Having a GPS location doesn't mean you have a suspect. Unless the person called from their own property (zero chance) or didn't move locations at all after making the call (very unlikely), it would require a substantial investigation that most departments aren't able or willing to do, because the odds of catching someone would be extremely low.
> The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.
Specifically, the transfer cost to download a 50MB app is approximately $0.0005. That's 200,000 downloads per $100. Even assuming a low average revenue of $1 per download, that's a $60,000 take for Apple for maybe $105 worth of hosting.
That's not to say there aren't other costs involved in running the store. But we definitely shouldn't be pretending that hosting is even relevant to the conversation. Hosting costs haven't been relevant for over a decade.
It's probably orders of magnitude smaller than that, like 2e-7 dollars per MB.
People have gotten use to AWS/Azure/GCP pricing when bandwidth is essentially free at scale. You can rent a few 100Gb/s ports for ~$500 to ~$5000 per month depending on location.
But I guess this is best case scenario and not everyone will have the capital/clout to colocate at POPs.
This disregards side costs like storage, global distribution, retries, re-downloads, updates, backups and the likes. It's probably still cheaper than AWS outbound pricing in the end, but hosting apps is more than just the bandwidth used exactly once.
Late on the reply, but I don't think your argument matches reality.
1. Storage for 50MB is less than $0.001 per month. So, even if you're storing and backing up every every version of an app, and they update a very high 50 times per year, and they're storing on 12 different locales, that's less than $1 per year for the typical app.
2. "Global distribution" is a one time cost per app update at approximately $0.006 per 50MB per server. For 12 updates per year spread across 12 servers, that's less than $1 per year total. Over 75% of apps are updated less than once per month.
3. Retries, re-downloads and updates are already insignificant transfer costs, per my original comment. Even if you want to attribute 90% of those downloads to being updates from the same set of users, and keep the lifetime revenue per user at a very low estimate of $1, Apple is still taking $6,000 for approximately $105 of hosting costs.
All in all, that matches my original estimate of $100 per 200k downloads for transfer and $5 for server fees. So, as I said, hosting isn't relevant to the conversation, at all.
The original comment only listed bandwidth cost. Storage is also equally cheap, global distribution is equally cheap if you have your boxes at POPs. Someone that is at Apple's scale could very easily manage this.
We're looking at cents per app per user in lifetime costs.
The "Cloud" is disgustingly expensive at nearly any scale. It does require some capital investment and competent people to host your own however. Although there really is no alternative to the cloud if you are small scale but need presence globally.
Even if you're legitimately attempting to analyze political preferences or skew on social media, it seems incredibly inappropriate to be basing that analysis on someone who makes purely biased claims in all of their social media posts. There are so many analytical flaws in the graphs he provides, that they really shouldn't be used for anything.
They've selectively[1] searched for multiple Palestine hashtags, which all show up under the same base hashtag[2], but then count all of the hashtags as separate data points -- and then compares them to a singular Israel hashtag that includes an emoji, which won't include most results regarding Israel. What's worse, is that including a Palestine hashtag doesn't remotely guarantee that the post is pro-Palestine or anti-Israel, and the same is true for posts including Israel hashtags not necessarily being pro-Israel, which can also be seen in [2]. In reality, the #palestine hashtag is used in pro-Israel posts all the time, so the sweeping generalizations made by Anthony Goldbloom aren't based on any legitimate statistical methodology.
Instead of echoing Goldbloom's manipulation of data as factual, it should be used as an example of pro-Israel disinformation and entirely backs the article's claim. In fact, even Goldbloom admits that he made mistakes[3], and the other graph was made by him and not the company who conducted the survey, who actually disputes his claim.
I think it could even be argued that your comment, without any supporting facts other than a very pro-Israel Twitter pundit who already debunked himself, is contributing to the misinformation discussed in the article, even if you're doing so unintentionally.
If you want to build trust in this industry, I think you'll need to do better than cloning an existing product and slapping a "for the people" label on it. Content creators of all types are exhausted by the endless nickel and diming, so at this point, transparency is going to be the only way to attract a mass audience.
When everyone knows hosting costs equate to a fraction of a penny per sale, you'll need to strongly justify that 5% fee. You'll need to pay ~3.5% in PRO fees just to have public playback on the site -- even if there's not a single cover song among the uploaded albums -- so let both the artist and fan know where that money is going and why.
A huge problem with the "pay what you want" model is that the host and PRO still get to middleman what is fundamentally a tip from the fan. Find a way to implement a secondary form for tips that go straight to an account the artist owns, without making the purchase form more complicated, and you'll have an attractive and unique feature.
However, Fourthwall already has a polished version of your product roadmap and charges less for it, albeit without the music-specific theming, and even Patreon recently implemented direct digital sales. You're facing an uphill battle against entrenched and VC-backed products.
When it comes to drug abuse, harm reduction can mean providing clean needles and other supplies to the user. The person isn't going to stop just because they're denied clean supplies. In the same way that you can't stop people from acquiring guns, but you can help prevent them from purchasing guns that are fundamentally unsafe to operate.
No, you literally cannot stop people from acquiring guns in the United States, as it's baked in the Constitution. Please make arguments based in reality.
There are some clever folks on gig sites (Fiverr, Upwork, etc) who are feeding stock video into AI just for the "artificialization" of each frame, while visually retaining the same actors' features, clothing and background scenes -- which also allows cuts that are longer than 4s. The results are surprisingly good, as long as you can find stock footage of the scenes you need.
I just moved into an apartment advertised at $1,420/mo that is costing over $1,700/mo because of extra fees only mentioned in fine print inside a 100+ page lease. The "no hidden fees" ISP that I'm now forced to use has over $30/mo in hidden fees. It's not just prevalent, it's business as usual for every company everywhere -- because they can and they know nobody will do anything about it.
Oh weird, how common is this? I rented from 2002 until 2020, and never experienced anything like this. The advertised rent was always the same as the check I'd mail the landlord every month. Sure, I had to pay for electricity, internet, etc. on my own, but that's expected and spelled out in the lease agreement.
One thing I did learn was to check on things like ISPs beforehand. You know the address of the place, so you can visit your preferred ISPs' websites and see if they offer service before you sign the lease. Ditto for cell service; when initially looking at a new place, I'd always check my cell phone to make sure I'd get decent service inside.
There is a fudge factor there that the landlord can play with. Common utilities like sewage, sometimes water, and some other stuff can be tacked on to the monthly bill. Some buildings will also make a deal with comcast and take a cut out of internet/cable. It varies based on the jurisdiction and what they can get away with. A typical case would be 10% or so in junk fees.
> Right, the question is, when my computer requests a file from your computer, which one of us is "making a copy" ? It becomes less ambiguous to ask who is doing the publishing.
That question is irrelevant in a discussion about legality, because it doesn't matter who physically made the copy at the time of transfer. It only matters if the first party has the legal rights to distribute it, which they don't. Since you are knowingly taking possession of copyrighted property that they don't have the rights to, then you have now violated the copyright by obtaining an illegal reproduction.
> In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.
Just because you don't get arrested for purchasing a bootleg DVD, doesn't make it legal. Not all illegal things involve arrest or prosecution. Lots of illegal things can only result in civil lawsuits. This is one of those things. The reason the seller of the bootleg DVDs can be arrested, is because the cities where bootleg sales are most common have laws specifically targeting the advertisement and sale of copyrighted works that were reproduced illegally. If you buy one, you're still violating the copyright and the MPAA could file a lawsuit if they had any evidence of your purchase and felt it was worth their time.
You say that very confidently, but you are very wrong. If you download music from a source that does not have a license to distribute that music, then they are violating the copyright and you are now in possession of stolen property. Finland uses different terminology for Fair Use, but the citations amount to the same as US policy and only apply if you obtained the work by legal means.
Huh, looks like you are partially correct. Apparently the law was changed in 2015. Before 2015 it was legal to download copies of music from the internet.
You are wrong regarding the copy of music being considered "stolen property" and your citation "Chapter 28: Theft" does not support your position. It lists many different types of theft NONE of the types of "theft" included there are in any way related to piracy or music.
You are right regarding that obtaining a copy of a song is apparently illegal.
