Fair enough but data usage isn't a constant. As has been mentioned data is bursty by it's nature and where there's a lack of capacity one moment there is excess capacity the next.
Nor am I mixing up the differences between constant demand as opposed to rising demand. Ever increasing is dubious as I'm not in the habit of projecting that far into the future. Though there is increasing demand right now, that I'll give you.
Some ISP's have chosen the cap route which have proven very unpopular others have chosen slightly increased monthly rates which, while unpopular, don't leave the user with a bad taste in their mouth every billing cycle which is the major draw back to caps.
And do I use the same amount of data I did in 2000? No. Has my ISP increased capacity in the 12 years since? Yes. In fact I installed, tested and designed an good part of that upgrade as part of the regular cycle of network upgrades all telcos do as part of their normal business. Heck, we made/make enough from Broadband to afford it quite handily. Our only challenge is geographical not monetary. It's part and parcel of the normal cost of doing business. Cableco's face different challenges with coaxial outside plant, a technology developed as simplex (one way) transmission whereas telcos have always operated in duplex (two way). And let's do keep in mind that network capacity and bandwidth are two different things.
The near-zero marginal cost not only takes into account the amount of data in the network but, as you say, the cost of maintenance and, as importantly, the profit made which can cancel out the cost of maintenance. Expansion and upgrading are maintenance.
Please forgive me for using local slang for electricity transmission and generation. It wasn't an attempt to confuse but me just being lazy. ;-)
So if the injunction is granted in full by the German court and the German court, not Motorola, enforce the injunction by putting it in immediate effect then a judge in Washington State can turn around and try to find Motorola liable for the German court enforcing the injunction?
Gonna make the Germans very happy, that is and make Microsoft even less popular among Eurocrats and politicians than it already is which, until I saw this, I just didn't think was possible.
Of course the German court could then step in and fine Microsoft the equivalent amount that the court in Seattle fines Motorola and then we get into a nice little closed loop here.
AT&T's investment in network improvements isn't simply for end user Internet capacity.
Keeping in mind that AT&T is a full spectrum telco not simply a long distance company or an ISP but owning and controlling several ILECs, satellite services to which we get to add things like an enormous chunk of backbone services and capacity for the Internet itself.
So your tossing out of the $19 billion figure, by itself means nothing. How much of this was for upgrades to old and outdated equipment in their network which was due for replacement no matter what, how much of it was strictly for internal use such as routing voice and cell calls through their network (via the Internet), how much for new services they were offering and how much for expansion. Then, how much does the new expansion is driven my capacity needs of business, government and residential users and how much was driven by simply by population expansion both in numbers and new customer numbers. Let's also keep in mind that AT&T's network is enormous and global in scope and operation. So the what went where is important.
Keep in mind that given all of this the nature of telco's is to build in relatively small chunks, put the new equipment in service and then remove whatever equipment the improvements are replacing. The reason for this is simple enough -- to use the old stuff as long as possible as an income stream to pay for the new equipment and then be able to provide a minimal downtime for switching from old to new. Preferably unnoticeable downtime for end users.
The end result is that AT&T was collecting income from everything but the totally new equipment/services right up until the last second. As the totally new equipment/services was the smallest part of the services we can safely say there was no net loss on income while this was all happening.
So again, what kind of capacity, where and for what reasons. The bulk of it was replacement of old and antiquated equipment, actually. Old in telecom these days is often less than 5 years so the schedules need to take into account things like writing down the old stuff before installing the new and other tax reasons.
In the industry the planning for the demand for increased bandwidth and capacity over pre ADSL/HDSL days has long been for 100% or more with the midtime frame needs projected to expand logarithmically before declining. Exactly what has happened, by the way.
The needs have gone up tremendously but so has the capacity as a result of the last statement since 2001. Telecoms, by and large, haven't been caught off guard by any of this and have anticipated this even if, as late as the mid 90s the Internet and Web were being written off as fads.
What you're missing in all of this is that though the need for capacity has increased the very nature of data transmission and the architecture of the Internet itself has kept the needs manageable for telcos in that they were in the data transmission business long before people wanted internet to the house. The other is that a great deal of what AT&T spent last year wasn't driven exclusively by needs of Internet customers but for other reasons.
But once the architecture is in place, yes the bits themselves are free. There will always be a need to upgrade and update equipment whit the next big burst of spending in telecom coming when the conversion of outside plant from twisted pair to fibre accelerates.
For a company the side of AT&T the costs will always be in the billions for major upgrades. That is unavoidable. If AT&T were stupid, which they are not, the upgrade wouldn't have taken in to account projections of increased demand though you can be absolutely certain that they did. The usual for situations in the telecom industry are three to five year projections and in the case of the Internet the telecom industry has learned to be very generous with those projections.
The effect on the network(s) would be far worse if data was flowing all the time in both directions if it weren't for the bursty nature of data transmission and the design of the Internet which is, in itself, very bursty.
The cap defense is lacking in being grounded in reality. Both in the sense that you can't raise money for expansion, typically done though market borrowing and lending anyway, by not selling the product beyond a certain arbitrarily set limit and by misunderstanding that data and the Internet are somehow the same as, say, television in that capacity in signals is always there as is normal with analog technologies rather than rapid off/off use as is the case with data and with the Internet.
I don't have a problem with metering, or with tiers of service (they exist now) but caps are bullshit. Even in a market where there's a scarcity of resources which, as you know by now, I don't accept either. There is no inherent shortage of capacity unless that shortage was introduced by the ISP by design. Horrific planning, not enough capacity, isn't solved by caps. In just about all cases caps are simply a way to gouge the consumer, nothing more, nothing less.
I'll be less polite than Lobo Santo and just say limits on usage and capacity being linked in is bullshit.
If an ISP has capacity constraints then bloody well fix it and get the money later by raising prices, if you must. Imposing caps does nothing to raise the money because the caps mean the data usage the ISP caps means the money will never get raised. If they must then meter the usage and bill for it. Kinda like Hydro companies do.
As for capacity there's the small problem that data is inherently bursty. It's sent and received in a matter of microseconds and it's gone. Capacity restored. The very design of the Internet makes it even more bursty as every internet connection is dropped after the data is sent or received and reconnected when one end of the other sends or receives some more data. At worst, in quiet moments, the user is left with a carrier tone above or below the data spectrum to keep their connection to the carrier up.
I'm more than willing to get into discussions of supply and demand but what you're claiming to be a scarce resource isn't for a properly equipped ISP. By the way, economics is also the study of resource allocation in times of abundance, too.
As I don't accept that there is scarcity for a half way well equipped ISP the notion of scarcity doesn't enter into it. That I don't accept that it's possible to raise money to fix an imaginary problem by not selling the service you're in the business of selling doesn't raise a penny to fix that problem isn't my problem either.
Your problem is that you don't understand the architecture of these here interwebs, which were designed to deal with and route around capacity scarcity, or the basis of data transmission and how that works.
(Not, in fairness, that many people do, unless you've worked in the field.)
The problem IS caps. There really isn't a technological reason for implementing them at all. It's just a way of digging deeper into the user's pocket.
And, YES, the problem is competition. There's precious little of it about.
One solution as things move towards more competition would be to declare what ISP's do as common carriers because Internet access is a utility these days. The ISP's would howl with outrage but who cares? The volume and pitch of the howling only goes to show that they'd actually have to provide the service they promise and probably make a dollar or two less out of every $10 grand they get from customers.
Caps are just a way to dig deeper into customer's pockets. There really is no technical reason for them.
Well, at least it took a few post before a troll brought up their favourite bad guy, Google.
As for "greedy, parasitical business model" Google has to go no further than look at how the "content" industry operates.
And what they heck that as to do with "Life, Liberty and Blazing Broadband" is beyond me but I suppose that you found a link somewhere. Or it's been a few days since you tried to trash Google and it boomeranged on you but you like pain so you thought you'd try again.
Or the sentence "That mantra isn't about "piracy" or wanting things for free. It's about a recognition of just how powerful and important the internet and internet freedom is as a fundamental principle of their identity."
Or was it just a knee jerk response to a headline so you figured you could fire off another tiresome adhom that has nothing whatever to do with the subject at hand?
Know something? You're not even very good at being a foul mouthed troll.
For some us more adult types, though I question my membership in adulthood every now and then.
I worked in telecom in the days of the early Web and dial up at speeds that would accurately be called narrowband. (48.8 bps modem) I was also an early adopter of the Web which struck me as simply wonderful when I found it. What a place! And what a pile of information at my fingertips! Even if the best search engines of the day were piles of steaming crap. Oh yeah, and places like usenet where you really got to hang out with the copyright outlaws even though you almost certainly faced computer death if you spent half the night downloading a 5 min porn clip or the latest code to improve the performance of Windows 3.x!
I remember our network engineers getting really upset at people, like me, who kept lines tied up wandering the Internet and Web instead of leaving them idle which was how things were done in those days, and still are, on calculations of how many calls on what days, what time and so on determined the number of lines in an office. Darn but that Internet was dangerous!
At the time my employer was a month or two away from rolling out ADSL as an end user "feature" I was at a sales conference about how to build something for a start up company that they wanted that would send and receive data and mail at high speeds. Sales came up with an expensive package that included a nailed down T3 connection from their site to our nearest central office which, while broadband in any sense of the word was broadband isn't what they wanted. There was no proposal for email or other things this customer wanted because sales felt that would eat into potential profit from ADSL or HDSL down the line and what was this thing called the Internet that I and a couple of other techie guys kept talking about? One of them went so far as to call it a fad. Surely it would go away. And surely they weren't serious about hooking up to the local cableco for data (!!) that was telco turf and what did a cableco know about that?!
They put the proposal in and I got the phone call I knew I'd get from my contact there who wanted Internet access at what was passing for broadband in those days and, no, ISDN just wasn't good enough. I did a runaround sales and got the company an "evaluation" install of corporate ADSL which was really HDSL by another name, the company whipped up a web site, got their email address and they were off. I also got to deal with an unhappy salesguy who lost his commission on his expensive, unworkable and out of spec proposal to them. I told him that it was his name on the sale so he'd get something, anyway, and to be happy and maybe he ought to look into this fad a little deeper.
I'm writing all of this to illustrate that from the moment I heard about the Web I was on it and have never stopped using it, or the broader Internet that it rides on.
Like the young women in the car SOPA and PIPA infuriated me. As much for the certainty that it wouldn't work as it's clumsy attempt to censor the Internet. Like the young women I'm a digital native, though, perhaps, digital immigrant is more appropriate as while I understand their view of the world, the Web and the Internet and completely share it even though I didn't grow up with it.
I started out on a Tandy 1000 desktop (oh, gawd!), not a laptop, eventually went to the laptop and now the smart phone.
The problem is that the "content" industry takes advantage of politicians, bureaucrats and others who are digital outsiders. Few, if any, of these people have any idea of the impact the Web and the Internet have had on the world, on trade, business, culture and identity. It's easier to brand what you don't understand as lawless then it is to embrace it. Particularly if you don't use it or on the outside looking "in".
We haven't seen the end of SOPA/PIPA/CISPA kind of legislation nor have we seen the end of ACTA/TPP kinds of "trade agreements" which are more about protecting analog turf than adapting to what digital natives or digital immigrants already know to be the truth about the Web and the Internet. It's NOT lawless but it does have a culture of its own and a way of doing things that is different than the analog world.
It demands speed in releasing "content" so that consumers can get it. And without geographical restrictions which are now meaningless. This is the adaptation the "content" industries refuse to make. Why is beyond me because I'm sure they'd make a bundle just by making the adaptation, perhaps more than they are now. But they won't because it's out of their comfort zone, and how they've done business since forever. Then again, it was also how buggy makers had done business forever and we know what happened to them. More to the point we know what happened to telegraph only companies who didn't move into telephony.
Too bad, so sad. Nothing at all to do with copyright at the end of the day but service.
So, I think I'll adopt the phrase "Life, Liberty and Blazing Broadband", print it out and pin it to the wall.
I wonder if, just for a moment, someone stopped to consider that reports of counterfeits, real ones, are increasing because of wide spread internet access?
I said real to differentiate between those in US border states who get their meds from on line pharmacies Canada which are then legally shipped into the United States.
Not those which can cause sickness or death if taken or nothing at all in the case of "sugar pills". In the latter case beware of the placebo effect which can be extremely powerful at times so the person taking them does get some healing effects from them.
The Internet may make it easier to access so-called counterfeit drugs, say Tylenol 3 which is an over the counter drug in Canada but needs script in the USA.
That self same Web makes it far easier to spread news about dangerous fakes than was possible before.
What Big Pharma really hates, though, is that the Web makes it easier to report and spread news about undocumented side effects of "legitimate" drugs that can cause death, injury and addiction whether they're being used off label or not.
Either way, news gets around. And either way government hates it.
In most cases, though, these days, the prescription has to be written by a practitioner licensed to do that kind of thing in the province where the prescription comes from.
That said, from what I do know of this is that seniors in border states will often come into Canada, get a GP here and then have the legal drugs sent into the USA on refills. For better or worse that's how most Canadian based online pharmacies have to operate these days.
As much as we may long for "the good old days" I still remember the local movie houses screaming that the appearance of video rental and sales stores would mean the end of their business. They didn't, of course, but there are a lot fewer screens around. Partly because people stopped going out to see a film in a cramped, dark, dirty movie house unless it was a mega blockbuster and wait for the video to come out where to could be watched in the comfort of home. The Web just accelerated that trend, piracy or not.
E-books are starting to do the same to publishing. This is in it's infancy for at the moment and the design of ebooks sucks big time but when that's overcome the day of dead tree books will be over. (Of course it needs a universal format for ebooks but that will come too.)
Your friend, the graphics designer, can find work for her because even ebooks are going to need "covers" because we expect it and because even ebooks need good layout, design and readable fonts. If she's flexible then there's work for her.
As for working in a video store, yes, the Web has killed those off along with Netflix and similar services. It's the price we all pay, at times, for technological progress.
Old jobs disappear, new ones appear as a result. I can't count the number of times I thought technology would take me out of my work over the 35 years I worked in telecom. Instead I adapted, became computer literate and learned new skills and tasks and stayed working.
I do love dead tree books, by the way. I also realize that their time is passing except for niche markets. I suspect that, when I'm gone, my family will get rid of 95% of the books I have and cherish and that will be it. By then, with luck, I'll have a nice supply of ebooks by then that they'll have to wade through too!
There's Paramount's way of looking at the world and there's reality. The two don't seem to intersect anywhere along the line.
One of the best ways of minimizing a threat to an individual's (or corporate) way of looking at the world is to deny that it's happening at all and if it is that it can't possibly be successful. Corporations get the additional "benefit" that they can propagandize their view to anyone that will listen or, even better, legislators.
Al Perry won't go "off message" because that would upset all the lobbying the *AA's have done to convince Congress critters and other legislators around the world that the end of the "content" world is nigh even if there are examples like Coulton's and Louis CK's. Even if it works for those two it can't possibly for anyone less well known. Even worse, they're giving up the "protection" of copyright even if they aren't completely giving it up.
Denial and propaganda can be powerful things, sometimes, even if the face of reality. For the "content" industry we've reached the point where it isn't working anymore on the citizenry and public so now they want to pick their audiences. Legislators and those likely to become legislators like lawyers.
One of the reasons I forwarded the newsletter to Mike is because Wardell goes though this in the newsletter.
As he says, the group that just want it free, your freetards, aren't buying no matter what he does so just write them off. Then he goes on to say that it's the underserved who "pirate" because they're pissed at the publisher (hello, Ubisoft) and they're the untapped market which they serve to earn them by doing just that. I'm not a gamer but from the product of theirs that I use, Fences, my experience is that they serve their market well. He also points out that the vast majority of us will pay for something we know has quality and value.
By writing off the pirates he's not wasting time going after people that won't buy no matter what. As for his eroding the entire business model of companies like Ubisoft, well if it does that then Ubisoft has no one but themselves to blame.
This isn't new for this company. They've been doing it for quite a while now. People still buy Stardock products and they suffer no more or less lost sales to "piracy" than do other game and utility companies.
If you notice the date, this newsletter came out just after the SOPA/PIPA black out.
I'm not much of a gamer so I have nothing to say about that end of their business. I do use Fences for Windows and it's delightful.
They have proven that given quality, value and service people will pay for product. To date, people haven't stopped buying, despite your apocalyptic view of humanity.
Perhaps it's you and whatever business model you are afraid will be eroded away are the ones who are wrong. Not Wardell.
For what it's worth I agree with those who saw this as him using more force on the knock offs than on his own brand.
BUT
The knockoffs were seriously damages on the first bounce and I could hear one of them cracking as soon as he stood on it.
The truism you "you get what you pay for" holds up here.
For what it's worth, I've sat in one of these chairs and they're incredibly uncomfortable particularly for those of us with injured spines. The genuine article, by the way.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: DandonTRJ on Apr 12th, 2012 @ 4:28pm
Sigh.
Architects routinely copyright their designs to the extent that the law allows. And the do charge the owner of the structure being built and, therefore, indirectly the general contractor in charge of constructing it.
Before handing over the drawings and notes whoever hired her for that has to pay her. Often quite a chunk of change.
Oh, and FYI, almost no one does blueprints anymore. Even those things that sorta look like them are computer generated and printed off on the nearest laser printer.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
Nor am I mixing up the differences between constant demand as opposed to rising demand. Ever increasing is dubious as I'm not in the habit of projecting that far into the future. Though there is increasing demand right now, that I'll give you.
Some ISP's have chosen the cap route which have proven very unpopular others have chosen slightly increased monthly rates which, while unpopular, don't leave the user with a bad taste in their mouth every billing cycle which is the major draw back to caps.
And do I use the same amount of data I did in 2000? No. Has my ISP increased capacity in the 12 years since? Yes. In fact I installed, tested and designed an good part of that upgrade as part of the regular cycle of network upgrades all telcos do as part of their normal business. Heck, we made/make enough from Broadband to afford it quite handily. Our only challenge is geographical not monetary. It's part and parcel of the normal cost of doing business. Cableco's face different challenges with coaxial outside plant, a technology developed as simplex (one way) transmission whereas telcos have always operated in duplex (two way). And let's do keep in mind that network capacity and bandwidth are two different things.
The near-zero marginal cost not only takes into account the amount of data in the network but, as you say, the cost of maintenance and, as importantly, the profit made which can cancel out the cost of maintenance. Expansion and upgrading are maintenance.
Please forgive me for using local slang for electricity transmission and generation. It wasn't an attempt to confuse but me just being lazy. ;-)
On the post: US Judge Forbids Motorola From Using German Injunction Against Microsoft
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Gonna make the Germans very happy, that is and make Microsoft even less popular among Eurocrats and politicians than it already is which, until I saw this, I just didn't think was possible.
Of course the German court could then step in and fine Microsoft the equivalent amount that the court in Seattle fines Motorola and then we get into a nice little closed loop here.
On the post: ACTA Closer To Death: Remaining EU Supporters Contemplate Rejecting It
It all reminds me of
Yet. :-)
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
Keeping in mind that AT&T is a full spectrum telco not simply a long distance company or an ISP but owning and controlling several ILECs, satellite services to which we get to add things like an enormous chunk of backbone services and capacity for the Internet itself.
So your tossing out of the $19 billion figure, by itself means nothing. How much of this was for upgrades to old and outdated equipment in their network which was due for replacement no matter what, how much of it was strictly for internal use such as routing voice and cell calls through their network (via the Internet), how much for new services they were offering and how much for expansion. Then, how much does the new expansion is driven my capacity needs of business, government and residential users and how much was driven by simply by population expansion both in numbers and new customer numbers. Let's also keep in mind that AT&T's network is enormous and global in scope and operation. So the what went where is important.
Keep in mind that given all of this the nature of telco's is to build in relatively small chunks, put the new equipment in service and then remove whatever equipment the improvements are replacing. The reason for this is simple enough -- to use the old stuff as long as possible as an income stream to pay for the new equipment and then be able to provide a minimal downtime for switching from old to new. Preferably unnoticeable downtime for end users.
The end result is that AT&T was collecting income from everything but the totally new equipment/services right up until the last second. As the totally new equipment/services was the smallest part of the services we can safely say there was no net loss on income while this was all happening.
So again, what kind of capacity, where and for what reasons. The bulk of it was replacement of old and antiquated equipment, actually. Old in telecom these days is often less than 5 years so the schedules need to take into account things like writing down the old stuff before installing the new and other tax reasons.
In the industry the planning for the demand for increased bandwidth and capacity over pre ADSL/HDSL days has long been for 100% or more with the midtime frame needs projected to expand logarithmically before declining. Exactly what has happened, by the way.
The needs have gone up tremendously but so has the capacity as a result of the last statement since 2001. Telecoms, by and large, haven't been caught off guard by any of this and have anticipated this even if, as late as the mid 90s the Internet and Web were being written off as fads.
What you're missing in all of this is that though the need for capacity has increased the very nature of data transmission and the architecture of the Internet itself has kept the needs manageable for telcos in that they were in the data transmission business long before people wanted internet to the house. The other is that a great deal of what AT&T spent last year wasn't driven exclusively by needs of Internet customers but for other reasons.
But once the architecture is in place, yes the bits themselves are free. There will always be a need to upgrade and update equipment whit the next big burst of spending in telecom coming when the conversion of outside plant from twisted pair to fibre accelerates.
For a company the side of AT&T the costs will always be in the billions for major upgrades. That is unavoidable. If AT&T were stupid, which they are not, the upgrade wouldn't have taken in to account projections of increased demand though you can be absolutely certain that they did. The usual for situations in the telecom industry are three to five year projections and in the case of the Internet the telecom industry has learned to be very generous with those projections.
The effect on the network(s) would be far worse if data was flowing all the time in both directions if it weren't for the bursty nature of data transmission and the design of the Internet which is, in itself, very bursty.
The cap defense is lacking in being grounded in reality. Both in the sense that you can't raise money for expansion, typically done though market borrowing and lending anyway, by not selling the product beyond a certain arbitrarily set limit and by misunderstanding that data and the Internet are somehow the same as, say, television in that capacity in signals is always there as is normal with analog technologies rather than rapid off/off use as is the case with data and with the Internet.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
If an ISP has capacity constraints then bloody well fix it and get the money later by raising prices, if you must. Imposing caps does nothing to raise the money because the caps mean the data usage the ISP caps means the money will never get raised. If they must then meter the usage and bill for it. Kinda like Hydro companies do.
As for capacity there's the small problem that data is inherently bursty. It's sent and received in a matter of microseconds and it's gone. Capacity restored. The very design of the Internet makes it even more bursty as every internet connection is dropped after the data is sent or received and reconnected when one end of the other sends or receives some more data. At worst, in quiet moments, the user is left with a carrier tone above or below the data spectrum to keep their connection to the carrier up.
I'm more than willing to get into discussions of supply and demand but what you're claiming to be a scarce resource isn't for a properly equipped ISP. By the way, economics is also the study of resource allocation in times of abundance, too.
As I don't accept that there is scarcity for a half way well equipped ISP the notion of scarcity doesn't enter into it. That I don't accept that it's possible to raise money to fix an imaginary problem by not selling the service you're in the business of selling doesn't raise a penny to fix that problem isn't my problem either.
Your problem is that you don't understand the architecture of these here interwebs, which were designed to deal with and route around capacity scarcity, or the basis of data transmission and how that works.
(Not, in fairness, that many people do, unless you've worked in the field.)
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
And, YES, the problem is competition. There's precious little of it about.
One solution as things move towards more competition would be to declare what ISP's do as common carriers because Internet access is a utility these days. The ISP's would howl with outrage but who cares? The volume and pitch of the howling only goes to show that they'd actually have to provide the service they promise and probably make a dollar or two less out of every $10 grand they get from customers.
Caps are just a way to dig deeper into customer's pockets. There really is no technical reason for them.
On the post: The Mantra Of The Digital Generation: Life, Liberty And Blazing Broadband
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Nice try but completely irrelevant.
On the post: The Mantra Of The Digital Generation: Life, Liberty And Blazing Broadband
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At least it isn't a Yugo!
On the post: The Mantra Of The Digital Generation: Life, Liberty And Blazing Broadband
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As for "greedy, parasitical business model" Google has to go no further than look at how the "content" industry operates.
And what they heck that as to do with "Life, Liberty and Blazing Broadband" is beyond me but I suppose that you found a link somewhere. Or it's been a few days since you tried to trash Google and it boomeranged on you but you like pain so you thought you'd try again.
On the post: The Mantra Of The Digital Generation: Life, Liberty And Blazing Broadband
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Or the sentence "That mantra isn't about "piracy" or wanting things for free. It's about a recognition of just how powerful and important the internet and internet freedom is as a fundamental principle of their identity."
Or was it just a knee jerk response to a headline so you figured you could fire off another tiresome adhom that has nothing whatever to do with the subject at hand?
Know something? You're not even very good at being a foul mouthed troll.
On the post: The Mantra Of The Digital Generation: Life, Liberty And Blazing Broadband
Life, Liberty and Blazing Broadband ;-)
For some us more adult types, though I question my membership in adulthood every now and then.
I worked in telecom in the days of the early Web and dial up at speeds that would accurately be called narrowband. (48.8 bps modem) I was also an early adopter of the Web which struck me as simply wonderful when I found it. What a place! And what a pile of information at my fingertips! Even if the best search engines of the day were piles of steaming crap. Oh yeah, and places like usenet where you really got to hang out with the copyright outlaws even though you almost certainly faced computer death if you spent half the night downloading a 5 min porn clip or the latest code to improve the performance of Windows 3.x!
I remember our network engineers getting really upset at people, like me, who kept lines tied up wandering the Internet and Web instead of leaving them idle which was how things were done in those days, and still are, on calculations of how many calls on what days, what time and so on determined the number of lines in an office. Darn but that Internet was dangerous!
At the time my employer was a month or two away from rolling out ADSL as an end user "feature" I was at a sales conference about how to build something for a start up company that they wanted that would send and receive data and mail at high speeds. Sales came up with an expensive package that included a nailed down T3 connection from their site to our nearest central office which, while broadband in any sense of the word was broadband isn't what they wanted. There was no proposal for email or other things this customer wanted because sales felt that would eat into potential profit from ADSL or HDSL down the line and what was this thing called the Internet that I and a couple of other techie guys kept talking about? One of them went so far as to call it a fad. Surely it would go away. And surely they weren't serious about hooking up to the local cableco for data (!!) that was telco turf and what did a cableco know about that?!
They put the proposal in and I got the phone call I knew I'd get from my contact there who wanted Internet access at what was passing for broadband in those days and, no, ISDN just wasn't good enough. I did a runaround sales and got the company an "evaluation" install of corporate ADSL which was really HDSL by another name, the company whipped up a web site, got their email address and they were off. I also got to deal with an unhappy salesguy who lost his commission on his expensive, unworkable and out of spec proposal to them. I told him that it was his name on the sale so he'd get something, anyway, and to be happy and maybe he ought to look into this fad a little deeper.
I'm writing all of this to illustrate that from the moment I heard about the Web I was on it and have never stopped using it, or the broader Internet that it rides on.
Like the young women in the car SOPA and PIPA infuriated me. As much for the certainty that it wouldn't work as it's clumsy attempt to censor the Internet. Like the young women I'm a digital native, though, perhaps, digital immigrant is more appropriate as while I understand their view of the world, the Web and the Internet and completely share it even though I didn't grow up with it.
I started out on a Tandy 1000 desktop (oh, gawd!), not a laptop, eventually went to the laptop and now the smart phone.
The problem is that the "content" industry takes advantage of politicians, bureaucrats and others who are digital outsiders. Few, if any, of these people have any idea of the impact the Web and the Internet have had on the world, on trade, business, culture and identity. It's easier to brand what you don't understand as lawless then it is to embrace it. Particularly if you don't use it or on the outside looking "in".
We haven't seen the end of SOPA/PIPA/CISPA kind of legislation nor have we seen the end of ACTA/TPP kinds of "trade agreements" which are more about protecting analog turf than adapting to what digital natives or digital immigrants already know to be the truth about the Web and the Internet. It's NOT lawless but it does have a culture of its own and a way of doing things that is different than the analog world.
It demands speed in releasing "content" so that consumers can get it. And without geographical restrictions which are now meaningless. This is the adaptation the "content" industries refuse to make. Why is beyond me because I'm sure they'd make a bundle just by making the adaptation, perhaps more than they are now. But they won't because it's out of their comfort zone, and how they've done business since forever. Then again, it was also how buggy makers had done business forever and we know what happened to them. More to the point we know what happened to telegraph only companies who didn't move into telephony.
Too bad, so sad. Nothing at all to do with copyright at the end of the day but service.
So, I think I'll adopt the phrase "Life, Liberty and Blazing Broadband", print it out and pin it to the wall.
On the post: As ACTA 1.0 Lies Dying, Are G8 Countries Already Working On ACTA 2.0?
I said real to differentiate between those in US border states who get their meds from on line pharmacies Canada which are then legally shipped into the United States.
Not those which can cause sickness or death if taken or nothing at all in the case of "sugar pills". In the latter case beware of the placebo effect which can be extremely powerful at times so the person taking them does get some healing effects from them.
The Internet may make it easier to access so-called counterfeit drugs, say Tylenol 3 which is an over the counter drug in Canada but needs script in the USA.
That self same Web makes it far easier to spread news about dangerous fakes than was possible before.
What Big Pharma really hates, though, is that the Web makes it easier to report and spread news about undocumented side effects of "legitimate" drugs that can cause death, injury and addiction whether they're being used off label or not.
Either way, news gets around. And either way government hates it.
On the post: As ACTA 1.0 Lies Dying, Are G8 Countries Already Working On ACTA 2.0?
Re: Re: Say goodbye to your affordable medicines
That said, from what I do know of this is that seniors in border states will often come into Canada, get a GP here and then have the legal drugs sent into the USA on refills. For better or worse that's how most Canadian based online pharmacies have to operate these days.
On the post: Another Reason Why DRM Is Bad -- For Publishers
Re:
E-books are starting to do the same to publishing. This is in it's infancy for at the moment and the design of ebooks sucks big time but when that's overcome the day of dead tree books will be over. (Of course it needs a universal format for ebooks but that will come too.)
Your friend, the graphics designer, can find work for her because even ebooks are going to need "covers" because we expect it and because even ebooks need good layout, design and readable fonts. If she's flexible then there's work for her.
As for working in a video store, yes, the Web has killed those off along with Netflix and similar services. It's the price we all pay, at times, for technological progress.
Old jobs disappear, new ones appear as a result. I can't count the number of times I thought technology would take me out of my work over the 35 years I worked in telecom. Instead I adapted, became computer literate and learned new skills and tasks and stayed working.
I do love dead tree books, by the way. I also realize that their time is passing except for niche markets. I suspect that, when I'm gone, my family will get rid of 95% of the books I have and cherish and that will be it. By then, with luck, I'll have a nice supply of ebooks by then that they'll have to wade through too!
On the post: Another Reason Why DRM Is Bad -- For Publishers
Re:
I almost took you seriously!! ;-)
On the post: Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He's Not Monetizing
One of the best ways of minimizing a threat to an individual's (or corporate) way of looking at the world is to deny that it's happening at all and if it is that it can't possibly be successful. Corporations get the additional "benefit" that they can propagandize their view to anyone that will listen or, even better, legislators.
Al Perry won't go "off message" because that would upset all the lobbying the *AA's have done to convince Congress critters and other legislators around the world that the end of the "content" world is nigh even if there are examples like Coulton's and Louis CK's. Even if it works for those two it can't possibly for anyone less well known. Even worse, they're giving up the "protection" of copyright even if they aren't completely giving it up.
Denial and propaganda can be powerful things, sometimes, even if the face of reality. For the "content" industry we've reached the point where it isn't working anymore on the citizenry and public so now they want to pick their audiences. Legislators and those likely to become legislators like lawyers.
On the post: Stardock CEO Wants To Maximize Sales, Not Stop Piracy
Re:
As he says, the group that just want it free, your freetards, aren't buying no matter what he does so just write them off. Then he goes on to say that it's the underserved who "pirate" because they're pissed at the publisher (hello, Ubisoft) and they're the untapped market which they serve to earn them by doing just that. I'm not a gamer but from the product of theirs that I use, Fences, my experience is that they serve their market well. He also points out that the vast majority of us will pay for something we know has quality and value.
By writing off the pirates he's not wasting time going after people that won't buy no matter what. As for his eroding the entire business model of companies like Ubisoft, well if it does that then Ubisoft has no one but themselves to blame.
This isn't new for this company. They've been doing it for quite a while now. People still buy Stardock products and they suffer no more or less lost sales to "piracy" than do other game and utility companies.
If you notice the date, this newsletter came out just after the SOPA/PIPA black out.
I'm not much of a gamer so I have nothing to say about that end of their business. I do use Fences for Windows and it's delightful.
They have proven that given quality, value and service people will pay for product. To date, people haven't stopped buying, despite your apocalyptic view of humanity.
Perhaps it's you and whatever business model you are afraid will be eroded away are the ones who are wrong. Not Wardell.
On the post: Furniture Designer Fights Copying By Busting Up Some Chairs
BUT
The knockoffs were seriously damages on the first bounce and I could hear one of them cracking as soon as he stood on it.
The truism you "you get what you pay for" holds up here.
For what it's worth, I've sat in one of these chairs and they're incredibly uncomfortable particularly for those of us with injured spines. The genuine article, by the way.
Cool design != comfort. ;-)
On the post: A Perspective On The Complexities Of Copyright And Creativity From A Victim Of Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: DandonTRJ on Apr 12th, 2012 @ 4:28pm
Architects routinely copyright their designs to the extent that the law allows. And the do charge the owner of the structure being built and, therefore, indirectly the general contractor in charge of constructing it.
Before handing over the drawings and notes whoever hired her for that has to pay her. Often quite a chunk of change.
Oh, and FYI, almost no one does blueprints anymore. Even those things that sorta look like them are computer generated and printed off on the nearest laser printer.
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