It might have something to do with the fact the book is $50 because the content is worth it. Printing and distribution are a very small fraction of the cost of a book and it is valid that these costs be removed from the price of an e-book. So you take the $50 book and charge $45.95 for the e-book.
Look into it some more, don't just assume that printing and distribution is extremely costly. As the author of a $50 book (http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=cd+and+dvd+forensics for example), I know the costs of shipping a box of 22 books from the publisher is like $10. The printing cost is also not significant. A book like CD and DVD Forensics might cost $5 to print in relatively small quantities.
Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.
There is also a general philosophy about embedded code that is it will never, ever have to be debugged, maintained or even looked at again. It is going into ROM.
I recall a guy that absolutely believed in that. His code was utterly unreadable but he could supposedly write it faster that way. And, it took less space without comments. After all, comments were useless. By over and over he was shown to be spending the same number of 14 hour days to complete a game (cartridge) that other people would spend 8 hour days on. No, that didn't convince him of anything.
Certainly there are really, really strong deadlines for any sort of consumer electronic device. And the software part of it is considered a really high one-time expense. So it makes sense to try to limit it as much as possible. Which gives us things like this. No, I don't see a good solution for it - the deadlines are set by people well outside of software or hardware development. And nobody familiar with the real business requirements is going to argue about that.
The code is protected in the US by copyright. It is not protected anywhere else, especially in countries where it is cheap to reproduce the hardware. US Customs has proven over and over they will not block the import of infringing devices.
This means that once the software gets out - and it is - look for cheap copies that will put the original manufacturer out of business. Because law enforcement and just about everyone else in the market for such devices is going to jump on the price difference. Same functionality for 1/10th the price.
Do not believe for a second that there are any safeguards left for this sort of thing. There are not.
Wrong. All they are selling is the software in the hardware - the hardware can be easily copied by any Chinese company and sold for 1/10th the price they are charging - whatever that is.
It is the software that is the only thing that differentiates the product, and would cost a Chinese company far more to duplicate. It is possible (but unlikely) that they further protected the software through the use of absolutely proprietary hardware that can't easily be duplicated. But the key is that for nearly all electronic devices today it is the software that is worth something and the hardware is meaningless.
As for the company having some sort of "look and feel" patent for their device, US Customs have pretty much proven they will not block the import of infringing products. This means that once the software gets out, if there is any sort of market at all for the devices they will be immediately replaced in the market by cheap Chinese copies. Law enforcement is under the same budget constraints as the rest of the country, so they aren't going to look too carefully at who is manufacturing a device, assuming they would care if it were known. They are interested in the overall cost of the device, and that's about it. So if you offer them a cheap copy at 1/10th the price, they are going to leap on it.
US manufacturer then leaves the market because they can't compete. The Chinese folks can take the code, however bad it might be, and just use it. Oh they might have a programmer make a couple of changes so it doesn't have the original manufacturer's name embedded in it - but I have seen cases where that hasn't even been done. It is probably easier to just avoid the programmer altogether.
Hardware is easily duplicated. Software, once it gets out in the world, is easily stolen. And in any sort of embedded system application there are no protections for the original manufacturer. So they are going to lose.
You ignore the obvious use of something like this. To continue the use Intel from your example, how about an artistic work with an Intel logo in a bucket of piss, to use familiar theme?
Once you allow "good" and "favorable" uses of such icons you are also open to negative ones. Extremely negative ones. The Coke logo as a tattoo on the butt of a dead hooker, say. You know, with a caption indicating all the wonderful aspects of drinking Coca-Cola and what it will do to your body, such that the dead hooker is now much, much better off than if she had been able to continue drinking Coke for the rest of her undoubtably short, disease-ridden life.
Why wouldn't anyone want to do this? And if there is an avenue to do this without legal retribution or recourse, I would think it would be extremely common.
Decency is a high point on a bell curve with there being positive and negative sides to it. We haven't even begun to explore the left side of the curve, but the Internet makes it all possible.
The Kindle TTS isn't quite as good as a professional voice talent reading a book. However, that costs lots of money to do and requires lots of human time. Recording a TTS system reading a book is good enough for quite a few of the people that are interested in an audio book.
Just a guess here, but you take a new "popular" book title and record a Kindle reading it. Then put that on CDs and sell it and I suspect you will get more than a few sales. Make it available as a bunch of downloadable files for MP3 players and you'll sell some more.
No, it isn't quite as good as the professional voice talent. But it is good enough for lots of people that want access to the material in their car or elsewhere where reading isn't practical. What the Kindle makes possible is (a) rapid access to newly released books and (b) TTS that can easily be recorded into an audio book form WITHOUT the need for a human. It is perfectly within reach of any Kindle owner to do this and make a mockery of the ability for Audible (or anyone else) to release an audio book of the same material. Sure they might be able to have a better one, but not a cheaper or quicker one.
Do you have any doubt that this could be a concern for someone intent upon selling the audio book rights separately?
I suspect you were communicating (uselessly) with a drone in India that was hired to make sure that nobody in management ever hears anything bad about customer service.
For the most part, it is useless to express your dismay to a customer service center in any form. They are paid to not care and not pass on information about other people's dismay.
PDF is an absurd format for an e-book. The "pages" are predetermined and fixed. This means that the reader must conform to the page layout, text size, etc. It better have a screen which can handle the pages at full resolution or it is going to look awful. And any extra screen space is a waste of time as well.
If there was a "standard" page size, you might be OK with PDF, but there isn't anything close. Books come in all sorts of sizes and internationally there is US letter and A4 for other documents.
So PDF just doesn't work. Of course, Google has popularized the format by distributing books in PDF form - except they are scanned and graphic images. No e-reader is going to do a good job with this.
What is needed is a format that eliminates the concept of a "page" from the document entirely because different readers are going to have different size screens. Trying to preserve coherence between a printed book and an e-book is a road to madness, and that is exactly where a PDF takes you.
In most states the state has some standards and even recommendations but the local school districts actually choose the textbooks to be used. Some districts are very large and receive quite a bit of attention where others are very small and will often just pick what some larger district did.
I suspect there would be a fight over this in some companies. Real simple - if your personal views are opposite to those of the company, you do not need to be working there. Period. Call it "incompatabile work culture" instead of political differences.
Someone working for Warner Brothers found using Bit Torrent to download movies would likely be fired on the spot.
If a devout Catholic managed to keep their beliefs a secret for a while I bet they would be immediately fired when they became known at the home office of American Atheists.
Similarly, a Jew probably wouldn't be welcome at the lobbying office of CAIR. When their views became known, they would be gone.
You aren't going to be able to legislate this sort of thing away. Not unless you want to end up like most European countries where it is not permitted to fire anyone, ever. At least for the most part. So companies never hire anyone because they can never get rid of them.
The Kindle supports text copying from a book, so you can clip out a section of text and it would likely be more usable than something scanned from a physical book. Not an issue at all. You can also take screenshots of the Kindle screen but that is limited to the physical display, not any particular text.
I am sure the DX will have at least this capability, if not something better in terms of screen shots.
What possible reason could there be for anyone thinking that a Kindle represents any sort of "sustainable" anything? Because it reduces the use of a recyclable commodity called paper?
If anything, the production of a Kindle uses vastly more resources than any paper and printing operation. In addition, from my understanding of it (being a Kindle 2 owner) the Kindle display has a rather short lifespan of around 2 years or so. And then it is dead and must be replaced - or at least the contrast is unreadably bad so it must be replaced. What is the lifespan of a modern textbook that is cared for at all well? 20 years? More?
No, I don't think there is anything even remotely "sustainable" about a Kindle and anyone believing that needs to have their head examined. Also, the level of technology required to produce a Kindle and the resources that go into making one are likely enough to feed 100 starving Africans for every Kindle not made. Now that would be a step in the direction of "sustaniable."
Let's see... would the American Beef Council (an industry group for the meat industry) be happy about having a vegetarian working there?
How about a devout Christan working in the office of American Atheists?
Often, even if you try to keep your personal life a secret so you can score a job, it leaks out. And when it does, everyone finds out that perhaps you aren't really suited for that sort of work after all. Your private opinion really isn't going to remain private very long if your beliefs are completely out of synch with your employer.
What about a committed pirate working at the BSA?
A closet pedophile working for the local Boy Scouts chapter?
A kleptomanic working as a security guard at WalMart?
Sometimes it is better all around to not take jobs when you disagree with the company's philosophy.
What this probably means is no real investigation can take place either, as that would fundamentally affect the user's rights as well. No investigation means no due process can take place. Thus, there really isn't any way to stop piracy in the EU. Not that there is really a way to stop piracy anywhere else, either.
Google doesn't charge for searching because they have an army of people that believe in paid placements and an even larger army of people bidding on keywords. You know what? They all lose. The only winner is Google but until the folks bidding on keywords figure it out, they are just going to continue to lose.
Its a great business model. Unfortunately, the paid placement model only works for a few.
If Google was only linking to the story, that would probably be fine. Google copies the headline and some of the text making it unnecessary to view the article at all. They then link to the same story in 10 other places where the ads might not be as prevalent. Again, no need to go visit the web site with the original story - might as well just go somewhere else.
I seriously doubt that Google News drives many people to newspaper web sites.
Sorry, but we have been training up a generation to believe digital == free. Since around 1985 or so when mass floppy piracy really started. Since 1995 everyone has seen that you don't need to copy a floppy anymore, just "share it" via FTP, Kazaa, BitTorrent or a myrid other ways of "sharing".
In other words, it is assumed to all be free. Not free stuff on the Internet pretty much either doesn't exist or doesn't get much attention. What do you think the ratio between visitors to free ad-supported porn sites is compared to pay porn sites? 100 to 1? 1000 to 1? I suspect it might be closer to 100,000 to 1.
Pay for what is free elsewhere? Forget it. This is the Internet, quality is never ranked above price - and free is king.
I would say that you are likely wrong. Very wrong.
The problem is that the masses are simply not equipped to fight this battle, assuming that you can find a group of people that can agree on what the battle is. I'd say for the largest group the battle is simply not having to pay anymore for what they want. And that is doomed.
You see, there is a temporary situation where people can use general-purpose computing devices to defeat the intent of content creators - the intent to get paid, that is. Seemingly, this is something that can never be resolved in favor of content creators. That view is extremely short-sighted. Two things can (and likely will) happen, the first being that content creators choose non-digital media to release works in. The second likely as not involves the idea of ubitiquous general-purpose computing devices.
Already we see that most of the world cannot handle such general-purpose devices. They are repurposed right out from under their owners to conduct business of others, usually criminal in some way. It is equally likely that the real "solution" to this problem is to take away the general-purpose computing devices and replace them with appliances which cannot be repurposed by either criminals or the owner.
Today people think this is impossible and unacceptable. Is it unacceptable that your toaster cannot be repurposed? How about your clock radio? When an email/web device is as easy to use as a clock radio it will be better for most people and perhaps chafingly restrictive to a few. It will also change the nature of the piracy debate because for the masses large-scale piracy and redistribtion to the planet for free will simply not be possible any longer.
So, the first thing I would look for is movies being released for theaters only. No DVD. No cable TV. No Netflix, no Blockbuster. And instead of a movie being released and disappearing three weeks later that it would stick around longer and be rereleased periodically. You want to see it, you are going to go to the theater.
The second thing I would look for is the general agreement that music is free. Completely. Nobody selling it anymore and nobody expecting to make money with it. This means FM radio dies, around 100 magazines just fold up and disappear and a lot of people are out looking for jobs. But music from 1950-2009 will be free. Music in 2010 will be rare and pretty rough, sort of what you expect on the first couple of episodes of American Idol. But most importantly, it will be free.
How long might it really take for the "appliance revolution"? Probably 10 years. But the idea of buying a piece of software to protect your computer from another piece of software will be as silly as buying a buggy whip is today.
Sorry, but that is a absurd attitude. The whole idea of progress is that we can actually know that electric light bulbs work and why so we don't have to repeat the entire series of Thomas Edison's trials. OK, Edison was a tinkerer rather than a scientist but that doesn't mean we have to discount his work.
Look it up in Encyclepedia Brittanica and you will find it there. Verified and checked by a lot more than one person. People with a professional regard for what they are doing. Do errors creep in? Sure they do, but they are not only caught they are accidental.
Wikipedia's innaccuracies are intentional, it is part of the design. The general dumbing-down of knowledge and discounting "experts" in a wholesale manner. The idea that all knowledge is an opinion and everyone has an equally valid opinion if they care to express it.
Does that mean that if I believe John F. Kennedy was killed by lizardmen from a far off planet that this is equally valid as people that believe he was killed by the mafia? On Wikipedia you might find either, on alternate days. And I bet I can find more than one source to cite about suit-wearing lizardmen being the real source of all our problems here on Earth. Sorry, the truth is not an opinion. It doesn't work for History and it doesn't work for Science.
Rough quote from Stranger in a Strange Land: "Scientists indeed! Half guess work and half superstition." This is indeed the attitude of far too many today and certainly in the US the education system is doing nothing to combat this problem. This quote is from a book written in 1960 or so and is in defense of the "science" of astrology. Yes, there are plenty of people that believe that astrology is just as relevent as physics.
Wikipedia is a silly idea that is just getting worse all the time. It was obvious it wasn't worth much from its inception to some people but every day that goes by you would think it would be clearer and clearer. Instead we have people defending it and claiming the silly foundation of Wikinonsense is true. Sorry, but science isn't an opinion. History isn't an opinion. There are facts and there are lies people want you to believe. Sorting them out is important, and you will never, ever be able to sort them out using Wikipedia as a reference.
This example probably has no "compete" in it in any meaningful way.
Let's say you were doing graphics design for an ad campaign for a new product for Apple. Like all new Apple products, it is real secret. Microsoft offers you more money, better benefits, relocation to anywhere you want to live - just bring along samples of your recent work. Very recent work. Big, high-resolution samples.
The problem is, a "corporation" has no ethical base. So a competitor offers a key employee 3x their salary to come work for them. Knowing full well that the loss of this key employee will set back the release of a product their current employer is trying to get out.
They pay the guy 3x his former salary for four months and fire him. Nope, you don't fit in with our culture.
Competitor succeeds in torpedoing product launch so their product is the only one in the marketplace longer. Big win for them.
Former employer is screwed, perhaps justifiably so. You can never have "key employees".
Employee is really screwed. He is out of a job and has a history of jumping ship and leaving projects unfinished. He also just got canned for "not fitting in" and "not being a team player". Loser. Big loser.
The only way this doesn't play out every day is competitor is afraid of getting sued. And even so, it still happens.
How about getting a job with a company that does not compete? How about the similar job for a company in a different line of business?
This doesn't help if your main attraction to a new employer is to bring over essentially trade secret information that they want to help them compete. This is clearly the case with a lot of Microsoft-Google job swaps. It has come up more than a few times with software companies that I have worked for. This should be actionable and in most cases, it is.
It gets a lot grayer if you have skills limited to a specific area. Let's say your knowledge is limited to programming complicated reports in RPG II and there are only four manufacturers left in the entire USA which use RPG II and the all compete with each other as well as one of the manufacturers being selected by most customers because of their excellent reports. Yup, I think you are screwed in any environment where a non-compete has any validity whatsoever.
But it is your own damn fault for over-specialization.
Most of these issues are easily dismissed if the said hacker is operating from a country that routinely says "fuck off" when approached by US authorities. Say, Bulgaria. Even if they have an IP address (likely) it doesn't go anywhere if the ISP is far more interested in preserving the ability of criminals to operate than enabling law enforcement. This is the case with plenty of Eastern European and Asian ISPs.
If the guy is operating out of his basement in the US, his ISP will probably not shield him and he is going down. If he collects the money and runs out to buy a Ferrari, he is going down. If he brags on hacker IRC channels, he is going down.
But a pretty smart guy outside the US with a friendly ISP might be able to get away with it, if he understands international banking and uses the right bank. Or enlists the help of larger criminal organizations.
Absolutely. What possible reason would there be for ever discontinuing any software product, anyway? Shouldn't everything be supported still? We wouldn't have an unemployment crisis if every single software product ever made was still supported, now would we?
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It might have something to do with the fact the book is $50 because the content is worth it. Printing and distribution are a very small fraction of the cost of a book and it is valid that these costs be removed from the price of an e-book. So you take the $50 book and charge $45.95 for the e-book.
Look into it some more, don't just assume that printing and distribution is extremely costly. As the author of a $50 book (http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=cd+and+dvd+forensics for example), I know the costs of shipping a box of 22 books from the publisher is like $10. The printing cost is also not significant. A book like CD and DVD Forensics might cost $5 to print in relatively small quantities.
Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.
There is also a general philosophy about embedded code that is it will never, ever have to be debugged, maintained or even looked at again. It is going into ROM.
I recall a guy that absolutely believed in that. His code was utterly unreadable but he could supposedly write it faster that way. And, it took less space without comments. After all, comments were useless. By over and over he was shown to be spending the same number of 14 hour days to complete a game (cartridge) that other people would spend 8 hour days on. No, that didn't convince him of anything.
Certainly there are really, really strong deadlines for any sort of consumer electronic device. And the software part of it is considered a really high one-time expense. So it makes sense to try to limit it as much as possible. Which gives us things like this. No, I don't see a good solution for it - the deadlines are set by people well outside of software or hardware development. And nobody familiar with the real business requirements is going to argue about that.
The code is protected in the US by copyright. It is not protected anywhere else, especially in countries where it is cheap to reproduce the hardware. US Customs has proven over and over they will not block the import of infringing devices.
This means that once the software gets out - and it is - look for cheap copies that will put the original manufacturer out of business. Because law enforcement and just about everyone else in the market for such devices is going to jump on the price difference. Same functionality for 1/10th the price.
Do not believe for a second that there are any safeguards left for this sort of thing. There are not.
Wrong. All they are selling is the software in the hardware - the hardware can be easily copied by any Chinese company and sold for 1/10th the price they are charging - whatever that is.
It is the software that is the only thing that differentiates the product, and would cost a Chinese company far more to duplicate. It is possible (but unlikely) that they further protected the software through the use of absolutely proprietary hardware that can't easily be duplicated. But the key is that for nearly all electronic devices today it is the software that is worth something and the hardware is meaningless.
As for the company having some sort of "look and feel" patent for their device, US Customs have pretty much proven they will not block the import of infringing products. This means that once the software gets out, if there is any sort of market at all for the devices they will be immediately replaced in the market by cheap Chinese copies. Law enforcement is under the same budget constraints as the rest of the country, so they aren't going to look too carefully at who is manufacturing a device, assuming they would care if it were known. They are interested in the overall cost of the device, and that's about it. So if you offer them a cheap copy at 1/10th the price, they are going to leap on it.
US manufacturer then leaves the market because they can't compete. The Chinese folks can take the code, however bad it might be, and just use it. Oh they might have a programmer make a couple of changes so it doesn't have the original manufacturer's name embedded in it - but I have seen cases where that hasn't even been done. It is probably easier to just avoid the programmer altogether.
Hardware is easily duplicated. Software, once it gets out in the world, is easily stolen. And in any sort of embedded system application there are no protections for the original manufacturer. So they are going to lose.
You ignore the obvious use of something like this. To continue the use Intel from your example, how about an artistic work with an Intel logo in a bucket of piss, to use familiar theme?
Once you allow "good" and "favorable" uses of such icons you are also open to negative ones. Extremely negative ones. The Coke logo as a tattoo on the butt of a dead hooker, say. You know, with a caption indicating all the wonderful aspects of drinking Coca-Cola and what it will do to your body, such that the dead hooker is now much, much better off than if she had been able to continue drinking Coke for the rest of her undoubtably short, disease-ridden life.
Why wouldn't anyone want to do this? And if there is an avenue to do this without legal retribution or recourse, I would think it would be extremely common.
Decency is a high point on a bell curve with there being positive and negative sides to it. We haven't even begun to explore the left side of the curve, but the Internet makes it all possible.
The Kindle TTS isn't quite as good as a professional voice talent reading a book. However, that costs lots of money to do and requires lots of human time. Recording a TTS system reading a book is good enough for quite a few of the people that are interested in an audio book.
Just a guess here, but you take a new "popular" book title and record a Kindle reading it. Then put that on CDs and sell it and I suspect you will get more than a few sales. Make it available as a bunch of downloadable files for MP3 players and you'll sell some more.
No, it isn't quite as good as the professional voice talent. But it is good enough for lots of people that want access to the material in their car or elsewhere where reading isn't practical. What the Kindle makes possible is (a) rapid access to newly released books and (b) TTS that can easily be recorded into an audio book form WITHOUT the need for a human. It is perfectly within reach of any Kindle owner to do this and make a mockery of the ability for Audible (or anyone else) to release an audio book of the same material. Sure they might be able to have a better one, but not a cheaper or quicker one.
Do you have any doubt that this could be a concern for someone intent upon selling the audio book rights separately?
I suspect you were communicating (uselessly) with a drone in India that was hired to make sure that nobody in management ever hears anything bad about customer service.
For the most part, it is useless to express your dismay to a customer service center in any form. They are paid to not care and not pass on information about other people's dismay.
PDF is an absurd format for an e-book. The "pages" are predetermined and fixed. This means that the reader must conform to the page layout, text size, etc. It better have a screen which can handle the pages at full resolution or it is going to look awful. And any extra screen space is a waste of time as well.
If there was a "standard" page size, you might be OK with PDF, but there isn't anything close. Books come in all sorts of sizes and internationally there is US letter and A4 for other documents.
So PDF just doesn't work. Of course, Google has popularized the format by distributing books in PDF form - except they are scanned and graphic images. No e-reader is going to do a good job with this.
What is needed is a format that eliminates the concept of a "page" from the document entirely because different readers are going to have different size screens. Trying to preserve coherence between a printed book and an e-book is a road to madness, and that is exactly where a PDF takes you.
In most states the state has some standards and even recommendations but the local school districts actually choose the textbooks to be used. Some districts are very large and receive quite a bit of attention where others are very small and will often just pick what some larger district did.
There is no federal level control of any sort.
I suspect there would be a fight over this in some companies. Real simple - if your personal views are opposite to those of the company, you do not need to be working there. Period. Call it "incompatabile work culture" instead of political differences.
Someone working for Warner Brothers found using Bit Torrent to download movies would likely be fired on the spot.
If a devout Catholic managed to keep their beliefs a secret for a while I bet they would be immediately fired when they became known at the home office of American Atheists.
Similarly, a Jew probably wouldn't be welcome at the lobbying office of CAIR. When their views became known, they would be gone.
You aren't going to be able to legislate this sort of thing away. Not unless you want to end up like most European countries where it is not permitted to fire anyone, ever. At least for the most part. So companies never hire anyone because they can never get rid of them.
I think you forgot the $20,000 administration fee. The organization behind this charity work needs that for the staff.
The Kindle supports text copying from a book, so you can clip out a section of text and it would likely be more usable than something scanned from a physical book. Not an issue at all. You can also take screenshots of the Kindle screen but that is limited to the physical display, not any particular text.
I am sure the DX will have at least this capability, if not something better in terms of screen shots.
What possible reason could there be for anyone thinking that a Kindle represents any sort of "sustainable" anything? Because it reduces the use of a recyclable commodity called paper?
If anything, the production of a Kindle uses vastly more resources than any paper and printing operation. In addition, from my understanding of it (being a Kindle 2 owner) the Kindle display has a rather short lifespan of around 2 years or so. And then it is dead and must be replaced - or at least the contrast is unreadably bad so it must be replaced. What is the lifespan of a modern textbook that is cared for at all well? 20 years? More?
No, I don't think there is anything even remotely "sustainable" about a Kindle and anyone believing that needs to have their head examined. Also, the level of technology required to produce a Kindle and the resources that go into making one are likely enough to feed 100 starving Africans for every Kindle not made. Now that would be a step in the direction of "sustaniable."
Let's see... would the American Beef Council (an industry group for the meat industry) be happy about having a vegetarian working there?
How about a devout Christan working in the office of American Atheists?
Often, even if you try to keep your personal life a secret so you can score a job, it leaks out. And when it does, everyone finds out that perhaps you aren't really suited for that sort of work after all. Your private opinion really isn't going to remain private very long if your beliefs are completely out of synch with your employer.
What about a committed pirate working at the BSA?
A closet pedophile working for the local Boy Scouts chapter?
A kleptomanic working as a security guard at WalMart?
Sometimes it is better all around to not take jobs when you disagree with the company's philosophy.
What this probably means is no real investigation can take place either, as that would fundamentally affect the user's rights as well. No investigation means no due process can take place. Thus, there really isn't any way to stop piracy in the EU. Not that there is really a way to stop piracy anywhere else, either.
Internet... the gateway to everything for free.
Google doesn't charge for searching because they have an army of people that believe in paid placements and an even larger army of people bidding on keywords. You know what? They all lose. The only winner is Google but until the folks bidding on keywords figure it out, they are just going to continue to lose.
Its a great business model. Unfortunately, the paid placement model only works for a few.
If Google was only linking to the story, that would probably be fine. Google copies the headline and some of the text making it unnecessary to view the article at all. They then link to the same story in 10 other places where the ads might not be as prevalent. Again, no need to go visit the web site with the original story - might as well just go somewhere else.
I seriously doubt that Google News drives many people to newspaper web sites.
Sorry, but we have been training up a generation to believe digital == free. Since around 1985 or so when mass floppy piracy really started. Since 1995 everyone has seen that you don't need to copy a floppy anymore, just "share it" via FTP, Kazaa, BitTorrent or a myrid other ways of "sharing".
In other words, it is assumed to all be free. Not free stuff on the Internet pretty much either doesn't exist or doesn't get much attention. What do you think the ratio between visitors to free ad-supported porn sites is compared to pay porn sites? 100 to 1? 1000 to 1? I suspect it might be closer to 100,000 to 1.
Pay for what is free elsewhere? Forget it. This is the Internet, quality is never ranked above price - and free is king.
I would say that you are likely wrong. Very wrong.
The problem is that the masses are simply not equipped to fight this battle, assuming that you can find a group of people that can agree on what the battle is. I'd say for the largest group the battle is simply not having to pay anymore for what they want. And that is doomed.
You see, there is a temporary situation where people can use general-purpose computing devices to defeat the intent of content creators - the intent to get paid, that is. Seemingly, this is something that can never be resolved in favor of content creators. That view is extremely short-sighted. Two things can (and likely will) happen, the first being that content creators choose non-digital media to release works in. The second likely as not involves the idea of ubitiquous general-purpose computing devices.
Already we see that most of the world cannot handle such general-purpose devices. They are repurposed right out from under their owners to conduct business of others, usually criminal in some way. It is equally likely that the real "solution" to this problem is to take away the general-purpose computing devices and replace them with appliances which cannot be repurposed by either criminals or the owner.
Today people think this is impossible and unacceptable. Is it unacceptable that your toaster cannot be repurposed? How about your clock radio? When an email/web device is as easy to use as a clock radio it will be better for most people and perhaps chafingly restrictive to a few. It will also change the nature of the piracy debate because for the masses large-scale piracy and redistribtion to the planet for free will simply not be possible any longer.
So, the first thing I would look for is movies being released for theaters only. No DVD. No cable TV. No Netflix, no Blockbuster. And instead of a movie being released and disappearing three weeks later that it would stick around longer and be rereleased periodically. You want to see it, you are going to go to the theater.
The second thing I would look for is the general agreement that music is free. Completely. Nobody selling it anymore and nobody expecting to make money with it. This means FM radio dies, around 100 magazines just fold up and disappear and a lot of people are out looking for jobs. But music from 1950-2009 will be free. Music in 2010 will be rare and pretty rough, sort of what you expect on the first couple of episodes of American Idol. But most importantly, it will be free.
How long might it really take for the "appliance revolution"? Probably 10 years. But the idea of buying a piece of software to protect your computer from another piece of software will be as silly as buying a buggy whip is today.
Sorry, but that is a absurd attitude. The whole idea of progress is that we can actually know that electric light bulbs work and why so we don't have to repeat the entire series of Thomas Edison's trials. OK, Edison was a tinkerer rather than a scientist but that doesn't mean we have to discount his work.
Look it up in Encyclepedia Brittanica and you will find it there. Verified and checked by a lot more than one person. People with a professional regard for what they are doing. Do errors creep in? Sure they do, but they are not only caught they are accidental.
Wikipedia's innaccuracies are intentional, it is part of the design. The general dumbing-down of knowledge and discounting "experts" in a wholesale manner. The idea that all knowledge is an opinion and everyone has an equally valid opinion if they care to express it.
Does that mean that if I believe John F. Kennedy was killed by lizardmen from a far off planet that this is equally valid as people that believe he was killed by the mafia? On Wikipedia you might find either, on alternate days. And I bet I can find more than one source to cite about suit-wearing lizardmen being the real source of all our problems here on Earth. Sorry, the truth is not an opinion. It doesn't work for History and it doesn't work for Science.
Rough quote from Stranger in a Strange Land: "Scientists indeed! Half guess work and half superstition." This is indeed the attitude of far too many today and certainly in the US the education system is doing nothing to combat this problem. This quote is from a book written in 1960 or so and is in defense of the "science" of astrology. Yes, there are plenty of people that believe that astrology is just as relevent as physics.
Wikipedia is a silly idea that is just getting worse all the time. It was obvious it wasn't worth much from its inception to some people but every day that goes by you would think it would be clearer and clearer. Instead we have people defending it and claiming the silly foundation of Wikinonsense is true. Sorry, but science isn't an opinion. History isn't an opinion. There are facts and there are lies people want you to believe. Sorting them out is important, and you will never, ever be able to sort them out using Wikipedia as a reference.
This example probably has no "compete" in it in any meaningful way.
Let's say you were doing graphics design for an ad campaign for a new product for Apple. Like all new Apple products, it is real secret. Microsoft offers you more money, better benefits, relocation to anywhere you want to live - just bring along samples of your recent work. Very recent work. Big, high-resolution samples.
Should they be able to do this with impunity?
The problem is, a "corporation" has no ethical base. So a competitor offers a key employee 3x their salary to come work for them. Knowing full well that the loss of this key employee will set back the release of a product their current employer is trying to get out.
They pay the guy 3x his former salary for four months and fire him. Nope, you don't fit in with our culture.
Competitor succeeds in torpedoing product launch so their product is the only one in the marketplace longer. Big win for them.
Former employer is screwed, perhaps justifiably so. You can never have "key employees".
Employee is really screwed. He is out of a job and has a history of jumping ship and leaving projects unfinished. He also just got canned for "not fitting in" and "not being a team player". Loser. Big loser.
The only way this doesn't play out every day is competitor is afraid of getting sued. And even so, it still happens.
How about getting a job with a company that does not compete? How about the similar job for a company in a different line of business?
This doesn't help if your main attraction to a new employer is to bring over essentially trade secret information that they want to help them compete. This is clearly the case with a lot of Microsoft-Google job swaps. It has come up more than a few times with software companies that I have worked for. This should be actionable and in most cases, it is.
It gets a lot grayer if you have skills limited to a specific area. Let's say your knowledge is limited to programming complicated reports in RPG II and there are only four manufacturers left in the entire USA which use RPG II and the all compete with each other as well as one of the manufacturers being selected by most customers because of their excellent reports. Yup, I think you are screwed in any environment where a non-compete has any validity whatsoever.
But it is your own damn fault for over-specialization.
Most of these issues are easily dismissed if the said hacker is operating from a country that routinely says "fuck off" when approached by US authorities. Say, Bulgaria. Even if they have an IP address (likely) it doesn't go anywhere if the ISP is far more interested in preserving the ability of criminals to operate than enabling law enforcement. This is the case with plenty of Eastern European and Asian ISPs.
If the guy is operating out of his basement in the US, his ISP will probably not shield him and he is going down. If he collects the money and runs out to buy a Ferrari, he is going down. If he brags on hacker IRC channels, he is going down.
But a pretty smart guy outside the US with a friendly ISP might be able to get away with it, if he understands international banking and uses the right bank. Or enlists the help of larger criminal organizations.
Absolutely. What possible reason would there be for ever discontinuing any software product, anyway? Shouldn't everything be supported still? We wouldn't have an unemployment crisis if every single software product ever made was still supported, now would we?