Of course ebook prices are fixed (amoungst other digital "goods") - how the hell do you price something that can be copied infinitely at next to zero cost?
Regardless of the cost of copying (either to yourself or to others), you price it at the point that your market estimates say that the expected sales times the sale price will maximize (price * total sales) minus (fixed costs plus (per-unit costs times total sales)).
Low cost of illegal copying probably makes expected sales fall off more sharply with price, but lower cost of legal production also reduces the per-unit cost of the product to you, so it generally reduces the price you can sell it at.
While that's undoubtedly the intent, the text doesn't say that at all.
That purpose, and the application of the law strictly within that purpose, is probably the only thing that makes it enforceable, given the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which trumps mere statute law.
I don't think the first amendment covers replicas of Seals of departments of the federal government anymore than it does creating replicas of currency.
It probably doesn't protect the former any more than the latter.
Then again, it probably does protect images of the currency presented in the same way Wikipedia presented images of the seal. At least, if it doesn't, wikipedia has a lot more to worry about than the seal, since they also have images of US currency.
Assuming that with "BBC" you mean the British Broadcasting Corporation, I don't think American laws matter a lot for them (except for material they sell there).
Because the US government never pursues what it perceived to be criminal violations of US law if they are committed by people outside the borders of the US at the time of the offense. Just ask Manuel Noriega.
At any rate, other media outlets covering the story also display the seal, including Vanity Fair and The New York Times, which presumably are more exposed to US criminal laws than the BBC.
Well, someone had better call David Duchovony and Jillian Anderson. They have even had the gall to do this on TV!
Actually, they didn't. The FBI seal represented in the X-Files (e.g., in the title sequence) is very clearly different from the actual FBI seal. The image of the seal used on Wikipedia (and, for that matter, in pretty much every news story covering the FBI/Wikipedia fight over the use of the seal) is the actual seal.
see what you did there. Your logic break down at a couple of points, though. First, you assume an equivalence between nations and an individual citizen where none exists.
There are differences, but not, at least relevant to the force of law, the ones you point to.
Individual citizens have rights. Governments do not.
Insofar as this is true, it is irrelevant to the force international or domestic laws have behind them, though its relevant to the moral justification of laws. Of course, there, it cuts in the direction of international laws binding nations as more just than domestic laws binding citizens, since the latter involves a government (which has no rights) limiting the freedoms of individuals (who have rights), rather than entities without rights constraining entities that are equally without rights.
Second, when those individual citizens consent to form a government and police force, that force is not beholden to any one private citizen. There are citizens who are not cops. When nations agree to international law, they are expected to uphold it themselves; they're supposed to be their own cops, in other words.
Significant organized police forces haven't historically been a universal norm, self-(or private, for-profit) service enforcement with governments providing courts (and prosecutors for offenses which are held to be against the society or soveriegnty itself rather than merely against the rules the society establishes for interactions between its members) aren't unheard of. So, international law isn't at all unusual among laws in that, while their are standing courts established to enforce international law, enforcement (in the sense of detection, policing, and prosecution) of most international laws binding on nations is self-service, with the occasional ad-hoc summoning of a posse (via, e.g., UN Security Council action) to do policing.
Interesting -- and I'm not suggesting that this is the case with the parent here -- those who dismiss international law most for the lack of standing institutions and dedicated policing/prosecuting authorities are also those most dedicated to blocking the formation of standing insitutions and dedicated policing/prosecuting authorities.
I would figure that they would have planned for it, with spam being so prevalent in almost every internet communication system. But are the measures that they have come up with really effective?
Well, the common social networking and instant messaging technique of using a whitelist where the only message you can get to someone who hasn't cleared you to communicate with them is a request to be added to their whitelist works pretty darned well.
I'm sorry, I have yet to see a movie in 3D where 3D provided anything additional to my movie experience other than a headache.
And your not the only one. OTOH, you also aren't the whole market.
Why do the movie companies believe that we want 3D?
The movie companies kept toying with it because there appeared to be some interest in the market, but didn't use it frequently because the benefit didn't usually outweight the expense.
Movie companies have started using it more as the technology has matured, because it has proven, more and more, to be worth the expense.
It pays off at the box office.
Heck, why do the television manufacturers believe that I'm willing to spend 2 grand more for it?
They probably don't. Believe it or not, you are not the whole of the universe, and the fact that someone makes a 3D TV with a $2,000 premium over conventional TVs doesn't mean they expect you personally to buy it.
Does anyone here feel that its a useful addition to a movie?
I think that -- like color, sound (whether its the difference between silent films and talkies, or mono to stereo, or stereo to surround, etc.), better frame rates, and lots of other things -- it can, used well, enhance the experience.
And, like all the others, it can also be used in a way which adds nothing, or detracts from the experience, and whether any particular use adds, does nothing, or detracts, is subjective and a point on which different viewers will often have widely varying opinions.
The government signed extremely good deals (that is, deals that include a clause that says that you will notify us when you make new discounts available to any of your customers, and you will allow us to have those discounts.
The government is now suing, alleging that Oracle has broken those deals.
What is wrong with the university system is because we've screwed up our high school system to pretty much let -everyone- graduate, a diploma now means nothing.
Well, except that the US highschool graduation rate peaked in 1969 at 77%, and is now below 70%. So, not only does your complaint not accurately reflect the current state of our high school system (without a ridiculously loose definition of "everyone"), it doesn't even reflect the direction of the current trend.
Who are those owners of which you speak? If they are the share holders, then look at the dividend yield. It tends to be tiny.
It tends to be tiny because for various reasons, including tax treatment, timing effects (dividends go to shareholders of record as of a particular date, whereas share value can appreciation be converted to cash immediately), and others, shareholders tend to prefer stock value appreciation to dividend distribution.
No they haven't - They've tried to enable hardware manufacturers to market tablet systems.
Marketing extends beyond making or even branding a product. Microsoft has participated in the marketing of tablet and other mobile systems using its OS's.
Most of that marketing hasn't been notably successful.
Again, its not lack of effort. Its just not being good at it.
I don't see any particular reason to expect that Microsoft trying this again is going to produce different results. They may have a new sense of urgency, but they haven't shown any new sign of productive ideas about how to succeed.
You don't think immortality would be available under say, a 5000 year mortgage plan?
No, because even if the thing used for immortality is reusable (so that it could be recovered and resold to recover all or some of the losses from the bad loan in the event of default), its unlikely to retain its value against newer models, so a very-long-term loan is no good. The effects on the monthly payments become negligible compared to the overall price long before you get anywhere near 5,000 years, and the longer the term is, the greater the risk of default. So, there's no upside and huge downside for the long term for the lender, and negligible upside for the borrower.
Wired reported on the existence of the iPad [boingboing.net] way back in 1999. Why wasn't Microsoft working on their iPad-competior way back then?
Uh, Microsoft has tried to market tablet systems several times in the period between 1999 and 2010.
They've failed to make a big market splash with any of them, of course. But that's not failing to work on it, that's just failing to be any good at it.
Microsoft, why don't you just write some QUALITY software for the iPad instead of trying to go head on in competition? That way, the more iPads Apple sells, the more software you sell.
Yeah, Apple would never just invents pretenses on which to reject applications from vendors which are major competitors with Apple in other markets from the App Store. Which is why you can buy the native Google Voice app that Google built for the iPhone in the App Store.
Programmers are a lot easier to find than people willing and able to lead/run a successful financial firm
Or, financial firm executives just overvalue the skills of other financial executives and managers because doing so is natural and self-validating.
If programmers were making the decisions on who to pay how much, programmers would probably get paid a lot more and non-programming managers and executives would get paid less. But, obviously, its going to be managers -- and particularly executives -- making those decisions, and its not particularly surprising who gets favored.
Unfortunately, employers use the "bad economy" argument to try and justify the rampant abuse. A perceived bad economy is an employer's best friend.
Of course, the model wherein even during the recovery between the two most recent recessions, pretty much all the rewards of the growth went to a very narrow band at the top is a big part of the reason that we have a bad economy (the housing collapse was the blow that broke it, but the state that economy was in that made it fragile was due to the way that the distribution of rewards over the preceding several years had made it), so in a large part its the major capital owners using the results of them grabbing everything for themselves and not allowing workers to share in the gains to justify grabbing everything for themselves and not allowing workers to share in the gains.
If you shift all the income from the workers to the managers, everybody will want to make business, and there'll be nobody left to do some work.
Actually, most of the rewards of business operations in the US (and, for that matter, much of the world) goes to the owners, not the workers (including the managers), though managers -- especially at the executive level -- do quite well compared to other workers.
That's why our economic system is called "capitalism": it is run by, and for the benefit of, the large holders of capital.
But there were scores of college students getting email accounts that weren't AOL, and (since I worked for an ISP at the time, I know) there were scores of non-AOL home users who just wanted email to leave messages for their kids (because their kids always had their modem using the dorm phone line). It exploded from college use, just like Facebook did. Maybe if college groups like frat houses sought this open source social network as a "better way to 'control exposure'" then it would eventually bleed Facebook dry like Facebook did to MySpace.
Lots of college students now are getting Google Apps accounts, as many colleges are "going Google" -- so an almost perfect analogy (though with Google its somewhat more likely to be open-specification than open-source, though some Google offerings are both) to email would be if Google rolled open social networking into Google Apps for Domains.
Currently, Google's existing social offerings are tied to Google Accounts but not, IIRC, available from Apps accounts, but which apps are available to Apps accounts is obviously subject to change.
Would anyone write new scripts in perl 6 as opposed to Python or Ruby or Perl 5?
Yes. Look, I mostly prefer Ruby out of the trio of Ruby/Python/Perl, with Python a close second, but Perl obviously has an active community and there are obviously quite a lot of people interested in Perl 6.
Yeah, in some ways its a big change from Perl 5 and there is going to be some time for people to hop on board (just as with Python 2.x to Python 3 and Ruby 1.8.x to Ruby 1.9.x) and sure, some people might prefer Python or Ruby to Perl (just as some people prefer Python or Perl to Ruby, and some people prefer Ruby or Perl to Python.)
Why do people insist on thinking that if they don't prefer something, no one else in the world is interested in it?
People with money to buy an awesome TV and awesome sound system won't take advantage of the combined audio / video anyway.
Why? It is better -- with a high quality digital channel for both -- to do that from source devices to receiver if you have an A/V receiver rather than just a audio receiver, with just video to the TV.
If your TV supports it, its probably also better to do combined digital A/V from source to TV and just audio the receiver if you have an audio-only rreceiver and multiple combined audio/video sources.
It would be great to have an open-source, open-standards, distributed social-networking system to replace Facebook. Except that when you mention SMTP, I shudder to think of all the spam that such a system would make possible.
Believe it or not, people building communications standards since the development of SMTP have noticed the problem of spam in email, and spam-prevention has often been a central feature of newer communications standards. XMPP, AMQP, and all kinds of other post-SMTP messaging protocols all have features designed to prevent spam (and often have spam prevention as an explicit part of their charter.)
Unless they can get Farmville ported to an open platform most facebook users will never leave no matter hope open or technically superior an alternative is.
Why do you think Google -- who is also beyond a lot of open standards in the social space -- has been reported recently to be in talks with Zynga?
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of the cost of copying (either to yourself or to others), you price it at the point that your market estimates say that the expected sales times the sale price will maximize (price * total sales) minus (fixed costs plus (per-unit costs times total sales)).
Low cost of illegal copying probably makes expected sales fall off more sharply with price, but lower cost of legal production also reduces the per-unit cost of the product to you, so it generally reduces the price you can sell it at.
That purpose, and the application of the law strictly within that purpose, is probably the only thing that makes it enforceable, given the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which trumps mere statute law.
It probably doesn't protect the former any more than the latter.
Then again, it probably does protect images of the currency presented in the same way Wikipedia presented images of the seal. At least, if it doesn't, wikipedia has a lot more to worry about than the seal, since they also have images of US currency.
Because the US government never pursues what it perceived to be criminal violations of US law if they are committed by people outside the borders of the US at the time of the offense. Just ask Manuel Noriega.
At any rate, other media outlets covering the story also display the seal, including Vanity Fair and The New York Times, which presumably are more exposed to US criminal laws than the BBC.
Actually, they didn't. The FBI seal represented in the X-Files (e.g., in the title sequence) is very clearly different from the actual FBI seal. The image of the seal used on Wikipedia (and, for that matter, in pretty much every news story covering the FBI/Wikipedia fight over the use of the seal) is the actual seal.
There are differences, but not, at least relevant to the force of law, the ones you point to.
Insofar as this is true, it is irrelevant to the force international or domestic laws have behind them, though its relevant to the moral justification of laws. Of course, there, it cuts in the direction of international laws binding nations as more just than domestic laws binding citizens, since the latter involves a government (which has no rights) limiting the freedoms of individuals (who have rights), rather than entities without rights constraining entities that are equally without rights.
Significant organized police forces haven't historically been a universal norm, self-(or private, for-profit) service enforcement with governments providing courts (and prosecutors for offenses which are held to be against the society or soveriegnty itself rather than merely against the rules the society establishes for interactions between its members) aren't unheard of. So, international law isn't at all unusual among laws in that, while their are standing courts established to enforce international law, enforcement (in the sense of detection, policing, and prosecution) of most international laws binding on nations is self-service, with the occasional ad-hoc summoning of a posse (via, e.g., UN Security Council action) to do policing.
Interesting -- and I'm not suggesting that this is the case with the parent here -- those who dismiss international law most for the lack of standing institutions and dedicated policing/prosecuting authorities are also those most dedicated to blocking the formation of standing insitutions and dedicated policing/prosecuting authorities.
Well, the common social networking and instant messaging technique of using a whitelist where the only message you can get to someone who hasn't cleared you to communicate with them is a request to be added to their whitelist works pretty darned well.
And your not the only one. OTOH, you also aren't the whole market.
The movie companies kept toying with it because there appeared to be some interest in the market, but didn't use it frequently because the benefit didn't usually outweight the expense.
Movie companies have started using it more as the technology has matured, because it has proven, more and more, to be worth the expense.
It pays off at the box office.
They probably don't. Believe it or not, you are not the whole of the universe, and the fact that someone makes a 3D TV with a $2,000 premium over conventional TVs doesn't mean they expect you personally to buy it.
I think that -- like color, sound (whether its the difference between silent films and talkies, or mono to stereo, or stereo to surround, etc.), better frame rates, and lots of other things -- it can, used well, enhance the experience.
And, like all the others, it can also be used in a way which adds nothing, or detracts from the experience, and whether any particular use adds, does nothing, or detracts, is subjective and a point on which different viewers will often have widely varying opinions.
I think you misunderstand.
The government signed extremely good deals (that is, deals that include a clause that says that you will notify us when you make new discounts available to any of your customers, and you will allow us to have those discounts.
The government is now suing, alleging that Oracle has broken those deals.
Well, except that the US highschool graduation rate peaked in 1969 at 77%, and is now below 70%. So, not only does your complaint not accurately reflect the current state of our high school system (without a ridiculously loose definition of "everyone"), it doesn't even reflect the direction of the current trend.
But don't let facts get in the way of your rant.
It tends to be tiny because for various reasons, including tax treatment, timing effects (dividends go to shareholders of record as of a particular date, whereas share value can appreciation be converted to cash immediately), and others, shareholders tend to prefer stock value appreciation to dividend distribution.
Marketing extends beyond making or even branding a product. Microsoft has participated in the marketing of tablet and other mobile systems using its OS's.
Most of that marketing hasn't been notably successful.
Again, its not lack of effort. Its just not being good at it.
I don't see any particular reason to expect that Microsoft trying this again is going to produce different results. They may have a new sense of urgency, but they haven't shown any new sign of productive ideas about how to succeed.
No, because even if the thing used for immortality is reusable (so that it could be recovered and resold to recover all or some of the losses from the bad loan in the event of default), its unlikely to retain its value against newer models, so a very-long-term loan is no good. The effects on the monthly payments become negligible compared to the overall price long before you get anywhere near 5,000 years, and the longer the term is, the greater the risk of default. So, there's no upside and huge downside for the long term for the lender, and negligible upside for the borrower.
Uh, Microsoft has tried to market tablet systems several times in the period between 1999 and 2010.
They've failed to make a big market splash with any of them, of course. But that's not failing to work on it, that's just failing to be any good at it.
Yeah, Apple would never just invents pretenses on which to reject applications from vendors which are major competitors with Apple in other markets from the App Store. Which is why you can buy the native Google Voice app that Google built for the iPhone in the App Store.
Or, financial firm executives just overvalue the skills of other financial executives and managers because doing so is natural and self-validating.
If programmers were making the decisions on who to pay how much, programmers would probably get paid a lot more and non-programming managers and executives would get paid less. But, obviously, its going to be managers -- and particularly executives -- making those decisions, and its not particularly surprising who gets favored.
Of course, the model wherein even during the recovery between the two most recent recessions, pretty much all the rewards of the growth went to a very narrow band at the top is a big part of the reason that we have a bad economy (the housing collapse was the blow that broke it, but the state that economy was in that made it fragile was due to the way that the distribution of rewards over the preceding several years had made it), so in a large part its the major capital owners using the results of them grabbing everything for themselves and not allowing workers to share in the gains to justify grabbing everything for themselves and not allowing workers to share in the gains.
Actually, most of the rewards of business operations in the US (and, for that matter, much of the world) goes to the owners, not the workers (including the managers), though managers -- especially at the executive level -- do quite well compared to other workers.
That's why our economic system is called "capitalism": it is run by, and for the benefit of, the large holders of capital.
Lots of college students now are getting Google Apps accounts, as many colleges are "going Google" -- so an almost perfect analogy (though with Google its somewhat more likely to be open-specification than open-source, though some Google offerings are both) to email would be if Google rolled open social networking into Google Apps for Domains.
Currently, Google's existing social offerings are tied to Google Accounts but not, IIRC, available from Apps accounts, but which apps are available to Apps accounts is obviously subject to change.
Yes. Look, I mostly prefer Ruby out of the trio of Ruby/Python/Perl, with Python a close second, but Perl obviously has an active community and there are obviously quite a lot of people interested in Perl 6.
Yeah, in some ways its a big change from Perl 5 and there is going to be some time for people to hop on board (just as with Python 2.x to Python 3 and Ruby 1.8.x to Ruby 1.9.x) and sure, some people might prefer Python or Ruby to Perl (just as some people prefer Python or Perl to Ruby, and some people prefer Ruby or Perl to Python.)
Why do people insist on thinking that if they don't prefer something, no one else in the world is interested in it?
Why? It is better -- with a high quality digital channel for both -- to do that from source devices to receiver if you have an A/V receiver rather than just a audio receiver, with just video to the TV.
If your TV supports it, its probably also better to do combined digital A/V from source to TV and just audio the receiver if you have an audio-only rreceiver and multiple combined audio/video sources.
Why not?
Does the fact that he doesn't get paid a lot justify him wasting my time rather than being honest and saying "I don't know".
Since when is the FTC composed of elected officials?
Believe it or not, people building communications standards since the development of SMTP have noticed the problem of spam in email, and spam-prevention has often been a central feature of newer communications standards. XMPP, AMQP, and all kinds of other post-SMTP messaging protocols all have features designed to prevent spam (and often have spam prevention as an explicit part of their charter.)
Why do you think Google -- who is also beyond a lot of open standards in the social space -- has been reported recently to be in talks with Zynga?