The government should stop spending money foolishly, and look instead at cutting expenses through more innovative means. How about cutting the pay of government employees on a temporary basis since the pay in the private sector has gone down? How about just eliminating staff members for government employees, which might cause an increase in unemployment, but WOULD reduce government overhead? Fix the broken pension system where people can work for 20 years and collect a pension for the rest of their lives(which is a part of why government has a hard time with money). Spending money to help other countries that have not shown themselves to be our friends(right now there is only England, Canada, and Japan that fall into that category) is also foolish when you are BROKE. That is the problem here, the US government is broke, has a lot of debt, and is in danger of not bringing in enough money to pay its debt.

If your average store clerk makes $35,000/year in an area, why would a government employee doing roughly the same job get paid $45,000/year plus get better benefits? That is what needs to be fixed. Those making over $65,000/year should not be able to get overtime as a government employee as well, and that would solve a lot of the budget problems as well. Reduce the money going out, without cutting jobs, and you solve most of the problems.

If we just bring the tax rate on the wealthy up to the level that your average person has to pay(which is at around the 30 percent mark), that would also go a long way toward solving the problems. Income is income is income, and if you eliminate the idea of different sources of income are taxed at different rates, and get rid of loopholes that allow people not to pay income tax on various sources of income, that would help everyone.

The wealthy are NOT the jobs creators, the successful businesses are. Why should private individuals who are wealthy be seen as job creators?

One solution would be to stop giving a pension to people who are earning more than they would in the private sector for the same job while getting better benefits and more time off. Government employees DO get more "holidays" than those in the private sector, and their health care benefits are better as well. As a result, they should either get paid less, or get no pension since they do not "sacrifice" by holding their jobs. How much of the budget is due to pensions paid to people who have "retired"?

So, it still shows that Apple did not invent these things. Apple does not seem to be able to really come up with new ideas, they just look at what others do, and then figures out a better package for it. The result is that Apple should not be in the position to patent much of anything, since their products are all based on what others have invented.

I am all for inventors being able to protect what THEY have invented, so what has Apple really come up with that is original, iTunes?

The vast majority of things that Apple developed have taken elements of things that were present in products made by other companies. Yes, Apple may have done things better, or made them more attractive, but the vast majority of what you see out there from Apple WERE done before. This is why Apple comes across as a patent troll, because they have not really come up with many ideas themselves.

Yes, there IS a cost, you just don't understand how much of an expense there is.

Fiber has a limit on how much bandwidth can be handled per strand, and in general, due to increased costs, carriers will NOT run a fiber bundle the size of one of Arnold Schwartzenagers biceps to each and every cell phone tower. The routers used to handle the traffic also have a limited capacity in how much data they can handle. So, what happens when the amount of data being used exceeds the capacity of the equipment? Slowdowns show up, and you have the complaints about AT&T that you must have heard about. So, carriers need to continually upgrade the equipment as the data usage goes up, and that means continued costs for that new equipment.

For cable and DSL providers, the data usage is fairly steady overall when everyone in an area has service, with spikes in usage that can cause some issues. So, they DO have to upgrade the equipment from time to time, but it is easier to predict the amount of data ahead of time for each network node. When people can roam around, the same person streaming video content will cause the data usage to move from tower to tower, so you could go from 5,000 people using data on a given tower to 7500 people using that same tower, but it isn't predictable. Go to a small town in Nebraska, and you may NEVER see data usage go up very high...until a basketball championship comes to town and drives demand through the roof. It's unpredictable in the mobile space, and yet, people expect the carriers to be able to predict and plan for every event, even while they don't offer service EVERYWHERE yet.

So yes, there is a cost to the providers to increase capacity, add/upgrade routers, and then you have all the maintenance as equipment goes bad. I'm sure you have had a car or computer die on you...did you buy a replacement after the first year, just in case the one you plan to use for five years dies on you? Companies DO tend to buy replacement parts in limited quantities, but if something major happens, they may not have replacements for EVERYTHING. Packets really do have a cost, but with fiber, it is fairly low on a per-packet basis. $50/month for 15 megabit download speeds with unlimited usage isn't really so terrible, but for cellular, the costs are higher.

If you were planning to stream video content, why would ANYONE go with the 300MB plan, instead of the 3GB plan? If you plan to use data, then you go with the plan that gives you the appropriate amount of data for what you want. AT&T DOES offer pay as you go data for those who do not have a smartphone, and it costs more per megabyte than if you go with a data plan.

Smartphones tend to have "phone home" features to check for updates and such, and if you don't have a data plan, customers who buy a smartphone without planning to use any data services would freak out about "what is this data usage fee on my bill". That is why all carriers REQUIRE a data plan for those who buy a smartphone. People have to accept that if they plan to use data, they should NOT go with a low-end data plan, and they should go to the 2GB or above plan.

2.81GB of data...fits in the new 3GB plan offered by AT&T. So, what's the problem?

The real problem with ME wasn't about DOS, or a lack of DOS, or anything like that, it was the whole "plug and play" layer being so broken that you could make the system unstable by adding a new card to the system, and even removing it wouldn't get you back. The way ME tried to interface with motherboard resources failed miserably.

It is a complex issue, no question, but you also have to look at the different perspectives involved, and then go into each one, because there are a TON of differences between different areas where copyright comes into play.

For music, the system is so broken that it isn't funny, mostly because the "artist" generally sees far less than the record labels. Yes, there is the cost of the recording studio, staffing, and all that, but once that expense has been covered, the cost of duplication has gotten so low, it is almost criminal that the record labels get such a large percentage of the revenues. This is where people feel more "justified" in downloading music "illegally", because the artist probably would never see any revenues from a legal purchase anyway.

For books, it becomes a bit more difficult, because to write in the first place, with the goal being to make a living from it, is a VERY risky thing. If an author writes one book that is popular, how much of the revenues go to the author, but then again, if a book is popular for the life of the author, and people buy it, shouldn't the author make money on each copy? The idea that one person buys a book(which takes months, if not years to write) and then would COPY it, while keeping the original, when the proceeds MUST be enough to cover writing the next book is where authors do deserve some protection. If the demand to read the book is so great that a COPY is made for a friend or relative(rather than transferring the existing book to the other person), then the author does deserve some compensation for writing it in the first place, since the book will still be in print.

For movies, the cost of making a movie is huge, and the number of people involved is large enough where the movie studios NEED extra income just to make sure they can stay in business if one or more movies in a year do not sell very well. If you figure $200 million as the cost to make many movies is there, then what if a movie is a flop, but YOU like it. The more money the studio brings in from that movie, the less of a loss there will be, and it will encourage more movies overall, even if there will be some bad ones in the mix.

Then you have software. If you work for a company and you get a paycheck for your work, then you have a certain amount of security, and probably benefits(health and such). Software publishers COULD make money on software written 15 years earlier if it is kept up to date. The key here is that a BUSINESS that exists to produce software needs to bring in enough money for MULTIPLE software releases. 3-5 years per program, so, how much money does the developer need to bring in from the sale of each program to make the business profitable? Yes, there are examples of some wildly successful software companies out there, but most live, produce a few titles, then die off, and THAT is where the problems come from.

The basic idea is that if someone can duplicate the effort of others and produce something similar, then that should be allowed(so music artists who cover songs from other artists), but if you can't write programs yourself, then you should not be allowed to just copy the work of others and claim you don't agree with copyright. Those who don't have the talent to independently reproduce the work of others is the problem here.

There really are two aspects here, the cost and effort to reproduce the work in question, and then the cost to be the author of the work in question. In the days when you needed a printing press to reproduce a printed work, then the effort required was LARGE, and on top of that, if the author was compensated for the composition, then there should be no problem with multiple publishing houses releasing the same book.

Software developers should in theory have the same option, where multiple publishers could be used, and the one that best sells the product makes the most money. The developers then are still the ones who profit on the software itself, and those who package and sell the product can make money on that side of it(so a program might cost $20, and the package, shipping, and so on might add $40 to that price, or $20 extra for the electronic version. Advertising and such could be the thing that draws consumers to one publisher or the other.

There is a huge difference between an illegal download, and file sharing, and that is the essence of the problem. To download means you only deprive the software publishers one sale, but when you SHARE(which most peer to peer networks use), then you are aiding one or more people to also make the unauthorized duplicate, and that is where the problem comes from.

So, you personally download a song, or a program...it wouldn't be seen as a big deal. The moment you share that download with 1 or more other people, you are now partially responsible for the lost revenues of each copy. Even if you accept the $0.99 cost as what is missing, if you help 10,000 people to download it "illegally", that adds up to how much money has been lost from the legit distributors.

You also may not be aware how much money it takes to actually write some of these programs. A team of 10 people(and that is LOW, many apps have a lot more than that), each being paid $50,000/year comes to $500,000/year. Now, picture that it takes 3-5 years to make most commercial applications, and you see the millions that had to go in to make the application. Just to break even, the studio needs to make at least that much money. If a program does not sell well, then that is a LOSS, and that is when illegal duplication really seems wrong. How many great developers have gone out of business over the years, who would still be around if all people who used the software actually paid for it?