'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.'

It was when he said this that the fine print started to appear:

* Price does not include technical support, which is free for the first two sessions, but USD $99 for further sessions (and per hour via telephone), the price of new computers you will have to buy to feed our bloated clock-cycle-consuming system, the costs of upgrades,, the extra cost of Office, or the rediculous amounts of money you'll need before we give you a look at the source code, which will require you to sign an NDA. Microsoft claims no responsibility for health issues caused by our OS, including, but not limited to, cranial damage you'll get after banging your head against the wall in frustration of our poorly-designed un-interoperable amalgamation of legacy support and psychosis caused by using our compulsory poorly-maintained virus-catching browser. Offer only good on Windows Vista Starter.

Sounds like an easy choice for Africa.

Have you ever worked in the music industry before? Do you know what actually happens when a song is produced? Or the amount of money the artist makes?

Let me tell you about production. An artist thinks of a song, and writes it down. He gives it to a producer, who gives the artist an extremely constrictive contract, which may have a provision limiting the amount of the profits he receives. From there, they hire technical staff, who actually do the audio production. It takes only an hour or so to make a song, depending on complexity and how much time it takes them to fine-tune the synthesizers. It's not so much a job then a short enjoyable gig.

Do the technical staff get a percentage of the album? No. They're paid a flat rate. In many cases, the artists hired to play the instruments are given a flat rate. This isn't taken as a loan from future sales; it is paid with profits from other albums, and that's the risk factor that goes along with any business.

Now, when you buy a CD, how is that ~$15 distributed? The record company, 99% of the time, takes more then half of the cash goes to the record company. Now, you may think that that goes to cover the costs of creation, but that's only about 10% of the sale, or less for more popular records. The artists often get a quarter of the profits, or less. More if they're a diva and scream at the record company long enough. I can guess that if only 15% of the people who obtained the album paid for it, the record company would get their risked capitol back.

With that in mind, can you honestly say that it's unfair to pirate if you send the money to the artist? I say it's even less fair to buy the album legally.

Let me reiterate: the money spent to produce a new album has already been made. The big 5 record companies are actually so big that they can produce hundreds of records consequentially and have them all flop without really hurting the company. The true purpose of the RIAA is to fuel the record companies' greed.

Note that it's the exact same way for digital books, except that there's no cost for reproduction and there are much fewer people in the production line and bureaucracy who need to be paid off.

P.S.: Your analogy does, however, works in the context of movies, since the tremendous amount of capitol required to film and market a movie is so large that they do need to make loans to make them.




Legal note: percentages are all estimates.

That's strange.... Then why do record/movie/stock photography studios get payed the ridiculous amounts of money, when there's infinitely better choices of places to put it, like a charity, or more appropriately, a creative institution, instead of a creativity-zapping money-making machine?

Get out of the house and stop playing Dragon Quest.

Don't worry; in the end it'll all be blamed on bugs. But unlike Amazon's case, Google will attribute to bugs in their system and real life.

You see, Google's genetic engineering department has had a security breach, and now their mutated insects (and a few arachnids) have escaped. A small band of them has formed an alliance to make the people at Google suffer. The guys who were interviewed for this article were dead. Their bodies were manipulated as giant marionettes by Preying Mantisi (note to grammar nazis: you find a better form), while the larvae feeding on him from their insides provided their voices.



That was supposed to be funny, but it just turned out nauseating....

Finding a distrobution that didn't crash. Linux wasn't always as easy to install as it is today (Have you tried to build your own Linux system? It's surprisingly easy to get a basic system going today.) Nearly every distrobution I found crashed as it booted from the CD. Eventually I discovered Ark linux, which worked beautifully. Then, for whatever reason (Ark crapped out), I installed collegelinux, which, unfortunately, wasn't as good a distro as Ark was.

I installed Mandrake Linux as soon as it was gifted to me. It was and still is the only decent linux system in a box. And the CDs! There were so many discs! Unfortunately, the distro was outdated before I even got it, so I eventually dropped it and went back to the dark side of computing. That is, Windows.

Note that this was all because of the frustration I had with Windows ME. ME wasn't really as bad an operating system as people said it was, but after about a year or two, it would crash every time you'd start it, with some undocumented problem you couldn't fix even if you knew the OS at a source code level.

So which linux distro am I using today? None; I'm running Windows XP, with all my unix-required needs and OS development tools in hardware-accelerated VMs (Has anyone ever told you how much better VirtualBox is than VMware?). SiS chips and a lack of expansion slots prevent me from running it. And I could never get NVidia's stupid driver to work, so I never even got a chance to play around with KDE4's special effects. Seriously, I've begun to think that people who say that their computers run with hardware graphics acceleration are lying - neither NVidia's nor ATI's drivers have ever worked for me.

I am gay. Therefore, genitalia is the only thing I care about.

Cha-CHING!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to hide in a corner while the masses try to mod me down into oblivion.

Yeah. I'm sick of hearing about Linux on these notebooks that don't have the kernel compiled with EVERY OPTION.

There is no such thing as a version of linux that is incomplete, unless, perhaps, you don't have the means to load the kernel.

Then it probably needs to be replaced. :P

Why do I think this? Because most online office application have a EULA, which states, more or less, that anything you write with it belongs to them. Who's saying that this doesn't apply to online IDE services? Software copyright is already insanely convoluted (or maybe just insane?) as it is. I can't even imagine a programmer who would use an application online where his source code is made available on a public-facing server (which is a big deal for those writing propriatary software) when a superior program is available natively for for their platform where they can keep their rights.

However, if the idea is that a company or individual sets up bespin for their private usage, then it would make sense.

It could possibly be the most lucrative income for your start-up for a little while, and it's way easier to implement then some of the other ideas presented here. All you need to purchase is a small block of IP addresses and a domain name. Assuming that you already have fast network hardware.

Just don't recycle them. People in china are dying because of the hazardous materials in electronic devices.

Time for everyone to switch to Enlightenment. Take that, desktop metaphor!

Let me demonstrate why we have binary distrobution.

"Hey dude, my copy of Adobe CS4 is coming today!"
"What? I thought you picked it up at the store a month ago?"
"Yeah, I did, but I had to wait for it to finish compiling!"


This is all without mentioning corperate need for code secrecy, and the need for an environment to compile an operating system on.

Although I agree that Cursive is possibly the stupidest thing to learn nowadays (how does having two scripts help anyone communicate? Wouldn't that just make it harder?), I realize that there are a few things that you need to know cursive to do. Signatures, for instance, are in cursive, and you should be able to read others' and write at least your own. Also, when I took the SAT, I was told to copy a legal agreement using my own cursive handwriting and then to sign it. Though, by the time I took the test, I hadn't written anything in cursive for about eight years. And we need to learn cursive to... to... I dunno, read historical documents?

Honestly. I mean, that won't make their OpenGL 2.0 drivers actually work, and there's no doubt in my mind that the 3.0 code will be faulty as well.