It's not just the music industry... Don't forget software....
Microsoft sells "OEM" versions of Windows, Office, etc for 1/2 - 1/3 the price of their "Retail" versions. The OEM has all the functionality of the retail version except its EULA states that you cannot transfer it to another computer after you install it. The EULA also states software is licensed, not sold.
But in this case, the PRIVATE COMPANY is dictating how you may use the LICENSE that you OWN.
Yes, the state government says I can't transfer my driver's license to someone else and they use it. But IP licensing is the old kind of license [that I can think of] that is not given out by a government entity. When did private companies acquire the ability to do this?
Can you imagine a furniture company "licensing" its tables & chairs to customers? Under the agreement that if they move the chair or table to another room, they must purchase another "license"? Or to give them the option of paying 2-3x as much for the ability to transfer their "license" to other rooms in their house or to other houses?
After all, the design and construction of that furniture is a trade secret. We simply can't have people using it as they please...
If I was single and had 3 months left, with little/few family connections:
Quit my job,
Sell my house,
tour Europe/world/etc
Spend time with family?
...
If I was happily married, had kids, a wife, and knew I had 30 years left
I would have to do things differently
True, I wouldn't choose to work 80 hrs/week in either case. But knowing the immediacy of one's death does cause them to change how one spends their last days...
My mom was diagnosed with hodgkin's lymphoma when she was about 27 [~1982]. [I was born two years earlier]. I think it all started with a strange lump on her neck...
She was treated with chemothearpy and things seemed okay. Two years later, it came back. This time, she was treated with chemothearpy + radiation (using a bone-marrow transplant on her own marrow).
Things were fine for about 10 years. The only lasting effects of her treatment were reduced energy [she got tired very easily]. Otherwise she led a normal life and got to see me grow up.
When the 10 years passed, she suddenly became very weak. My understanding is the bone marrow went kaput and stopped producing good blood cells. She went in for a bone-marrow transplant (her brother's), which required more chemothearpy --she died a few weeks later. She was barely 41 years old, had good eating habits, did not smoke nor drink, exercised, and maintained good body weight her whole life, and had regular check-ups [for the cancer].
Both the 2nd & 3rd treatments were performed at Stanford -- which was/is supposed to be on the leading edge for this kind of stuff.
It sound like your treatment went well and you are back on your feet. I sincerely hope so. I believe methods for hodgkins' treatment have progressed considerably in the past 20 years.
Regardless, life (or death) has ways of surprising us, throwing curves when we least expect them.
After all, for my mom living 10 years without cancer and being in good health, one might has though she would have almost certainly seen me graduate from high school. But that didn't happen. She died during my Junior year.
The improbable does happen. And when it does, it has life-changing consequences for more than just one's self.
Hopefully for you it won't come back. But would you plan your life differently knowing that it would in 10-15 years? You may not find out until it's too late to do things differently.
Kristopher Tate, the 17-year-old who make Zoomr, will undoubtedly become noticed by companies looking for such ambitious programmers. But he got lucky; the rest of us aren't so fortunate.
I'm not sure this kid getting notice is a good thing for him...
I'm not sure how fortunate he will be. If Ebay can get sued for the "Buy It Now" feature, how long will it be until Flickr [or another compnay] sues the 17yr-old for patent infringement? [Or maybe they will wait until he turns 18]
That is, when his thing takes off and starts to compete, I can see Flickr sueing him into smitherenes. [I didn't read the article:] And since he probably hasn't taken the necessary steps to hide behind his own cooperation, this kid will be paying for more than just college loans...
I work in the biotech biz. We've been warned about Chinese "students" snafing our secrets. Thought it was a lot of tinfoil hat paranoia until we saw logs of HUGE attachments going to Asian hotmail addresses. Guess what some of those attachements were? Research data going straight back to China.
Needless to say, his worker agreements were terminated and the person shipped back.
How convenient... Since you shipped him back, he can explain to his Chinese counterparts the details that were not covered in the attachments.
So I'm very jaded about the home theater industry in general.
You should be. People promote 96khz sampling rate audio (0-48khz range) despite the fact that most adults can't hear past 15khz and most kids can't hear past ~20khz.
Even more disturbing is that there is not a whole lot of difference between 8bit and 16bit audio. (Yes, there is a small noticeable difference, but it is not huge).
Which means audio isn't going to get a whole lot better [in terms of clarity] than CD-quality. (In some sense, CDs are over-engineered, considering how many people are happy with low-bitrate mp3s)
I'm not an audio buff, but I would guess the only remaining (incremental) advancements are in the multi-channel area and perhaps in more sophisticated stereo amps/receivers [e.g. the ability to automatically equalize for the room's characteristics with a hand-held mic]. And possibly active noise cancellation -- but this may be inherently limited.
Well, one mitigating factor for Windows machines is the number of reboots needed for regular operation/upgrading. They cannot be compromised before the network interface goes up during the boot.
On the other hand, I wonder if they are vulnerable in the few seconds during shutdown.... Does the 3rd-party firewall shut off before the network interface is disabled?
I recently got a **new** LiION battery for my laptop. Total cost was about $50. (I found the/proc/acpi/battery stuff in Linux even confirmed that it was a new battery)
Also you can get a 12V car adapter and an external 12V battery pack really cheap ~$100. [External LiION batteries for laptops are much more expensive and less flexible].
If you can run your CPU at half/lower speed and turn down the LCD brightness, it helps a lot.
My laptop draws ~4amps at full load/speed with a bright screen. It draws about 2 amps at half speed and and dimmer screen [full load]. And about 1amp with a dimmer screen, half cpu speed, and idling.
Right.. It's called incompetence... There is a difference.
Most software is fairly simple. Things like industrial automation, cash registers, CRM crap, etc don't require highly trained/advanced programmers. The general public thinks "software engineering" is rocket science, but it's really closer to manual labor/construction work.
Most software jobs don't require intricate knowledge of math or engineering. They just need someone to code up a simple application combined with a few customizations or integrate package X with Y in application environment Z. These jobs aren't hot growth areas right now (compared to some other stuff in ECE/CS). Also consider these are positions are sometimes those whose main requirement is "knowledge of Visual Basic".
Thus, I can forsee entire cooperations of criminally stupid/incompetent people -- regardless of which industry they are in. So it doesn't surprise me that pinpads might be insecure.
There are quack doctors, bad lawyers, and bad car mechanics... People somehow think that there won't be badly written software probably because the salaries are higher.
Given a choice between working on a cool new 3D video game and working on the next model of cash register, which would you pick? Why would anyone with a MS/PhD in CS/ECE want to work on cash registers? Yes these degrees are not needed for the work, but the people that get these degrees often [not always] have enough drive+knowledge+wisdom not to do really stupid stuff.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I doubt government regulation will improve things. Education is probably the answer...
There is also the very real potential for influencing the outcome of an election using purely electronic voting by simply causing a power outage in the areas where the population is not likely to vote the way that you want.
Actually, I think the best way to throw an election would be to cause the power outage in an area that would normally vote in a desirable manner, while at the same time doing something more insidious in a difficult area... The power outage would make the other party look bad and rile up the public against them, while providing a distraction about the real thing.
Couldn't malware just work at the driver level, similar to the Sony "rootkit" that got in-between the apps and the cdrom?
This would be almost invisible to the user, but really really bad things could be done. (Like bypassing firewalls, avoiding packet-capture programs, hiding files, etc).
Whenever you fill up your tank, at least a portion of that lines the pockets of the rich oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia who then in turn find ways to get the money to terrorists.
Doesn't that just give you a warm and fuzzy feeling when you see someone fill up their Ford Excursion at a gas station?
The direct route is down the highway. If I took a bike-friendly route it would be much longer than 15 miles
Which leads to the next rhetorical question:
Why are there so few bike routes?
In smaller communities, 30,40,50-something adults in the rest of the world still walk/ride bicycles to work [several miles too!]...
Local roads are often cut/sealed for highways and interstates... They easily could add a bike path (far enough away) that would enjoy a direct route without car intersections, etc...
Yes, this may not be realistic for old parts of cities and downtown areas... But look at the new construction... In the suburbs... Are things being done differently? Are they planning ahead and putting walking trails and bike paths that could be useful for more than just a Sunday stroll?
No.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
a single person experiences very little payback for their contribution
That is the biggest evil in our culture... How many people bother recycling now that a bag of aluminum cans isn't worth much? [If anything].
I was away from my apartment for a couple of months. I turned everything off. My electric bill was insanely low, less than 100KHh -- 1/10 of my usual usage. Guess what? My electric bill went down only a third... Still paid $25/month for not using anything. In other words, using 10x the electricity only costs 3x as much -- a bargain! Where's the incentive?
Water here is shared.... I pay $40/month (USD) whether I bathe three times a day or once a week. And I live by myself...
Judging by the number of souped up 4x4 trucks with sparkling-new looking cargo beds, cars are still too cheap... Even a recent (Lexus) commercial seemed to make fun all-solar car attempts in an effort to promote their new SUV.
Forget environmental concerns... When oil becomes scarce [Or when people think it has], what will happen? How will goods be transported? How will plastics be manufactured? How will coal be mined without the use of gas-powered vehicles? How will people get to work? What will propel ocean liners carrying goods? How will farmers harvest food? How will they deliver it? Keep it refrigerated? Commercial planes aren't going solar anytime soon...
Yes, there are alternatives to some of these... No, I don't think people will plan the switch in time.
Society should not be promoting this sub-culture of waste and greed. Unfortunately, "society" has too many idiots and greedy businessmen for this to change anytime soon.
We seem to try to live as far apart as possible, as far from work, school, etc as possible... Just imagine how much time we could save doing more useful stuff, how much less driving done, and how things could be better...
Or do people in southern california and in large cities enjoy a 1-hr commute to work? Do people really dream of sitting in stopped traffic? Do they fantasize about gridlock? I for one, do not.
Yes, because I'm sure they'd have great difficulty in tracking down a Mr J. B. who has contacted them asking for Linux support and specifications.
Yeah, really difficult... Especially when the guy using the anonymizer service pays for the "service" with his personal credit card and is logged in from his home ip address...
But then the insurance company didn't want to be on the line for defending a libel case. So what did they do? They sued my friend to get out of having to pay the legal fees.
I thought the concept of insurance was to protect the policy holder... I guess the Next Thing will be insurance against insurance companies... (ad nausem)
Just curious, what did libel have to do with housing convenants? Seems really strange unless the board publicly announced "This idiot wanted to put up a basketball court on his own front driveway"
I'm under the impression that AT&T is almost back together from when it was split apart, PLUS it now has wireless phones [Cingular].
Even more strangely, wired pay-phones have been increasing in price in a time where long-distance calls are pretty much free...
Basic supply in demand: For inelastic goods, lowering the price a little won't increase quantity demanded much [not enough to make up for profit lost due to lower price]... Thus, it is in the supplier's interest to keep prices high. I believe inelasticity is the root of all evil under a capitalistic economy.
I recently discovered for myself the used CD market on ebay.
I have currently purchased about ~50 cds. I got most for about $3 - $4 each on average including shipping. Each CD is a full album (no singles). Most have 10-15 songs on them. Many come from shops specializing in the sale of used cds...
Which means I'm paying about $0.30 per song. And to think that someone had to collect these CDs, figure out which ones were scratched, which not, advertise on ebay, put them into a box, and ship them to be via the postal mail...
Even if 25% of the CD is so scratched up that my computer can't read it, I still come out -- way ahead. And I like to think that maybe I'm helping someone [non-RIAA] out... (which may/may not be the case)
And to think that we currently have an *industry* selling electronic copies of songs for $0.99? Thery already had the digitized recording from the recording studios... Bandwidth these days is practically free. There is virtually no packaging or transportation cost. Very little human intervention is required....
So are the music companies colluding? Maybe. Or maybe they are just exploiting the dumbness of their customers... These companies are large enough to **define** the market. They don't have to answer to supply & demand. The real crime is that the public puts up with this and asks for more...
Does anyone remember how buying home VHS/DVD movies used to be expensive? $15-$20 US for a single movie? Lately, Wal-Mart has a huge crate in their electronics dept, filled with DVDs for ~$5-$7 each... (*renting* at blockbuster costs almost that much ~$4). When displayed like that, I realize how stilly this whole $$$ for IP thing really is... But when displayed neatly in nice packaging on a shelf, these videos somehow appear [to the public] to merit their price...
Some might say the $5-$7 movies are crap... Well, what are most of downloadable songs selling for $0.99 EACH??? And movies cost far far more to produce than music...
The MS people were willing to learn more about their field and the PhD people are just plain insane for wasting all those years, when they could have had good,well-paying jobs?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the music industry... Don't forget software....
Microsoft sells "OEM" versions of Windows, Office, etc for 1/2 - 1/3 the price of their "Retail" versions. The OEM has all the functionality of the retail version except its EULA states that you cannot transfer it to another computer after you install it. The EULA also states software is licensed, not sold.
But in this case, the PRIVATE COMPANY is dictating how you may use the LICENSE that you OWN.
Yes, the state government says I can't transfer my driver's license to someone else and they use it. But IP licensing is the old kind of license [that I can think of] that is not given out by a government entity. When did private companies acquire the ability to do this?
Can you imagine a furniture company "licensing" its tables & chairs to customers? Under the agreement that if they move the chair or table to another room, they must purchase another "license"? Or to give them the option of paying 2-3x as much for the ability to transfer their "license" to other rooms in their house or to other houses?
After all, the design and construction of that furniture is a trade secret. We simply can't have people using it as they please...
If I was happily married, had kids, a wife, and knew I had 30 years left
True, I wouldn't choose to work 80 hrs/week in either case. But knowing the immediacy of one's death does cause them to change how one spends their last days...
My mom was diagnosed with hodgkin's lymphoma when she was about 27 [~1982]. [I was born two years earlier]. I think it all started with a strange lump on her neck...
She was treated with chemothearpy and things seemed okay. Two years later, it came back. This time, she was treated with chemothearpy + radiation (using a bone-marrow transplant on her own marrow).
Things were fine for about 10 years. The only lasting effects of her treatment were reduced energy [she got tired very easily]. Otherwise she led a normal life and got to see me grow up.
When the 10 years passed, she suddenly became very weak. My understanding is the bone marrow went kaput and stopped producing good blood cells. She went in for a bone-marrow transplant (her brother's), which required more chemothearpy --she died a few weeks later. She was barely 41 years old, had good eating habits, did not smoke nor drink, exercised, and maintained good body weight her whole life, and had regular check-ups [for the cancer].
Both the 2nd & 3rd treatments were performed at Stanford -- which was/is supposed to be on the leading edge for this kind of stuff.
It sound like your treatment went well and you are back on your feet. I sincerely hope so. I believe methods for hodgkins' treatment have progressed considerably in the past 20 years.
Regardless, life (or death) has ways of surprising us, throwing curves when we least expect them.
After all, for my mom living 10 years without cancer and being in good health, one might has though she would have almost certainly seen me graduate from high school. But that didn't happen. She died during my Junior year.
The improbable does happen. And when it does, it has life-changing consequences for more than just one's self.
Hopefully for you it won't come back. But would you plan your life differently knowing that it would in 10-15 years? You may not find out until it's too late to do things differently.
Kristopher Tate, the 17-year-old who make Zoomr, will undoubtedly become noticed by companies looking for such ambitious programmers. But he got lucky; the rest of us aren't so fortunate.
I'm not sure this kid getting notice is a good thing for him...
I'm not sure how fortunate he will be. If Ebay can get sued for the "Buy It Now" feature, how long will it be until Flickr [or another compnay] sues the 17yr-old for patent infringement? [Or maybe they will wait until he turns 18]
That is, when his thing takes off and starts to compete, I can see Flickr sueing him into smitherenes. [I didn't read the article:] And since he probably hasn't taken the necessary steps to hide behind his own cooperation, this kid will be paying for more than just college loans...
I work in the biotech biz. We've been warned about Chinese "students" snafing our secrets. Thought it was a lot of tinfoil hat paranoia until we saw logs of HUGE attachments going to Asian hotmail addresses. Guess what some of those attachements were? Research data going straight back to China.
Needless to say, his worker agreements were terminated and the person shipped back.
How convenient... Since you shipped him back, he can explain to his Chinese counterparts the details that were not covered in the attachments.
Way to go!
So I'm very jaded about the home theater industry in general.
You should be. People promote 96khz sampling rate audio (0-48khz range) despite the fact that most adults can't hear past 15khz and most kids can't hear past ~20khz.
Even more disturbing is that there is not a whole lot of difference between 8bit and 16bit audio. (Yes, there is a small noticeable difference, but it is not huge).
Which means audio isn't going to get a whole lot better [in terms of clarity] than CD-quality. (In some sense, CDs are over-engineered, considering how many people are happy with low-bitrate mp3s)
I'm not an audio buff, but I would guess the only remaining (incremental) advancements are in the multi-channel area and perhaps in more sophisticated stereo amps/receivers [e.g. the ability to automatically equalize for the room's characteristics with a hand-held mic]. And possibly active noise cancellation -- but this may be inherently limited.
Well, one mitigating factor for Windows machines is the number of reboots needed for regular operation/upgrading. They cannot be compromised before the network interface goes up during the boot.
On the other hand, I wonder if they are vulnerable in the few seconds during shutdown.... Does the 3rd-party firewall shut off before the network interface is disabled?
Silencing dissent weakens the commonwealth by encouraging ignorance and mindless assent.
True. But the public can't be told this directly... One must define to them "ignorance" first. And perhaps "commonwealth" for that matter...
Just curious, which auction is yours?
/proc/acpi/battery stuff in Linux even confirmed that it was a new battery)
I recently got a **new** LiION battery for my laptop. Total cost was about $50. (I found the
Also you can get a 12V car adapter and an external 12V battery pack really cheap ~$100. [External LiION batteries for laptops are much more expensive and less flexible].
If you can run your CPU at half/lower speed and turn down the LCD brightness, it helps a lot.
My laptop draws ~4amps at full load/speed with a bright screen.
It draws about 2 amps at half speed and and dimmer screen [full load]. And about 1amp with a dimmer screen, half cpu speed, and idling.
You can't call it negligence,
Right.. It's called incompetence... There is a difference.
Most software is fairly simple. Things like industrial automation, cash registers, CRM crap, etc don't require highly trained/advanced programmers. The general public thinks "software engineering" is rocket science, but it's really closer to manual labor/construction work.
Most software jobs don't require intricate knowledge of math or engineering. They just need someone to code up a simple application combined with a few customizations or integrate package X with Y in application environment Z. These jobs aren't hot growth areas right now (compared to some other stuff in ECE/CS). Also consider these are positions are sometimes those whose main requirement is "knowledge of Visual Basic".
Thus, I can forsee entire cooperations of criminally stupid/incompetent people -- regardless of which industry they are in. So it doesn't surprise me that pinpads might be insecure.
There are quack doctors, bad lawyers, and bad car mechanics... People somehow think that there won't be badly written software probably because the salaries are higher.
Given a choice between working on a cool new 3D video game and working on the next model of cash register, which would you pick? Why would anyone with a MS/PhD in CS/ECE want to work on cash registers? Yes these degrees are not needed for the work, but the people that get these degrees often [not always] have enough drive+knowledge+wisdom not to do really stupid stuff.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I doubt government regulation will improve things. Education is probably the answer...
I salute them!
With which finger?
There is also the very real potential for influencing the outcome of an election using purely electronic voting by simply causing a power outage in the areas where the population is not likely to vote the way that you want.
Actually, I think the best way to throw an election would be to cause the power outage in an area that would normally vote in a desirable manner, while at the same time doing something more insidious in a difficult area... The power outage would make the other party look bad and rile up the public against them, while providing a distraction about the real thing.
Couldn't malware just work at the driver level, similar to the Sony "rootkit" that got in-between the apps and the cdrom?
This would be almost invisible to the user, but really really bad things could be done. (Like bypassing firewalls, avoiding packet-capture programs, hiding files, etc).
what is GPG?
You are a disgrace to nerds!
Whenever you fill up your tank, at least a portion of that lines the pockets of the rich oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia who then in turn find ways to get the money to terrorists.
Doesn't that just give you a warm and fuzzy feeling when you see someone fill up their Ford Excursion at a gas station?
The direct route is down the highway. If I took a bike-friendly route it would be much longer than 15 miles
Which leads to the next rhetorical question:
Why are there so few bike routes?
In smaller communities, 30,40,50-something adults in the rest of the world still walk/ride bicycles to work [several miles too!]...
Local roads are often cut/sealed for highways and interstates... They easily could add a bike path (far enough away) that would enjoy a direct route without car intersections, etc...
Yes, this may not be realistic for old parts of cities and downtown areas... But look at the new construction... In the suburbs... Are things being done differently? Are they planning ahead and putting walking trails and bike paths that could be useful for more than just a Sunday stroll?
No.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Hey you, RTFM!
Vnc has supported this for quite a while.
The mods must be on crack today...
a single person experiences very little payback for their contribution
That is the biggest evil in our culture... How many people bother recycling now that a bag of aluminum cans isn't worth much? [If anything].
I was away from my apartment for a couple of months. I turned everything off. My electric bill was insanely low, less than 100KHh -- 1/10 of my usual usage. Guess what? My electric bill went down only a third... Still paid $25/month for not using anything. In other words, using 10x the electricity only costs 3x as much -- a bargain! Where's the incentive?
Water here is shared.... I pay $40/month (USD) whether I bathe three times a day or once a week. And I live by myself...
Judging by the number of souped up 4x4 trucks with sparkling-new looking cargo beds, cars are still too cheap... Even a recent (Lexus) commercial seemed to make fun all-solar car attempts in an effort to promote their new SUV.
Forget environmental concerns... When oil becomes scarce [Or when people think it has], what will happen? How will goods be transported? How will plastics be manufactured? How will coal be mined without the use of gas-powered vehicles? How will people get to work? What will propel ocean liners carrying goods? How will farmers harvest food? How will they deliver it? Keep it refrigerated? Commercial planes aren't going solar anytime soon...
Yes, there are alternatives to some of these... No, I don't think people will plan the switch in time.
Society should not be promoting this sub-culture of waste and greed. Unfortunately, "society" has too many idiots and greedy businessmen for this to change anytime soon.
We seem to try to live as far apart as possible, as far from work, school, etc as possible... Just imagine how much time we could save doing more useful stuff, how much less driving done, and how things could be better...
Or do people in southern california and in large cities enjoy a 1-hr commute to work? Do people really dream of sitting in stopped traffic? Do they fantasize about gridlock? I for one, do not.
I mastered Qbasic between 5th and 7th grade...
So VB might be fine, until one is old enough to get a driver's license.
Yes, because I'm sure they'd have great difficulty in tracking down a Mr J. B. who has contacted them asking for Linux support and specifications.
Yeah, really difficult... Especially when the guy using the anonymizer service pays for the "service" with his personal credit card and is logged in from his home ip address...
But then the insurance company didn't want to be on the line for defending a libel case. So what did they do? They sued my friend to get out of having to pay the legal fees.
I thought the concept of insurance was to protect the policy holder... I guess the Next Thing will be insurance against insurance companies... (ad nausem)
Just curious, what did libel have to do with housing convenants? Seems really strange unless the board publicly announced "This idiot wanted to put up a basketball court on his own front driveway"
I try to buy cds where I recognize and like 2-3 songs... [I'm not too good with names]
For many, I like some of the others. If I don't, its not a huge loss.
I'm under the impression that AT&T is almost back together from when it was split apart, PLUS it now has wireless phones [Cingular].
Even more strangely, wired pay-phones have been increasing in price in a time where long-distance calls are pretty much free...
Basic supply in demand: For inelastic goods, lowering the price a little won't increase quantity demanded much [not enough to make up for profit lost due to lower price]... Thus, it is in the supplier's interest to keep prices high. I believe inelasticity is the root of all evil under a capitalistic economy.
I recently discovered for myself the used CD market on ebay.
I have currently purchased about ~50 cds. I got most for about $3 - $4 each on average including shipping. Each CD is a full album (no singles). Most have 10-15 songs on them. Many come from shops specializing in the sale of used cds...
Which means I'm paying about $0.30 per song. And to think that someone had to collect these CDs, figure out which ones were scratched, which not, advertise on ebay, put them into a box, and ship them to be via the postal mail...
Even if 25% of the CD is so scratched up that my computer can't read it, I still come out -- way ahead. And I like to think that maybe I'm helping someone [non-RIAA] out... (which may/may not be the case)
And to think that we currently have an *industry* selling electronic copies of songs for $0.99? Thery already had the digitized recording from the recording studios... Bandwidth these days is practically free. There is virtually no packaging or transportation cost. Very little human intervention is required....
So are the music companies colluding? Maybe. Or maybe they are just exploiting the dumbness of their customers... These companies are large enough to **define** the market. They don't have to answer to supply & demand. The real crime is that the public puts up with this and asks for more...
Does anyone remember how buying home VHS/DVD movies used to be expensive? $15-$20 US for a single movie? Lately, Wal-Mart has a huge crate in their electronics dept, filled with DVDs for ~$5-$7 each... (*renting* at blockbuster costs almost that much ~$4). When displayed like that, I realize how stilly this whole $$$ for IP thing really is... But when displayed neatly in nice packaging on a shelf, these videos somehow appear [to the public] to merit their price...
Some might say the $5-$7 movies are crap... Well, what are most of downloadable songs selling for $0.99 EACH??? And movies cost far far more to produce than music...
So what does that make MS and PhD degree holders?
The MS people were willing to learn more about their field and the PhD people are just plain insane for wasting all those years, when they could have had good,well-paying jobs?