Posts by Squander Two

"I don't think I've ever met anyone who spends that amount of money on CDs a month."

I did, before I had kids. I know lots of other people who did, too; some still do. You know: music fans. Don't assume everyone's the same as you.

> The business just needs to catch up, and figure out a way to ensure the artist gets paid properly too. It isn't Spotify's fault - its the labels who sell the music to them not coming up with a formula to properly fund the artists.

WTF? The labels' formulae are, obviously, based on the amount of money they're receiving for the music, which is being pushed down by Spotify.

> may I suggest that he puts his money where his mouth is and set up a competing service? Oh, he can't? Why?

Well, apart from the rather obvious point that he is putting his money where his mouth is by pulling out from a service that was making him some money, the key word there is "competing", isn't it? It's extremely difficult to set up a service that will compete with an established dominant industry player by paying more for your raw material. Not impossible, though: you could, for instance, try to encourage the providers of raw material not to do business with the established player. Oh, look! That's what Yorke is doing.

One of the big problems with the music business is that so much of the raw talent enters the industry seventeen years old and desperate, which makes it very easy to exploit by telling it things like "We won't pay you for this, but the exposure will be great for you," or, depressingly often, "It'll cost you £100 to play this gig and it'll be another £100 if you don't sell at least 50 tickets." The price of the talent and material is constantly being pushed down by the fact that these people are naive and know nothing whatsoever about work or business, so are very easily exploited. People who've been in the business a decade or three, like Yorke, are much more savvy and have far better record deals. Occasionally, some of them try to help younger artists by giving them business advice or setting up their own labels which give better deals. And, very occasionally, they do the one thing that the kids really badly need: they set an example. For an established (and, to many, cool) artist like Yorke to do this sends a great message to the kids: "No, you don't have to put up with this crap. Yes, you can turn down offers from people who are ripping you off. Yes, you can set the price of your own product." And the industry is well aware of how bad this sort of influence is for their appalling business model, which is why they've run such a successful propaganda campaign against anyone who does this: witness the fools who are convinced that artists can't survive without giving away their product. Other workers don't get this, you'll notice. "Unless nurses provide care to hundreds of people for free, how will the hospitals know how good they are? No hospital's going to hire a nurse without trying out the service first!"

Re: "Meanwhile, millions of streams gets them a few thousand dollars. Not like radio at all."

Yeah, it's a tricky one. It doesn't seem quite fair to compare a million streaming instances with just one or two radio airplays, but it can't be right either to compare a million streams with a million broadcasts. I think everyone involved would agree that the correct figure has to be somewhere inbetween; they just can't agree exactly where.

"there is no reason to sponsor a known Monopoly abuser"

If we're talking about whether Nokia can compete with Apple and Samsung, I honestly don't think this reason figures very highly in most users' buying decisions.

> you can't customize windphone to look and work the way you want.

You can move and resize all the tiles, you can grab functions from within apps and turn them into tiles, and you only include the tiles you want. That may not be quite enough customization for you, but it's wrong to say that it's no customization at all. And it's a lot more than on IOS.

> Its impossible to get rid of the garishly colored tiles

But you can pick one of the non-garish colours. It's impossible to get rid of the icons in IOS as well. Or Windows and OSX, come to that. I'm not experienced with Android, but I thought it used icons too. Are you actually using CLI on your phone?

Re: Waste

I'm getting one as soon as my contract's up.

Re: Use the fines to prop up physical book publishers/sellers

> I believe that ALL of the potential fines should be used to keep PAPER publishing alive as they are the REAL VICTIMS of the price fixing.

The victims of price-fixing are the consumers who pay the higher fixed prices, not the vendors who collect the money.

Apple colluded with publishers to push prices up. Not down. Do you really not see the difference there?

"Amazon will be free to raise prices back up"

But this is the fascinating thing about Amazon: they don't do that. They locate inefficiencies in a market, use their muscle to get rid of those inefficiencies (which necessarily causes problems for competitors who can't or won't become as efficient as Amazon), and that's it. The traditional final stage of monopolistic behaviour -- pushing prices back up again once you've got a monopoly -- appears not to interest them. Find us an example of a product whose price Amazon has increased after driving out the competition. I bet you can't.

The corporate ethos appears to be that everyone benefits from a more efficient market, so make it more efficient and leave it that way. Look at Netflix: they're in direct competition with Amazon's LoveFilm, yet they use Amazon's AWS. Amazon are in a perfect position to cause serious problems for Netflix, yet they don't.

The very reason we have anti-monopoly laws is to protect consumers from monopolies forcing prices up. Since Amazon don't do that, what exactly is that you think the law should be protecting us poor Amazon customers from?

Re: Did Apple Hire 6-Year-Olds for Lawyers!?

Quite. And they were also clearly hoping no-one would notice the ellision: "But Amazon engaged in anticompetitive practice in order to force prices down, so why shouldn't we engage in anticompetitive practice in order to force prices up?"

Re: In the eBook market

Really? A Jack Reacher book on Kindle is roughly half the price it is on paper in a bookshop. I don't feel shafted by Amazon.

"Did the judge actually call out Steve Jobs personally as being a criminal?"

Near enough, yes:

"After carefully weighing the evidence, the court agreed with the Justice Department and 33 state attorneys general that executives at the highest levels of Apple orchestrated a conspiracy with five major publishers to raise e-book prices," the assistant attorney general in charge of the DoJ’s antitrust division, Bill Baer, said.

Even if Jobs were alive, the only way he could fight the accusation would be for Apple to claim that they went ahead and formed major policy without consulting him. Even they would be hard pushed to do that with a straight face.

"the decisions are made by human beings ... are they going to see any time for fraud?"

I agree, except that the crime in question wasn't fraud. People do go to prison for fraud, even when they commit it via a corporation. But the punishment for price-fixing is not imprisonment; it is a fine.

One could argue that it would be correct in principle to fine the people within the corporation who were responsible for the price-fixing, but what would be the point? The corporation would just adjust their salaries and bonuses to cover it. The corporation's going to pay either way. Best remedy against the people is to hope that they lose their jobs if the company decides it doesn't like being associated with criminal behaviour. Don't think that's going to happen at Apple, somehow.

"'D hate to be on a plane with one of these."

Windows Phone allows you to set data connections to on, off, or only when not roaming.

Re: "why cant you just buy [a camera] and have the rest of the phone as a separate entity?"

@ Great Bu

But then what would I photograph?

Nice to see you're up, by the way.

Re: "so I don't have to suffer the humilation of owning a Windows Phone."

Perhaps, and a change of policy at Nokia won't solve the problems of 99% of the population.

Re: No expandable storage

Yeah, roaming is the one situation where Skydrive falls down. Personally, I can't see me taking so many photos in a couple of weeks that I'd fill up that much memory; my 800 only has 16GB and I haven't come close to needing it all -- and I take a lot of photos. I tend to bump into the odd wifi hotspot on holiday these days, too; it's not all roaming when abroad. And I'd've thought that someone who wants to take such a huge volume of photos might have a laptop with them anyway. Not saying an SD card would have been a bad idea, but I think the number of people who will actually experience real problems as a result of its lack is vanishingly small.

Re: No expandable storage

It does have expandable storage: Skydrive. Get with the times.

Meego.

I had an N900 and loved Maemo. Thought Elop was a moron for ditching it. But I have to say, using WinPho, I'm a convert. It's superb.

It's always going to come down to personal taste, I suppose.

"why cant you just buy [a camera] and have the rest of the phone as a separate entity?"

Well, of course you can, and I think a lot of us do. I for one am getting quite pissed off with lugging a decent camera around, though, especially on holiday with kids, who always manage to provide you with loads of other stuff to carry. If I could get a phone with a good enough camera to do justice to those valuable memories I want to be looking at tearfully in my eighties, then I'd happily ditch the bloody camera.

Re: No expandable storage?

I have a Lumia, and can confirm that the auto-upload to Skydrive is completely hassle-free and means that onboard storage is academic. If you take a photo then immediately delete it, it'll still be sitting there on your PC next time you turn it on.

Re: Regardless of which OS we are talking about that piece of tat is an Acer.

I had an Acer that got lugged around the world and generally mistreated for ten years without a single hardware fault (which is a lot more than can be said for my flimsy piece-of-crap Macbook). Built like a tank, and so reliable I would go out of my way to pick Acer now even if they were the more expensive option. That they're cheap is just icing on the cake.

Catch?

I thought "tennis" came from the French for "hold".

I was going to upvote that comment until the final sentence, which is pompous grandiose bollocks. You're telling us that there was no slavery in North America until the English established it there? Seriously? And, fascinating though your historical explanation is (really, no sarcasm here), it doesn't do anything at all to contradict the original point, which was that one of the results of American Independence was that slavery stayed legal in the US for a lot longer than it would have had the States remained British colonies.

"Why deny us human rights?"

I don't think the protestors are denying anyone any rights. The protestors are American citizens, and are protesting against the American Government, demanding that they respect a clause in the American Constitution that specifically protects certain civil rights of American citizens. Fair enough. There's nothing in the Constitution regarding not being allowed to spy on foreigners (I think the Framers would have been rather surprised at the suggestion, to be honest). If you don't want YOUR government to collude with US intelligence agencies in trampling YOUR rights, organise your own bloody protest, don't just sit around whining that the American protestors aren't performing your democratic duty for you.