Not to belittle your point, but as a citizen of this 1984 community, I seriously doubt you would even notice that you are being manipulated. Many of the points in your 1984 list could be argued as fulfilled, we're just so used to it that it doesn't seem that way.
Take #2 - How long do you think you would be able to buy anything if our government shut off Visa? Or if the electronic networking that connected banks were to be brought down? How much money do you have in your wallet right now?
Try #3 in a public place.
#4 happens all the time in cases of abuse.
#5 - Well duh.
#6 is hard to prove. To many missing emails.
#7 - Guantanamo. Ever heard of it?
#8 has been demonstrated all week. Just check CNN and look for "Health care reform, town hall meetings"
verses a private company that was caught with it's pants down. I'm sure the government will step in, but not because it cares about the law... There are bound to be government employees that will use Palm Pre's, and they certainly don't want THEIR locations and app usage getting out.
And we're just going to trust that if we shell out some coin, that all the bias we see in the news currently is just going to magically wash away? Right. Frankly, I think there's more money in posting a politically charged opinion that generates page views than you'll ever get charging for "unbiased" media.
You would think that a company the size of Sony could come up with a name that wasn't already out there in the market with a product that is so close in specification and function that it might actually be confused as their competitor with the same name. Or, maybe that was their intent...
The execs at Apple have got to be shaking their heads, and the lawyers are salivating.
Not to belittle your point (I actually agree with you that radio is crap), but when has it ever been any different? Aside from hip-hop, which is a relatively new genre on the radio, hasn't it always been pop, country, and "classic" rock? I suppose you could claim there were "indy" stations, but that was mostly just a way to play the stuff that was too esoteric in it's day to make it big (think Kate Bush and B-52's).
The money has ALWAYS been with "pop". Duh. And pop-ular music has pretty much always been decided by someone else telling you that band X is great, and that if you want to be "current" you need to like them. I can argue the musical superiority of grunge, heavy metal or movie soundtracks, but I'll still be a freak to the greater percentage of the population. So. The greater percentage of the population also has an IQ of 105.
Wow, I can't believe the number of replies from people who either think that "music" is only a live band, or that everything that people listen to from the iTunes Store these days sucks in both quality and content. What a load of crap.
The "music industry" is whatever people currently feel inclined to listen to. If Hanna Montana is all the rage, then who the frak are you to argue? I don't like her stuff, but who cares?! I don't think I like a single currently "popular" band out there, and I'm not even that old.
It's always been about marketing. As a kid, I used to listen to the radio to find new artists. It was either that or word of mouth peer pressure. (If you want to be in our clique, then you must like band X.) But times have changed. I can sample stuff all over the place. I can pick up a card at Starbucks and download a free digital track, or listen to streamed Pandora "radio" on the internet. Sure, I could go pirate stuff, but people don't just pirate gigs and gigs or random musical shit (well, okay... some morons do), they pick the bands they have heard about or sampled.
The music "industry" isn't dying. It's DEAD... and buried. It's just that nobody who has any real push has figured this out yet, or what to do about it. Radio is a waste of time, and beyond sites like Spotify, it's all word of mouth now. Which, frankly, is too damn slow and tedious.
There is no shortage of "music" or musicians. And thanks to the ability for nearly anyone to create studio quality recordings, there's even no shortage of actual material. But people want to be told what's "hot". It's American Bandstand, only there's no one at the helm.
This analogy might work if instead you thought of the end user as EXTENDING their grid. Basically, solar panels supply something that the electric company sells, namely electricity. You're ISP isn't selling you electrons, or even content. They are selling you wires.
Not disagreeing with you, but in almost all cases, the people with solar panels on their roofs are both generators AND consumers. They are already paying various fees and taxes, just as any other customer would. The fact that they only use $5 a month in electricity because of their generation costs is irrelevant. The electric company isn't going to pay them per watt/hour of electricity what they are charging for the same... Not even close. THAT is their profit. That is also the pool that they use when they build or maintain THEIR grid. They get cheap electricity at a fraction of what they charge for it, and Joe Solar gets a low monthly bill because his overall generation minus use is minimal.
If you view Joe Solar as ONLY a generator, then sure, he's mooching off the electric company's infrastructure. But as both... no way. The problem is that more and more people are putting panels on their roofs and their overall profit is at risk of dropping. They don't make as much if you don't use as much. Their "fee" is just a means of trying to recoup that potential lost profit by getting people used to paying extra just for the privilege of having solar panels on their roofs. And that's bogus. Make no mistake, there's no "free lunch" here. If we were getting electricity AT COST, then sure, they could charge us for infrastructure. But they are very much in it for the money, and so make a profit.
Think of electricity like any other commodity. If you were buying shares of stock, wouldn't you be a little upset if you were charged a fee just because the price was lower than it was last week and a lot of people were taking advantage of it?
Uh, actually the parent is right, at least for SoCal. We get brown-out notices on the hottest, brightest days when people crank up the AC. The rest of the year, we're fine. Can't speak for the whole country though.
But I'm going to want them to come out and fix the panels when there's a problem.
Perhaps they could forgo the fee if I generate more than I use annually by a certain amount? After all, I'm building THEM free infrastructure and helping them meet their government required percentage of clean energy.
How much would a setup like this cost? I mean, I can't imagine it's cheaper than hiring a chauffeur, and they're a lot less likely to go BSOD on you while you're doing 70mph down the freeway...
Interesting. I wonder why states don't simply print their own textbooks (beyond the screaming of, "unfair competition" from the publishing industry)? I mean, the states set the curriculum guidelines, why not go a step further and create and print them as well? Then the state can decide (based on budget, etc.) if the state textbooks need an update, or not.
I thought the whole point about the App Store was that you could BUY an app (as in, ONCE). This is very different than services such as Verizon's Get It Now, which allows you to get a SUBSCRIPTION to an app that you will pay for again and again each month for as long as you own the phone (or cancel the subscription). I understand about being able to "try" something to see if it's worth sticking with, but come on, most apps for the iPhone are a buck or two. You pick up a dozen for the cost of lunch. And how long is it going to be before the average "micropayment" starts creeping up to near what the greater percentage of apps cost now (.99)? Poof! You're Verizon again.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to generate power by walking instead of putting it into a lousy pedometer? The sun doesn't _usually_ shine too brightly into the pockets of my pants. Besides, what do I need a pedometer for anyway? That's what GPS is for.
Sorry, I don't buy that logic either. You said 95% of their profit comes from concession sales. Sure, but that's not "cost". How they choose to make a profit is their business, but it doesn't negate the fact that $4.50 is a ridiculous price to pay for 10 oz. of soda. They weigh what they can change with what they can "get away with". Since you are rarely allowed to bring food or drink into a theater, they have you by the nads.
They could just add $10 to the ticket price and charge market prices for concessions, but people would never go for it.
This is the very point I was trying to make with the cell industry. They could just charge you $10 more per month and give you unlimited SMS, but we all got used to ~$20 phone bills from our land lines. More so, those.20 text messages are where they are choosing to make their profit. Just like soda in the theater, it costs them fractions of pennies on the dollar. And just like that theater, there's not a whole hellava lot we can do about it.
I don't go to the movies. I get much better and cheaper service in my home (and quite possibly a bigger screen). But that doesn't mean they (and the cell industry) aren't still screwing the customer for all they are worth.
Your analogy doesn't work for the telcos. Sure, I can "choose" not to have a phone, but it's going to look pretty silly when any one of a dozen different services asks for a phone number and you can't supply one. It'll be even sillier when I fall and break both my legs and my wife can't call 911.
Profit isn't a bad thing, I agree. But "willingly" screwing myself applies to the entertainment industry only because we see them as an optional service. I don't think of my cell phone as optional, especially considering I don't have a land line. I can bitch and moan about the cost of SMS, but really, what am I going to do? Go to another theater where they are still going to charge me $4.50 for my Coke? The problem isn't with the number of users, the capacity of the hardware, or the cost of "research". It's about greedy cellcos that know they have you over a barrel and could care less. They screw you because they can. It's the American Way. Service?... only if it's incredibly profitable or there's a strong marketing angle to it. Doing anything because it's "good" for the customer died a LONG time ago.
... Having said that the books do turn out to be quite expensive, I put that down to the low numbers the publisher expects to sell.
Hmm, that would explain the hard-cover foil embossing and holographic covers I see these days. Have to cut costs somewhere because of those low publishing numbers.
Have you been to the movies lately? Do you really believe it costs $4.50 for the theater to give you a small Coke? They screw you because they can. They will make money wherever they see an opportunity. Customer be dammed.
The problem with this is that YOU are not Joe Consumer. The average internet user might write to blogs, buy products, check their insurance, email, etc. They might have as many as two dozen or more sites that all require them to have an account. Sure, some people might use throw-away info on a few, but I wouldn't bet the majority do. And do you really think those same people are going to memorize a purposely non-intuitive, unique, alphanumeric password for each site? Not a chance.
"NARA, which archived more than 75 million Web sites in 2004 after George Bush's first term ended, will not harvest agency and Congressional Web sites when his current term is over because it says agencies are supposed to be archiving Web content on their own."
Um, are these agencies the same ones that were supposed to be archiving all their e-mail as well? You know, the e-mail that was all conveniently deleted according to "procedure" just before it was needed in a major congressional investigation?
Slashdot Mirror
The device in on your tongue... hmmm...
"Oooh heyo preyee ledy, coo on ower here an leh ey geh a goo lig ah yo."
Not to belittle your point, but as a citizen of this 1984 community, I seriously doubt you would even notice that you are being manipulated. Many of the points in your 1984 list could be argued as fulfilled, we're just so used to it that it doesn't seem that way.
Take #2 - How long do you think you would be able to buy anything if our government shut off Visa? Or if the electronic networking that connected banks were to be brought down? How much money do you have in your wallet right now?
Try #3 in a public place.
#4 happens all the time in cases of abuse.
#5 - Well duh.
#6 is hard to prove. To many missing emails.
#7 - Guantanamo. Ever heard of it?
#8 has been demonstrated all week. Just check CNN and look for "Health care reform, town hall meetings"
verses a private company that was caught with it's pants down. I'm sure the government will step in, but not because it cares about the law... There are bound to be government employees that will use Palm Pre's, and they certainly don't want THEIR locations and app usage getting out.
And we're just going to trust that if we shell out some coin, that all the bias we see in the news currently is just going to magically wash away? Right. Frankly, I think there's more money in posting a politically charged opinion that generates page views than you'll ever get charging for "unbiased" media.
You would think that a company the size of Sony could come up with a name that wasn't already out there in the market with a product that is so close in specification and function that it might actually be confused as their competitor with the same name. Or, maybe that was their intent...
The execs at Apple have got to be shaking their heads, and the lawyers are salivating.
Not to belittle your point (I actually agree with you that radio is crap), but when has it ever been any different? Aside from hip-hop, which is a relatively new genre on the radio, hasn't it always been pop, country, and "classic" rock? I suppose you could claim there were "indy" stations, but that was mostly just a way to play the stuff that was too esoteric in it's day to make it big (think Kate Bush and B-52's).
The money has ALWAYS been with "pop". Duh. And pop-ular music has pretty much always been decided by someone else telling you that band X is great, and that if you want to be "current" you need to like them. I can argue the musical superiority of grunge, heavy metal or movie soundtracks, but I'll still be a freak to the greater percentage of the population. So. The greater percentage of the population also has an IQ of 105.
Wow, I can't believe the number of replies from people who either think that "music" is only a live band, or that everything that people listen to from the iTunes Store these days sucks in both quality and content. What a load of crap.
The "music industry" is whatever people currently feel inclined to listen to. If Hanna Montana is all the rage, then who the frak are you to argue? I don't like her stuff, but who cares?! I don't think I like a single currently "popular" band out there, and I'm not even that old.
It's always been about marketing. As a kid, I used to listen to the radio to find new artists. It was either that or word of mouth peer pressure. (If you want to be in our clique, then you must like band X.) But times have changed. I can sample stuff all over the place. I can pick up a card at Starbucks and download a free digital track, or listen to streamed Pandora "radio" on the internet. Sure, I could go pirate stuff, but people don't just pirate gigs and gigs or random musical shit (well, okay... some morons do), they pick the bands they have heard about or sampled.
The music "industry" isn't dying. It's DEAD... and buried. It's just that nobody who has any real push has figured this out yet, or what to do about it. Radio is a waste of time, and beyond sites like Spotify, it's all word of mouth now. Which, frankly, is too damn slow and tedious.
There is no shortage of "music" or musicians. And thanks to the ability for nearly anyone to create studio quality recordings, there's even no shortage of actual material. But people want to be told what's "hot". It's American Bandstand, only there's no one at the helm.
This analogy might work if instead you thought of the end user as EXTENDING their grid. Basically, solar panels supply something that the electric company sells, namely electricity. You're ISP isn't selling you electrons, or even content. They are selling you wires.
Not disagreeing with you, but in almost all cases, the people with solar panels on their roofs are both generators AND consumers. They are already paying various fees and taxes, just as any other customer would. The fact that they only use $5 a month in electricity because of their generation costs is irrelevant. The electric company isn't going to pay them per watt/hour of electricity what they are charging for the same... Not even close. THAT is their profit. That is also the pool that they use when they build or maintain THEIR grid. They get cheap electricity at a fraction of what they charge for it, and Joe Solar gets a low monthly bill because his overall generation minus use is minimal.
If you view Joe Solar as ONLY a generator, then sure, he's mooching off the electric company's infrastructure. But as both... no way. The problem is that more and more people are putting panels on their roofs and their overall profit is at risk of dropping. They don't make as much if you don't use as much. Their "fee" is just a means of trying to recoup that potential lost profit by getting people used to paying extra just for the privilege of having solar panels on their roofs. And that's bogus. Make no mistake, there's no "free lunch" here. If we were getting electricity AT COST, then sure, they could charge us for infrastructure. But they are very much in it for the money, and so make a profit.
Think of electricity like any other commodity. If you were buying shares of stock, wouldn't you be a little upset if you were charged a fee just because the price was lower than it was last week and a lot of people were taking advantage of it?
Uh, actually the parent is right, at least for SoCal. We get brown-out notices on the hottest, brightest days when people crank up the AC. The rest of the year, we're fine. Can't speak for the whole country though.
But I'm going to want them to come out and fix the panels when there's a problem.
Perhaps they could forgo the fee if I generate more than I use annually by a certain amount? After all, I'm building THEM free infrastructure and helping them meet their government required percentage of clean energy.
How much would a setup like this cost? I mean, I can't imagine it's cheaper than hiring a chauffeur, and they're a lot less likely to go BSOD on you while you're doing 70mph down the freeway...
Oh boy, this can't be good. I could really see this being used maliciously.
Interesting. I wonder why states don't simply print their own textbooks (beyond the screaming of, "unfair competition" from the publishing industry)? I mean, the states set the curriculum guidelines, why not go a step further and create and print them as well? Then the state can decide (based on budget, etc.) if the state textbooks need an update, or not.
I thought the whole point about the App Store was that you could BUY an app (as in, ONCE). This is very different than services such as Verizon's Get It Now, which allows you to get a SUBSCRIPTION to an app that you will pay for again and again each month for as long as you own the phone (or cancel the subscription). I understand about being able to "try" something to see if it's worth sticking with, but come on, most apps for the iPhone are a buck or two. You pick up a dozen for the cost of lunch. And how long is it going to be before the average "micropayment" starts creeping up to near what the greater percentage of apps cost now (.99)? Poof! You're Verizon again.
How long do you think it will be before OS vendors start charging subscription fees for services.
so...
You want to Install Windows? $50
You want to Boot Windows? That's $2 a session.
You want to Install Applications? That'll be $10 a MONTH
You want to play Blu-Ray? That'll be another $50 a MONTH
etc...
Yeah, and that's all well and good until someone mentions virtual memory.
Some old guy fly-fishing in the middle of nowhere when a black helicopter lands nearby and three beefy men in suits and black sunglasses hop out.
"Excuse the interruption of your retirement, Doctor, but you're going to need to come with us..."
Developers, developers, developers, developers!
Wouldn't it be a better idea to generate power by walking instead of putting it into a lousy pedometer? The sun doesn't _usually_ shine too brightly into the pockets of my pants. Besides, what do I need a pedometer for anyway? That's what GPS is for.
Sorry, I don't buy that logic either. You said 95% of their profit comes from concession sales. Sure, but that's not "cost". How they choose to make a profit is their business, but it doesn't negate the fact that $4.50 is a ridiculous price to pay for 10 oz. of soda. They weigh what they can change with what they can "get away with". Since you are rarely allowed to bring food or drink into a theater, they have you by the nads.
They could just add $10 to the ticket price and charge market prices for concessions, but people would never go for it.
This is the very point I was trying to make with the cell industry. They could just charge you $10 more per month and give you unlimited SMS, but we all got used to ~$20 phone bills from our land lines. More so, those .20 text messages are where they are choosing to make their profit. Just like soda in the theater, it costs them fractions of pennies on the dollar. And just like that theater, there's not a whole hellava lot we can do about it.
I don't go to the movies. I get much better and cheaper service in my home (and quite possibly a bigger screen). But that doesn't mean they (and the cell industry) aren't still screwing the customer for all they are worth.
Your analogy doesn't work for the telcos. Sure, I can "choose" not to have a phone, but it's going to look pretty silly when any one of a dozen different services asks for a phone number and you can't supply one. It'll be even sillier when I fall and break both my legs and my wife can't call 911.
Profit isn't a bad thing, I agree. But "willingly" screwing myself applies to the entertainment industry only because we see them as an optional service. I don't think of my cell phone as optional, especially considering I don't have a land line. I can bitch and moan about the cost of SMS, but really, what am I going to do? Go to another theater where they are still going to charge me $4.50 for my Coke? The problem isn't with the number of users, the capacity of the hardware, or the cost of "research". It's about greedy cellcos that know they have you over a barrel and could care less. They screw you because they can. It's the American Way. Service?... only if it's incredibly profitable or there's a strong marketing angle to it. Doing anything because it's "good" for the customer died a LONG time ago.
... Having said that the books do turn out to be quite expensive, I put that down to the low numbers the publisher expects to sell.
Hmm, that would explain the hard-cover foil embossing and holographic covers I see these days. Have to cut costs somewhere because of those low publishing numbers.
Have you been to the movies lately? Do you really believe it costs $4.50 for the theater to give you a small Coke? They screw you because they can. They will make money wherever they see an opportunity. Customer be dammed.
The problem with this is that YOU are not Joe Consumer. The average internet user might write to blogs, buy products, check their insurance, email, etc. They might have as many as two dozen or more sites that all require them to have an account. Sure, some people might use throw-away info on a few, but I wouldn't bet the majority do. And do you really think those same people are going to memorize a purposely non-intuitive, unique, alphanumeric password for each site? Not a chance.
"NARA, which archived more than 75 million Web sites in 2004 after George Bush's first term ended, will not harvest agency and Congressional Web sites when his current term is over because it says agencies are supposed to be archiving Web content on their own."
Um, are these agencies the same ones that were supposed to be archiving all their e-mail as well? You know, the e-mail that was all conveniently deleted according to "procedure" just before it was needed in a major congressional investigation?