Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, April 30, 2007:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

And now? A recent news story about global smartphone market share:

The latest smart-phone numbers from Canalys show that Apple’s gaining share like a bat out of hell.

The company has gone from 2% global share to 14% share in a year.

And Apple is just beginning to make deals in China. In the U.S., the iPhone’s market share has rocketed from 7% to 23%, nearly a quarter of the entire market. Microsoft’s smartphone market share shrank globally from 14% to 9%, most of that being eaten up by Apple. Looks like Ballmer’s not getting the 80% he thought he’d get.

Here in Japan (where everyone is supposed to hate the iPhone), I don’t know what the numbers are, but the iPhone is definitely taking off. You can see them everywhere now–more and more, I keep seeing people tapping away at them. Not so much in school, where students are married to cheap plans which allow for low-cost cross-carrier calls, but among the general population, it’s evidently very popular. The iPhone has consistently been in the top 10 in smartphone sales, and the 32GB 3GS has held on to the #2 spot since September, with its 16GB sister unit bring up the rear between #9 and #5. As much as people claim this is only because SoftBank offers the 8GB 3G for free, both of Apple’s top-selling models are not free–the free unit held the #14 spot for the last two months. In short, the iPhone don’t need no free deal to make it big.

Meanwhile, Microsoft got a hell of a black eye this week when it revealed that it failed to back up data on its Sidekick cloud network. When the servers failed last week, the data went bye-bye. That means that many of the million or so people depending on Microsoft just lost all their contact, calendar, and photo data, permanently. Microsoft has been running the service for about a year now–presumably enough time that they can’t blame someone else for the failure.

The GOP attempts a weak, last-gasp shoot-down of Net Neutrality:

The Republican Party has ramped up its opposition to Federal Communications Commission proposals to enact tough net neutrality rules with a call for the agency to conduct a “market analysis” of the broadband landscape before going any further. Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida, who asked for the study on Monday, was not shy about telling the FCC what he thinks it should conclude. “At first glance, net neutrality regulations may appear reasonable and harmless, but, a deeper examination reveals that net neutrality is neither reasonable nor harmless,” he warned. “These mandates would harm consumers, reduce competition, and discourage new investment and innovation at a time of tremendous technological growth.”

That seems to be the new Republican SOP: wait and study and see while we take the time to spread so many lies and smears that the subject becomes toxic. This is another area where Republicans are completely bought and sold by industry interests.

The Internet grew–exploded, in fact–and has thrived under Net Neutrality. The FCC is not going to change things, it’s going to keep them from changing. The whole cock-and-bull story about Net Neutrality “adding regulations” which will inhibit free-market growth and deny investors their due is utter BS–a lie cooked up by the telecoms who want to get private ownership of the Internet handed to them on a silver platter for free. Current rules ensure a free-market environment, something the telecoms want to end.

If Net Neutrality is not reconfirmed and made official, if the telecoms get their way and do away with the policy, you will pay more for Internet connections and services, and will get worse service for it. The telecoms, which already charge everyone for bandwidth, will divide the Internet pathways into slow and fast, and will add surcharges for the fast connections–and you’ll start paying for it. On top of that, the telecoms are asking for the power to tell you what apps you can and cannot use on the Internet. Had there been no policy of neutrality from the start, the telecoms would by now have decided for you which browsers, telephony apps, and email clients you would be allowed to use. A variety of apps and web sites would be blocked or banned, and your service would be slower and more expensive.

Hopefully, this is just impotent chest-beating on the part of Congressional Republicans, and the FCC will simply go right ahead and ignore the pipsqueaks.

A post at Sean’s blog brought back to mind the dangers of doing business with online firms, especially ones with recurring charges. Many people are nervous enough using their credit cards to pay for anything online; where you have to be most careful, however, is when you sign contracts for an ongoing service.

Ten years ago, I signed on to a web host, and like most people, I did not read the long service agreement that they tell you to read. This right here is a pet peeve of mine–that businesses know damned well that people don’t read these, and take advantage of that fact to introduce terms that they know most people would never agree to, or at least would start questioning.

I strongly support the idea of plain-language, bullet-point summaries where standard consumer contracts are concerned. If it’s a business-to-business deal where each side has lawyers to protect the interests of the clients, that’s one thing–but when it’s the average consumer just trying to buy into a simple service, that’s something else. This may not be workable in real life for some reason, but saying that the user “should” read and understand the terms of every single EULA a person agrees to is over-simplistic and ignores basic realities.

Think of all those agreements you skip past and click “I agree”–every update of iTunes, for example, requires this. If you stopped and read through every single such agreement so that you understood it fully, it would make online purchasing a horror. Imagine going to the supermarket and having to read a long, obscure, boring legal document to sign before you paid at the checkout counter. If it’s not reasonable there, why should it be reasonable with documents you sign electronically all the time?

Now, you do have to do this in brick-and-mortar shops, but mostly just with recurring payments (web purchases almost always have lengthy terms, even for one-time purchases), and there is a service person right there to answer whatever questions you have. Online transactions require these long contracts far more often (frequently with one-time purchases equivalent to supermarket visits) and there is no one easily available to help you without a long-distance telephone call where you expect to be put on hold for twenty-five minutes. Not to mention that there is a common perception that clicking “I Agree” is not as weighty as signing your name on the bottom line; to get that effect, you’d have to call it a “digital signature” or something along those lines.

Additionally, the language of these documents is difficult to understand. This may be necessary for legal reasons but there is no reason whatsoever that the same terms cannot be simplified and listed at the top, with the caveat of the fine print being the main determiner of what was agreed to (so long as the bullet points are not misleading or completely different).

The fact that most people don’t read these is clearly evidence enough that the current standard is not something the average person would be inclined to do, thus preventing reasonable expectation of a true meeting-of-minds.

These terms should be boiled down so that the salient points stand out in clear, easy-to-read bullets. True, one could go the full distance and say that such contracts must be written so that the biggest idiot in the world could understand, thus making a mockery of the whole idea. However, the alternative is to leave it as is, where the contract is deliberately dense and long enough to cause most people not to fully read or understand the terms–which is just as much a mockery, just going in the other direction. A reasonable middle can and should be found.

To get on with my original point, I found out about the perils of ignoring such agreements when I signed up for web hosting services with a place called “Aitnet.com”. When you sign up, they have a service agreement which is depressingly boilerplate–you can find dozens of firms, mostly web hosts, with virtually the exact same language.

In this “agreement,” there is a clause, usually down near the bottom after most people who even tried to read the whole thing gave up, which is alarmingly permissive for the business to rip you off. Here is the language–and keep in mind that this is a business which you have given permission to automatically bill you:

12. CHANGES IN TERMS OF AGREEMENT: [company name] reserves the right to make changes to the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time, and to the on-line application/order form, to include pricing of the Services, advising of the change and the effective date thereof by publishing it to the appropriate [company name] Web site, but with changes in fees being effective only at the end of any period for which Customer has prepaid. Utilization of the Service(s) by Customer following the effective date of such change(s) shall constitute acceptance by Customer of such change(s). Customer is solely responsible for staying informed with respect to changes in this Agreement, to include the application/order form, the AUP, and the BP, all of which are published on-line, as indicated above, and are readily available for public viewing.

Did you get that? Boiled down, it means that the business can, at any time, change the terms of your contract, setting any price they desire, and they do not need to contact you in any way to inform you of this–all they need to do is change a few words in the online agreement. You are responsible for reading and re-reading the agreement every single month and noticing whatever small, unflagged changes may have been made in the contract which consists of many pages of dense legalese.

For example, they could decide to triple your charges and commit you to a year-long contract instead of the month-long contract you agreed to. If you fail to faithfully visit their site and read the agreement in time to catch the change, then you’ll be legally obligated to pay whatever they decided to charge you.

This is along the lines of what happened to a lot of people who signed on to AIT many years ago: AIT suddenly changed their standing contracts from one-month contracts to six-months contracts. Neither I nor anyone else on the service who I spoke to received any email notifying us of this; it may have been buried deeply in some spam-filled monthly ‘newsletter’ that no one reads, but the point is, AIT was not even legally obligated to do that. All you had to do was not carefully check their online agreement for 30 days, and whammo–you’re theirs for another six months and you didn’t even know it.

Now, I can imagine a rational argument for this particular contract clause: a company often needs to make changes in a contract, and though they can make an honest best effort to notify everyone by email, there will inevitably be those who don’t get it. If they promised email notification, that would be kind of messy. So instead, they make it the responsibility of the user to check.

The problem with that, of course, is that it is completely unreasonable to expect regular people to check the long, dense legalese every month for changes of a few words. That is far more unreasonable than expecting the company to dutifully notify everyone by email.

And it’s not as if reasonable solutions could not be found. For example, instead of requiring readers to read the entire contract each month and catch even the smallest of changes, the revisions could also be posted on a central web page dedicated to pointing out such things. It would not be unreasonable to ask customers to check a page like that every month. Alternately, one could have a grace period of one or two months after the new contract is charged to their account where the customer could back out of the agreement when they get their billing for the month and notice the change for the first time. Not that they’d necessarily get a full refund, but they could get back the difference and/or be allowed to terminate the contract with pro-rata refunds.

The way things are now, contracts are slanted heavily in favor of corporations, which can get away with pretty nasty stuff, especially if they are on a decline and expect to be out of business soon–and their executives would like to pick the pockets of their remaining customers for one last, big bonus for themselves before declaring bankruptcy.

Sure, consumers can complain, report them, criticize the publicly, maybe even try to sue them, but corporations know that most people won’t; putting up a small amount of resistance can gain them a lot of money. Just say “no” until a customer really threatens big action, then give in.

These clauses, one would expect, are allowed on the basis of corporations using them in good faith–for example, they have to make some minor, niggling change for circumstances beyond their control. For them to suddenly introduce a major price hike, change the length of contracts significantly, or otherwise do something that any reasonable customer would want to know about beforehand, they should not be able to hide behind the legalese and slip in the change in the fine print, knowing that a vast majority of customers will not notice until too late.

That good faith, in my opinion, was abused by AIT when I dealt with them. Especially coming at a time when many people were getting more and more buggy service, experiencing more and more problems, to suddenly increase the contract length sixfold is not what a reasonable person would expect without a greater effort by the company to inform people. It did not help their image when they maintained the one-month contract period on their main web page, and certainly did not make them look too honest when many customers started reporting over-billing and double-billing upon trying to leave the service.

That’s what happened to me, though the circumstances were kind of bizarre. Actually, AIT’s screw-ups worked to alert me to why I should leave them, and just in time. Despite the fact that I has signed on for automatic payment and my credit card info was in order, and despite the fact that they had already quietly slipped me into their 6-month contract, they suspended my account and shut down my web site for “non-payment” (which they kindly plastered on placeholder on my own domain). When I told them to bring me back up, they billed me for previous “non-payment” which I had actually paid, and then double-billed me for that, all around the time I was making it clear that I wanted out of there. When my complaint became loud enough, they agreed to refund my money–but when I got the “refund,” it was nothing more than store credit, meaningless to someone who is quitting a service.

It was hard for me to get anything done with my site or my account, however, as they had their customer “support” and billing people contradicting each other three times daily in a long-distance telephone hell while consistently shutting down my services in a variety of annoying ways while denying that anything was wrong. This went on for a few weeks, wreaking havoc with my blood pressure.

In the end, I fired off a direct email to their top execs threatening to file a formal complaint to the Better Business Bureau–at which point they promptly closed my account as requested and refunded all overcharges. For a longer version of the whole story, you can see the page I created back at the time.

Just one other pet peeve about online transactions: stopping them. Sure, when you want to sign on to a service, they are very happy to take your money after just a few minutes and some basic info. But when you want to stop paying them, suddenly they don’t trust you anymore, and require a far more difficult set of forms and other hoops to jump through. In the case of AIT, I had to sign a physical piece of paper, fax it back to them, and then wait two days for them to carefully inspect it. As if not taking your money was more of a security risk for you than it was to take it. Clearly they just want to discourage customers from leaving. There should be a consumer law stating that there be no more effort to quitting an agreement than there is to entering into one.

What I guess I am trying to say here is, as always, caveat emptor. That is not a cliché without good reason: it is the nature of businesses to take the upper hand and to wring as much money out of customers as possible (yes, Apple too). That’s simply a given. What makes a good business is when they try their best to deliver a good product or service. But the bad businesses are far too common, and are given far too many tools to rip you off.

At his press conference today:

OBAMA: … As one of those options, for us to be able to say, here’s a public option that’s not profit-driven, that can keep down administrative costs, and that provides you good, quality care for a reasonable price as one of the options for you to choose, I think that makes sense.

QUESTION: Wouldn’t that drive private insurance out of business?

OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If — if private — if private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

As people have said before, in answer to the criticism that a low-cost government plan will drive the private insurers out of business, one should say, “Good!” In this case, the anti-socialized-medicine crowd can’t win; they’ve painted themselves into a corner. If it’s an option to take the public insurance route, then if people don’t want it, they won’t take it. If government can’t run health care efficiently, then private health insurance should drive the public insurance out of business. And if the government can do health insurance better than private industry, then why shouldn’t it?

The right-wing criticism is that the government can’t run anything efficiently, but we’ve seen that proven false lots of times–until the Republicans get their hands on it and intentionally drive it into the ground, and then declare, “See!?”

Opponents of public health care ask snidely if people want politicians making your medical decisions for you. A stupid question, as politicians would meddle with your coverage far less than the insurance companies currently do; under a public plan, your doctor would have more control than now. And right now, lawyers working for the insurance companies are making your medical decisions based upon how much it profits them; how’s that working out?

The bottom line is this: health care should not be a lucrative, for-profit industry. We’ve seen close-up what happens when it is, when corporations can charge whatever the market can bear to save your life, and lie, cheat, and steal when it comes to living up to their end of the bargain. The whole reason there’s even a debate about this is because the private businesses have done such a horrific job. The insurance companies are running scared because they know that they can’t compete with a public health insurance option, not without cutting their profits to a reasonable margin, covering people the way they’re supposed to, and not denying them coverage at every possible excuse. They don’t want to lose all that.

In what was probably music to the RIAA’s ears, a jury found in its favor and awarded it $1.9 million in damages in a file sharing retrial in Minnesota.

The bad news for the RIAA, even if they don’t realize it or don’t care, is that this verdict makes them look far worse then they ever did previously, which is saying a lot.

First, the evildoer they have crushed is a single mother of four. So, not exactly the poster girl for evildoers. She is low-income, so she is not likely to be able to pay even a fraction of the fine. Then there is the idea that this penalizes her kids just as it does her, and considering the relatively pedestrian nature of the “crime,” it comes across as chopping off someone’s hand for stealing a piece of penny candy. No, for stealing the discarded wrapper of a piece of penny candy.

Second, the judgment was so outrageous that most people will recoil: $80,000 per song, or $1,920,000. For downloading 24 songs, and maybe a few people downloaded them from her. Actual damages to the RIAA, at most, were probably well under a hundred bucks. Hard to imagine how the jury didn’t gag on that verdict–one can only assume that they were simply following a set of rules and did not allow reason to interfere.

And third, the verdict is likely to cause a legal challenge more powerful than before, under the proposition that such an award is “grossly excessive.” You can be sure that we haven’t seen the last of this case yet. After all, this was a retrial–the first trial ended with a $220,000 award for the RIAA, but the case was thrown out because the judged ruled that award to be “wholly disproportionate,” “unprecedented and oppressive.” The new punitive damages are roughly a hundred thousand times the actual damages. Frankly, I find the minimum penalty of $750 per song to be excessive–no doubt carrying the force of law only because RIAA lobbyists bribed enough congressmen.

With luck, a challenge will rule the standing law to be unconstitutional–the Eighth Amendment says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” How many people think that an $80,000 fine for downloading a single $1 song is not excessive? In fact, the law allows for $150,000 per song. Perfectly reasonable, right?

But one can be fairly confident that the folks over at the RIAA are smugly patting themselves on the back right now, because they don’t give a crap about any of the above. What they wanted was to scare the hell out of file sharers, making it easier to shake them down, and to scare people into buying the overpriced music they monopolize. That they took someone who was about as inoffensive as they get and derailing their life, crushing them for a petty offense, means nothing to them. This verdict is likely to frighten more people into caving to the RIAA’s extortion and coughing up thousands of dollars to avoid this kind of trial–despite there being no real evidence that they did anything wrong.

One can only suppose that the RIAA has given up on presenting any semblance of having any good will or image; they have likely decided that people need their music, even if they have to buy it from scum-sucking fascist fat cats.

One of the reasons that cheap PCs and other equipment are not quite as cheap as they seem is mail-in rebates. I have always hated these rebates, as I am sure many people do. And yet, many people act like they are a great thing, or at least will go along with the idea that the rebate actually lowers the price. But I think it’s no secret that rebates are actually designed to keep the consumer’s money.

I think it was back in the 90’s when I first dealt with this, and my experience varied little from the cartoon version above. The rebate form required that you keep every scrap of paper associated with the item, and fill in an inordinate amount of information that would make a spammer drool. That is assuming that you can figure out the information and do it correctly. Then you get to mail in the form, hope it is accepted, and at that, wait a few months (or longer–the most common complaint is that the rebates takes too long to arrive) before the long-awaited rebate check arrives–one which is somewhat hard to cash, if I recall correctly. Some rebates don’t even pay by check–they issue you a debit card which can only be used at certain stores. Usually these details are not evident unless you read the fine print, which no one ever does.

Finally, there is the time/effort cost: how much is it worth to you to take the trouble of filling out all those forms, mailing things in, dealing with potential snags, keeping tabs on the rebate coming back, and then doing what is necessary to claim the cash in the end? Before getting excited about a rebate-discounted price, ask yourself if you would be just as excited if you had to do all that work before the purchase? You have two items, one is $299, the other is $230 after a $100 rebate. But before you can walk home with the cheaper item, you have to sort through papers, fill out forms, go to the post office, go to the bank–an assorted variety of tedious tasks, even not including the months-long wait. Is it worth it?

The common reaction is to give up somewhere along the line–which is exactly the idea the manufacturer had in mind. Fact is, about 60% of all people who qualify for rebates don’t claim them.

The soon-to-be-released Palm Pre is playing this game. The price you see for their 8GB model is $199.99, after a $100 mail-in rebate. Apparently they could not get the price down to match the $199 8GB iPhone, so they priced it at $300 and tacked on the rebate. If the 60% rule about rebate claims holds true, Palm will be getting $260 per phone–and the remaining $40 will probably be covered by all the detailed marketing information they’ll get from the people who do fill in and submit the rebate forms. Good deal for them, not so great for buyers who don’t think about the rebate drawbacks before buying.

If you’re hot for the Pre, then get it at Best Buy or Radio Shack, which claim that they will honor the $100 rebate instantly. I’m not sure if they require cumbersome forms or not, but the ‘instant’ part sounds a lot better than the normal route.

Interestingly, Japan doesn’t do rebates, or at least I have never heard of one here. Sachi was puzzled by the concept and had not heard of it, either.

As for me, I have long considered any mail-in rebate as a scam and I do not buy anything that includes one–or if I do, I disregard the rebate and count the pre-rebate price as the real cost.

Carly Fiorina, CEO of HP, recently got into trouble when she said that Sarah Palin couldn’t run a corporation. She quickly amended that to say that she was talking about specific business credentials, and that John McCain (who was responsible for the BlackBerry, don’t you know), Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were similarly unqualified.

That brought me to think about exactly that question–how would each of the four perform as a chief executive of a corporation? Having no experience in or knowledge of the job or the environment, let me give my completely unqualified assessment, and see if you agree.

McCain would be the closest thing to a pointy-haired boss; especially in a tech corporation, he would likely not understand what he was selling. He would probably lead by whim more than by far-sighted planning, and would probably be easily influenced by those around him, doing either the last thing someone told him was a good idea, or the thing that the most people on his senior staff thought was a good idea. His mercurial temper would not help. He might have a few priorities and directions he would want to go in, but these would be limited in scope and importance. He would be uninspiring overall–workers would be less than impressed with grampaw’s war stories, and more affected by his poor speaking style. His health would spark concerns that would dampen (or, I suppose, spark) stock prices, and people would always be asking about who’s next in line to take over.

Palin would be the usurper, the lightweight that shot up to the top for a variety of reasons not having much to do with actual talent. Though sharp and ambitious, she would not be the productive type; she would have gotten to where she was over the backs of others she tore down along the way, or by the helping hand of those above who favored her. There would be widespread concern about how capably she would govern, and while she might win over the PR crowd, the professionals would have strong doubts. The social pages of the newspapers might herald her self-proclaimed accomplishments, but those in the know would laugh at the claims and understand her for the lightweight she is; look to the boring columns in the financial sections to read far-less-optimistic reviews. Those working for the company would be unhappy–people in any management position would be in constant fear of being fired (except for the neophytes, cronies, and kiss-ups), and those below would be wondering what draconian edicts would restrict their working conditions next. She would bring light to the company, but not progress, efficiency, or productivity.

Biden would be the college-professor type of CEO–a good deal of knowledge and experience, but otherwise uninspiring. He might miss the big picture for the details, and some would see him as ineffectual. While some workers would be comfortable with the low-key professional, others would be worried about whether or not this leader could take the business where it needs to go, and whether the big boss had what it takes to sell the company and make it thrive. Biden would have connections, but not necessarily the power to bring the company to the heights expected of it. He would be far preferable to McCain or Palin, but would just not be the type who would make a company a great one. The corporation he ran would be as low-key as he is–getting by, doing OK, but never in the big leagues.

Obama, while a new face, would be the only one who would really do well as a CEO. While relatively inexperienced, he would have two necessary things that any of the other three would not: the charisma to drive the company and sell the product, and the intellect to grasp what the company needs to do and how to do it. While Obama technically has no executive experience, he did start from virtually nothing and build a multi-hundred-million-dollar organization which took on and took down one of the biggest, if not the biggest political dynasty around. Obama is, in fact, closer to a self-made dotcom startup that offers a great new product that everyone wants to try. It might be heavy on flash and style, and it will have bugs, but still has the substance to sell. There is the same effect in both cases–people who like the product say it’s really great, and the naysayers quickly tire of the fans, exaggerate the expectations, and then try to shoot down the company for not being 100% perfect and delivering a product of god-like perfection. But the product is still solid and sells well. Obama is similar to Steve Jobs–someone with very good business intuition and the public persona to sell it. Everyone working for him might wonder if he could take on Microsoft after leaving Dell in the dust, but they’d be optimistic about the stock options and excited about the person leading their corporation.

Thoughts?

In case there was any remaining doubt about whether Wal-Mart was completely without any sense of morality or ethics, this article should dispel those illusions. They are telling their people that unions are bad and they should vote against Democrats who will help the unions. Now, I’m not legal expert, but isn’t such mandatory anti-union and vote-persuasion propaganda illegal in this context?

“The meeting leader said, ‘I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won’t have a vote on whether you want a union,’” said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. “I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote,” she said.

And can Wal-Mart get off the hook simply by claiming they’re not doing what they’re obviously doing, or is that power limited only to the Republican Party? Or is there no difference?

It’s not entirely clear how accurate it is, but a survey (PDF) done by the Ponemon Institute (yeah, I know) for Dell claims to have found that on average, about 10,300 laptops go missing at the 36 biggest airports in the U.S. each week. Averaged out, that’s about 40 laptops lost at each major airport every day. The frequency of reported loss is not equal, though; LAX has the highest, reporting about 1200 lost each week, or about 170 per day. 69% of those lost at major airports are never recovered.

Even stranger, the place where people lose their laptops most is at security checkpoints–airports report that 40% are lost there. 23% are lost at the departure gate, 9% in restrooms, 7% at food service, 6% at clubs or lounges, 6% on transport systems, and 4% each at retail shops and ticketing counters.

Something sounds fishy here. Assuming the data is accurate, then even accounting for intentional theft being higher at airports than elsewhere, that still sounds like a very high number. Even people who carry laptops belonging to their companies understand how expensive they are; I don’t know of many people who treat the things casually. A laptop is not exactly something that you just put on the seat next to you and then forget about, like a dog-eared paperback.

Some of the locations sound strange too. Why 40% at security? It’s not as if the laptops are out of your sight for very long. Even if you account for people in front of you “accidentally” picking up your computer, it still sounds high; again, it’s a place where people tend to be wary of stuff like that. And restrooms? How the hell does that happen?

So, being the cynic that I am, I have to wonder exactly how many of those “lost” laptops are actually stolen by the people claiming to have lost them, using the airport as a convenient excuse? Seeing as how large companies most likely reclaim such losses via insurance, it seems likely that employees might consider such theft “covered” and therefore more attractive.

But there’s another possibility: the survey was commissioned by a computer company selling a security system> I am always suspicious of “research” released by people trying to sell you something.

There’s a story hitting the news wires: the Mac has hit an all-time high of 7.95% market share, more than ever before, with the impression being of an immediate upward trend for Apple. Last year at about this time, some clueless tech writer at Computerworld wrote that the Mac OS was flailing while Vista showed robust growth, using the exact same source of stats that the new story uses (Net Applications’ tracking data). I wrote a blog post explaining in detail why this guy was full of it. Both stories–the one that was negative about Macs last year and the one which is positive about Macs this year–are wrong, and for similar reasons.

Yes, a new all-time high about Mac use is nice to hear, but not impressive to me right now. The reason: it’s not Mac season yet. I have noticed a pattern over the past three years–here’s the data over that period of time:

The areas filled in with green show sustained growth. See a pattern? Every year, starting in September, there is a sustained growth burst that continues until January. Between February and August, there are minor fluctuations, but the market share generally remains static.

The growth spurts are dramatic–less than 1% growth in terms of total market share in late ’05 (but that was bigger in terms of percentage of growth over the existing brand market share), 2% in late ’06, and close to 1.5% in late ’07. But right now we’re in the lull period.

Not to mention that the larger rise took place in May, not June (which was only a slight uptick from May), which was not really reported on. And if you look back, for some reason, there has always been a peak around April or May, so this is not a surprise. The safe bet is that the number will fall again in July and/or August, but then take off again in September, as always–probably representing back-to-school sales which create the growth spurt which lasts into Christmas sales, dying out soon afterwards.

Now, I’ll be surprised if the numbers continue to grow before September; that would be unusual, and could signal a bigger-than-usual surge in the latter third of the year. But right now, it’s not clear how big that surge will be. Yes, the iPhone 3G is making waves, but the original iPhone was making even bigger waves a year ago. While the current spurt trend–only two data points long–shows a slowing increase (2% to 1.5%), that’s less a trend than it is just a couple of data points. The surge this year could be anywhere from a 1% increase up to about 9%, or a 2% increase again up to 10%.

The only thing I’m pretty sure of is that there will be a surge–that’s the safe bet. And if you take a look at Apple stock, you’ll see a similar trend: a general pattern of big increases in the latter half of the year, with slower growth, decreases, and/or volatility in the first half.

That graph is less clear-cut, but you’ll notice that the biggest increases, especially when you discount the drop-and-recover beginning of 2008, always fall in the second half of the year, peaking over the new year, and then dropping or at least slowing. But since 2003, there’s never been a value drop between June and December.

Those seem pretty clearly to be the golden months for Apple.

Wow, the right-wingers are really showing their true colors as bigots. They just filibustered (what, the 5,349,816th time this session?) a bill that would make it possible for workers to sue for pay discrimination, essentially killing it. Obama and Clinton returned to D.C. to vote for it, and McCain stayed away, signaling that he would have voted to kill it anyway.

Let’s rehash: this is based upon a scummy re-interpretation of law by the Bush administration. The original law was intended to make it so that if you found out your employer was paying you less than another worker for the same job because you were the wrong gender or race, you could sue them, so long as you filed suit 180 days after the last occurrence of the discriminatory pay. That was obviously meant to be structured so that the 180 day deadline happened after the last disparate paycheck was issued.

In a suit based upon this law, an employer tried to claim that the 180-day deadline started when the initial decision was made to issue unequal pay, taking advantage of wording that was just nebulous enough to allow for that interpretation (if you’re a complete idiot). Co-workers don’t immediately disseminate how much money they make to all coworkers, and employers often strongly discourage (or even try to prohibit) such sharing in any case. Finding such disparity within 6 months of the initial pay difference is so rare to discover that the law would essentially be meaningless under the new interpretation. It’s about as obvious as it can get that this was not the way the law was supposed to work.

The plaintiff, Ms. Lilly Ledbetter, won her case, and all the appeals until it reached the conservative-stacked 11th circuit (a spin-off of the 5th circuit, the most conservative in the country)–whereupon the law suddenly changed to support discrimination. Then the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, and naturally, the Bush administration jumped on the company’s side, filing a brief in support of the bigotry, in opposition to the EEOC’s rational application of the law in accordance with decades of precedence. And the 5-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court voted along straight party lines to uphold the ludicrous reinterpretation that essentially gutted the law. (Message: if you’re a corrupt, lawbreaking corporation, now is the time to get your suits before the high court! Get the payoffs while they last!)

Some right-wingers used the “it’s the law’s fault” defense, saying that they’d like to fight against discrimination, but darn it, the law is just so clearly written to be stupid, we have no choice but to follow it and be stupid ourselves. The Bush administration made no such dodges; they simply claimed [PDF] that once a decision was made to discriminate, a corporation could not be expected to remember that it had initiated such discrimination beyond 6 months, and it would be a travesty if people were allowed to sue after discrimination had continued for years and years. (They even made the deranged argument that the Ledbetter law would discourage allegations of discrimination from being “expeditiously resolved.”)

So if a corporation got away with discrimination for 180 days, then they were home free–untouchable from that point on. As I pointed out before, this asinine view of the law just begs for abuse, and is even institutionalized in posterity if pay increases are decided as a percentage of initial pay levels.

Well, no problem–just re-word the law so that it clearly states the obvious intent. But there’s a big problem–no, two big problems: one, the president–who vowed to veto the reworded bill, and now the Senate Republicans, who just filibustered it to death before it could even get to the president’s desk.

So the conservative wingnuts in all three branches of government have not voiced their intent to let bigotry reign.

Ready to vote yet?

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the insidious Liberal Media™ continues to call Republican obstruction “blocking” or “denying” in their headlines, even eschewing the correct term “filibuster” in the full text of most of the articles covering this story (the few that there are, that is). They showed no such reluctance to use the word “filibuster” almost endlessly in the far more rare cases when Democrats blocked a handful of the most extremist right-wing judicial nominees.

Oh, and here’s a bonus bit of Republican hypocrisy:

Republicans said Democrats were playing politics, by timing the vote to give the Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, time to return to the Capitol from the campaign trail. Both senators spoke in support of the bill before the vote.

Yes, how terrible that they allowed senators time to vote on legislation. As opposed to four years ago, when Kerry returned to D.C. to vote for a veteran’s health care vote… and the Republican leadership delayed the vote so Kerry couldn’t vote on it. Those Republicans are just pips, aren’t they?

The latest display of unfettered greed from the RIAA:

Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users. …

[The] idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers — something like $5 per user per month — and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels. …

“If ISPs do not cooperate voluntarily,” [U2 manager Paul] McGuinness declared, “there will need to be legislation to force them to cooperate,” McGuinness said.

Um, right. Good idea.

Preface: the reports I have seen say nothing about this idea including the legalization of music file-sharing. I would presume that if the RIAA were suggesting that the $5 fee would allow everyone to legally download all the music they want for no extra cost, it would be a huge story and everyone would be covering that angle. From what I have read, they seem to be suggesting that the $5 surcharge only compensates them for what pirates steal, and nothing more; people would still have to pay for their music in addition to this surcharge. Under that assumption:

So many problems, where to start? Oh yeah: the idea of a blanket fee. Unable to target individuals efficiently, and tired of shooting in the dark, the RIAA now says, effectively, “kill them all and let god sort them out.” Charge everyone for the music, whether they download or not; essentially, the RIAA will get their very own federal tax.

Now, you could argue that stuff like this already happens; you pay more for items at stores as a way to cover losses to shoplifting. But at least the stores do this in-house; they don’t ask the oil companies to add a surcharge to gasoline sales on the idea that shoplifters use their cars to get to the stores. A more consistent model would be to add to the price of music sales to offset losses to piracy. Maybe the RIAA doesn’t want to do this because they know that the music they sell is already vastly overpriced. Just as likely is that they know it would dampen sales, whereas a surcharge on ISP services would only dampen the ISPs’ sales.

And we’re talking about huge fees generated. At $5 per ISP contract per month, with about 90 million U.S. households online, the RIAA would get a nice $5.4 billion bonus on top of all the music they sell each year. Cover most industrialized nations, and we’re talking many tens of billions of dollars the RIAA “earns” just for waking up in the morning. Brilliant! And all this without any evidence that they’re actually losing any money to file sharing–and actually some evidence that file sharing is actually generating revenue for them. Even if you believe they do lose money, it can’t even come close to that much money.

The Wired article actually legitimizes this approach somewhat:

The idea is controversial but — as Griffin and Jenner point out — hardly without precedent. The concept of collecting a fee for unauthorized use of music was developed in France in 1851 as a way of reimbursing composers whose work was being performed without their permission in cafes and the like.

The practice spread to the United States in 1914 and currently applies to radio airplay and webcasts in addition to live performances. In a 2004 white paper, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called for it to be applied to file sharing, but the Recording Industry Association of America immediately dismissed the proposal.

Either the writer of the story was just regurgitating what the RIAA was feeding him without checking it out, or he was simply poorly informed. The EFF white paper suggested something somewhat different from what is being suggested by the RIAA today. That 2004 white paper proposed a system in which individual file sharers could pony up $5 a month and in return, they could continue their file-sharing ways unabated. Having ISPs voluntarily buy into the system was one means of doing this–but the key point was that in return for the fee, all customers could then legally download all the music they wanted. As I mentioned above, I see no reference to this in the RIAA’s current proposal; instead, they simply push their idea as an additional compensation for pirated music only, not a blanket subscription-fee service. As for the radio fees, those were applied only to specific businesses who used the product–it was not applied indiscriminately as a tax. Unless I am mistaken, radio stations that do not broadcast music don’t pay the fee. (Could someone confirm that, please?)

The idea of having ISPs collect revenue for the RIAA seems a bit much to ask. Music is not all that is downloaded; if enforced by law, you would have the movie and TV producers, software developers, e-book vendors, and may other parties suddenly claiming they were losing billions to pirating and demanding additional fees be added to the ISPs’ prices until the fees became ridiculously high.

There is one precedent I can think of for this kind of idea: in Canada, a surcharge is added to media players and blank recording media and the money distributed to the music industry and artists; in fact, Canada has recently started to consider the $5/mo. ISP fee, but in exchange for making file-sharing legal.

The actual precedent in making up for revenues lost to theft is crystal clear: costs are added to the specific product stolen, or else added to the prices in the specific vendor’s venue. If the RIAA wants to jack up their own prices to compensate for this, then fine. If the RIAA wants to offer everyone a $5 per month subscription fee for accessing all the music they want, also fine. But to force every user of the Internet to pony up $5 a month, indefinitely, on the unfounded basis that the music industry is losing money it cannot even come close to proving it is actually losing, and to do so while insisting that these same people still pay full price for their music on top of this… like I said, that would be a fantastic deal for the music industry. But realistically, it is a stupid idea with little precedent and no rational justification.

Here’s a different view, by the way:

Here’s the latest genius masterstroke from the networks:

Looking to strike a blow against the proliferation of digital video recorders, the ABC network, its affiliated broadcast stations, and Cox Communications’ cable systems are establishing an on-demand video service that would allow viewers to watch ABC shows like “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” any time they choose.

The catch: It uses a new technology that disables the viewers’ ability to fast-forward through commercials. …

ABC and Cox executives said that consumer response to the test had been positive. Several executives involved in the project, which ABC plans to offer to other cable systems around the country, said the move was an overt attempt to staunch the use of DVRs like TiVo, which viewers often use to avoid commercials. That activity is increasingly seen as threat to broadcast television, which depends on ad revenue to pay for programs.

“This does counter the DVR,” said Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group. “You don’t need TiVo if you have fast-forward-disabled video on demand. It gives you the same opportunity to catch up to your favorite shows.”

So, to quote Maxwell Smart’s various and sundry opponents, exactly what kind of idiots do they think we are? “Hmm, I have this DVR sitting right here and can record the TV show in high-def and can blow through all the commercials… or I can wait a few days, and then slowly download a lower-res, DRM-studded version of the show that I have to watch on my PC with the fast-forward disabled, forcing me to watch commercials.”

Easy choice! Since I’m a complete and utter moron, I’ll watch the downloadable version!

They just don’t get it, do they? The networks, I mean. They seem to think that these various schemes they keep on coming up with will somehow just destroy people’s ability to think rationally and decide to do what is in their best interests. Now, if they were Republicans, maybe they’d be a lot more skilled at it. Unfortunately, studio and network executives aren’t running the GOP, otherwise Bush would have certainly lost four years ago. Instead, their stupidity is wasted on these Quixotic, worthless attempts to bypass the far more appealing alternatives that average viewers can clearly see are better for them.

I have said it before: there is only one way this can work out to the content providers’ benefit: narrowcasting.

What they have to do is give up the old-school thinking of doing things in broadcast mode and switch to delivering personalized content. The pay-as-you-go method of making people pay $2 to watch a TV show they’re used to getting for free just ain’t gonna cut it with 95% of the audience. And people are now too used to being able to cut through commercials or otherwise getting past the dreck that is advertising. 97% of the audience isn’t expected to watch or be interested in commercials anyway–it’s just getting that 3% who happen to be interested in the commercial being shown at the moment which is key. And there is only one solution that is really going to work in a big way.

Here’s the condensed version: make all video content available online–all old movies and TV shows, as well as new television series episodes as they are produced. Make it so people can browse an iTunes-like interface and easily choose which programming they’d like. Then stream it to them, or download in higher definition, whatever works best.

But here’s the key: personalize the commercials. Don’t broadcast, narrowcast. You’ll have to find out what people want to see, so instead of charging money, you have people answer some questions once a month. They have to say what kind of commercials they like to see, want to see. What will they be buying in the next month? What subjects are they interested in?

One thing we all have in common is that there are commercials we like to see. For me, if all my commercials were movie previews, computer commercials, and commercials for stuff I plan to buy in the near future (local wedding chapels is one, in my case, or ideas for what to buy Sachi for her birthday)–then I would want to watch the commercial breaks.

Knowing that I would have to watch commercials, I would be OK so long as the commercials were ones I wanted to see. And I would be glad to give up that info to get access to all the programming I’d like to watch. Privacy, schmivacy–most people give up that data in exchange for a member’s card at their local supermarket and a two-dollar discount on three refrigerator packs of Diet Coke.

This would be golden for the advertisers: instead of reaching only 3% of the audience, they’d be reaching over 90% in all likelihood–30 times the value. The studios could even eliminate the middleman in the form of local stations, and make off like bandits. The advertisers would be happy, the viewers would be happy, and the studios would get rich.

It’ll take bigger investment in broadband, which is overdue anyway, and details would have to be worked out to salvage DVD sales. Maybe offer the downloadable stuff in 480i old-fashioned TV quality, and then sell DVDs of the shows in Blu-ray with the extra features and commentary–they’ve probably already mined out most of the 480i DVD sales anyway.

However they figure that out, the narrowcasting option is the only viable option that I can see. Frankly, whenever I see one of these stupid, lame attempts by the networks to “do away with” DVRs or pirate downloads or whatever, I just laugh. They are all pathetic and doomed, and clearly so.

When are they going to learn?

If you bought an HD-DVD player and/or recorder and some HD-DVD titles, then it looks like you’ve got a nice, new Betamax machine on your hands. That’s right: Toshiba has apparently thrown in the towel as Blu-ray takes the prize as the winner of the new high-capacity DVD battle.

The turn came when Warner Brothers made the switch to Blu-ray. This kind of surprised me, because over the past few years, there were all kinds of dips and turns in the battle, where each maker seemed to suffer big setbacks, but then charged back later when the tide turned. When Warner–just one studio of many–announced their switch, there was a lot of buzz that this was some momentous turn. Beats me as to why–a variety of studios had been turning this way and that for a while now, and it never seemed to change anything.

Toshiba fought back, primarily by slashing prices on their players, which had always been cheaper and had come out earlier than Blu-rays. But that didn’t seem to work. Vendor after vendor decided to go Blu-ray, until the lethal blow came with Wal-Mart deciding to drop HD-DVD. That signaled the end that had begun with Warner’s move. Toshiba has not made its formal announcement yet, but it seems pretty much set:

A source at Toshiba confirmed an earlier report by public broadcaster NHK that it was getting ready to pull the plug.

“We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,” said the source, who asked not to be identified. He added that an official announcement could come as early as next week.

And here I was, figuring that it would last until somebody came up with a hybrid drive, like they did with the DVD±R/RW format. For a long time, people thought that the plus-minus wars would produce a single winner, but now everyone uses optical drives that allow for both types (although it’s getting harder and harder to find “plus” disks; “minus” seems to be the anti-climactic winner there).

Instead, everyone who bought an HD-DVD player will start to find it harder and harder to get disks to put into their machines, and eventually will have to buy a Blu-ray device.

The competition was good for at least one thing: it drove prices down a lot faster than might have happened otherwise, and spurred development and releases. Hopefully, that trend won’t slow down too much now that Sony can take a breather and relax, its dominance assured.

Oh, and guess who championed HD-DVD? Microsoft. And who picked Blu-ray from the start? Apple.

The only downside I can see: now we have to get used to a weird format naming system. Until now, it had been simple: everything was -ROM, -R, and -RW, and the initial letters made sense–CD and DVD. For some strange reason, Sony decided to go with “BD-R” and “BD-RE” for the recordable and re-writable formats. One would have expected “BR” (for Blu-Ray) to be the initial string instead of “BD” (for Blu-ray Disk), but when you think about it, that would have made the full designations “BR-R” and “BR-RW”–which sound a bit “chilly.” But “RE”? Apparently, that’s for “RE-writable,” instead of the long-used “Re-Writable” (“RW”). Why Sony changed that, beyond the desire to confuse people, is anyone’s guess.

But what really blew me away was this map:

Those are Blu-Ray regions, as in the DVD regions that have created so many headaches for international travelers. Just last night, I got an email from an old student who was having trouble getting American DVDs to play on his Japanese computer. That’s because Japan uses Region 2, strangely aligned with Europe, but not with America, which uses Region 1. But look at the new map: Japan and America use the same region. That means we can use American BD-videos in Japan! Which means that potentially, I could buy films from Amazon.com for movies that are only just coming out in theaters in Japan, and for a price which is less than the two movie tickets Sachi and I would have to buy here. That’s nice. (Although it should be noted that HD-DVDs were region-free–oh well.)

So, what will you be in for with a Blu-ray upgrade from your old DVD? Well, for starters, Blu-Ray has a minimum of 5 times the capacity–25 GB vs. the old DVD’s 4.7 GB (though I find a DVD-R will only take 4.3 GB when you actually want to record something). However, multi-layer discs are becoming available; you can buy 50 GB Blu-rays now. There is talk about BD’s with up to 10 layers, or 250 GB of storage on a single disc. No news on when those will be out, though. Blu-Rays, having so much capacity, will take longer to write; currently, it’s supposed to take a half hour to burn a 25 GB BD-R with the fastest available writer.

Blu-ray movie discs should have a more powerful and varied interface, allowing for more features the user can control. Let’s just hope they did away with that idiotic you-can’t-skip-past-these-ads “feature.” BD’s also sport a much thinner but tougher plastic coating, supposedly resistant even to scrubbing with steel wool.

So, should you buy your Blu-ray today? As always with computer equipment, it depends–future equipment will always be cheaper and/or have more features. Drives bought today might not be able to handle higher-capacity discs released in future years. On the other hand, optical disc drives do have a tendency to crap out after a few years of steady use; there’s no telling how long the new machines may last. And by the time those better-featured machines come out, prices may have dropped to a level where you might not mind buying a new machine so much.

Me, I’ll have to wait until I get a Hi-def TV. However, they do sell Blu-ray drives for computers, and I do have this nice, big, HD-ready 24-inch iMac screen… but looking at what Yodobashi Camera is selling, their cheaper units seem to only work with Windows PCs–ironic, since Apple supports the Blu-ray format, and Microsoft went HD-DVD. Figures.

You know how the RIAA whines about how downloading music of the Internet is really hurting the artists? How it’s not so much about the greedy, parasitic corporate suits as it is about the struggling, bona-fide musicians who are just trying to get by–except for all you lousy, stinking criminals who keep stealing their music and taking food out of starving artists’ mouths? And so forth and yadda yadda yadda.

Well, despite the fact that the musicians do all the work, spilling their hearts into the music, writing and arranging and performing, the RIAA pays them a pittance–and now wants to cut that even further. Despite the fact that digital downloads and digital streaming costs far less to distribute than traditional CDs, the RIAA thinks that current royalties paid for a music track (now at 9 cents) is much too high. They want to pay less than that. For a downloaded track, the songwriters are asking for 15 cents; the RIAA wants to cut the current rate by about half, down to 5 cents.

For streaming music–aka Internet radio–the artists want 12.5% of the money made. The RIAA: take 0.6% and be happy with our extreme generosity. Why? Because, they say, streaming music is like radio and artists don’t deserve any of that revenue. Which is full of it, because radio doesn’t pay, last I checked, while streaming music now does. The RIAA wants all the money made from streaming music, and wants to give the artists squat.

Whatever you do, never use the domain name registrar Network Solutions, ever. If they are your registrar for any domain names now, then immediately pull your business from them, and get your names registered with another registrar, like GoDaddy. A policy Network Solutions enacted in just the past few weeks showed them up to be predatory, unethical, and downright anti-consumer.

In short: when you do a search for a domain name on Network Solution’s web site, they claim the name for themselves and force you to pay them more than three times what the competition charges, or else risk losing the name to cybersquatters.

Although it’s been in the news over the past few weeks, I had not heard of the controversy. I got wind of it today, when my father told me that he’d fallen into their little trap. A family friend needed help getting a domain name, and together they came up with the perfect name–the only name, in fact, that they felt would be good for the situation. He went to Network Solution’s web site to see if it was available. The web site informed him that it was available for purchase–but prices for other dot-com domains were listed for $15 on the page, so he assumed that was the price (actually, that also is misleading–the domains are “from” $15, and most are $35) and went to GoDaddy to see if he could get a lower price. To his surprise, GoDaddy informed him that the domain name was taken. When he did a “WhoIs” search, he discovered that Network Solutions had reserved the domain name, blocking any purchase from anywhere except Network Solutions. If he went to their site, the domain name was listed as “available.”

It turns out that there is a new twist in cybersquatting, called “frontrunning.” Apparently, cybersquatters have worked out ways to see what domain names people are enquiring about on services like Network Solutions and GoDaddy. When they see that there is interest in a name they deem worthwhile, they will move in and snap it up before the person who originally searched for it can make up their minds.

What Network Solutions claims it is doing is protecting people from the frontrunners: when someone searches for a domain name, they put a 4-day hold on it. The idea is that frontrunners would be foiled from snatching it up. That’s the claim, in any case.

And, as it turns out, the claim is completely bogus. Network Solutions is doing nothing but blackmailing consumers into buying the domain name from them, and nobody else. How can we tell? My father and I did a little experiment: we ginned up a domain name that we didn’t really want, and I searched for it at GoDaddy: name available! For $10/year.

I then searched for the same name at Network Solutions: name available!

I went back to search for it again at GoDaddy: Sorry, that name is taken.

We did a WhoIs search: Network Solutions has taken that name.

But the key was to do one final search: while I had done the original search, my father–not only on a different computer, but from a different continent–searched for it on Network Solutions: that domain name is available!

In other words, anyone could get that domain name–but only from Network Solutions, and only for $35–more than three times what GoDaddy charges.

How does this protect you from Frontrunners? Not at all; they could buy the domain name if they wanted, from Network Solutions. In fact, the block on the name helps the Frontrunners–if you decide to wait four days for the domain name to become open again, that give the cybersquatters that much more time to grab it out from under you.

In other words, if you are afraid that someone else might grab the domain name you want, then you are essentially blackmailed into paying steep prices to buy it from Network Solutions.

Network Solutions does not even tell you about the 4-day lock before you do a search. A week ago, they claimed they would add that to their web site–something that would take only minutes to add–and yet no warning appears today when you do a domain name search.

Network Solutions claims that they “hide” the data from frontrunners, but when the WhoIs search actually advertises that the name was searched for and held by Network Solutions, their claim falls apart as an utter crock. In fact, until just a few days ago, Network Solutions would actually go so far as putting a billboard ad for themselves on the domain name someone searched for, calling out for other people to snap up that domain name! Yeah, sure, they’re doing a great job of “hiding” that information. And up until last week, they were putting holds on domain names that people checked out under WhoIs searches–not even asking on their web site.

Now, if they allowed customers the option of a domain name lock for four days so that only they could purchase the domain name, that might be a different story. But that’s not what Network Solutions did. Instead, they decided on a policy that essentially tricks people into divulging their original ideas for names, and them blackmails them to pay usurious prices, fast, or risk losing their idea to cybersquatters.

Scummy. Really scummy. I believe in sending businesses a signal. I will never touch Network Solutions as a registrar (luckily, I never did before), and I urge everyone else to do the same. If you have domains registered with them, then leave. Get out. A company that treats potential customers like that is bound to burn you, sooner or later.

Update: My father says he called Network Solutions and asked them to release the domain name he’d searched for, the one he and the family friend needed–and Network Solutions freed the domain name. Which is great for my dad and our friend, but is another bit of proof that Network Solutions isn’t trying to stop frontrunners. They had no proof whatsoever that my dad was not a frontrunner himself; they just released the domain at his request.

Is this the new version of the press release? You may not even be aware of the print version, in fact: many “news” stories are simply word-for-word reprints of text press releases, essentially ads put out by organizations in the form of a news story. Usually they announce some new product, an event, or an organization’s position on a news-related story–something that resembles news more than it does an ordinary ad. But it’s still an ad. A lot of people read them and don’t know that they come directly from an interested party, some business or other organization that has a stake in influencing people’s views.

And that’s the problem: people usually accept news reports as being unbiased, as coming from an uninterested source, giving an objective view. Press releases are the exact opposite of that. That some news organizations reprint this word for word, especially when they do it without any disclosure about the source of the “story,” is contrary to the idea of objective journalistic practice.

A new version of this seems to be the “video press release”–a short insert for TV programs or even web sites, disguised as a news report. Done in the same format (or close to it), it can be dropped into any TV show or web site and appear to be a regular news story. It may have preceded the Bush administration, but Bush certainly made extended use of it–especially the type that tries to hide its biased source and fool people into thinking that it’s a real reporter. This is even worse than the text press release, because people are less familiar with the fact that these even exist, and they are less likely to have some disclosure about where they came from.

Well, not surprisingly, now the RIAA has jumped onto the wagon, and has their own fake news “video press release” out--which, of course, does not identify itself as coming from the RIAA. It has all the usual RIAA claims, like the canard that piracy costs the industry billions, but it goes further, trashing pirated copies as having “atrocious” quality, and then quietly segues into full-commercial mode, suggesting “cool, innovative ways to get your favorite music,” such as buying Christmas-themed ringtones.

Ah, yes–nothing says “I got the perfect gift for you” like paying two and a half bucks for a shortened version of a song you already paid a dollar for, especially when it’s a song that is only usable on a cell phone for one month out of the year–and most people would find “atrocious” even in that case.

Via CNet News:

A coalition of entertainment and publishing industry heavyweights would like to see the 2008 presidential candidates champion “meaningful copyright protection” in their policy platforms. …

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Ross said the group also intends to hold briefings with presidential campaigns about its copyright priorities, but it’s not “in the endorsement game,” although individual alliance members may choose to take that step.

Here’s the pledge that I would like to hear the candidates make concerning copyright:

“I pledge that my campaign will take a firm stance on copyright infringement; that, where the constitution and the law require and permit, those who violate the law will be held responsible for their actions.

”I also pledge that copyright law will be revised in a manner that is far more compliant with personal creativity, and less with an eye toward the eternal profits of non-person corporations. The idea of a corporation having the same rights and powers of a human being is offensive to me, as it should be to all people who take the concepts of humanity and personal responsibility seriously. Copyrights are intended to stimulate creativity, not line the pockets of shareholders and executives who do not create anything but more money for themselves. Current copyright limits are the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years, but that number is continuously extended to protect the profits of the corporations owning those copyrights, and are not in any way intended to encourage new creations.

“For this reason, I shall sponsor and support legislation that will restrict copyright protection solely to the individuals who create; these individuals may lease their copyright holdings to businesses, such as corporations, for a period of time not to exceed twenty years beyond the act of creation. The reason: to stimulate creativity and public knowledge by enriching the public domain, allowing more universal access to all works of art and information, unrestricted by cost or other legal impediments. This not only allows a sufficient time for the original artists to collect on their creations, but adds stimulus to corporations–who might otherwise rest on profits from already-created work–to pay artists to create even more to generate more profits for themselves.

”I also pledge to strengthen laws concerning ‘Fair Use,’ as well as the personal use of legally-purchased intellectual property. I shall sponsor and support legislation allowing anyone who has purchased a work of art or information to use and enjoy that product in any and all forms that the individual pleases, and forbidding the sellers to prevent or limit the right of the individual to do so in any way, shape, or form.

“I further pledge that I will fight to the extent of my ability to maintain the law, including where it applies to arbitrary and blind lawsuits that attack broad swaths of our citizenry in the hopes of either extorting money as the end result of nuisance suits, or which attempt to ferret out potential civil suit awards by indicting large numbers of people, despite the knowledge that many or most of those people are innocent of any wrongdoing.”

Such a pledge would be a true “commitment to creativity” that the media suits talk about but clearly do not intend.

Former Disney studio head Michael Eisner says that writers are stupid to strike against the industry and to ask for a cut of digital sales:

The problem, Eisner said, is that the Writer’s Guild is lobbying for a bigger cut of the profits from digital distribution–and according to the former Disney chief, those profits simply aren’t there.

Gee whiz, where have we heard that before? It’s practically a mantra with the studios. This was portrayed pretty well on last weekend’s SNL, on Weekend Update, where a “Studio Head” talked about an end to studio profits:

Studio Head: DVDs and the Internet have put an end to all that. You know what it costs to make a DVD? Sixty cents. You know how much we charge? Twenty-nine dollars. And the writers want a bigger piece of the profit. What profit??? You know, we asked our accountants to figure out what twenty-nine dollars minus sixty cents is, and you know what they came up with?

Amy: Twenty-eight forty?

Studio Head: Negative thirteen dollars.

If that sounds like exaggeration, just take a look at Forrest Gump. Winston Groom wrote the novel, and made a deal with the studios to get 3% of the net profit. Not the gross, which is everything the film takes in, but the net, which is what’s left over after costs have been deducted. Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis got cuts of the gross, and made something like $40 million apiece.

The budget was estimated at about $55 million. It made $330 million domestically, and had worldwide ticket sales of $661 million. That’s before even DVD sales. And yet at that point, Paramount claimed that the movie was $60 million in the red. Somehow costs of $55 million became costs of $720 million. The studios, however, graciously admitted that “someday” the film would show a profit, and so “advanced” Groom a quarter of a million dollars to show their good will. This is commonly known as “Hollywood accounting”; many more examples can be found here.

So what is the new pitch? How come the movie studios aren’t making anything new off of Internet sales of TV and movies?

Blame Steve Jobs. According to Eisner, he’s the baddie:

Eisner, a well-known critic of Apple (whose CEO, Steve Jobs, is a powerful member of Disney’s board of directors), suggested that the profits may be getting sucked up elsewhere. The studios “make deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners. They make all these kinds of things, and who’s making money? Apple! They should get a piece of Apple. If I was a union, I’d be striking up wherever he is.”

Okay, two things. First of all, Apple makes most of its profits from sales of hardware like the iPod. I seriously doubt that they get much more a cut of retail sales than any distributor. And second, what Eisner is effectively saying here is that writers should be angry at Jobs for being a smart businessman, and not at the studio heads who bargained away all of their profits. Somehow that makes the writers “stupid” and the studio heads blameless–assuming that again, Eisner isn’t lying his ass off.

But that’s the problem with Eisner or anyone else who represents the studios. They are well known for being habitual, if not obsessive liars when it comes to profits. You do that, it may get you more money in the short run, but in the end, no one believes a word you’re saying, and simply assumes that everything coming out of your mouth is a self-serving lie.

Which it probably is.

An interesting point from Michael Arrington via Blackfriar’s Marketing:

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies (meaning there is perfect competition and zero barriers to entry).

That’s an excellent point concerning “intellectual property”: so long as it is sold electronically, so that not even distribution or packaging costs come in, the cost of production is close to zero. Now, with software, there is a mitigating factor: the cost of producing the original, which can be pretty damned high in some cases, and so the cost must be offset by multiple sales and/or high pricing.

Music, on the other hand, costs somewhat less to produce. Yes, costs for studio recording and so forth can be fairly high, but in the end, the average song must cost far less to produce than the average software package churned out by a company.

In the past, there was more respect for the costs of intellectual property because of the physical nature of the product; there was a book, a record, a CD–some physical product that had to be manufactured, and held in one’s hand. A consumer could feel they were getting value, or additional value, because of this. With electronic transmission–a very new development–that physical component no longer needs to matter.

And so producers suddenly have a commodity that can be reproduced at zero cost and costs nothing to distribute. The problem is, they still expect to price and police the system as if there were a physical product involved. And that’s where part of the intellectual disconnect comes in.

Imagine that a farmer who sells oranges suddenly finds that a machine has been made that can take an orange and reproduce it at zero cost. Initially he is ecstatic, as he sees his production costs fall drastically, but he can still charge as much for the product as he did when he grew each orange from the soil.

Then the technology for replicating oranges falls into the hands of his customers, and they no longer need the farmer after the first orange is produced.

True, the analogy is not perfect; software and songs are not oranges in that each product is unique; one will not simply get one piece of software or one song and then reproduce it forever. But there is enough to the analogy to realize that new technology requires new paradigms for the marketplace. Piracy and the RIAA/MPAA’s reaction to them are part of the process of coming to a new equilibrium.

The content owners are fighting like mad to maintain the old system, and keeping all the gains of technology for themselves; they use their money, power, and influence in government circles to win this battle.

Piracy is the consumer’s reaction, essentially saying, “Oh, no you don’t!” and often going to the other extreme, trying to claim all the benefits of the new technology for themselves; they use their numbers, anonymity, and civil rights legislation to fight their side.

Coming to a settlement will, like all settlements, involve both extremes to agree to a place that neither likes. Where that settlement will land is anyone’s guess right now.