Hmmm ... You want to slam Apple for letting users convert CD audio to MP3 but you want to praise Amazon for offering MP3 files.

The point is that all the tracks that Amazon offers are downloaded directly as mp3s, whereas iTunes tracks with DRM are downloaded as AAC, then you have to burn them to CD (which involves converting them to WAV if I'm not mistaken) and then rip them back to mp3s. There are a couple extra steps there. Now multiply that effort by all the tracks in your library that you purchased from iTunes and it makes more sense to just use an iPod instead of trying to use another player. Therefore using Amazon (or for that matter any non-iTunes store) makes it practical to use non-Apple hardware players.

Of course Rhapsody has to pay a fee for their subscription services. Any commercial outfit has to pay royalties when it uses copyrighted material. In fact, the increase in royalty rates caused a big stink: (from USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2002-07-21-radio_x.htm)

On June 20, a copyright appeals board set a rate of seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener. For many stations, run by music fans for music fans, that works out to thousands of dollars more than they make.

That's in addition to royalties paid to publishing houses - i.e. the artists. But there is also the overhead of running a subscription that is more than that for a store front. I expect that bandwidth costs are higher for a subscription service and the DRM management is tougher particularly when transfering subscription tracks to a player (the mechanism for making tracks expire with membership without accidentally causing legit tracks to expire is more tricky than a sale). Even if the subscriptions completely subsidized the track purchase prices, that says less about the record companies trying to screw Apple than it does about Apple's business model for iTunes vs. a subscription-subsidized service.

My dig about Apple's cut vs. the artists' cut was to point out that someone provided figures showing that Apple wasn't getting as much per sale as the record companies, but the data showed that Apple is making more per sale than the artists, a common complaint about the recording industry. If the record companies are screwing the artists because they take a bigger cut than the artists on sales, Apple is screwing them too. It's just a fight between who gets to do the lion's share of screwing the artist. On who gets the lions share, Apple is a distributor while the record company is the producer who incurs costs for scouting, signing, recording, touring, and legally representing artists - costs Apple does not incur directly.

The economic incentive for regional jets is simple. There isn't enough demand to fill a 737 much less a 767 for many routes. Given their lower weight, they must use less fuel per flight and cost less than a 737. A full - or even 1/2 full - regional jet is more cost-effective than a 15%-full 737. The smaller capacity of these jets allow for better matching of demand - you can increase capacity in smaller increments.

So why not combine the 5 regional jet flights per day into 1 737-scale flight per day? It's logistics. You can collect passengers from different spoke airports for a single flight from a hub airport. Also, reducing the number of flights to/from spoke airports will just trade flight delays for even longer layovers as flights to/from Madison, WI from/to Newark or Cleveland will have to wait until enough flights come in/leave to make that route to MSN economical in a 737. You'll only have one flight per airline per day in small markets if you're lucky. Good luck flying internationally from small cities (like college towns). Expect to have to pay for a hotel room since you'll only be able to leave the small cities in the evening and won't be able to make connections at the hubs.

The fundamental problem is that increasing air traffic is significantly easier than increasing airport capacity. The solution is routing more international/intercontinental flights to hubs with room to grow capacity (CLE, DEN, etc.).