Of course. Didn't he say "Only a fool wouldn't buy an Apple Watch"?

Where I live they haven't bothered to make any provision for back up power to the repeaters on their coax plant. Power goes out? Kiss your phone service goodbye, even if you've got the battery in your modem. They finally did upgrade us to DOCSIS 3, about eight months ago, so now our peak hour speeds have gone from atrocious to tolerable FWIW.

And I repeat: that's where Net Neutrality comes in. It serves to keep those barriers low, in a "market" (ISP) that is not competitive. Otherwise you'd get "tiered" service which keeps those small players small.

Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?

However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.

The GURPS_NPC Law: Sooner or later every difficult problem in physics is attributed to Gremlins.

Mod up.

They're not. The GP obviously doesn't realize that Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable quite some time ago.

They've been trying(in part by developing, in part by buying, they ate Softlayer and Cloudant fairly recently); but they've been finding it a bit tricky.

IBM wants to sell you some sort of unique, value-added, hardware and/or software feature that makes going with them worth it over going with the commodity product(presumably, this is why they sold of PCs and low-end servers). Some customers do want this; but it's a very, very, different offering from the more commodified cloud providers(Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all differ a bit in where they are on the spectrum from 'what you do with them is your problem; but our VMs are cheaper than you can believe' to 'we can provide automagic email accounts and SQL server instances abstracted from the host OS'; but all of them are very much on the 'we aren't going to hold your hand; but look at how cheap this stuff is' side, an area where IBM has no obvious advantages.)

The one other element in the cycle you identify is arguably 'management/administration'.

This can work both for and against both local and remote/cloud options: Back when anything that touched the mainframe needed 6 signatures and a blessing; but you could classify an IBM-compatible as an 'office supply' and just have it on your desk and doing stuff, part of the virtue was in cutting through red tape, not in enjoying DOS on a slow machine with virtually no RAM. These days, especially for individuals or small outfits, without technical expertise available, 'the cloud' wins not so much because local computers are expensive(since they aren't, they've never been cheaper, either absolutely or per unit power); but because 'the cloud' is something you can use just by plugging in a URL and following directions. IT geeks are correct to point out that 'the cloud' is neither impregnable nor as well-backed-up as it likes to pretend to be; but for a non-techie user who will lose all their data as soon as their HDD dies or they lose their phone, it's still a step up.

For larger outfits, who have technical expertise available(and whose needs are complex enough that they will need IT and/or developers whether they go 'cloud', local, or some combination of the two), it is much more a straight battle on cost, security, and reliability; but ease of use and ease(or nonexistence) of management is huge for the consumer side.

Amazon is a bit tepid when they try anything too novel(their phone went from flagship pricing to free-after-contract how fast?); but they have three basic virtues that make them a terrifying force to be reckoned with:

1. Cultural disinhibition: They started selling books; but never seemed to have fossilized into the 'We are a bookstore. I can see maybe expanding into selling some bookmarks, or paperweights; but hand tools? How absurd!' model. 'Books' was merely a special case of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail. They've since expanded into an ever larger collection of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail, without much concern about what they are.

2. Adequately competent implementation: Remember 'Microsoft PlaysForSure', the killer ecosystem of hardware, software, and a competitive marketplace of music sellers(almost always cheaper than iTunes)? No? That's not very surprising, they don't really deserve to be remembered. How about 'Ultraviolet', the 'cloud-based digital rights library' that is somehow associated with blu-ray, some media players and streamers, and various retailers; but is so dysfunctional that I can't actually summarize exactly what the hell it is? No? I can't imagine why.

Amazon, though, while they don't lead the pack, knows how to get the job done well enough (their Kindle e-readers and 'FireOS' tablets all have at least adequate industrial design and build quality, and 'FireOS' is arguably nicer than some Google-blessed-but-vendor-skinned versions of Android, despite being a hostile fork; and their media-streamer hardware and software are both more or less painless). You don't necessarily go to them for the premium gear; but they are definitely good enough that they don't actively sabotage the appeal of the low prices.

3. Logistics. I don't know how they do it(if I did, I'd probably be a whole hell of a lot wealthier); but when they decide to sell something, they know how to make it impressively cheap compared to the competition, whether it be books or VM time.

On the very small plus side, perhaps this will make using Ireland as the tax dodge for your tech company slightly less convenient. Otherwise, isn't this the same country that decided that outlawing blasphemy would be a cool idea in 2009? There may be a screw or two loose.

Easy.
You take an old copy from the public domain, invest time and money, make it beautiful, and republish it.
Now, your work is copyrighted.

Some other guy can take an old copy and make it beautiful, but not yours. That's protected by copyright. He would have to invest again. And then compete against you.

So it's even better than in the case of books. With books, after they are in the public domain, it's a free for all, very low barriers to entry. With stuff that needs to be restored, it's even more lucrative for the republisher, because they get a new copyright, less competition.

Also, note that this only covers the 70-90 years of undigitized stuff. Todays works won't need _that_ kind of work done to be republished.

We are talking about Germany here. Judges there don't like it if you game the system. Steamboat Willy would have to be on sale publicly, so that everyone who wants to watch it can do so. And judges can see if the price is exorbitant so that no actual sales are made.

So it covers my reasoning against eternal copyright: That copyright makes works disappear if the copyright owner doesn't care about it anymore. It doesn't cover lots of people's reasoning: That eternal copyright is bad because we want things for free.

Before software was protected by copyright, which happened sometime in the 80's or so, in Germany software was protected by "unfair competition law". Quite simply, if A hires developers for a million to write software and sells it, and B just copies the software, that is unfair competition. However, "unfair competition" only applies if A is actually selling the software; if A doesn't sell it, then B isn't competing with A at all, whether fair or unfair. Obviously now software is under copyright, so things have changed.

With very old works the same could be done: Let them run out of copyright. However, it would be "unfair competition" and thus illegal to compete with the copyright holder. So as long as Disney is selling Steamboat Willy, it would be protected. If they stop selling it, you can copy it and even sell it freely.

There is monetary incentive if you can put the movie onto a shelf in the shops and sell it. Most people don't actually copy stuff. And those with huge illegal collections don't actually listen to or watch all the stuff that they copied. So you have to be careful estimating how many sales would be lost. And at last, you _can_ put DRM onto works in the public domain if you feel like it.

On the other hand, if people are worried about cultural values being lost, and these people are not the copyright holders, then works being in the public domain is actually very helpful for society. Because these people _can_ restore movies without having one foot in jail.