True, in which case it may benefit the band to fall slightly below the 'market' price point...however that can be taken into account with the pricing algorithm.
However, most of the non-music sales (clothing, touring income, etc.) has traditionally gone to the artist and not the record company which is usually restricted to the music sales, in which case they don't care as much about ancillary sales. This is changing as record companies try to tap into merchandising and touring profits as they complain about piracy stealing money from them (as an excuse to steal more from the artist), but for now, labels are expected to reap the short term benefits obtained by milking album sales for every penny.
Actually, this is a good idea. The optimum pricing for any product creates a balance between how much you charge and how much you sell. You are trying to maximize your profit using the equation:
[cost] * [sales] = [profit]
The optimum solution is the Nash equilibrium point (The A Beautiful Mind guy...not Russel Crowe). If you sell 10 items at $.50, you make 5 times the profit you would selling 1 object at $1. The point of decreasing the price is that you generate more sales...would you buy the new [insert band name here] album for $20? How about $15? Or even $3? If you're interested in the album, there is a price point where it's worth it (to you) to buy the album.
For popular acts, a high price point is the Nash equilibrium, for less popular acts and cult bands, a lower price point will generate the most profit. Supply is irrelevant because the commodity isn't lost if it isn't sold. If you flood the market with oranges, they have to be sold at some point, or they will spoil. A music distributor can sit on a song essentially forever without losing money on it, since it's an electronic copy. Brick and mortar stores are still subject to the 'orange' issue because they have a limited space for physical CDs, so it's in their interest to get rid of the low-priced ones which don't generate any profit (or generate larger losses if the disks are primarily loss-leaders).
Market-based song pricing is the theoretically most efficient pricing scheme, especially if the pricing is updated close to real time (on the scale of days or weeks).
(Well, a case can be made that the war takes money away from cities/towns which results in property taxes needing to be increased to cover the difference.)
However, property taxes - and college tuition, and many other things - have been increasing as a multiple of inflation for much longer than the war has been going on, and longer than Bush has been in office for that matter.
Of course the cost of registering a domain should go up over time...after it first drops to an equilibrium as the technology improves. A domain name is still a valuable commodity and subject to inflation as the value of money decreases (which is what inflation is). In that case, the value of the domain name is constant. However, domain names are not a limited commodity (for all intents and purposes) mainly due to the fact that they all have to be renewed yearly, and there are an extremely large number of valid names available (a 3 word name taken at random from a 30,000 word dictionary results in approximately 27,000,000,000,000 (27 trillion) combinations. Remove some nonsense combinations, add in numbers, misspellings (think google) made up words, etc, and you still have a huge number of potential names...and that's just in one TLD. In that case, a price increase close to inflation is reasonable. Twice inflation is ludicrous.
Microsoft has no rights to 'Windows' in the US and they know it. This comes from the Lindows case previously mentioned on slashdot here. Unfortunately that doesn't translate directly to Australia, so the developer may have had a problem there. If this happened in the US, there would be a pretty good case for extortion.
This has been tax law for ages. If you live in one state and work in another, whether driving over the state line to work in an office, or telecommuting in, you owe taxes in both states. That's why you make sure you register your residence in the same state as your job, for the purposes of taxes. It certainly doesn't help his case that he was physically in NY 25% of the time, although many states allow you to deduct taxes paid to another state on a given income from the amount you owe them.
This also opens up states to taxing foreign nationals who never leave their country of origin....for example if some guy in Finland SSHs in to NY to work on a project. He owes NY taxes, but will they ever be collected? Probably not.
This won't have any effect on your problem since it only applies to the.mobi TLD and/. is not on that domain (although they may create a trimmed-down version explicitly for it, which would alleviate your problem with or without the forced compliance to standards). Besides, isn't it your problem if you try to view a feature-rich website in your cell phone? Should we make all websites display nicely on a 1.5 sq. inch screen? Obviously not. Companies that want to provide mobile-friendly versions of their website will create one with the.mobi domain and that 'may' display nicely on your phone. I say 'may' because there are so many screen size variations that it's pretty hard to create something that displays nicely for everyone and isn't just a bunch of text (and even text can be a problem if there are very long words involved -- think 'antidisestablishmentarianism') Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean everyone needs to cater to you, especially when there is so much change taking place in the cell-phone browser area that it hardly makes sense to develop sites for public consumption over a cell phone yet. It's enough of a pain in the ass to design regular sites for IE/Firefox/Safari with/without javascript, which display nicely on screen resolutions from 640x480 to 1280x1024+, using CSS with all the required browser hacks.
Standards may help, but there will also be hacks to get around them (think CSS hacks in current browsers) and everything will always display slightly differently on different browsers because it is not in any company's interest to be just like all of the competition. Everyone wants to add something the other guys can't do, especially in web design.
As for your download speed problems, that's between you and your provider, and it will get better over time. If/. takes 2-3 minutes to load, standards won't help you unless images are banned from the.mobi domain.
The patents talk about data transmission in non-hierarchical forms only...isn't XML hierarchical with a defined structure...parents, children, etc. Doesn't seem like the patents cited here apply.
A 1 person government can't enforce whatever stupid rules it comes up with, hence there is much more freedom.
The problem you think you're describing is 1 person in control of a large government. That gives the 1 person the ability to proclaim that everyone wear hats on Tuesday, and enforce it by killing everyone who doesn't (through the rest of the government). Without the large government to back him up, someone else would shoot him first.
The smaller the government, the more freedom people have. Granted that also can mean less security, but that's a whole different can of worms.
But the typical engineer is not the same as a the contractor. In this analogy the engineer is the laborer who places the bricks. The contractor is the company that employs the engineer.
Part of the controversy is due to the fact that there are other 'small' animal bones which have been found on the island, such as miniature elephants. In conjunction with the finds or other mini-species, the 'hobbit' people becomes a more likely conclusion than if you only consider the 'hobbit' bones by themselves. Not only that but on other islands in the archipelago, they have found bones of apparently human-related giants who were much larger than people today. Only the hobbit-folk get any press though.
As I understood the problem, redundancy wasn't an issue. Level 3 was actively filtering out request to Cogent, however they came in. The redundancy was working, but Level 3 was playing NetNanny and blacklisting all Cogent IPs.
Slashdot Mirror
True, in which case it may benefit the band to fall slightly below the 'market' price point...however that can be taken into account with the pricing algorithm.
However, most of the non-music sales (clothing, touring income, etc.) has traditionally gone to the artist and not the record company which is usually restricted to the music sales, in which case they don't care as much about ancillary sales. This is changing as record companies try to tap into merchandising and touring profits as they complain about piracy stealing money from them (as an excuse to steal more from the artist), but for now, labels are expected to reap the short term benefits obtained by milking album sales for every penny.
Actually, this is a good idea. The optimum pricing for any product creates a balance between how much you charge and how much you sell. You are trying to maximize your profit using the equation: [cost] * [sales] = [profit] The optimum solution is the Nash equilibrium point (The A Beautiful Mind guy...not Russel Crowe). If you sell 10 items at $.50, you make 5 times the profit you would selling 1 object at $1. The point of decreasing the price is that you generate more sales...would you buy the new [insert band name here] album for $20? How about $15? Or even $3? If you're interested in the album, there is a price point where it's worth it (to you) to buy the album. For popular acts, a high price point is the Nash equilibrium, for less popular acts and cult bands, a lower price point will generate the most profit. Supply is irrelevant because the commodity isn't lost if it isn't sold. If you flood the market with oranges, they have to be sold at some point, or they will spoil. A music distributor can sit on a song essentially forever without losing money on it, since it's an electronic copy. Brick and mortar stores are still subject to the 'orange' issue because they have a limited space for physical CDs, so it's in their interest to get rid of the low-priced ones which don't generate any profit (or generate larger losses if the disks are primarily loss-leaders). Market-based song pricing is the theoretically most efficient pricing scheme, especially if the pricing is updated close to real time (on the scale of days or weeks).
Property taxes don't pay for the war =P
(Well, a case can be made that the war takes money away from cities/towns which results in property taxes needing to be increased to cover the difference.)
However, property taxes - and college tuition, and many other things - have been increasing as a multiple of inflation for much longer than the war has been going on, and longer than Bush has been in office for that matter.
Of course the cost of registering a domain should go up over time...after it first drops to an equilibrium as the technology improves. A domain name is still a valuable commodity and subject to inflation as the value of money decreases (which is what inflation is). In that case, the value of the domain name is constant. However, domain names are not a limited commodity (for all intents and purposes) mainly due to the fact that they all have to be renewed yearly, and there are an extremely large number of valid names available (a 3 word name taken at random from a 30,000 word dictionary results in approximately 27,000,000,000,000 (27 trillion) combinations. Remove some nonsense combinations, add in numbers, misspellings (think google) made up words, etc, and you still have a huge number of potential names...and that's just in one TLD. In that case, a price increase close to inflation is reasonable. Twice inflation is ludicrous.
Microsoft has no rights to 'Windows' in the US and they know it. This comes from the Lindows case previously mentioned on slashdot here. Unfortunately that doesn't translate directly to Australia, so the developer may have had a problem there. If this happened in the US, there would be a pretty good case for extortion.
This has been tax law for ages. If you live in one state and work in another, whether driving over the state line to work in an office, or telecommuting in, you owe taxes in both states. That's why you make sure you register your residence in the same state as your job, for the purposes of taxes. It certainly doesn't help his case that he was physically in NY 25% of the time, although many states allow you to deduct taxes paid to another state on a given income from the amount you owe them.
This also opens up states to taxing foreign nationals who never leave their country of origin....for example if some guy in Finland SSHs in to NY to work on a project. He owes NY taxes, but will they ever be collected? Probably not.
This won't have any effect on your problem since it only applies to the .mobi TLD and /. is not on that domain (although they may create a trimmed-down version explicitly for it, which would alleviate your problem with or without the forced compliance to standards). Besides, isn't it your problem if you try to view a feature-rich website in your cell phone? Should we make all websites display nicely on a 1.5 sq. inch screen? Obviously not. Companies that want to provide mobile-friendly versions of their website will create one with the .mobi domain and that 'may' display nicely on your phone. I say 'may' because there are so many screen size variations that it's pretty hard to create something that displays nicely for everyone and isn't just a bunch of text (and even text can be a problem if there are very long words involved -- think 'antidisestablishmentarianism') Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean everyone needs to cater to you, especially when there is so much change taking place in the cell-phone browser area that it hardly makes sense to develop sites for public consumption over a cell phone yet. It's enough of a pain in the ass to design regular sites for IE/Firefox/Safari with/without javascript, which display nicely on screen resolutions from 640x480 to 1280x1024+, using CSS with all the required browser hacks.
Standards may help, but there will also be hacks to get around them (think CSS hacks in current browsers) and everything will always display slightly differently on different browsers because it is not in any company's interest to be just like all of the competition. Everyone wants to add something the other guys can't do, especially in web design.
As for your download speed problems, that's between you and your provider, and it will get better over time. If /. takes 2-3 minutes to load, standards won't help you unless images are banned from the .mobi domain.
The patents talk about data transmission in non-hierarchical forms only...isn't XML hierarchical with a defined structure...parents, children, etc. Doesn't seem like the patents cited here apply.
Because it's impossible to fake a digital image =P
The irony of your comment is that it's 100% true.
A 1 person government can't enforce whatever stupid rules it comes up with, hence there is much more freedom.
The problem you think you're describing is 1 person in control of a large government. That gives the 1 person the ability to proclaim that everyone wear hats on Tuesday, and enforce it by killing everyone who doesn't (through the rest of the government). Without the large government to back him up, someone else would shoot him first.
The smaller the government, the more freedom people have. Granted that also can mean less security, but that's a whole different can of worms.
But the typical engineer is not the same as a the contractor. In this analogy the engineer is the laborer who places the bricks. The contractor is the company that employs the engineer.
It's not the bad patents that influence them, it's the bad court decisions that back up the bad patents.
Part of the controversy is due to the fact that there are other 'small' animal bones which have been found on the island, such as miniature elephants. In conjunction with the finds or other mini-species, the 'hobbit' people becomes a more likely conclusion than if you only consider the 'hobbit' bones by themselves. Not only that but on other islands in the archipelago, they have found bones of apparently human-related giants who were much larger than people today. Only the hobbit-folk get any press though.
As I understood the problem, redundancy wasn't an issue. Level 3 was actively filtering out request to Cogent, however they came in. The redundancy was working, but Level 3 was playing NetNanny and blacklisting all Cogent IPs.