Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.
The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.
Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.
"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?
And it has only gotten worse since then. A copyright for a decade or two is completely reasonable, but "life of author, plus 70 years" benefits only large companies. Someone is violating your rights? Good luck suing them if you are an indie creator! Want to create a parody, which is totally legal? Sorry, you can't upload it anywhere - all the hosting companies decided to apply Copyright 2.0 instead!
I feel like I must be the crazy one for never having a problem with just vanilla pip, PyPi, and venv (or virtualenv for old Python 2 stuff). Maybe it's just my use case?
I'm sure there are plenty of people who will pay for it even though its being given away for free. Maybe not enough to replace the income from google but its worth a shot trying a fund raising drive.
The "Stop Killing Games" movement is a lot more palatable to the general public. (It can be boiled down to "I should be able to play the thing I bought and paid for")
As soon as you mention to someone uninvolved what started this conversation (incest games and such), you're climbing an uphill battle.
It's the same reason why "protect the children" arguments often work, no matter how flawed.
I'd say it'll become more and more relevant to enact such changes. Unlike in the 90s/2000s where gaming was a somewhat 'niche' thing, it's definitely in the mainstream nowadays.
Based on my 5 seconds of Googling, games made about $190b in revenue, 55% from mobile. Movies made $32b, so even ignoring mobile, games are about double what movies do. Games also have massive projects like Call of Duty that now cost $700 million to develop.
Steam as a platform accounts for about $5bn. A good chunk of it is Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite. Then a handful of really big hitters like GTA and CoD. Excluding those enormous titles, the games industry is smaller than the numbers suggest.
Which is to say, the big fish are the ones with the most influence and least likely to be affected by this.
> Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget?
I dare say a great many people are very inspired by what the DoD does with their budget. Inspired to what... well, that's another subject. And the most inspired people are not the ones living in the US.
I wonder how much of this is reaction to Elon and how much is a reaction to the cyber truck.
For me personally, any consoderation I had for purchasing a Tesla has died thanks to the cyber truck. Its well-documented littany of defects and design flaws has killed my faith in Tesla to successfully iterate and improve on their existing fleet. It just feels a lot safer now to stick with incumbent auto manufacturers - even for EVs.
Even 5% more expensive means 80% of people buy the taiwan version for $475 instead of $500.
20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead of the $600 one.
Never make the mistake of falling for people's virtue signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon virtue, being far stronger than any other).
There's many fields where paying 10% extra on parts is more than worth it for shorter and more reliable supply chain. Not to mention probably better for the environment as well. The price for parts is often a small piece of the overall costs.
Seems other agree with me on that:
> And while many companies fear that moving their manufacturing to the U.S. would cost significantly more, some experts estimate that wafer production at the Arizona site is only about 10% more expensive compared to Taiwan. Despite that, the company says that its customers are willing to pay a higher price, with production already sold out until late 2027.
Also interesting that many of the new tariffs settle down to around 10%. That seems like a good balance for the US, and also similar to what European tariffs have been for many industries.
IMHO, the idea of entirely free trade is as dumb as excessive trade barriers. It's like trying to model people as purely rational agents. We're not. It's a decent starting point but we need perturbative models based on empirical information of human biases.
The ideal solution for tariffs is likely a distribution function with a peak around 5-15% with a steep drop off toward 0% and a longer tail for higher tariffs. Because 0% just leaves you open to any market manipulations of malicious foreign actors and corporations looking to offshore for a few cents of profits while higher tariffs lead to increasing protectionism and local companies becoming lax and inefficient.
That would just so happen to align well with these extra cost to manufacture in the USA in this instance.
If the US can maintain even just 5-10% of production volume, that's a huge win IMO. It means the US has a foundation of knowledge, equipment, and supply chains to expand on in the event of an emergency.
Taiwan is in a precarious position, which is a huge liability for "western" powers. And a liability for us is effectively also a liability for Taiwan, considering we are their protectorate. North America and western Europe are comparatively safe.
This is the manufacturing cost, not the retail MSRP.
_Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be passed along to the consumer.
When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy whatever is on the shelf at the time.
The manufacturing cost is 5%-20% more expensive. That doesn't say much about what AMD is going to do with the prices they charge customers. They may be able to absorb that cost, albeit with lower margins, and may choose to do so for exactly the reason you state: people won't buy it if they can get a more or less identical product elsewhere for cheaper.
Whether or not AMD is motivated to eat that cost is another question, of course.
If other people agree with Lia Siu about supply chain resiliency, presumably what will happen is that they buy from both. Maybe they buy more from Taiwan, but the effective price will be somewhere between the two.
Virtue signaling? What are you talking about. You seem to have an axe to grind.
Cost increase in a single part doesn’t necessarily mean the cost of the device needs to go up. If a CPU costs 120$ instead of 100$ like that of a competing device 300$ device you can always sell yours for 310$ and make less margins. Things have to get subsidized in the short term if we are going to get domestic production up.
Sorry, but I can't stand posts like this and they always come up in discussions about Firefox. If you have a better alternative than Firefox, please say so.
Mozilla has many problems and has done bad stuff. Firefox is better than Chrome for most users. These are not mutually exclusive statements.
They're facts, but they aren't helpful on their own. The article is about convincing Chrome users to switch to Firefox. If all you do is criticize Mozilla - no matter how much they deserve it - then you are signalling to users that they should stay with Chrome. Despite Mozilla's many problems, I'm sure you'd agree that Google is even worse.
An alternative to Firefox needs to be offered at the very least, or all you're doing is helping Google keep its iron grip on the web.
The trend Mozilla is going is clearly seen. these facts show the trend. That was the purpose of my post, to show the direction they have chosen.
I do get the frustration of not having safe choice at the moment. People lash out because anyone critical of Firefox removes the last safe choice they had. Subconscious reaction is to attack the messenger, instead of realising the grim state of things.
I'd suggest sticking to Apple at the moment, for the lack of better alternative. It has no skin in Ads game, it sells expenssive devices with pretty good privacy and security. Private Relay is big pain in the ass for Google and Facebook, btw.
Might as well use Brave at that point if I'm tying my fate to Chromium, though I appreciate your confirmation that there's no non-Chromium option to prioritize over Firefox on Android.
Sounds like I'll stick with Firefox and consider it to be the primary non-Chromium recommendation for 74% of the world's smartphone users who aren't on Apple.
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