were going to relax the restrictions in January or something like that. Didn't happen. Probably because someone heard that was just being waited on with the original scheme just delayed. Not sure it is worth the hassle, but the alternative is clearly to lose an airliner or two a year. Maybe more.
You obviously haven't been taking advantage of all of the "Free Public WiFi" locations at airports these days. It is rare not to find several of these everywhere.
Of course, it is a fake, but it works for harnessing the rubes.
99% of Windows users don't care about perfect, predictable printing. They don't care about RGB vs. CMYK. They are interested that when they put red text in a Word document that it comes out on the color printer in red. Anything more complicated than that is the graphic arts department's problem.
And they, probably, use Macs.
Autorun came from "put in the CD, the game starts." This was introduced before there was the possibility of recordable CD-R discs so it was utterly safe, until malware folks start producing CD-ROMs by the 1,000s.
Extending it to USB devices is problematic. Anything that can be written to by a user can then be used to corrupt other machines, assuming that some users have blackness in their hearts. That pretty much means that for CDs it isn't safe anymore either.
When showing extensions, Vista behaves correctly for renaming.
Extensions were suppressed for Win95 to make it more Mac-like and user friendly. Extensions were associated with 8.3 file names and any connection there had to be eliminated.
The whole extension vs. magic number vs. file application registration issue still hasn't been resolved properly. The Mac has trouble with foreign files and don't even think about version/vendor changes for a common file format. Windows gets lost if the extension is altered or lost. Linux alternately uses extensions or not, depending on how the developer felt about it but doesn't have the application registration in the files that the Mac does.
The environmentalist idiots want to treat Earth as a closed system. No resources available from off-planet. They do not understand what that means, but they think it is a smart idea anyway.
I believe it is an important mission to teach them what is means.
When was the Earth last "sustainable", meaning that natural processes recycled wastes as fast (or faster) than they were produced? Oh, I'd say somewhere around 1800 or so. Maybe 1850. Certainly no later than that. Given that population level and a healthy level of technology, I think the carrying capacity of a sustainable Earth might be as many as 250 million. Not anywhere near 6 billion.
What does this mean? Well, it means that if you want to treat the Earth as a closed system and want to manage natural resources in a "sustainable" manner we need to reduce the population to about 250 million. Overnight. Or at least as quickly as possible. It is highly doubtful that a Islam vs. Rest of of the Planet war would kill that many people. Avian flu isn't going to kill more than a few hundred million, even by the worse estimates.
Nope, we need to offer the alternatives of use off-planet resources or start the killing. Cull 90% of the human race in the name of "sustainability" or get an active space program. One asteroid would provide resources that we haven't even considered for perhaps 25 t0 30 years. What biological and hydrocarbon resources could be gathered from cis-Jupiter space? Simple answer is lots and lots but we are short on specifics right now.
Could be the environmentalists are right. Could also be that the great culling might not really be necessary. I'd suggest giving off-planet resources a try. Sadly, I don't think very many people are going to put it to the leaders of the environmentalist movement quite this way. Where we are likely to go is having 6 billion people living on the resources of 250 million. And strong enforcement to make sure nobody uses more than their fair share.
Apollo-era NASA was not a collection of scientists and researchers. It was an engineering job, first and foremost. They took stuff that was learned in 1943 Germany and applied it on a larger scale. Big engineering job, no research at all.
You don't want national healthcare.
What will happen is someone will notice that nearly all (over 90%) of healthcare spending is spent on the last year of life. A law will be passed saying "let 'em die" more or less and this will rescue all healthcare in the US immediately - and the costs to the taxpayer will be 10% of what is spent today.
Not so popular with anyone over 50, but immensely popular with everyone under 50. And most of the people paying taxes, unless they happen to be older. The main difference between US healthcare and the rest of the world is that spending ratio. Eliminate it, and all will be well with healthcare spending.
But not so popular with anyone over 50.
err, it is Two Faces of Tomorrow. A play on the name of the computer, Janus, a two-faced god.
Excellent read for anyone contemplating wider and wider distribution of data systems that can perform autonomous actions. Are you sure you want to make a self-repairing system?
Today, your computer can be turned against you. Not in a Stallmanesque fantasy about some lack of programming freedom, but in a very serious sense by people unrestrained by law enforcement of any sort. In the US and Western Europe as have service providers that, when confronted with information clearly indicating someone is using the Internet to attack and destroy, turns not only a blind eye but encourages their customer by shielding them from any possible contact or consequence.
The result is that your computer cannot be trusted. And don't bother thinking of any of that anti-Microsoft ranting. Would you leave a Linux system connected to the Internet with telnet accessible and a root password of "password"? Why not, it was done in the 1980's? Could it be because your computer can be turned against you by people that wish you, your possessions and your resources harm?
Trust me, by shielding bad actors on the Internet we are growing a faction that believes they are immune from laws and cannot be touched by any consequences. In large measure, this is a correct belief but one that is very, very dangerous for the rest of the planet.
If there was a robot (bipedal or not) that could destroy a city block in a few minutes and no force available to police could possibly stop it, do you think there might be some people that would desire to hack into it? And to set it on its way of destruction? Of course there are such people, and given the opportunity to do so would gleefully do it. Without a moment's thought as to the consequences believing they are immune through layers of proxies and Tor nodes.
Forget AI run amuck and chasing down humanity. Fear the irresponsible folks that worship destruction for destruction's sake.
Bad reviews are one thing. Competitors pounding out bad reviews are another. Legitimate bad reviews can be good - they can point out flaws in something that can be corrected. But one thing that is easy on the Internet is to get people to put in phony "reviews" that just say not to go to a restaurant or something because the food is terrible or someone got sick there.
The true power of the Internet is that it makes all reviews meaningless because phoney ones are so easy to come by. But most people don't know that. So they pay attention. And competition lives on, by hook or by crook.
Sorry, nobody ever pays for credit card fraud. It is just a cost of doing business for merchants. I've never heard of a cardholder paying for fraud.
Now the merchants don't like it much because indeed they do have to pay. Both in fines (for submitting fraudulent charges) and in merchandise they didn't get paid for.
So in this way you can say that credit card thieves are just sticking it to those nasty corporate merchants. Unless you happen to be one.
OK, since you got a copy you can "share" it with me. I would have paid, but I am cheap. I would rather download it from you (or anyone else on the planet) rather than pay.
I guess if I have to pay, I might. But I don't want to. I am cheap and I know it. The Internet today is assisting me in being cheap. Low price trumps everything, which means if I can get it for free I win.
Why would you need to pass it off as your own? WalMart sells stuff every day that they didn't make. So they could just as easily sell artists work without compensating them. No copyright law means there would be nothing to prevent this from happening.
Trust me, WalMart and Sony have already figured this part out and know exactly what to do should something like the elimination of copyright law. They will make more money than ever before.
If there was no law to prevent it, Sony or WalMart would simply grab all the music they could get and put it out on a CD you could buy. For the people that (a) don't have Internet broadband and (b) people that don't know any better this would be much more convenient. They would make millions and the artists would get nothing.
They could probably out-distribute the artists with their own work. Why not? WalMart is the biggest distribution channel in the world.
I think it can be best summed up as "I want." Yes, I want to download movies and music for free. Anything that gets in the way of that is obviously oppressive and damages my fragile psyche. There should be laws against things like that.
Up to a point, I agree with you. If you are running a 100 watt transmitter where you should only be outputting 5 watts, you are going to get a letter and not much more for a long time.
If you are running 1000 watts around 120Mhz and disabling aircraft radios you are going to get your door broken down and the equipment seized. Real soon. If you are jamming a commercial broadcaster you are going to get a visit and they will be nice, up to a point. And then your equipement will be going with them.
If you are "illegally" using a improper channel on your WiFi access point I'd say nobody will ever notice.
Sorry, but the police and courts do not enforce FCC regulations. The FCC does. Exclusively.
They aren't searching, they are shutting down and seizing. That is their job, to keep the airwaves safe from unregulated or violating transmitters. The Communications Act of 1934 gave them that power and responsibility, again exclusively. Should you interfere with their enforcement actions you will find yourself looking at a federal rap.
A good part of the reason for this is that the courts are not qualified in any respect to judge the actions of the FCC. The FCC finds a transmitter in violation of the regulations. How? Their methods, as authorized by the Communications Act of 1934. So about all they could do in front of a judge would be to say they know there is a transmitter there and they need to shut it down. Judge has virtually no recourse other than to say OK. You want to debate the point? Fine, but it will be done in front of an FCC administrative judge.
The rights you are talking about were pretty much waived in 1934. These powers were granted to the FCC because the airwaves were an unregulated mess before that. You pretty much could not count on any radio frequency being usable for any purpose. Police radios didn't exist, partly because they couldn't work - they would be jammed by other transmitters. Same with aircraft, commercial broadcasters, etc. The Communications Act finally made it something other than the Wild West. But there were still hundreds, if not thousands, of unregulated transmitters in existance that someone had to be able to enforce the new regulations upon.
You want the police to enforce these regulations? That would be the only way you would get "due process" into this. While enforcement is a very small part of the FCC today, it still exists and I suspect you are going to have to pry it out of their cold dead hands. I would also say the police, at all levels, are utterly uninterested in enforcing FCC regulations.
I am pretty sure that under 1934 rules they can come into your home, office or anywhere else and seize equipment that is in violation of the FCC regulations.
A long time ago it was fun to connect things like linear amplifiers to CB radios - this is like 1970 or so. Completely in violation of the regulations. It doesn't take long before the FCC comes around and knocks. And takes the equipment. Their mission is to prevent interference with licensed operators. Like airplanes, police and commercial broadcasters. If your transmitter interferes with aircraft communications they do not need a warrant and will forcibly shut down the transmitter as quickly as possible. Failure to do this can mean loss of an aircraft in many situations.
I suspect their authority is very simply that they are charged with enforcing the regulations and they, and only they are empowered to locate interfering transmitters and do something about them.
With a DVD player it is really quite simple. In order to not violate the DVD Forum patents, you have to license the technology from them. In order to license the technology, you pay a big fee and agree to their terms. Their terms include how a DVD player is supposed to function according to the specifications of a DVD movie.
If you violate the agreement, you are in breech of contract and they can sue to for patent infringement. If you make a DVD player without licensing the technology from DVD Forum, they can come after you for violating their patent. So you either agree to do it their way or you do not do it at all.
Macrovision has pretty much same setup for DVD players - you are required to set the "Macrovision" flag on DVDs or you are in violation of their patent. If you set the flag without licensing their patent, you are in violation. This is what finally got 321 Studios and forced them to cease operations.
Donations are a joke. What, 1% of the people donate? How does that pay for anything.
Publishers do not strike deals with new authors. Stephen King might be able to do a flat-fee publishing deal if he wanted to. Maybe. Nobody else gets to do that. So you aren't going to get paid like that. Not only that, but the publisher counts the books sold and if it reaches a certain number, you get asked back. If your book doesn't sell that well, you are part of the rest of humanity that doesn't have a book deal.
The author doesn't get to decide on e-book terms either. The author doesn't set the price, the publisher does. The author doesn't get to pick where or how the book is offered, the publisher does. So you can assume that the author writes the book and the publisher gets to do the rest. Unless you do it yourself, on your own. Good luck with that.
There are damn few ways that you have suggested that work. Maybe someday. Not anytime in the near future.
You are correct about attitudes. Nobody is going to "respect" anything that involves the Internet. If it is there, it is free for the taking. If it isn't available for free from Amazon, someone else has it for free.
The printing of the book in reasonably large quantities is dirt cheap. Maybe $5 for a 300 page book and perfect-bind cover. We get boxes of 22 books like that and the shipping is $10. That is 10/22 or about $0.46 shipping per book. Be generous and say all the physical handling of a book is $10.
How do you think they sell paperback books for $7? Do you actually believe it costs more than $1 to make the book?
The reason the book is $50 has nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with the content. If it isn't worth $50 to you, then you should not have it. Of course the Internet way is if it isn't worth $50 to you then pirate it. No, I don't see any changes in book pricing coming down anytime soon, and it would have nothing whatsoever to do with e-books if they did change.
The big difference with the library is you get to look at the book for a short time, but you cannot "have" it. It belongs to the library and they will only let you have it for a short time.
It may be that all you need it for is a short time. In that case the library is your logical choice. But the library is enough of a hassle that if you even think you might want the book for longer than you can borrow it for, you are going to buy it.
Unless, of course, you can get a pirated copy.