Minimum acceleration is arbitrarily small. You can certainly bring more modules to orbit, put lots of solar array on it, and use that to power an ion or VASIMR type electric thruster. In fact, a VASIMR thruster is planned to be tested on the Station, because it's giant solar arrays cause enough drag to lower it's orbit, needing fuel to push it back up every so often. Electric thrusters use 10x less fuel. So you can place a copy of the Station where you wanted to. The problem is radiation shielding. If you go much higher than the current orbit, you get into the Earth's radiation belt, and above that, you are not protected by the Earth's magnetic field from Solar and Cosmic radiation. So any long term habitat needs shielding.
A rotating cable 600 km long, and having 1 Earth gravity at the tip, would let you place objects at rest on the Moon, and also fling them to more than escape. If it's in polar orbit, it also has the advantage of being able to drop and pick up from anywhere on the Lunar surface. Being much shorter than the Moon-L1 elevator by a factor of around 100, it is much less exposed to meteor impact, which can cut cable strands. Also, the climb time is greatly reduced. Instead of having to climb 60,000 km or so to escape the Moon, you climb at most 300 km from tip to center to reach Lunar orbit, and about 150 km from tip to halfway to center to reach escape. You merely wait till it rotates half a turn, to release you at above orbit speed. The rotation period is around 18 minutes.
To understand how this works, imagine a giant spoked wheel rolling along the Lunar surface. Now remove everything but two spokes opposite each other and the hub, with the motion unchanged. Smaller ones would work also, but would leave some job for a rocket to do on landing or taking off.
As icebike mentions, space elevator, specifically one rotating at a tip velocity equal to orbit velocity. Then you are dropped off on the Lunar surface at zero net velocity. Half a rotation later, the elevator can fling you off at more than lunar escape, so you can pretty much go wherever you want. What do you build it out of? Near Earth asteroids can supply the raw materials for fiberglass and carbon fiber (depending which asteroid you mine). The asteroids don't have a pesky gravity well, so you can haul back materials entirely using efficient electric thrusters (~10x more efficient than chemical rockets). A partially built elevator helps lower the velocity required, so it's useful even before it's finished.
Actually, the most useful thing we learned building the Space Station is how to assemble and maintain large complex objects in space. Any scientific research done on board is a bonus. If we ever want to do any other large scale projects in space, we had to learn how to assemble stuff, and this was the first really big, long term example (not neglecting all the Russian stations that came before, but they were smaller and didn't stay up there as long).
The usual assumption by people who have worked on it seriously (I'm one of them, retired from Boeing, did advanced space studies while there), is you set up a habitat module, which is your Space Station type pressurized cylinder, and then over that you place a quonset hut type arched structure, which you pile lunar regolith (surface rocks and dust) on top of for shielding. Depending what level of shielding you want, it needs to be around 1-3 meters. Given the Moon's gravity, that's equivalent to 16-50 cm on Earth, which is quite reasonable. Your airlock, antennas, and such would poke out of the lunar dirt.
The other thing burying your habitat does is protect it from landing craft. The rocket exhaust from them tends to throw any loose dust around at high velocity. Even if you pave the landing pad itself, there will be loose dust around that.
tl;dr: Robots first, mine the asteroids for building materials.
The proper plan is to start mining Near Earth Asteroids for supplies. Why NEO's? They take less velocity to reach than the Moon's surface for some of them, and all of the velocity can be done with highly efficient electric thrusters. The Moon is physically closer, but distance is not what costs in space, it's velocity and fuel. Haul back surface dust and rocks from your chosen asteroid with a solar powered tug, and have the extraction equipment in Earth orbit. Why here? it's close enough to be remote controlled by humans on the ground. Depending which asteroid and it's composition you can get: metals, glass, oxygen, fuel for more mining trips, carbon, silicon for solar panels, even water in some of them. Also sheer bulk rock gives you radiation shielding.
Once you learn to extract useful stuff, and build up a supply, you use that to build a habitat, including a greenhouse using the glass for windows and carbon to feed the plants. *Then* you start sending people. Until then you send the minimum crew you can get away with, possibly zero. With people up there and their life support taken care of long term, you can start building space elevators in Earth orbit and Lunar orbit out of the carbon you extract. Not the sci-fi one at Earth that goes all the way to the ground, that takes materials we can't make yet. You can reach 30% of the way to the ground in velocity terms at Earth, and all the way on the Moon, cause it's smaller. 30% in velocity means 50% in energy for a vehicle starting from the ground. You can now build single stage to orbit vehicles easily. At the moon you don't need vehicles at all as far as propulsion, just a pressure cabin. Now you can send people all the way from Earth to the Moon at reasonable cost. You can also send habitat parts made in orbit down to the Moon, and start building up your infrastructure there.
We already know a lot about mining and manufacturing on Earth. The main thing we have to learn is how to do it remotely, and possibly in zero gee (you can always spin things if you need gravity).
You are in danger any time there is a strong central government (which, unfortunately, is almost everywhere). Centralized organizations tend to attract psychopaths and greedy bastards who leech off the concentration of power and money. The only real answer is to decentralize power as much as possible to the local level. Evil bastards will still be attracted to it, but they can do less damage if it's split up.
Would not the Dept of Justice shutting down Megaupload be a Denial of Service for all the non-copyright infringing users of the site? Would not it have been fairer to require Megaupload to scrub the files hosted there, or change their business practices, instead of shutting the whole thing down?
The short term result will be the hydra effect: They cut off one head, and several more will pop up to replace it, because now the dedicated pirates will post their files to multiple cyberlockers in case one of them gets shut down.
(Actually, they already post things to multiple sites because of file size and download speed restrictions, but now they will do it even more, enlarging the cyberlocker market in the process).
If piracy spreads, nobody will create anything because their work will be pirated as soon as it is finished.
Dick Morris
I have news for you Dick, stuff is already pirated as soon as it is finished, sometimes even before. The places that have it that soon are called "0 day" sites - available 0 days after release.
But your premise is simply wrong. Microsoft has a free trial of their Office 2010 software. The actual value of distribution these days is nearly nothing. For Office, the value for users is in standardization (cause everyone else uses it), bug fixes, support, and lots of other things besides passing around the installer package.
For movies, the value isn't in a 632x258 DVD rip. It's in higher quality/3D video and audio on discs or the theater, extras on a disc, stuff a download doesn't usually have. But when you weigh down the purchased disc or theater experience with advertisements, cell phones going off, and other crap, that downgraded the paid experience until the pirate copy is competitive. If you can't compete with amateur distribution, maybe you *should* get out of the business.
Pretty soon (if not already) we will have "Render@Home" distributed farms that will let people generate theater quality computer graphics, so you media companies will not only have to compete on distribution, but on creation. Good luck with that.
When Twentieth Century Fox is owned by the same company that owns Fox News Channel, and the Wall Street Journal, it's pretty easy to get them to parrot whatever you want.
One thing I noticed is many of the top sites reporting on this story have comments turned off in the articles, when they usually have comments enabled. Smells like pre-emptive silencing, because they know how unpopular this is.
Actually, the question is how many people may be killed by shutting down Megaupload? Xray and other medical data is notoriously large files, a job for which file lockers are useful, because of size limits on emails.
I use MediaFire to distribute graphics files to my customers for the same reason (size). That's not life and death, but there's certainly a lot of business uses for file storage and transfer.
Obviously, some people use these kinds of sites for movies and games when they are not supposed to, but there are as many legitimate uses as you have big files on your hard drive.
Then we can return him for being "not as described", like with ebay, right?
Joking aside, I think politicians should publish a platform, which, if they later change their mind about, we can also change our vote. This being stuck with a bad choice for 2, 4, or 6 years is a holdover from the speed of 18th century transportation. For that matter, so is the two months between the main elections and swearing in of the new Congress. It simply took that long to count the votes locally, deliver the results to the state capitol, inform the winner, and then have them travel to where the Congress would be (which was Wall Street for the first one, ironically).
No offense, but you need to find a better business model. Take a look at a security engineering text (I recommend Andersen's) for more information on why DRM will always fail you in the end If DRM+absurdly long copyrights+the DMCA+DHS hijacking DNS records+all the other things we are doing are not enough to keep your revenue stream flowing, then you need to find a different way to make money.
The Second Life virtual world might be instructive here. The client software is open source, and there are a dozen variant versions available, including ones designed to rip the models and textures so as to copy them. The content isn't DRM'd either. And yet creators like myself still make money selling our items. How you ask? By providing customer service. Things like: once you buy an item, you get invited to an "update group" to get upgrades and announcements of new items, or custom mods, or replacements if you accidentally deleted the item. The business model of "create the content once, and don't support your customers afterwards" is certainly easier, but it's not how you build a sustainable business.
The real impact of sites like Wikipedia and Google doing *something* is it's getting reported all over the mainstream media. That has a huge multiplier on how many people are finding out about it, beyond the actual users of those sites that run into notices.
The modules are what fits on a tractor-trailer, and most of the work is done in the factory. The modules bolt together, and the supplies for the finish work are delivered shrink wrapped to the module, so it's all right there without having to haul it up a construction elevator.
Those of us who read Slashdot understand that digital data is just a string of 1's and 0's. So ANY means of transferring data can be used for illicit purposes. To really stop copying, you would have to eliminate email, wifi, removable disks and drives, and every file protocol in existence, not just mess with the DNS lookup for some websites. The trick is getting the general public and legislators to understand this point.
Commercial pirates and counterfeiters you can catch by "following the money". It has to get into their hands somehow, so trace the payments and you can catch them. Places like iTunes, NetFlix, and Steam show that if you provide good service at a reasonable price, most people are happy to use them. The other people who won't pay for anything and just want it free were never going to be your customers anyway. The best way to deal with that is make deals with the ISPs to carry your content, cause someone has to pay for that connection, and you might as well get a cut.
Check your own government. The media cartels are trying to pass similar laws around the world. I know of the UK, Spain, and Australia off the top of my head, and probably other places.
The way to keep these bills from resurfacing like the creature in a bad Hollywood horror film is to punish the senators and congressmen who signed on as supporters. Because you know the big media will be pushing for something new as soon as the hubbub over SOPA and PIPA dies down.
Punish means voting for their opponents, sending them money, even campaigning for them, and, this is the important part, telling the jerkwads in Congress you are doing it and why. The one thing that outweighs their greed for bribes (campaign donations), is fear of getting voted out entirely, and the gravy train stopping.
On the other hand, if they come out against these laws, thank them, and say how much you will support them in the future. Make censoring the Net a toxic subject, so the next time the media come knocking (and they will), they get told to get the hell out.
This is the important part of the letter I sent off to my Congressman. I am open-sourcing it, so feel free to copy and modify as needed:
Discussion of H.R. 3261 (Stop Online Piracy Act)
Deterring physical counterfeiting is a worthy goal – By physical counterfeiting I refer to things like DVD disks and other consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and military goods as mentioned in the bill. The best way to catch people selling counterfeit goods for gain is to “follow the money”. This is because to make any gain off their activities, the money has to reach them somehow, and so leads you to them.
Sec 102 violates Due Process – It authorizes the Attorney General to determine who is committing a crime and take action against them on his own recognizance, before any determination of guilt. It bypasses long cherished legal principles such as “presumption of innocence” and “right to face your accuser”.
Sec 201 misunderstands the value of distribution – I will use Microsoft Office as an example. If you visit http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/ you can see that Microsoft offers a free trial of their Office software, a major commercial product that sells for up to $500 depending on version. They distribute it for free for the obvious reason that they want people to try out their software.
Mere distribution is not the same as a full license to use the software, with service, support, and customization, as evidenced by the above example. Therefore punishing someone for the act of distribution as if that constitutes the full retail value, as section 201 does, is wrong.
Attempts to block communication will not work – The bill includes what it refers to as “reasonable measures” to block access to infringing websites. The original design of the Internet was to preserve military communications in the face of damage during a nuclear war. More recently as a commercial network, great effort has gone into making it reliable in the face of inevitable hardware failures. So by design, any attempt to block data flow will not work short of shutting down the network completely.
In particular, the Domain Name System (DNS) interference (which I understand is being reconsidered by the bill’s sponsor) will not work for the same reason criminals get disposable phones. The DNS is essentially the phone book for the Internet. It associates a name with a number which the network knows how to connect to, just like the telephone network does. If one number is blocked, serious infringers will simply get another one, under a new name.
Blocking websites will not stop illicit activities because there are many other methods of transferring digital data. The saying goes “it’s all ones and zeroes”, meaning binary data bits. Computers and the Internet cannot distinguish a photo of your cat from the latest Hollywood movie during transmission and storage, because it literally is just a long string of 1’s and 0’s. The interpretation of what the data means only happens once a program loads it and a human sees it.
To block illicit activities, you would have to block every possible channel of communication, including email, removable disks and drives, even the old phone network, which people used before broadband. If you block one channel, wrongdoers will simply use a different one. I won’t bore you with a list of possible methods, but suffice it to say I know a number of them just involving the Internet, but not websites you might try to block.
It's teaching by example. "If this kind of bill gets passed, this is what will happen to the whole internet". I think most people will understand the intent of the blackout.
Do you have any support for your thesis that it is "likely to be interpreted" the way you posit, or is it just your own unsupported opinion? In that case I say "anecdotal evidence is weak". So a bit of googling for political polls or sociology experiments to back up your thesis, and more people might believe it.
The one thing more powerful for elected officials than bribes (campaign donations), is fear of losing the next election. So contact the bill sponsors, and let them know why you will be voting for/sending money to/campaigning for their opponent. Do that even if the bills die in this congressional session. They need to be spanked, hard, for ever supporting this kind of bill, so the next time big media comes around (and they will, you know they will) they will remember this is a politically life threatening topic.
It's either that, or nuke them from orbit, it's the only ways to be sure.
Crysis is made by Crytek, and distributed by EA games, not Ubisoft. Also, Crytek distributes their game engine as part of an SDK for free, so you can mod their games or create your own from scratch: http://www.crydev.net/
Slashdot Mirror
Minimum acceleration is arbitrarily small. You can certainly bring more modules to orbit, put lots of solar array on it, and use that to power an ion or VASIMR type electric thruster. In fact, a VASIMR thruster is planned to be tested on the Station, because it's giant solar arrays cause enough drag to lower it's orbit, needing fuel to push it back up every so often. Electric thrusters use 10x less fuel. So you can place a copy of the Station where you wanted to. The problem is radiation shielding. If you go much higher than the current orbit, you get into the Earth's radiation belt, and above that, you are not protected by the Earth's magnetic field from Solar and Cosmic radiation. So any long term habitat needs shielding.
A rotating cable 600 km long, and having 1 Earth gravity at the tip, would let you place objects at rest on the Moon, and also fling them to more than escape. If it's in polar orbit, it also has the advantage of being able to drop and pick up from anywhere on the Lunar surface. Being much shorter than the Moon-L1 elevator by a factor of around 100, it is much less exposed to meteor impact, which can cut cable strands. Also, the climb time is greatly reduced. Instead of having to climb 60,000 km or so to escape the Moon, you climb at most 300 km from tip to center to reach Lunar orbit, and about 150 km from tip to halfway to center to reach escape. You merely wait till it rotates half a turn, to release you at above orbit speed. The rotation period is around 18 minutes.
To understand how this works, imagine a giant spoked wheel rolling along the Lunar surface. Now remove everything but two spokes opposite each other and the hub, with the motion unchanged. Smaller ones would work also, but would leave some job for a rocket to do on landing or taking off.
As icebike mentions, space elevator, specifically one rotating at a tip velocity equal to orbit velocity. Then you are dropped off on the Lunar surface at zero net velocity. Half a rotation later, the elevator can fling you off at more than lunar escape, so you can pretty much go wherever you want. What do you build it out of? Near Earth asteroids can supply the raw materials for fiberglass and carbon fiber (depending which asteroid you mine). The asteroids don't have a pesky gravity well, so you can haul back materials entirely using efficient electric thrusters (~10x more efficient than chemical rockets). A partially built elevator helps lower the velocity required, so it's useful even before it's finished.
Actually, the most useful thing we learned building the Space Station is how to assemble and maintain large complex objects in space. Any scientific research done on board is a bonus. If we ever want to do any other large scale projects in space, we had to learn how to assemble stuff, and this was the first really big, long term example (not neglecting all the Russian stations that came before, but they were smaller and didn't stay up there as long).
The usual assumption by people who have worked on it seriously (I'm one of them, retired from Boeing, did advanced space studies while there), is you set up a habitat module, which is your Space Station type pressurized cylinder, and then over that you place a quonset hut type arched structure, which you pile lunar regolith (surface rocks and dust) on top of for shielding. Depending what level of shielding you want, it needs to be around 1-3 meters. Given the Moon's gravity, that's equivalent to 16-50 cm on Earth, which is quite reasonable. Your airlock, antennas, and such would poke out of the lunar dirt.
The other thing burying your habitat does is protect it from landing craft. The rocket exhaust from them tends to throw any loose dust around at high velocity. Even if you pave the landing pad itself, there will be loose dust around that.
tl;dr: Robots first, mine the asteroids for building materials.
The proper plan is to start mining Near Earth Asteroids for supplies. Why NEO's? They take less velocity to reach than the Moon's surface for some of them, and all of the velocity can be done with highly efficient electric thrusters. The Moon is physically closer, but distance is not what costs in space, it's velocity and fuel. Haul back surface dust and rocks from your chosen asteroid with a solar powered tug, and have the extraction equipment in Earth orbit. Why here? it's close enough to be remote controlled by humans on the ground. Depending which asteroid and it's composition you can get: metals, glass, oxygen, fuel for more mining trips, carbon, silicon for solar panels, even water in some of them. Also sheer bulk rock gives you radiation shielding.
Once you learn to extract useful stuff, and build up a supply, you use that to build a habitat, including a greenhouse using the glass for windows and carbon to feed the plants. *Then* you start sending people. Until then you send the minimum crew you can get away with, possibly zero. With people up there and their life support taken care of long term, you can start building space elevators in Earth orbit and Lunar orbit out of the carbon you extract. Not the sci-fi one at Earth that goes all the way to the ground, that takes materials we can't make yet. You can reach 30% of the way to the ground in velocity terms at Earth, and all the way on the Moon, cause it's smaller. 30% in velocity means 50% in energy for a vehicle starting from the ground. You can now build single stage to orbit vehicles easily. At the moon you don't need vehicles at all as far as propulsion, just a pressure cabin. Now you can send people all the way from Earth to the Moon at reasonable cost. You can also send habitat parts made in orbit down to the Moon, and start building up your infrastructure there.
We already know a lot about mining and manufacturing on Earth. The main thing we have to learn is how to do it remotely, and possibly in zero gee (you can always spin things if you need gravity).
You are in danger any time there is a strong central government (which, unfortunately, is almost everywhere). Centralized organizations tend to attract psychopaths and greedy bastards who leech off the concentration of power and money. The only real answer is to decentralize power as much as possible to the local level. Evil bastards will still be attracted to it, but they can do less damage if it's split up.
Would not the Dept of Justice shutting down Megaupload be a Denial of Service for all the non-copyright infringing users of the site?
Would not it have been fairer to require Megaupload to scrub the files hosted there, or change their business practices, instead of shutting the whole thing down?
The short term result will be the hydra effect: They cut off one head, and several more will pop up to replace it, because now the dedicated pirates will post their files to multiple cyberlockers in case one of them gets shut down.
(Actually, they already post things to multiple sites because of file size and download speed restrictions, but now they will do it even more, enlarging the cyberlocker market in the process).
If piracy spreads, nobody will create anything because their work will be pirated as soon as it is finished.
Dick Morris
I have news for you Dick, stuff is already pirated as soon as it is finished, sometimes even before. The places that have it that soon are called "0 day" sites - available 0 days after release.
But your premise is simply wrong. Microsoft has a free trial of their Office 2010 software. The actual value of distribution these days is nearly nothing. For Office, the value for users is in standardization (cause everyone else uses it), bug fixes, support, and lots of other things besides passing around the installer package.
For movies, the value isn't in a 632x258 DVD rip. It's in higher quality/3D video and audio on discs or the theater, extras on a disc, stuff a download doesn't usually have. But when you weigh down the purchased disc or theater experience with advertisements, cell phones going off, and other crap, that downgraded the paid experience until the pirate copy is competitive. If you can't compete with amateur distribution, maybe you *should* get out of the business.
Pretty soon (if not already) we will have "Render@Home" distributed farms that will let people generate theater quality computer graphics, so you media companies will not only have to compete on distribution, but on creation. Good luck with that.
When Twentieth Century Fox is owned by the same company that owns Fox News Channel, and the Wall Street Journal, it's pretty easy to get them to parrot whatever you want.
One thing I noticed is many of the top sites reporting on this story have comments turned off in the articles, when they usually have comments enabled. Smells like pre-emptive silencing, because they know how unpopular this is.
How many people were killed by Megaupload?
Actually, the question is how many people may be killed by shutting down Megaupload? Xray and other medical data is notoriously large files, a job for which file lockers are useful, because of size limits on emails.
I use MediaFire to distribute graphics files to my customers for the same reason (size). That's not life and death, but there's certainly a lot of business uses for file storage and transfer.
Obviously, some people use these kinds of sites for movies and games when they are not supposed to, but there are as many legitimate uses as you have big files on your hard drive.
Then we can return him for being "not as described", like with ebay, right?
Joking aside, I think politicians should publish a platform, which, if they later change their mind about, we can also change our vote. This being stuck with a bad choice for 2, 4, or 6 years is a holdover from the speed of 18th century transportation. For that matter, so is the two months between the main elections and swearing in of the new Congress. It simply took that long to count the votes locally, deliver the results to the state capitol, inform the winner, and then have them travel to where the Congress would be (which was Wall Street for the first one, ironically).
I hear Adobe is working on this.
No offense, but you need to find a better business model. Take a look at a security engineering text (I recommend Andersen's) for more information on why DRM will always fail you in the end If DRM+absurdly long copyrights+the DMCA+DHS hijacking DNS records+all the other things we are doing are not enough to keep your revenue stream flowing, then you need to find a different way to make money.
The Second Life virtual world might be instructive here. The client software is open source, and there are a dozen variant versions available, including ones designed to rip the models and textures so as to copy them. The content isn't DRM'd either. And yet creators like myself still make money selling our items. How you ask? By providing customer service. Things like: once you buy an item, you get invited to an "update group" to get upgrades and announcements of new items, or custom mods, or replacements if you accidentally deleted the item. The business model of "create the content once, and don't support your customers afterwards" is certainly easier, but it's not how you build a sustainable business.
The real impact of sites like Wikipedia and Google doing *something* is it's getting reported all over the mainstream media. That has a huge multiplier on how many people are finding out about it, beyond the actual users of those sites that run into notices.
Check out Broad Air, a Chinese construction company. They can put up a 30 story office building exactly that way: http://www.broad.com:8089/english/product/bsb/bsb.asp
The modules are what fits on a tractor-trailer, and most of the work is done in the factory. The modules bolt together, and the supplies for the finish work are delivered shrink wrapped to the module, so it's all right there without having to haul it up a construction elevator.
Those of us who read Slashdot understand that digital data is just a string of 1's and 0's. So ANY means of transferring data can be used for illicit purposes. To really stop copying, you would have to eliminate email, wifi, removable disks and drives, and every file protocol in existence, not just mess with the DNS lookup for some websites. The trick is getting the general public and legislators to understand this point.
Commercial pirates and counterfeiters you can catch by "following the money". It has to get into their hands somehow, so trace the payments and you can catch them. Places like iTunes, NetFlix, and Steam show that if you provide good service at a reasonable price, most people are happy to use them. The other people who won't pay for anything and just want it free were never going to be your customers anyway. The best way to deal with that is make deals with the ISPs to carry your content, cause someone has to pay for that connection, and you might as well get a cut.
Check your own government. The media cartels are trying to pass similar laws around the world. I know of the UK, Spain, and Australia off the top of my head, and probably other places.
The way to keep these bills from resurfacing like the creature in a bad Hollywood horror film is to punish the senators and congressmen who signed on as supporters. Because you know the big media will be pushing for something new as soon as the hubbub over SOPA and PIPA dies down.
Punish means voting for their opponents, sending them money, even campaigning for them, and, this is the important part, telling the jerkwads in Congress you are doing it and why. The one thing that outweighs their greed for bribes (campaign donations), is fear of getting voted out entirely, and the gravy train stopping.
On the other hand, if they come out against these laws, thank them, and say how much you will support them in the future. Make censoring the Net a toxic subject, so the next time the media come knocking (and they will), they get told to get the hell out.
This is the important part of the letter I sent off to my Congressman. I am open-sourcing it, so feel free to copy and modify as needed:
Discussion of H.R. 3261 (Stop Online Piracy Act)
Deterring physical counterfeiting is a worthy goal – By physical counterfeiting I refer to things like DVD disks and other consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and military goods as mentioned in the bill. The best way to catch people selling counterfeit goods for gain is to “follow the money”. This is because to make any gain off their activities, the money has to reach them somehow, and so leads you to them.
Sec 102 violates Due Process – It authorizes the Attorney General to determine who is committing a crime and take action against them on his own recognizance, before any determination of guilt. It bypasses long cherished legal principles such as “presumption of innocence” and “right to face your accuser”.
Sec 201 misunderstands the value of distribution – I will use Microsoft Office as an example. If you visit http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/ you can see that Microsoft offers a free trial of their Office software, a major commercial product that sells for up to $500 depending on version. They distribute it for free for the obvious reason that they want people to try out their software.
Mere distribution is not the same as a full license to use the software, with service, support, and customization, as evidenced by the above example. Therefore punishing someone for the act of distribution as if that constitutes the full retail value, as section 201 does, is wrong.
Attempts to block communication will not work – The bill includes what it refers to as “reasonable measures” to block access to infringing websites. The original design of the Internet was to preserve military communications in the face of damage during a nuclear war. More recently as a commercial network, great effort has gone into making it reliable in the face of inevitable hardware failures. So by design, any attempt to block data flow will not work short of shutting down the network completely.
In particular, the Domain Name System (DNS) interference (which I understand is being reconsidered by the bill’s sponsor) will not work for the same reason criminals get disposable phones. The DNS is essentially the phone book for the Internet. It associates a name with a number which the network knows how to connect to, just like the telephone network does. If one number is blocked, serious infringers will simply get another one, under a new name.
Blocking websites will not stop illicit activities because there are many other methods of transferring digital data. The saying goes “it’s all ones and zeroes”, meaning binary data bits. Computers and the Internet cannot distinguish a photo of your cat from the latest Hollywood movie during transmission and storage, because it literally is just a long string of 1’s and 0’s. The interpretation of what the data means only happens once a program loads it and a human sees it.
To block illicit activities, you would have to block every possible channel of communication, including email, removable disks and drives, even the old phone network, which people used before broadband. If you block one channel, wrongdoers will simply use a different one. I won’t bore you with a list of possible methods, but suffice it to say I know a number of them just involving the Internet, but not websites you might try to block.
It's teaching by example. "If this kind of bill gets passed, this is what will happen to the whole internet". I think most people will understand the intent of the blackout.
Do you have any support for your thesis that it is "likely to be interpreted" the way you posit, or is it just your own unsupported opinion? In that case I say "anecdotal evidence is weak". So a bit of googling for political polls or sociology experiments to back up your thesis, and more people might believe it.
The one thing more powerful for elected officials than bribes (campaign donations), is fear of losing the next election. So contact the bill sponsors, and let them know why you will be voting for/sending money to/campaigning for their opponent. Do that even if the bills die in this congressional session. They need to be spanked, hard, for ever supporting this kind of bill, so the next time big media comes around (and they will, you know they will) they will remember this is a politically life threatening topic.
It's either that, or nuke them from orbit, it's the only ways to be sure.
Crysis is made by Crytek, and distributed by EA games, not Ubisoft. Also, Crytek distributes their game engine as part of an SDK for free, so you can mod their games or create your own from scratch: http://www.crydev.net/
This game will be on pirate bay within a week of release and the version of pirate bay will have the DRM as severed as charlie sheens tv career..
It already is: http://thepiratebay.org/search/Anno%202070/0/99/400