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Comment Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score 1) 205

What about viewers? For movie makers to make new movies? The people who cannot pay are copying anyway.
Those who can pay may also understand the reason to pay. Give your $15 streaming subscription to the people who made the movie you liked most that month and they will be able to produce the next. If it doesn't work out they can make a kickstarter to collect the rest of the money. If their project is promising they have a good chance.
Yes, that doesn't work out currently, because too many things would have to change at once. But it would be the better model for everyone. Do alone the calculation what share Netflix gets. Or do the calculation, what share Netflix pays to use the different DRM schemes they have (e.g. Widevine license fees for browser support). There are a lot of middlemen you can cut if you give up the anti-piracy game and just charge for your content upfront.

If that could happen, then why doesn't it happen now? There is nothing stopping anyone make movies that way today. The fact that it doesn't happen suggests it is not really viable.

Comment Re: Lack of information.... (Score 1) 37

There is no front-running going on. You cannot submit your order ahead of someone else's order - the trades happen in the order received. By the time the order shows up, it's public knowledge.

I know that it is not front-running in the strictest sense. However, they are essentially using information about market dislocations, and their speed advantages to put themselves in a position to profit from trades they know are almost certain to happen. I do not see why exchanges couldn't just share information directly and fill orders with each others without having HFTers put themselves in the middle.

Comment Re: Lack of information.... (Score 1) 37

I donâ(TM)t think we need a tax on transactions.

I donâ(TM)t mind HFT if they are genuinely responding to what they observe to be asset misprints. Is the front running of othersâ(TM) orders that I think is most egregious.

Therefore my solution would be to timestamp all trades, and have a computer solve for the fairest price based on the order of the trades after a small delay. So if a HFT company sees a big order in one location, and they try to front run it, they will be put in the back of the line, and the orders will be filled after the big order they were trying to front run is executed.

To be clear, they would still be allowed to cancel their order, but that cancellation needs to be sent before someone else has accepted their order.

Comment Re:Even simpler solution (Score 1) 46

It may not erase your debt, but there is a cost to debt recovery, and the typical value of a phone means most companies do not want to bother with debt collection on such a small amount.

Sim locking is a "good" way to prevent a customer taking advantage of a discount to acquire a phone cheaply from one network provider and using the phone with a different network.

I don't have a problem with it if the company makes it clear that the phone will only be mine once I fulfil my contract.

Comment Re:Uranium availability [Re:More nuclear energy y. (Score 1) 197

If we needed to power the world on uranium fission, we could extract uranium from seawater. There is an estimated 4.5bn tonnes of uranium dissolved in seawater - if we extracted 10% of that, that would last 5,000 years at current consumption rates and without breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors can take us to millions of years, by which point, we may well have perfected other forms of energy production, population may have shrunk enough to make completely renewable energy sources more than adequate.

With nuclear, we could even contemplate actively scrubbing some CO2 from the atmosphere, converting it into oil, and pumping it underground, effectively reversing climate change. In fact, instead of sending money to poorer countries to help address future climate risk impacts, if richer countries actually put money into reversing their own contributions to climate change, that would actually be a worthwhile endeavour.

Comment Unintended consequences (Score 1) 48

I can understand the reasons behind this, but what happens if two artists / singers sound very similar. Does one get to stop the other performing depending on who was born first (and therefore has their voice automatically copyrighted)?

And I can imagine a whole host of other unintended consequences of such legislation if not drafted very carefully.

Comment Re:To quote my friend Karl (Score 1) 180

On top of that, the use of software evolves, and software that might not have been expected to be internet facing may one day end up on the internet, security issues and all. So it is good practice to ensure software is secure by default, even if it is being used on an air-gapped computer in the middle of some remote desert.

Comment Re: China is cheaper (Score 1) 102

China didnâ(TM)t expect their manufacturers to pivot because their car industry was then much smaller and less invested in ICE. A modern ICE engine is a remarkable feat of engineering, and a lot has gone into refining it into what it now is. Those were huge investments and a huge moat if you were a traditional car manufacturer or component supplier. China didnâ(TM)t have that much to protect so could leapfrog the ICE era.

Western government should have seen the writing on the wall and also helped their industries more directly.

Comment Re:Problems? (Score 1) 181

I would not disagree that there are greedy corporates out there who want to maximise revenue while minimising investment.

However, if you turned it around, if there are 2 out of 300 customers per node who are causing issues, then why wouldn't the company just want to get rid of those two customers and not have to invest more and actually have 298 happy customers and however many happy executive and shareholders. I am sure they would rather not have the other 2 as customers.

That being said, I would expect a company providing, say, a gigabit internet connection to not have a data cap that you could hit in 3 hours. So a gigabit internet connection with a 1TB cap would be silly. But a 10TB cap might be justifiable.

Comment Re: This will work. At all. (Score 1) 87

I suspect that YouTube, being a closed platform that is not quite as integrated into the web the way search is will not be as much of an issue as Chrome and Android.

However, I am not sure that forcing a divestment of Chrome will achieve much. That is one element that Google actually built from the ground up and did not acquire. It was just so much better than Internet Explorer and Firefox.

I can see a bigger case for divesting Android. I suspect that Google might ultimately accept giving Android given that it has largely achieved its core objective of preventing a competitor search engine gaining market share by being the default in most devices.

The other remedy is likely to involve not allowing Google to post Apple for default placement, which may not feel as much of a punishment for Google in the short term given that there is no real competitor to take its place on Apple devices. It will just be a $20 billion annual saving for Google.

Comment Re:Economic suicide by LCOE. (Score 1) 173

If you have a steady supply, it is a heck of a lot easier to plan a storage system to store the excess when you produce it, than it is with an intermittent supply.

Nuclear may require a few hours worth of battery storage, Wind and Solar may require weeks worth of storage i.e. nearly two orders of magnitude higher requirement.

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