Because the plain old internet doesn't make much money for anyone.
You're kidding right? Never mind the large sector of the American economy built on the plain old internet.
It does seem like a big deal. I mean, last year there nominations titled "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love", which was an unusual choice for both a Nebula (a different SF/F award, chosen by a jury) and a Hugo nomination. The genre is floundering fairly hard.
I agree that the awards are floundering hard, but I disagree about the genre. There is a large body of good SciFi out there, you just have to look a bit harder to find it through the noise.
But really, if real programmers ever got their hands on Windows under a GPL, they would just strip out anything of value and add it to Linux. Really.
So that kernel would look remarkably like the one we have today
Clearly I don't understand capitalism.
Clearly. Geoblocking is at least partially about market segmentation. The EU is so large that it has extremely major disparities in wealth between its member nations. Consider the difference between Sweden and Romania. If you have a movie and charge a single price to stream it across the entire EU then:
a) Some people will find it incredibly cheap and others will find it still too expensive, just pushing them back towards piracy.
I suppose this is slashdot and I should expect any reponse to my inital post to be condesending, well done. You wanted an argument, this is abuse
Keeping things geo-locked pushes people to piracy. Drop the locks and at least the portion of the population that want to pay either for content or convience can do so. Geolocking doesn't stop those that will pirate, it stops those that will not from paying.
b) You end up having to deal with the tax systems of every single EU country anyway due to the retarded VAT changes they introduced this year, so it doesn't help simplify your business at all, and you theoretically aren't allowed to opt out of serving particular regions due to their horrible paperwork requirements, so being able to geoblock unprofitably complicated regions whilst claiming you have some other reason is quite attractive.
If we are assuming the basics of captialism hold here and there is a sufficiently sized market, the regulatory changes will be made. If not by the multinationals looking for profit, then by the local people who are pissed they can't buy what they want.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
