But wait...if we took the music instrument maker's point of view and applied it to what you said...
If you pay for an instrument you're not paying the FULL PRICE of the instrument, you're paying a partial price, for one copy. You're not paying for more than a fraction of the R&D, manufacturing investment, advertising, distribution, etc. I guarantee you Fender doesn't design a guitar for $500. Development costs, training and re-tooling a factory, etc all get rolled up into an overhead, a fixed cost to introduce a new product.
If we take your example of a song costing $75,000 (which for many artists is high, but low for the big-name, highly produced artists), then they should distribute that cost, plus the actual costs of producing and transporting the material. Just like with the guitar you pay for the wood, strings, electronics, shipping, etc, you should do that with an MP3. So if it costs $0.00001 to distribute (GoDaddy charges ~$5/1.5Tb of data), plus one copy's share of the overhead. Back when this was Tapes or CDs, the physical copy was fairly expensive to produce - several orders of magnitude more in fact. These days, producing an additional copy of a song is virtually free. In fact, you could send a copy to every computer on the planet for about $10,000 worth of bandwidth. Imagine being able to give a CD to every cd-player on the planet for that price, INCLUDING distribution and shipping.
So that's why your argument makes no sense. Buying a CD is no more of a "partial purchase" than buying a guitar is, and arguing otherwise is simply "...someone trying to deny reality."
AT&T has a bad history with these commercials. A while back, I recall them suing Verizon over the claim "Fewest dropped calls", and Sprint over "Best call quality" - claiming these were unfair comparisons, or something similar. Then, when they lost in court, they got very quiet about it for a while.
So AT&T sells "coverage" - which is actually better than VZW, and Verizon sells "Speed and 3G density" - which is better than AT&T. All it does is signal to the public that Verizon is probably right, and AT&T is scared.
I hope Verizon wins, then runs an add clarifying that a judge agreed that AT&T's 3G coverage is only 20% of Verizon's. Put a little cost on AT&T's plate.
So there was one thing I'd mention is that when I get free products from a company (for example, MS sends me stuff all the time because of my involvement with MSDN and their testing community). When my Office 2007 Ultimate showed up, I used it for a bit and told my friends how much I liked it (especially OneNote, for example). I also said "Yeah, MS sent it to me. It's really cool that they send out samples and let me try stuff early, and I give them feedback." This is typically seen as "neat" by my customers, and an example of companies they may want to do business with, or even get in on the testing side.
That said, I don't think I need a law requiring me to disclose my relationship to MS or the fact that they sent it free every time I post about something that I like or dislike in a given MS product.
They have rules against live-blogging, but not against using Google Wave. You want to really see them flip out...real time, character-by-character updates of a game, people discussing and interacting...
It'll be the end of sports as we know it! People will share and collaborate as thought they were all in a stadium together, but without having to BE in a stadium! The horror.
I've been to many events that "passed a hat" at the end of the night to give money back to the performers.
I know in my community it started as a way to cover the cost of hauling generators and equipment out into the middle of nowhere, and has turned into a way to tip the artists for the night's music. It works great with small gatherings, haven't ever seen it tried at an actual venue though.
You know, you're right. See, your repeated grammar mistakes make me think that you're not particularly intelligent, well-read, or informed on the subject. So I can safely ignore incredible hyperbole that takes us from "a two year mark on your academic record for habitual cheating" (actually quite forgiving by most academic standards), to "See? We live in a tyrannical society: after multiple convictions (not charges) involving alcohol and abusing those around me, I should still be allowed to keep a gun."
Right, but typically the students cheating aren't as bright as the college wants either - they're misrepresenting the college academically, and when they enter the professional world and can't do their own work, they make the college look worse - like it hands out degrees to idiots.
You know, having grown up with a father in the Academic world, and having seen countless students (peers and friends) accuse professors of "hating them" because they "proved them wrong" and giving them a low grade as a result...it really doesn't happen. I've certainly never seen a professor wrongfully accuse a student of cheating out of spite. That sounds like the reaction of someone who did poorly in a class and is looking for a way to protect their ego.
The fact is that cheating is taken very seriously at colleges. Where exposed, it is taken to an ethics committee, reviewed, and diciplinary action is taken. As mentioned by "Free Capitalist", in the UC system there is a zero tolerance policy. If a teacher has PROOF you cheated (not just "I saw them"), you're kicked out of the whole system. Period. I've seen it happen to students, too.
But if you think there are professors out there that actually have the time and energy to develop a grudge against a student who is "smarter" than them, you've been watching too many 80s college movies. That opinion just isn't based in reality. No matter how much better it might make you feel to tell yourself that. Most of the time professors aren't even the ones grading your papers, it's overworked grad students. They sure don't want to pick a fight with an undergrad, because then they have to spend long hours defending it to their advisers, professors, and justifying why they gave this student a grade other than what they deserved.
This is a fairly common feeling in arguments (phones, computers, cars, sports teams, religions). Some people feel they need to defend their purchases. As nerds or enthusiasts or whatever, we make purchases that we feel are based on a lot of thoroughly researched and well thought-out choices, and invariably a bunch of trade-offs. When someone comes along and tells us we're wrong, we see it as a "personal attack". Aside from the emotional bonds and identity people tend to make with their purchases, we are in love with the decision we made. The fact is that some stranger, typically no more or less informed than us (but still a peer, if you will) tells that our decision was wrong. They're being critical of our intelligence, logic, and all the other factors that go into making a major purchase like this.
Nevermind that they made a different set of tradeoffs and are a different person with different needs. All that goes out the window and it BECOMES a personal attack. On the other side, we feel BETTER when we criticize someone for making a decision differently, it bolsters our belief that we made the right one. Especially if we can get others to agree.
I can easily touchtype on my HTC TouchPro. Whether or not you can is up to you.
Hell, I have a friend who quite comfortably touch-types on her T9 regular old phone. Sure, you can't touchtype on a touchscreen phone, but then again, smartphone != iPhone.
I work in the telecom industry. I should be more specific: I'm a Product Manager for an equipment provider. We sell (among other things) devices for mobile backhaul over fiber.
In the mobile backhaul space, our customers aren't exactly knocking down our door to buy more equipment to feed the towers with TONS of extra wireless bandwidth. They buy new towers and plug them in to the existing fiber networks quite easily. Having a "proprietary fiber" network wouldn't gain them anything, it'd just be a lot of extra trenching.
My expertise lies in the optics side of things. Assume for a moment that the carrier somehow solved an incredible problem and managed to get a WIRELESS SIGNAL (or combination of multiple signals) to push 20gbps, my immediate question is...where does it go? Unless you're going device-to-device with that, I can't imagine connecting that upstream. You're talking literally THOUSANDS of bonded T1s, just for a single customer. The optics cost alone (for the 200 XFP/XFF modules) to feed that would be in the tens of thousands of dollars PER SUBSCRIBER. Routers are just starting to get 10G connections, and even at the industry standard 20:1 oversubscription rate (on ethernet networks), you'd be pushing hundreds of Gbps through each router to serve a moderate user set. That's more than the national fiber backbone typically does. They're certainly not using the multi-million-dollar Juniper/Redback routers to do this...so who?
Even if we assume they really meant 20Mbps, I still can't see a startup having the financial capital to roll out more than a single tower. They don't own the optical networking world end-to-end, so assuming for a moment that they COULD do it wirelessly, they're still looking at hundreds of billions of dollars in optical transport equipment alone to roll out a nation-wide network. And once you've done that, you STILL have to pay for the actual bandwidth.
High-speed wireless data isn't a problem only at the wireless interface. Backhaul, especially in densely populated areas, is still a huge hurdle to overcome. Running tens-of-gigs to a single tower is still not cost effective.
@DarkHelmet "It's not a slipper slope, iTunes is Apple's, end of story."
By that logic, Windows is Microsofts, and if they want to prevent you from installing Firefox, they can. Or iTunes, for that matter.
The point is this is a dominant player in a market abusing that position to harm a competitor (or more specifically, a competitor's customers). And why? To make that product / company less appealing to consumers.
Right. The FIRST iPhone wasn't subsidized, so they didn't have to recoup the cost of the subsidy and could happily let you sign another contract. The fact that you had to sign a two year contract to buy an unsubsidized phone is the big joke on iPhone 1.0 owners - you were turning over a two year contract just for the privilege of owning an iPhone.
The argument from the cellphone industry in the US (agree with it or not) is that they give you a cheaper device up front in exchange for two years of guaranteed payments. Given that the cost of buying phones outright (even outside the US) is relatively inline with what they claim the "unsubsidized" phone price is, this actually seems like a fairly reasonable deal. When the iPhone originally came out, Apple claimed it was going to "change everything" about how the cellphone industry worked. Then they discovered that the $600 upfront cost was a hurdle for all but the most devout Apple fans. So in less than a month they lopped it down to $400. Still too high for mass-adoption, so they went to the SAME model that everyone else uses - get the carrier to shoulder the upfront cost for the device in exchange for the promise of future revenue.
So here we are, little over two years later, and Apple has, in fact, changed nothing. Simple features that exist on many phones (like MMS, tethering) have yet to make it. What's worse, the App Store policies make it such even installing SOFTWARE that you want isn't legal, if it gets in the way of the carrier's profits. So while Apple users are understandably upset that they can't upgrade to Apple's latest and greatest, they did sell their souls for a $200 discount on the iPhone 3G.
You can always just cancel your contract and pay the $175 cancellation fee. Then sign up as a new user. If you had Google voice, you wouldn't even lose your number.
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Re: (as Brad Hubbard)
Sure they can! Being "just a musician" has nothing to do with making money - it involves playing because you love to make music.
What you're really saying is "Too bad they can't just be self-indulgent artists who do what makes them feel good and have money handed to them."
Re: Re: Thank you (as Brad Hubbard)
But wait...if we took the music instrument maker's point of view and applied it to what you said...
If you pay for an instrument you're not paying the FULL PRICE of the instrument, you're paying a partial price, for one copy. You're not paying for more than a fraction of the R&D, manufacturing investment, advertising, distribution, etc. I guarantee you Fender doesn't design a guitar for $500. Development costs, training and re-tooling a factory, etc all get rolled up into an overhead, a fixed cost to introduce a new product.
If we take your example of a song costing $75,000 (which for many artists is high, but low for the big-name, highly produced artists), then they should distribute that cost, plus the actual costs of producing and transporting the material. Just like with the guitar you pay for the wood, strings, electronics, shipping, etc, you should do that with an MP3. So if it costs $0.00001 to distribute (GoDaddy charges ~$5/1.5Tb of data), plus one copy's share of the overhead. Back when this was Tapes or CDs, the physical copy was fairly expensive to produce - several orders of magnitude more in fact. These days, producing an additional copy of a song is virtually free. In fact, you could send a copy to every computer on the planet for about $10,000 worth of bandwidth. Imagine being able to give a CD to every cd-player on the planet for that price, INCLUDING distribution and shipping.
So that's why your argument makes no sense. Buying a CD is no more of a "partial purchase" than buying a guitar is, and arguing otherwise is simply "...someone trying to deny reality."
Should get tossed...probably won't (as Brad Hubbard)
AT&T has a bad history with these commercials. A while back, I recall them suing Verizon over the claim "Fewest dropped calls", and Sprint over "Best call quality" - claiming these were unfair comparisons, or something similar. Then, when they lost in court, they got very quiet about it for a while.
So AT&T sells "coverage" - which is actually better than VZW, and Verizon sells "Speed and 3G density" - which is better than AT&T. All it does is signal to the public that Verizon is probably right, and AT&T is scared.
I hope Verizon wins, then runs an add clarifying that a judge agreed that AT&T's 3G coverage is only 20% of Verizon's. Put a little cost on AT&T's plate.
All-purpose response (as Brad Hubbard)
Grammar Nazi: "You used ______ incorrectly!"
Response1: "English is a living language. I used a colloquialism or dialectal variance, either of which is perfectly acceptable and accurate."
Re: Freedom of Speech.. (as Brad Hubbard)
That sounds like a death threat, against the entire world.
INCLUDING MISOURI TEENS.
You're fucked, buddy.
I tell my friends when I get something free (as Brad Hubbard)
So there was one thing I'd mention is that when I get free products from a company (for example, MS sends me stuff all the time because of my involvement with MSDN and their testing community). When my Office 2007 Ultimate showed up, I used it for a bit and told my friends how much I liked it (especially OneNote, for example). I also said "Yeah, MS sent it to me. It's really cool that they send out samples and let me try stuff early, and I give them feedback." This is typically seen as "neat" by my customers, and an example of companies they may want to do business with, or even get in on the testing side.
That said, I don't think I need a law requiring me to disclose my relationship to MS or the fact that they sent it free every time I post about something that I like or dislike in a given MS product.
Ooh! Google Wave (as Brad Hubbard)
They have rules against live-blogging, but not against using Google Wave. You want to really see them flip out...real time, character-by-character updates of a game, people discussing and interacting... It'll be the end of sports as we know it! People will share and collaborate as thought they were all in a stadium together, but without having to BE in a stadium! The horror.
Passing the Hat (as Brad Hubbard)
I've been to many events that "passed a hat" at the end of the night to give money back to the performers.
I know in my community it started as a way to cover the cost of hauling generators and equipment out into the middle of nowhere, and has turned into a way to tip the artists for the night's music. It works great with small gatherings, haven't ever seen it tried at an actual venue though.
Re: P.S. (as Brad Hubbard)
You know, you're right. See, your repeated grammar mistakes make me think that you're not particularly intelligent, well-read, or informed on the subject. So I can safely ignore incredible hyperbole that takes us from "a two year mark on your academic record for habitual cheating" (actually quite forgiving by most academic standards), to "See? We live in a tyrannical society: after multiple convictions (not charges) involving alcohol and abusing those around me, I should still be allowed to keep a gun."
Re: Re: Makes Sense (as Brad Hubbard)
Right, but typically the students cheating aren't as bright as the college wants either - they're misrepresenting the college academically, and when they enter the professional world and can't do their own work, they make the college look worse - like it hands out degrees to idiots.
Re: Abusing that (as Brad Hubbard)
You know, having grown up with a father in the Academic world, and having seen countless students (peers and friends) accuse professors of "hating them" because they "proved them wrong" and giving them a low grade as a result...it really doesn't happen. I've certainly never seen a professor wrongfully accuse a student of cheating out of spite. That sounds like the reaction of someone who did poorly in a class and is looking for a way to protect their ego.
The fact is that cheating is taken very seriously at colleges. Where exposed, it is taken to an ethics committee, reviewed, and diciplinary action is taken. As mentioned by "Free Capitalist", in the UC system there is a zero tolerance policy. If a teacher has PROOF you cheated (not just "I saw them"), you're kicked out of the whole system. Period. I've seen it happen to students, too.
But if you think there are professors out there that actually have the time and energy to develop a grudge against a student who is "smarter" than them, you've been watching too many 80s college movies. That opinion just isn't based in reality. No matter how much better it might make you feel to tell yourself that. Most of the time professors aren't even the ones grading your papers, it's overworked grad students. They sure don't want to pick a fight with an undergrad, because then they have to spend long hours defending it to their advisers, professors, and justifying why they gave this student a grade other than what they deserved.
Have you even been to college, AC?
Re: Re: Re: Another reason for the argument (as Brad Hubbard)
This is a fairly common feeling in arguments (phones, computers, cars, sports teams, religions). Some people feel they need to defend their purchases. As nerds or enthusiasts or whatever, we make purchases that we feel are based on a lot of thoroughly researched and well thought-out choices, and invariably a bunch of trade-offs. When someone comes along and tells us we're wrong, we see it as a "personal attack". Aside from the emotional bonds and identity people tend to make with their purchases, we are in love with the decision we made. The fact is that some stranger, typically no more or less informed than us (but still a peer, if you will) tells that our decision was wrong. They're being critical of our intelligence, logic, and all the other factors that go into making a major purchase like this.
Nevermind that they made a different set of tradeoffs and are a different person with different needs. All that goes out the window and it BECOMES a personal attack. On the other side, we feel BETTER when we criticize someone for making a decision differently, it bolsters our belief that we made the right one. Especially if we can get others to agree.
Re: (as Brad Hubbard)
I can easily touchtype on my HTC TouchPro. Whether or not you can is up to you.
Hell, I have a friend who quite comfortably touch-types on her T9 regular old phone. Sure, you can't touchtype on a touchscreen phone, but then again, smartphone != iPhone.
Where does the 20Gbps go? (as Brad Hubbard)
I work in the telecom industry. I should be more specific: I'm a Product Manager for an equipment provider. We sell (among other things) devices for mobile backhaul over fiber.
In the mobile backhaul space, our customers aren't exactly knocking down our door to buy more equipment to feed the towers with TONS of extra wireless bandwidth. They buy new towers and plug them in to the existing fiber networks quite easily. Having a "proprietary fiber" network wouldn't gain them anything, it'd just be a lot of extra trenching.
My expertise lies in the optics side of things. Assume for a moment that the carrier somehow solved an incredible problem and managed to get a WIRELESS SIGNAL (or combination of multiple signals) to push 20gbps, my immediate question is...where does it go? Unless you're going device-to-device with that, I can't imagine connecting that upstream. You're talking literally THOUSANDS of bonded T1s, just for a single customer. The optics cost alone (for the 200 XFP/XFF modules) to feed that would be in the tens of thousands of dollars PER SUBSCRIBER. Routers are just starting to get 10G connections, and even at the industry standard 20:1 oversubscription rate (on ethernet networks), you'd be pushing hundreds of Gbps through each router to serve a moderate user set. That's more than the national fiber backbone typically does. They're certainly not using the multi-million-dollar Juniper/Redback routers to do this...so who?
Even if we assume they really meant 20Mbps, I still can't see a startup having the financial capital to roll out more than a single tower. They don't own the optical networking world end-to-end, so assuming for a moment that they COULD do it wirelessly, they're still looking at hundreds of billions of dollars in optical transport equipment alone to roll out a nation-wide network. And once you've done that, you STILL have to pay for the actual bandwidth.
High-speed wireless data isn't a problem only at the wireless interface. Backhaul, especially in densely populated areas, is still a huge hurdle to overcome. Running tens-of-gigs to a single tower is still not cost effective.
Re: Re: Excessive Reach???? (as Brad Hubbard)
@DarkHelmet "It's not a slipper slope, iTunes is Apple's, end of story."
By that logic, Windows is Microsofts, and if they want to prevent you from installing Firefox, they can. Or iTunes, for that matter.
The point is this is a dominant player in a market abusing that position to harm a competitor (or more specifically, a competitor's customers). And why? To make that product / company less appealing to consumers.
Re: Well... (as Brad Hubbard)
Right. The FIRST iPhone wasn't subsidized, so they didn't have to recoup the cost of the subsidy and could happily let you sign another contract. The fact that you had to sign a two year contract to buy an unsubsidized phone is the big joke on iPhone 1.0 owners - you were turning over a two year contract just for the privilege of owning an iPhone.
The argument from the cellphone industry in the US (agree with it or not) is that they give you a cheaper device up front in exchange for two years of guaranteed payments. Given that the cost of buying phones outright (even outside the US) is relatively inline with what they claim the "unsubsidized" phone price is, this actually seems like a fairly reasonable deal. When the iPhone originally came out, Apple claimed it was going to "change everything" about how the cellphone industry worked. Then they discovered that the $600 upfront cost was a hurdle for all but the most devout Apple fans. So in less than a month they lopped it down to $400. Still too high for mass-adoption, so they went to the SAME model that everyone else uses - get the carrier to shoulder the upfront cost for the device in exchange for the promise of future revenue.
So here we are, little over two years later, and Apple has, in fact, changed nothing. Simple features that exist on many phones (like MMS, tethering) have yet to make it. What's worse, the App Store policies make it such even installing SOFTWARE that you want isn't legal, if it gets in the way of the carrier's profits. So while Apple users are understandably upset that they can't upgrade to Apple's latest and greatest, they did sell their souls for a $200 discount on the iPhone 3G.
You can always just cancel your contract and pay the $175 cancellation fee. Then sign up as a new user. If you had Google voice, you wouldn't even lose your number.