Could you give some examples? I don't feel like googling for "young one complain language foss project crappy fork code get distro use".

Ok dammit I just did, first result was your parent comment.

Oh how I wish I had mod points right now. Almost spit out my water.

Ah so just like beautiful women are partly to blame for being raped, because they were beautiful.

According to your cited wiki it says currently the only providers abusing this extra "X" pin on mini-USB are Verizon in collusion with Motorola.

So hang Verizon for this just as high because I have a T-Mobile Motorola phone that charges/interfaces just fine with my 99-cent newegg cable.

In a sane world, electronic music prices would reflect the lack of "manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, or any other costs" as pointed out by mcgrew, rather than the labels going "OMGZ eMusicz we can make 1000%s profitz!!!!"

Anecdote time. Back when I was downloading music frequently I had a simple two-step process for acquiring music. 1st step: check allofMP3.com. As said, I was willing to pay pennies on the MB for music, rather than muck around torrent trackers for whatever it was I was looking for. 2nd step: If 1st step failed, then I would muck around torrent sites. There was no 3rd step.

Point of anecdote, I was willing to pay sane prices for music rather than jump straight to 'piracy'. I imagine most people would be too. 69 cents is still very high for something with near-zero distribution, storage, and replication costs.

File size as in the amount of physical space a song occupies on a server, and the amount of bandwidth needed to transfer said song are the only meaningful metrics here. allOfMP3.com had it right with regards to pricing model, it was a shame when Visa/MasterCard were bullied into no longer accepting charges from them.

Also this is where VBR encoding comes to play. If its just a straight 20 minutes of you screaming, you gotta stop for breath quite a while in those 20 minutes. Ever tried to scream for even 10-15 whole seconds? It's harder than you think. The point being with VBR, those breaks for breath are going to be encoded at a lower bit rate, resulting in a smaller file size than if it were CBR encoded.

Another thing allOfMP3.com did that was awesome, was you could choose any audio format, and even the quality of the file. Want FLAC? It'll cost extra, but you could do it. I always used what was formerly known as LAME --alt-standard though, I think it's known as -v2 now. Gives about an average 190-224 kbs bit rate and was engineered to be indiscernible from the source material.

And like I said, they could charge a small premium for new release stuff to cover your very lofty "quality" metric.