That's a rare situation. Most folks don't buy a special trunk to the exchange, because most people don't have those sorts of requirements. Other reasonable examples of private trunk lines include companies setting up video feeds for later broadcast, big companies setting up high-speed multi-city intranet systems, etc. None of these are the typical things that most companies or individuals would do, however.
Either way, by "I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it", the "it" didn't refer to private trunk lines. It referred to a private trunk line for general communication purposes. Sorry for the weak/unclear antecedent.
If someone lit your face on fire, don't worry. The damage and pain you feel is are well-understood physiological and neurological phenomena. People experience pain like this all the time, so your pain isn't all that special and you should really just buck the fuck up.
That's not even remotely a valid interpretation of what I said. What I said was that the fundamental problem with the argument that death is preferable to child molestation is that in the vast majority of cases it isn't. When it is, it is caused by either the circumstances being particularly heinous or the victim being particularly susceptible.
The heinousness of a crime in the general sense should not be gauged based upon unusually extreme examples of that crime. It is a crime to rob a bank. It is a crime to rob a bank by dropping an atomic bomb on it and sucking up the molten gold using a giant vacuum cleaner. Robbing a bank is not (typically) tantamount in heinousness to nuking a city.
The victim being particularly susceptible/vulnerable, as a rule, means that the victim needs more/better counseling, not that the crime was more heinous (unless the reason for choosing that victim was because the victim was particularly susceptible/vulnerable).
At no point did I suggest that anyone "suck it up". Quite the opposite. The only acceptable response to a post like that is to recommend professional counseling. Suicidal thoughts are nothing to screw around with.
So Sexual abuse isn't actual abuse?
You parsed that sentence wrong, though I'll admit that my elision of two implied words could cause someone to read it that way. Reinsert the implied words "limited to" and you'll understand the intended meaning:
...the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even limited to actual abuse).
In other words, not only is it not limited to the sexual abuse (a narrow category), but it is further not even limited to actual abuse (a broader category that includes the former). Many people experience those symptoms even in some situations where they merely perceive abuse, but no actual abuse has taken place. The key point was that until the person (whether an actual victim or not) chooses to stop acting like a victim, no healing can take place, and the fact that some people react in this way to any one particular crime is irrelevant in determining its heinousness because some people react that way to every crime to some extent (and to many, many things that are not crimes).
No, guaranteed end-to-end quality is a private trunk line from point to point. This is basically not useful for general communication except in very rare situations. I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it unless the service providers deliberately add jitter or otherwise attempt to disrupt typical use of normal connections to force the issue, which is why the ITU should absolutely not recommend such an ill-advised concept.
Yeah, I'm sure it's a piece of cake tracking down the precise identity of some random abused youth locked in a completely generic concrete basement. There are only millions upon millions of generic concrete basements out there in the world.
You're completely missing the point. Law enforcement, like anything else that involves time and effort, is a zero sum game. Every minute they spend wasting their time chasing distributors and downloaders and other penny-ante criminals (who have almost zero chance of being actual producers) is a minute that they did not spend doing something else that might have actually resulted in an arrest of a real child molester or other abuser.
First, although this isn't an extremely rare reaction to abuse, it is by no means the norm. The sex abuse victims I've known (admittedly a small sample size) have not wished that they were dead. Such a reaction is not healthy, and can get worse with time. If you truly feel that way, please seek proper counseling from a trained medical professional. Help brings hope. You can recover from this.
Second, not to diminish your experience in any way, but what you're describing is a fairly well-understood psychological phenomenon. The problem with your argument is that the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even actual abuse). A certain subset of the population reacts in this way because of bullying, physical abuse, serious financial losses, relationship breakups, and any number of other crises in their lives.
Clearly a guy dumping his girlfriend isn't guilty of something as heinous as murder, or else we're all in trouble. Yet for some people, it is just as bad. For this reason, you cannot judge a crime's heinousness based on how a particular individual is affected by the crime, but rather based on the typical effect. Most people would rather live than die, including most victims, and calling abuse a worse crime than murder is essentially claiming that even the abuse victims who do not feel that they would rather have died would still have been better off dead.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
The hard part is figuring out a way to generate a public-private key pair without any single computer or individual ever having the entire private key during the keygen process. I will leave that as an exercise for the crypto researchers.
And if the EXIF tags contain a device serial number or equivalent, it requires only a trivial subpoena to determine the identity of the photographer, assuming the owner registered the camera for warranty purposes. I would hope that the FBI would be quick to arrest someone in such situations, though. Presumably they wouldn't bother trying to crack crypto if they could discover the perp by spending ten minutes with a judge....
As horrible as child abuse is, it is utterly irrational grandstanding to say that child abuse is worse than murder. If I asked you if you would rather be raped or killed, do you really mean to tell me that you would answer "killed"? If not, then murder is worse than any form of abuse. The heinousness of a crime is directly proportional to its effect on the victim. There can be no crime more heinous, therefore, than any crime that deprives the victim of his or her existence unwillingly.
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
It doesn't require any access to the actual transactions.
It doesn't require weakening the security model of the Internet to do it.
By jailing the people who make the porn, you actually protect children by getting them out of abusive situations.
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
No one expects the NYPD inquisition. Our two main assumptions are that this is A. all true, B. a direct result of this policy, and C. not unconstitutional... our three main assumptions....
Actually, it describes the end state of every empire that lasts long enough. This is invariably followed (eventually) by the commoners eating the aristocracy (figuratively speaking, usually). Eventually, the resulting new government gets corrupted by those who look for ways to bend the law to their benefit. In time, these become the new sheep, who in turn eventually get eaten, and the cycle continues.
Depends on whether they are stuck on or off. One stuck-on pixel is completely unacceptable and very, very obvious even at a glance. Several stuck-off pixels are often unnoticeable unless they are near one another.
High density PPI displays are extremely expensive to produce because of the zero-defect-over-large-surface-area manufacturing issues.
This. The failure rate for a panel equals the subpixel failure rate times the number of subpixels. A 2x increase in DPI means at minimum a 4x increase in the percentage of defective panels, and that's if you managed to keep the subpixel failure rate constant as you doubled the density. In practice, I'd expect it to be worse than 4x. And even at current DPIs, I've read that large LCD panels still have about a 10% reject rate as of a couple of years ago, which means you'd probably have to toss about half of them if you doubled the DPI....
On the other hand, if they did it right, they could ostensibly build the panels in such a way that a defective panel could be remanufactured into a dozen smaller panels for mobile phone use (discarding the one with the bad subpixel), and then they could cut their waste to near zero. I wonder if anybody has attempted such a design....
Best Buy tends to match prices on a few specific, high-volume products as loss leaders to get people in the door. Then they make it up on everything else. The last product I bought at Best Buy was a Blu-Ray player about six months ago. I'm struggling to remember the exact numbers, but IIRC, Best Buy's regular price was IIRC about $80 more than Amazon' (about a 40% premium, IIRC). I wanted to buy one in a local store, so I found an open-box return at Best Buy that was slightly less than Amazon's new price (because it had originally been purchased while that model was on sale). Unfortunately, it turned out to be DOA, so I returned it. They wouldn't exchange it for a working unit (without charging me the much higher price of the new one), so I drove across town and bought it at Fry's, who matched the Amazon price. I ended up getting a new one for only a few dollars more than I originally spent for the open-box return from Best Buy. Thus, when that product was on sale, its price was comparable with Amazon's price, but its regular price was highway robbery.
Since I had a Best Buy gift card to use up, I decided to try to find DVDs that were priced comparably to Amazon. About one in every 5-10 DVDs that I considered was within a dollar of Amazon's price (+10-20%). I found only one that was cheaper than Amazon's price. Most of the other DVDs I looked at were priced at a 50-100% premium over Amazon's price.
Those numbers were real numbers based on my recent experiences doing price comparison between a Best Buy store and Amazon. As always, your mileage may vary, depending on which products you happen to look at.
A lot of consumers now go to Best Buy etc brick'n'mortar to "window shop", find what they want, write it down, and go home and amazon it etc. The brick'n'mortar stores are tired of being the window shopping of the online clearance stores.
If they're tired of it, they should try lowering their prices. You can't tell me that a local store can't compete with Amazon. Fry's does, for the most part. If Best Buy can't, then they're doing something seriously wrong. Compared with Fry's, Best Buy is a huge mega-chain. Best Buy closed half again more stores this year than Fry's has in total.
When most or all your products range from 30% to 100% higher than Amazon, consumers with the slightest clue aren't going to set foot in your store except perhaps to look. Don't get me wrong, people will pay a price for convenience, but it usually isn't more than five or ten percent. At a 100% premium, my response is, "Yes, but at half the price, I can buy two and have a spare to use while I send the defective one off for repair." (I actually had that conversation with an associate at Fry's once back before they started matching Amazon's prices.)
I agree that it would be an unacceptable loss of privacy as well. The reason I made the points I made rather than bringing privacy into the mix is that privacy vs. safety is a continuum, and the sweet spot on that continuum is a matter of opinion. Thus, an argument from that position would be unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't already think it's a bad idea. By contrast, if you can show that something would be completely ineffectual or infeasible in practice, such an argument is more likely to sway the opinion of even people who fall more towards the safety end of that continuum.
But if that search inspires the local police department to, say tail you for a day or two to make sure you don't commit the crime, I don't see what the harm is.
Because statistically speaking, they would spend all of their time tailing people with search histories like mine, and wouldn't be available to respond to actual crimes or credible threats.
Every time CSI or some other crime drama is on, there will be tens of thousands of searches. You could attempt to filter those out, but then you have someone with intent simply searching while watching CSI.
You can't avoid falsely throwing out real searches, but it is easy to avoid picking up that sort of false search. Statistically, there will be a number of people searching for he same subject at the same time (and usually again two or three hours later during the rebroadcast for Pacific time).
The hard part is ruling out people like me. In the past year, I've searched for information about creating various types of explosive devices (including reactivity of certain nasty metals), yield and critical mass numbers for nuclear weapons, LD50 and appearance of numerous types of poisons, the actual chemistry involved in making cyanide, various subjects in virology and bacteriology, etc. And I've searched for a lot of famous people by name, too.
If you looked purely at my search history, you'd think I was a complete lunatic ready to snap and kill millions of people or assassinate various famous people. Anyone who actually knows me would fall on the floor laughing at such a notion. On the other hand, most of the time, when an actual crazy person decides to kill someone for the first time, their friends would also laugh at the notion. The result is that there is no good way to filter out people like me without also ruling out most of the actual crazy people that this sort of thing would be intended to catch.
If you investigated more carefully (traffic sniffing), you would quickly discover that many of these searches involve fact checking for comments I later posted on Slashdot (or decided not to post, in some cases).
You would have a much harder time discovering the reasoning behind searches related to a series of books I'm writing (well, mostly editing at this point; I'm basically done with the writing). You would *eventually* understand, but not for many years after the search, by which time if I were actually trying to kill someone, my target would already be dead, buried, and the evidence disposed of.
But the maximum level of confusion would be caused by books and articles—when I read something and wonder, "Is that really possible?"
Worse, you can't even rule it out based on who made the search, saying, "Oh, it's just that writer," because creativity and insanity are closely related biologically. By doing so, you would likely eliminate all of the people you were actually trying to catch.
In short, as you implied, investigating all the legitimate concerns would be prohibitively costly. It would inarguably make us safer as a society, but it would be completely impractical to do so, requiring a level of human involvement (physically spying on the suspect) that will always be infeasible given the number of false positives.
I'm sure some other party would love to bring more fiber in here, because they would be the only competition for AT&T and everyone and their mom would jump ship.
Yes and no. I've seen this play out with cable TV in my hometown. What happens is that the incumbent carrier has almost no ongoing costs (other than getting the service from upstream) because they already have the wire infrastructure. By contrast, the newcomer has to pay off the cost of their infrastructure. Thus, both companies quickly lower their prices in competition with one another until the incumbent carrier's price is so low that the new carrier would have to lose money in order to match it.
After about three years, the newcomer realizes it will never break even, and sells the new wire infrastructure to the incumbent carrier at a small loss. The incumbent carrier now has better signal strength, but the competition evaporates.
I think we can safely say what would have happened. Almost nothing. In the U.S., somewhere around a quarter to one fifth of the people are spread out across approximately 97% of the land mass, and the other 70-75% are concentrated in the remaining 3% of our land mass. Even with the best wireless technology we have at our disposal, covering much of the U.S. is infeasible because of geography (mountains, etc.). And the cellular phone industry has doubtless poured more money into wireless research than the total spending on ISPs nationwide.
Let's take my hometown in Tennessee as an example. Many of my friends did not have cable service because even with subsidies, it was not profitable. It costs about $30,000 to run a mile of coax or fiber, and in many places, that would serve only one or two households. Even if they stood to make $30 profit per month (unlikely), it would take over 40 years to break even, without factoring in such pesky things as interest.
So what about wireless? Realistically, most wireless Internet services cap out at somewhere on the order of ten miles or so. Assuming you placed a cellular tower ($150,000 or so) in a location where it could serve the areas between towns, there are many areas where a tower with a ten mile radius would serve only a low four-digit number of households). Many of these areas do not even have basic cellular phone service today from any carrier.
Given that probably 90% of those four-digits worth of people live in a town (and thus would likely already be served by a wired Internet provider because it would be profitable to do so, subsidies or not), you're talking about almost half a grand per household served. And that's just for the initial tower construction costs. On top of that, you have to add the cost of a trunk line out to the middle of nowhere (at $30,000 per mile times 10+ miles to the nearest town), plus hundreds of dollars in customer premises equipment costs for each household (that many of those households could not realistically afford). Granted, $2,000 per customer is a far cry from $15,000, but it is still something that no sane person would invest in.
Even if you could miraculously crank up the radius up to 30 miles, it would barely be profitable, and short of insanely tall towers, that's about where the curvature of the earth itself will bite you in the you-know-what.
And the bigger problem is that all this proposed infrastructure is unlikely to pay for itself before the technology becomes obsolete.
In short, there is just no feasible way to solve the last-mile problem except for either A. the government forcing private enterprise to build out the wired infrastructure in exchange for the right to serve other, more profitable areas or B. the government building the infrastructure itself. Your viable choices are basically the system we have now or socialism. Take your pick.
And the vast majority of those companies were given money by the government because for many years, every company they asked to serve those areas responded, "Hell, no". The free market works well when there are enough customers per square mile to make competition feasible. In more rural areas, true competition can't possibly work, which means the only viable alternative is a government-run last-mile infrastructure that leases access out to multiple competing ISPs.
If your not going to make the system work for people who don't have network connections, you're giving them an official de facto "do it off the books when the network is down or if you live far enough north."
Unverified transactions aren't relevant. When somebody buys me dinner on a credit card and I hand a $10 bill to that person, that transaction is guaranteed to be "off the books" because my friends trust that I'm not counterfeiting bills, and any additional effort on their part to authenticate the bill would be wasted effort. There's no inherent requirement that every transaction be verified. However, when that person hands that bill to a restaurant, if that restaurant wants to check the bill, they can choose to do so.
Either way, the burden of checking for counterfeit bills falls on the people or companies that choose to check a bill for authenticity, just as is the case today. Requiring those companies to have a network connection in order to do so is a fairly low hurdle. There is an advantage, of course, to having the functionality available to more businesses—the fewer transactions a fake bill goes through, the easier it is to identify its creator—but nobody is proposing making those checks mandatory for anyone. That would be utterly impractical and would almost completely eliminate the benefit of cash when it comes to transactions between individuals.
You have multiple properties and you cannot copy all of them because when you read one of them, it changes the others. If the verifier chooses to verify the property that the forger copied, your fake passes. If it chooses to verify one of the other properties, your fake is rejected. Therefore, if each bill has a bunch of these quantum particles and the verifier chooses which property to evaluate randomly, odds are any copied bill will fail. (Of course, you probably also have to allow a certain percentage of failures to prevent false rejections, which may or may not make this approach impractical.)
Verification does, as others have mentioned, destroy the quantum state of the particles, but that's a separate (and easily solvable) problem.
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That's a rare situation. Most folks don't buy a special trunk to the exchange, because most people don't have those sorts of requirements. Other reasonable examples of private trunk lines include companies setting up video feeds for later broadcast, big companies setting up high-speed multi-city intranet systems, etc. None of these are the typical things that most companies or individuals would do, however.
Either way, by "I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it", the "it" didn't refer to private trunk lines. It referred to a private trunk line for general communication purposes. Sorry for the weak/unclear antecedent.
That's not even remotely a valid interpretation of what I said. What I said was that the fundamental problem with the argument that death is preferable to child molestation is that in the vast majority of cases it isn't. When it is, it is caused by either the circumstances being particularly heinous or the victim being particularly susceptible.
The heinousness of a crime in the general sense should not be gauged based upon unusually extreme examples of that crime. It is a crime to rob a bank. It is a crime to rob a bank by dropping an atomic bomb on it and sucking up the molten gold using a giant vacuum cleaner. Robbing a bank is not (typically) tantamount in heinousness to nuking a city.
The victim being particularly susceptible/vulnerable, as a rule, means that the victim needs more/better counseling, not that the crime was more heinous (unless the reason for choosing that victim was because the victim was particularly susceptible/vulnerable).
At no point did I suggest that anyone "suck it up". Quite the opposite. The only acceptable response to a post like that is to recommend professional counseling. Suicidal thoughts are nothing to screw around with.
You parsed that sentence wrong, though I'll admit that my elision of two implied words could cause someone to read it that way. Reinsert the implied words "limited to" and you'll understand the intended meaning:
...the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even limited to actual abuse).
In other words, not only is it not limited to the sexual abuse (a narrow category), but it is further not even limited to actual abuse (a broader category that includes the former). Many people experience those symptoms even in some situations where they merely perceive abuse, but no actual abuse has taken place. The key point was that until the person (whether an actual victim or not) chooses to stop acting like a victim, no healing can take place, and the fact that some people react in this way to any one particular crime is irrelevant in determining its heinousness because some people react that way to every crime to some extent (and to many, many things that are not crimes).
No, guaranteed end-to-end quality is a private trunk line from point to point. This is basically not useful for general communication except in very rare situations. I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it unless the service providers deliberately add jitter or otherwise attempt to disrupt typical use of normal connections to force the issue, which is why the ITU should absolutely not recommend such an ill-advised concept.
You're completely missing the point. Law enforcement, like anything else that involves time and effort, is a zero sum game. Every minute they spend wasting their time chasing distributors and downloaders and other penny-ante criminals (who have almost zero chance of being actual producers) is a minute that they did not spend doing something else that might have actually resulted in an arrest of a real child molester or other abuser.
Two things:
First, although this isn't an extremely rare reaction to abuse, it is by no means the norm. The sex abuse victims I've known (admittedly a small sample size) have not wished that they were dead. Such a reaction is not healthy, and can get worse with time. If you truly feel that way, please seek proper counseling from a trained medical professional. Help brings hope. You can recover from this.
Second, not to diminish your experience in any way, but what you're describing is a fairly well-understood psychological phenomenon. The problem with your argument is that the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even actual abuse). A certain subset of the population reacts in this way because of bullying, physical abuse, serious financial losses, relationship breakups, and any number of other crises in their lives.
Clearly a guy dumping his girlfriend isn't guilty of something as heinous as murder, or else we're all in trouble. Yet for some people, it is just as bad. For this reason, you cannot judge a crime's heinousness based on how a particular individual is affected by the crime, but rather based on the typical effect. Most people would rather live than die, including most victims, and calling abuse a worse crime than murder is essentially claiming that even the abuse victims who do not feel that they would rather have died would still have been better off dead.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
The hard part is figuring out a way to generate a public-private key pair without any single computer or individual ever having the entire private key during the keygen process. I will leave that as an exercise for the crypto researchers.
And if the EXIF tags contain a device serial number or equivalent, it requires only a trivial subpoena to determine the identity of the photographer, assuming the owner registered the camera for warranty purposes. I would hope that the FBI would be quick to arrest someone in such situations, though. Presumably they wouldn't bother trying to crack crypto if they could discover the perp by spending ten minutes with a judge....
As horrible as child abuse is, it is utterly irrational grandstanding to say that child abuse is worse than murder. If I asked you if you would rather be raped or killed, do you really mean to tell me that you would answer "killed"? If not, then murder is worse than any form of abuse. The heinousness of a crime is directly proportional to its effect on the victim. There can be no crime more heinous, therefore, than any crime that deprives the victim of his or her existence unwillingly.
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
No one expects the NYPD inquisition. Our two main assumptions are that this is A. all true, B. a direct result of this policy, and C. not unconstitutional... our three main assumptions....
Actually, it describes the end state of every empire that lasts long enough. This is invariably followed (eventually) by the commoners eating the aristocracy (figuratively speaking, usually). Eventually, the resulting new government gets corrupted by those who look for ways to bend the law to their benefit. In time, these become the new sheep, who in turn eventually get eaten, and the cycle continues.
Depends on whether they are stuck on or off. One stuck-on pixel is completely unacceptable and very, very obvious even at a glance. Several stuck-off pixels are often unnoticeable unless they are near one another.
This. The failure rate for a panel equals the subpixel failure rate times the number of subpixels. A 2x increase in DPI means at minimum a 4x increase in the percentage of defective panels, and that's if you managed to keep the subpixel failure rate constant as you doubled the density. In practice, I'd expect it to be worse than 4x. And even at current DPIs, I've read that large LCD panels still have about a 10% reject rate as of a couple of years ago, which means you'd probably have to toss about half of them if you doubled the DPI....
On the other hand, if they did it right, they could ostensibly build the panels in such a way that a defective panel could be remanufactured into a dozen smaller panels for mobile phone use (discarding the one with the bad subpixel), and then they could cut their waste to near zero. I wonder if anybody has attempted such a design....
Best Buy tends to match prices on a few specific, high-volume products as loss leaders to get people in the door. Then they make it up on everything else. The last product I bought at Best Buy was a Blu-Ray player about six months ago. I'm struggling to remember the exact numbers, but IIRC, Best Buy's regular price was IIRC about $80 more than Amazon' (about a 40% premium, IIRC). I wanted to buy one in a local store, so I found an open-box return at Best Buy that was slightly less than Amazon's new price (because it had originally been purchased while that model was on sale). Unfortunately, it turned out to be DOA, so I returned it. They wouldn't exchange it for a working unit (without charging me the much higher price of the new one), so I drove across town and bought it at Fry's, who matched the Amazon price. I ended up getting a new one for only a few dollars more than I originally spent for the open-box return from Best Buy. Thus, when that product was on sale, its price was comparable with Amazon's price, but its regular price was highway robbery.
Since I had a Best Buy gift card to use up, I decided to try to find DVDs that were priced comparably to Amazon. About one in every 5-10 DVDs that I considered was within a dollar of Amazon's price (+10-20%). I found only one that was cheaper than Amazon's price. Most of the other DVDs I looked at were priced at a 50-100% premium over Amazon's price.
Those numbers were real numbers based on my recent experiences doing price comparison between a Best Buy store and Amazon. As always, your mileage may vary, depending on which products you happen to look at.
If they're tired of it, they should try lowering their prices. You can't tell me that a local store can't compete with Amazon. Fry's does, for the most part. If Best Buy can't, then they're doing something seriously wrong. Compared with Fry's, Best Buy is a huge mega-chain. Best Buy closed half again more stores this year than Fry's has in total.
When most or all your products range from 30% to 100% higher than Amazon, consumers with the slightest clue aren't going to set foot in your store except perhaps to look. Don't get me wrong, people will pay a price for convenience, but it usually isn't more than five or ten percent. At a 100% premium, my response is, "Yes, but at half the price, I can buy two and have a spare to use while I send the defective one off for repair." (I actually had that conversation with an associate at Fry's once back before they started matching Amazon's prices.)
I agree that it would be an unacceptable loss of privacy as well. The reason I made the points I made rather than bringing privacy into the mix is that privacy vs. safety is a continuum, and the sweet spot on that continuum is a matter of opinion. Thus, an argument from that position would be unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't already think it's a bad idea. By contrast, if you can show that something would be completely ineffectual or infeasible in practice, such an argument is more likely to sway the opinion of even people who fall more towards the safety end of that continuum.
Because statistically speaking, they would spend all of their time tailing people with search histories like mine, and wouldn't be available to respond to actual crimes or credible threats.
You can't avoid falsely throwing out real searches, but it is easy to avoid picking up that sort of false search. Statistically, there will be a number of people searching for he same subject at the same time (and usually again two or three hours later during the rebroadcast for Pacific time).
The hard part is ruling out people like me. In the past year, I've searched for information about creating various types of explosive devices (including reactivity of certain nasty metals), yield and critical mass numbers for nuclear weapons, LD50 and appearance of numerous types of poisons, the actual chemistry involved in making cyanide, various subjects in virology and bacteriology, etc. And I've searched for a lot of famous people by name, too.
If you looked purely at my search history, you'd think I was a complete lunatic ready to snap and kill millions of people or assassinate various famous people. Anyone who actually knows me would fall on the floor laughing at such a notion. On the other hand, most of the time, when an actual crazy person decides to kill someone for the first time, their friends would also laugh at the notion. The result is that there is no good way to filter out people like me without also ruling out most of the actual crazy people that this sort of thing would be intended to catch.
If you investigated more carefully (traffic sniffing), you would quickly discover that many of these searches involve fact checking for comments I later posted on Slashdot (or decided not to post, in some cases).
You would have a much harder time discovering the reasoning behind searches related to a series of books I'm writing (well, mostly editing at this point; I'm basically done with the writing). You would *eventually* understand, but not for many years after the search, by which time if I were actually trying to kill someone, my target would already be dead, buried, and the evidence disposed of.
But the maximum level of confusion would be caused by books and articles—when I read something and wonder, "Is that really possible?"
Worse, you can't even rule it out based on who made the search, saying, "Oh, it's just that writer," because creativity and insanity are closely related biologically. By doing so, you would likely eliminate all of the people you were actually trying to catch.
In short, as you implied, investigating all the legitimate concerns would be prohibitively costly. It would inarguably make us safer as a society, but it would be completely impractical to do so, requiring a level of human involvement (physically spying on the suspect) that will always be infeasible given the number of false positives.
Maybe she wants someone wearing Pampers. If saying "She wants George Clooney" is correct, then so is "She wants Pampered".
If my sources are correct, about thirty grand per mile, including material and labor.
Yes and no. I've seen this play out with cable TV in my hometown. What happens is that the incumbent carrier has almost no ongoing costs (other than getting the service from upstream) because they already have the wire infrastructure. By contrast, the newcomer has to pay off the cost of their infrastructure. Thus, both companies quickly lower their prices in competition with one another until the incumbent carrier's price is so low that the new carrier would have to lose money in order to match it.
After about three years, the newcomer realizes it will never break even, and sells the new wire infrastructure to the incumbent carrier at a small loss. The incumbent carrier now has better signal strength, but the competition evaporates.
I think we can safely say what would have happened. Almost nothing. In the U.S., somewhere around a quarter to one fifth of the people are spread out across approximately 97% of the land mass, and the other 70-75% are concentrated in the remaining 3% of our land mass. Even with the best wireless technology we have at our disposal, covering much of the U.S. is infeasible because of geography (mountains, etc.). And the cellular phone industry has doubtless poured more money into wireless research than the total spending on ISPs nationwide.
Let's take my hometown in Tennessee as an example. Many of my friends did not have cable service because even with subsidies, it was not profitable. It costs about $30,000 to run a mile of coax or fiber, and in many places, that would serve only one or two households. Even if they stood to make $30 profit per month (unlikely), it would take over 40 years to break even, without factoring in such pesky things as interest.
So what about wireless? Realistically, most wireless Internet services cap out at somewhere on the order of ten miles or so. Assuming you placed a cellular tower ($150,000 or so) in a location where it could serve the areas between towns, there are many areas where a tower with a ten mile radius would serve only a low four-digit number of households). Many of these areas do not even have basic cellular phone service today from any carrier.
Given that probably 90% of those four-digits worth of people live in a town (and thus would likely already be served by a wired Internet provider because it would be profitable to do so, subsidies or not), you're talking about almost half a grand per household served. And that's just for the initial tower construction costs. On top of that, you have to add the cost of a trunk line out to the middle of nowhere (at $30,000 per mile times 10+ miles to the nearest town), plus hundreds of dollars in customer premises equipment costs for each household (that many of those households could not realistically afford). Granted, $2,000 per customer is a far cry from $15,000, but it is still something that no sane person would invest in.
Even if you could miraculously crank up the radius up to 30 miles, it would barely be profitable, and short of insanely tall towers, that's about where the curvature of the earth itself will bite you in the you-know-what.
And the bigger problem is that all this proposed infrastructure is unlikely to pay for itself before the technology becomes obsolete.
In short, there is just no feasible way to solve the last-mile problem except for either A. the government forcing private enterprise to build out the wired infrastructure in exchange for the right to serve other, more profitable areas or B. the government building the infrastructure itself. Your viable choices are basically the system we have now or socialism. Take your pick.
And the vast majority of those companies were given money by the government because for many years, every company they asked to serve those areas responded, "Hell, no". The free market works well when there are enough customers per square mile to make competition feasible. In more rural areas, true competition can't possibly work, which means the only viable alternative is a government-run last-mile infrastructure that leases access out to multiple competing ISPs.
Unverified transactions aren't relevant. When somebody buys me dinner on a credit card and I hand a $10 bill to that person, that transaction is guaranteed to be "off the books" because my friends trust that I'm not counterfeiting bills, and any additional effort on their part to authenticate the bill would be wasted effort. There's no inherent requirement that every transaction be verified. However, when that person hands that bill to a restaurant, if that restaurant wants to check the bill, they can choose to do so.
Either way, the burden of checking for counterfeit bills falls on the people or companies that choose to check a bill for authenticity, just as is the case today. Requiring those companies to have a network connection in order to do so is a fairly low hurdle. There is an advantage, of course, to having the functionality available to more businesses—the fewer transactions a fake bill goes through, the easier it is to identify its creator—but nobody is proposing making those checks mandatory for anyone. That would be utterly impractical and would almost completely eliminate the benefit of cash when it comes to transactions between individuals.
You have multiple properties and you cannot copy all of them because when you read one of them, it changes the others. If the verifier chooses to verify the property that the forger copied, your fake passes. If it chooses to verify one of the other properties, your fake is rejected. Therefore, if each bill has a bunch of these quantum particles and the verifier chooses which property to evaluate randomly, odds are any copied bill will fail. (Of course, you probably also have to allow a certain percentage of failures to prevent false rejections, which may or may not make this approach impractical.)
Verification does, as others have mentioned, destroy the quantum state of the particles, but that's a separate (and easily solvable) problem.