A couple of considerations: (3) the facts and circumstances of your given situation are very important, blanket generalizations are risky. Facts can sometimes be fluid a good lawyer, can setup the playing field to the benefit of his/her client.
...which is relevant in the trial. What he's talking about is BEFORE that, the investigation has a much lower bar on what they need to prove that they can go rifling through your stuff.
"A good lawyer" isn't going to do you any good at 10:00 on a Tuesday night when the police knock on the door with a warrant in hand, ready to arrest you if you don't cooperate right then.
This is true... of both Windows and Linux. Tell me how to do a tracert without the command line... (or show me an internet connection so reliable that I never need to run a trace).
It makes sense to charge more for more features in your app. Modularization is just an efficient way to reach a wider range of audiences and ensure that each audience can get all they need from your product, at the cheapest price, without undermining the price for those who need more.
But deliberately crippling your product and charging less for it is stupid.
*Whew*! For a second there, I thought you were going to say that this was a good idea... and then we would have all had to SET YOU ON FIRE.
I guess I'll have to eat my marshmallows cold. Poo.
Why would they have MSNM, AIM, and YIM all open at once, when they could put them all in Pidgin?;-)
So, that's one. Then there's IE, that's two (if it even counts, since it's "part of the OS").
Word.
Email.
Game... not many standalone games you can play while pretending to do your homework and chatting with your friends, but ok.
You're still at a good five or six. I guess MS needs come out with Windows Seventeen Edition, that REQUIRES you to have at least three apps open at all times.
One day, far in the future, we'll look back at the past (c. 2050), and shake our heads, and wonder why people thought a "commonwealth" society could work. All it encourages is parasitism of the slothful upon the industrious.
That's a pervasive myth, but it turns out, it's not true.
Who cares? I do. A lot of people do. You, on the other hand, seem to have an investment in keeping spamming easy and cheap. Let me guess where your paycheck comes from...
There's really no such thing as a viable flat-fee unlimited-access service.
yes there is.
Capacity per second / number of users = each user's capacity per second.
No lies, no caps, no problems.
Capacity per second is limited, therefore, the service is not unlimited.
ALL SERVICE HAS LIMITS. The issue is whether the limits are practical limits on how much a person can use given the scenario, technology, equipment, etc., or the service provider has to impose limits if the practical limits on use cannot make "unlimited" access economically viable.
I'm sure that what happens is you download it, run it, it says, "Oh, I detect that you're not running Windows Vista! Let me FIX that for you!...There, $104.99 has been charged to your credit card. Where else do you want to go today?"
Did I say that? I didn't say that. I said that it's routine for businesses to change their prices when their costs change, and cited a couple of examples of things that can affect their costs. Their job is to make money, not to provide you with the maximum amount of service for the minimum price.
How would you explain then having to pay a premium if you dont get TV service?
Market forces.
why would they continue to market higher bandwidth packages if they can't afford bandwidth from uplink?
They won't. Huh?
I sure would like to change my cable provider, but I couldn't find anyone here besides charter. Seems to me like price gauging.
Actually, price gauging would be monitoring prices. Price gouging, on the other hand, is a felony offense in some regions during civil emergencies, or more informally applied to anticompetitive practices (which may be more accurately termed price-fixing).
And they're not raising their prices, nor are they lowering the amount of service delivered at that price to the vast majority of their clients. They're requiring that a small minority of clients who are using their services in a manner that far exceeds the norm to upgrade to a more expensive level of service to continue that level of usage. If that's price gouging, then so are most utility pricing structures, which charge you a higher rate for usage above a threshold amount (usually based on average usage or on prior year usage).
I am all for agility and changing business plans, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the customer.
Uhhhh... if the customer is the source of revenue, then it is ALWAYS at the expense of the customer. Who exactly do you expect to pay for things?
If you set a certain expectation from the customer and have a contract with him, then see it through, don't flip the switch on him. After all, they don't pay per glass like jamba juice.
If you have a contract with your cable company, they cannot change terms on you until the contract expires. Similarly, *you* cannot disconnect service without penalty until expiration of that contract. OTOH, if you pay monthly for service, and can terminate anytime with minimal notice (in my experience, cable services can be terminated with as little as a few hours' notice, and rarely more than a few days), you DO NOT have a contract with them, and they, likewise, can change your service terms. You can then either accept the new terms or terminate service.
The way I see it, they would like to treat their customers like wireless carriers and are taking us slowly there.
Wireless carriers usually lock their clients into one- or two-year contracts. If the client wishes to terminate service before the expiration of the contract, they will pay a hefty penalty. OTOH, their rates are fixed for the term of the contract. It sounds like you would prefer that system, so I'm not sure why you'd be upset to see cable service move in that direction. But then... it doesn't sound like it is anyway.
Why don't we do something to stop this, rather than debating how it could work? Obama needs to step up on his word and shut this down before it spreads.
As far as I know, Obama has talked about investment in bringing broadband to places where it's currently unavailable... and not said anything about making sure that you, personally, can download 500GB a month at a low low flat rate.
If anyone remembers, Dial-up worked kinda like this where you paid for the time you're online. It took years to get to unlimited services. Why ruin it now?!
I remember AOL working like that, but most actual dial-up was a flat fee per month. If you had a dedicated phone line, you could stay dialed up pretty much full-time (and that's exactly what we did before we got our first cable internet account). Some ISPs would time you out for inactivity, but of course you could script your way around that.
Unlimited services are only an economically viable business model when there are some sort of natural limits on what people can use. "All you can eat" buffets can work because people can only eat so much at one time. They're pretty successful in mixed populations, but in certain areas (like near universities) they often have to create additional rules to remain profitable (like all you can eat within one hour).
Until relatively recently, there were much lower practical limits on what you could download. There was the speed of the line that could be provided to your house, the network card in your actual computer, and the expense of hard drive space. There has also been an explosion in the content available; the amount of video and audio content available (both legally and illegally) has exploded in the last couple of years. People can download more than they used to be able to, and there's more available that they want to download, too.
There's really no such thing as a viable flat-fee unlimited-access service. Either there's a practical limit on what individual customers can consume that protects your profit margin, or you need to have policy-based limits in place.
I'm fine with it as long as they reduce the capped service fee to something close to the price of dialup.
Why should they charge "something close" to the price of a service which is significantly lower-bandwidth?
Besides, dialup also requires a phone line... if you pay $12/month for the line, and $10/month for your dial-up service, you're getting close to what our family pays for our cable internet connection.
If they were selling water or batteries after an earthquake, yeah.
They have been offering the services for a long time now without caps. So they cant claim they can't maintain it.
What, business plans can't change? What if they're being charged more by their upstream providers? What if they had a contract with a provider which expired, and now they're having to renegotiate? And then there's always the possibility that they've realized their product was undervalued, and they're correcting that. I realize Jamba Juice writes a long letter of explanation and apology every time they raise their prices, but that's not necessarily required by all businesses.
But you're paying for water usage and electric usage for a finite resource, not the means of transmission. All Charter or any other ISP is providing me is a means to access a resource. I'm paying my water company for the water I use, not the pipes that it comes in on.
Your ISP has differential costs based on whether there is data flowing along their "pipes" or not, just as the water company has differential costs based on whether there is water flowing. While the nature of the metered item is different (water being a tangible resource, and data being somewhat abstract), the scaling of costs with consumption is very similar.
You are correct that their main effort is to reduce congestion as the poster clarified in response to my post. I do think, though, that having automatic tolls during congested time periods would be a more economical model to persue in getting the desired effect.
In what way would it be more economical? Tolls require either access control (toll booths with gates) or an automated transponder-based payment system (i.e. Fastpass). Installing access control everywhere would be a huge infrastructure burden, would increase congestion (due to lines), and would encourage people to cut through areas not designed for high volumes of traffic. So you're left with a transponder-based system... now, you put a transponder in every vehicle, and you charge people automatically for their toll road usage. If you have tolls on *all* the major roads, and you charge people based on the miles of road they've used, you've done almost exactly the same thing as what they're doing.
Gas taxes are a poor proxy for travel volume but are very good for road wear and tear since the weight of vehicles tend to correlate with gas consumption.
It does tend to correlate, but not all that well. There are hybrid SUVs, and very lightweight sports cars that are gas hogs. People who do most of their driving for short trips around their neighborhood will have lower gas mileage in the same type of vehicle as people who commute on relatively uncongested freeways, but are not having as great an impact on the infrastructure.
Also, there are enormous problems with the way gas taxes are implemented in the US. Currently they are a specific tax, meaning that the tax rate is set at a number of dollars per barrel (of oil... the tax is not actually on consumer gasoline; it's just passed on that way very explicitly by the oil companies). That level cannot be changed without an Act of Congress (and State taxes generally need the State Legislature's vote). The taxation levels often stay the same for a decade or two at a time, while the value of that set amount of money falls due to normal inflation. Meanwhile, average fuel economy improves, lowering the dollar amount of taxes collected per mile driven.
An ad valorem tax where the percentage automatically adjusts as average fuel economy increases would address these issues, but given the enormous difficulty states have had in switching their own gas taxes from specific to ad valorem, it doesn't seem likely that we'll see this anytime in the near future.
It's not perfect, but it's a straight way of spreading the costs of road maintenance to those who cause their proportion of road damage.
Another way to do that is to charge registration fees based on vehicle weight and number of tires, as they do in the UK. There are actually three-wheeled cars, because they have lower registration fees.
I just think that the most high-tech method of solving the problem isn't always the most efficient. That was my only point.
I would agree with that as a general statement, but in this case, by the time you adjust a lower-tech system to the point that it gives you a reasonable approximation, you're not that far removed from the higher-tech system that gives you a much better metering system.
I know they are somewhat conflicting numbers but they both seem to come from presumably reliable sources.
They do... but the fact that they are orders of magnitude apart shows that either (a) the sources are not as reliable as they might seem, or (b) it is extremely difficult to derive accurate statistics about this subject. How do we know, if the best numbers we have available are a range x to 1.167x, and a fixed value that is 3.33x, that the true number isn't actually x/2, or x/10, or x*10?
You're probably right that the risk of being struck by lightning is lower... but when you get down to tenths of a percent, it's hard to tell the difference between the relative risks, is I think the issue.
But the comparison may help us in another way: even if your chance of being struck by lightning was 1 in 560, I don't think there would be the level of massive media exposure for the risks of lightning, legislation instituted to protect people from lightning, etc. Kidnapping is a very emotional subject, and that emotion magnifies the true risk... while often masking other, more prevalent, risks to children.
It works beautifully where they've implemented it. The 91 Express Lanes in Orange County, CA have a toll system that reflects the peak usage; tolls are highest when usage is highest, and lowest when it's lowest. Between this and live camera surveillance so that obstructions can be cleared immediately, these two lanes carry 50% of the traffic in each direction... even though there are FOUR free lanes alongside. IOW, half the lane-miles carry the same amount of traffic, because dynamic tolls and improved hazard clearance keep traffic free-flowing 95% of the time.
Or, of course, they can simply tax the gasoline which essentially does the same thing, or maybe they already do that:).
Gasoline taxes are a fairly poor proxy for travel volume. First of all, there's a huge range of fuel efficiency, and it doesn't correspond perfectly with other impacts of car use; a Prius on the road a rush hour has a very similar effect on total congestion as an Explorer.
Furthermore, average fuel efficiency improves over time, so to keep taxes per mile at a more or less constant rate, you have to continually raise the gas tax.
Finally, as the poster mentioned, they're also disincentivizing peak-period Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), which is totally impossible with aggregate readings.
Nor should you get your statistics from websites that, on the very same page, list conflicting data:
Of the 800,000 children reported missing annually, approximately 69,000 are abducted: Family members account for the majority of these reported cases (82 percent) Non-family abductions account for 12,000 of these reported cases (18 percent)
Farther down on the same page:
Each year 3,600 to 4,200 children are abducted by someone outside the family; 1/2 of them are age 12 or older; 2/3 are female; at least 19% of these abductors are not strangers to their victims-Finklehor, p. 10. *The chance of a minor being kidnapped by a stranger is 1 in 560, by a family member 1 in 180. - Discover Magazine as reported by Gannett News Service 5/28/96.
Now, if you take that 12,000 number, multiply it by 18 (years of childhood), and then take that result (216,000) and determine the percentage that represents of the child population in the US (82,457,018... I grabbed a number off the Census website that's for the 2007 American Community survey, but I had to total up percentages of population by age group and then take that percentage of the total population), you get about a.26% chance of being kidnapped by a stranger... but 1 in 560 is more like.17%. And the ratio of those two percentages don't match the annual statistics, where one lists a number that's 3-4 times as high as the other. Notice that the much higher number is listed prominently at the top of the page, without a footnote as to the conflicting measures from other sources.
Couldn't you just wrap your passport in tinfoil, so that the RFID chip only worked when it was open? Then it would still work for valid uses and would be undetectable the rest of the time.
Maybe, not sure how well that would actually shield it.
You could just follow the instructions for building your own sniffer/cloner, and test it yourself....
Passports aren't even the biggest concern here though, it's more the move to put RFID into all manner if inappropriate items like credit cards, phones (which are then tied to credit cards), clothing (yes really, and not just for inventory tracking), and probably lots of other things we haven't thought of yet. It's one thing for them to clone your passport, it's another entirely for them to clone your credit card.
But what if RFID technology was used to ensure that your credit card would stop working if it was outside of your wallet for too long, for example? Or too far away from your driver's license?
I think that, rather than creating a scary woo-woo they're going to get me scenario, ubiquitous RFID will actually dilute the effectiveness of privacy invasions, cloning, etc. I don't gather that these things broadcast a whole lot of data; if everything in your wallet has a tag, how does the cloner figure out what he's looking at and what to do with it? In a crowded place, how does he match people with tags?
Besides... if everything everyone carries has an RFID tag, it will only take a few cloning/counterfeiting debacles before every wallet has built-in masking. As long as its only used for a few specialized circumstances, ThinkGeek will remain the only supplier of such things (and I want one in a more ladylike format!)
If the banks and credit card companies are incorporated in the US, using US dollars, they are. Which covers most transactions. You can evade it if you use a Swiss bank or send gold coins to a mailbox, of course.
Ok, so if my bank does something illegal, someone can do something about it... but if *I* authorize a transaction via their usual means, and the person on the other end of the transaction is breaking US laws but is outside the US, what happens then?
Anyway, the idea is not to stop trade where the customer knows what's up and what they're getting, but scammers.
I thought the idea was to stop SPAM. Spam is often selling "legitimate" items, but through illegitimate means. (I use quotes because the items frequently don't really do what they appear to claim, but they have the proper disclaimers and it would be difficult to sue them for straight-up fraud.)
Someone who buys a pill that's supposed to enlarge their member knows it probably won't work, but they're willing to try it. The problem is that, for that ONE person who buys it, hundreds of thousands of people have to delete that same email. That's the problem they're trying to address.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have modded that terrifying were than an option. Is the USAF really having that kind of trouble recruiting people who've taken algebra?
Maybe they're recruiting straight from Verizon.
A couple of considerations:
(3) the facts and circumstances of your given situation are very important, blanket generalizations are risky. Facts can sometimes be fluid a good lawyer, can setup the playing field to the benefit of his/her client.
...which is relevant in the trial. What he's talking about is BEFORE that, the investigation has a much lower bar on what they need to prove that they can go rifling through your stuff.
"A good lawyer" isn't going to do you any good at 10:00 on a Tuesday night when the police knock on the door with a warrant in hand, ready to arrest you if you don't cooperate right then.
This is true... of both Windows and Linux. Tell me how to do a tracert without the command line... (or show me an internet connection so reliable that I never need to run a trace).
It makes sense to charge more for more features in your app. Modularization is just an efficient way to reach a wider range of audiences and ensure that each audience can get all they need from your product, at the cheapest price, without undermining the price for those who need more.
But deliberately crippling your product and charging less for it is stupid.
*Whew*! For a second there, I thought you were going to say that this was a good idea... and then we would have all had to SET YOU ON FIRE.
I guess I'll have to eat my marshmallows cold. Poo.
Why would they have MSNM, AIM, and YIM all open at once, when they could put them all in Pidgin? ;-)
So, that's one. Then there's IE, that's two (if it even counts, since it's "part of the OS").
Word.
Email.
Game... not many standalone games you can play while pretending to do your homework and chatting with your friends, but ok.
You're still at a good five or six. I guess MS needs come out with Windows Seventeen Edition, that REQUIRES you to have at least three apps open at all times.
Unionization has been on the decline for decades. It does not explain this phenomenon.
One day, far in the future, we'll look back at the past (c. 2050), and shake our heads, and wonder why people thought a "commonwealth" society could work. All it encourages is parasitism of the slothful upon the industrious.
That's a pervasive myth, but it turns out, it's not true.
Who cares? I do. A lot of people do. You, on the other hand, seem to have an investment in keeping spamming easy and cheap. Let me guess where your paycheck comes from...
Sounds like someone makes a lot of money off of spam...
There's really no such thing as a viable flat-fee unlimited-access service.
yes there is.
Capacity per second / number of users = each user's capacity per second.
No lies, no caps, no problems.
Capacity per second is limited, therefore, the service is not unlimited.
ALL SERVICE HAS LIMITS. The issue is whether the limits are practical limits on how much a person can use given the scenario, technology, equipment, etc., or the service provider has to impose limits if the practical limits on use cannot make "unlimited" access economically viable.
I'm sure that what happens is you download it, run it, it says, "Oh, I detect that you're not running Windows Vista! Let me FIX that for you!...There, $104.99 has been charged to your credit card. Where else do you want to go today?"
they can't afford it?
Did I say that? I didn't say that. I said that it's routine for businesses to change their prices when their costs change, and cited a couple of examples of things that can affect their costs. Their job is to make money, not to provide you with the maximum amount of service for the minimum price.
How would you explain then having to pay a premium if you dont get TV service?
Market forces.
why would they continue to market higher bandwidth packages if they can't afford bandwidth from uplink?
They won't. Huh?
I sure would like to change my cable provider, but I couldn't find anyone here besides charter. Seems to me like price gauging.
Actually, price gauging would be monitoring prices. Price gouging, on the other hand, is a felony offense in some regions during civil emergencies, or more informally applied to anticompetitive practices (which may be more accurately termed price-fixing).
And they're not raising their prices, nor are they lowering the amount of service delivered at that price to the vast majority of their clients. They're requiring that a small minority of clients who are using their services in a manner that far exceeds the norm to upgrade to a more expensive level of service to continue that level of usage. If that's price gouging, then so are most utility pricing structures, which charge you a higher rate for usage above a threshold amount (usually based on average usage or on prior year usage).
I am all for agility and changing business plans, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the customer.
Uhhhh... if the customer is the source of revenue, then it is ALWAYS at the expense of the customer. Who exactly do you expect to pay for things?
If you set a certain expectation from the customer and have a contract with him, then see it through, don't flip the switch on him. After all, they don't pay per glass like jamba juice.
If you have a contract with your cable company, they cannot change terms on you until the contract expires. Similarly, *you* cannot disconnect service without penalty until expiration of that contract. OTOH, if you pay monthly for service, and can terminate anytime with minimal notice (in my experience, cable services can be terminated with as little as a few hours' notice, and rarely more than a few days), you DO NOT have a contract with them, and they, likewise, can change your service terms. You can then either accept the new terms or terminate service.
The way I see it, they would like to treat their customers like wireless carriers and are taking us slowly there.
Wireless carriers usually lock their clients into one- or two-year contracts. If the client wishes to terminate service before the expiration of the contract, they will pay a hefty penalty. OTOH, their rates are fixed for the term of the contract. It sounds like you would prefer that system, so I'm not sure why you'd be upset to see cable service move in that direction. But then... it doesn't sound like it is anyway.
Sure, I accept that.
Why don't we do something to stop this, rather than debating how it could work? Obama needs to step up on his word and shut this down before it spreads.
As far as I know, Obama has talked about investment in bringing broadband to places where it's currently unavailable... and not said anything about making sure that you, personally, can download 500GB a month at a low low flat rate.
If anyone remembers, Dial-up worked kinda like this where you paid for the time you're online. It took years to get to unlimited services. Why ruin it now?!
I remember AOL working like that, but most actual dial-up was a flat fee per month. If you had a dedicated phone line, you could stay dialed up pretty much full-time (and that's exactly what we did before we got our first cable internet account). Some ISPs would time you out for inactivity, but of course you could script your way around that.
Unlimited services are only an economically viable business model when there are some sort of natural limits on what people can use. "All you can eat" buffets can work because people can only eat so much at one time. They're pretty successful in mixed populations, but in certain areas (like near universities) they often have to create additional rules to remain profitable (like all you can eat within one hour).
Until relatively recently, there were much lower practical limits on what you could download. There was the speed of the line that could be provided to your house, the network card in your actual computer, and the expense of hard drive space. There has also been an explosion in the content available; the amount of video and audio content available (both legally and illegally) has exploded in the last couple of years. People can download more than they used to be able to, and there's more available that they want to download, too.
There's really no such thing as a viable flat-fee unlimited-access service. Either there's a practical limit on what individual customers can consume that protects your profit margin, or you need to have policy-based limits in place.
I'm fine with it as long as they reduce the capped service fee to something close to the price of dialup.
Why should they charge "something close" to the price of a service which is significantly lower-bandwidth?
Besides, dialup also requires a phone line... if you pay $12/month for the line, and $10/month for your dial-up service, you're getting close to what our family pays for our cable internet connection.
might this qualify as price gauging?
If they were selling water or batteries after an earthquake, yeah.
They have been offering the services for a long time now without caps. So they cant claim they can't maintain it.
What, business plans can't change? What if they're being charged more by their upstream providers? What if they had a contract with a provider which expired, and now they're having to renegotiate? And then there's always the possibility that they've realized their product was undervalued, and they're correcting that. I realize Jamba Juice writes a long letter of explanation and apology every time they raise their prices, but that's not necessarily required by all businesses.
But you're paying for water usage and electric usage for a finite resource, not the means of transmission. All Charter or any other ISP is providing me is a means to access a resource. I'm paying my water company for the water I use, not the pipes that it comes in on.
Your ISP has differential costs based on whether there is data flowing along their "pipes" or not, just as the water company has differential costs based on whether there is water flowing. While the nature of the metered item is different (water being a tangible resource, and data being somewhat abstract), the scaling of costs with consumption is very similar.
You are correct that their main effort is to reduce congestion as the poster clarified in response to my post. I do think, though, that having automatic tolls during congested time periods would be a more economical model to persue in getting the desired effect.
In what way would it be more economical? Tolls require either access control (toll booths with gates) or an automated transponder-based payment system (i.e. Fastpass). Installing access control everywhere would be a huge infrastructure burden, would increase congestion (due to lines), and would encourage people to cut through areas not designed for high volumes of traffic. So you're left with a transponder-based system... now, you put a transponder in every vehicle, and you charge people automatically for their toll road usage. If you have tolls on *all* the major roads, and you charge people based on the miles of road they've used, you've done almost exactly the same thing as what they're doing.
Gas taxes are a poor proxy for travel volume but are very good for road wear and tear since the weight of vehicles tend to correlate with gas consumption.
It does tend to correlate, but not all that well. There are hybrid SUVs, and very lightweight sports cars that are gas hogs. People who do most of their driving for short trips around their neighborhood will have lower gas mileage in the same type of vehicle as people who commute on relatively uncongested freeways, but are not having as great an impact on the infrastructure.
Also, there are enormous problems with the way gas taxes are implemented in the US. Currently they are a specific tax, meaning that the tax rate is set at a number of dollars per barrel (of oil... the tax is not actually on consumer gasoline; it's just passed on that way very explicitly by the oil companies). That level cannot be changed without an Act of Congress (and State taxes generally need the State Legislature's vote). The taxation levels often stay the same for a decade or two at a time, while the value of that set amount of money falls due to normal inflation. Meanwhile, average fuel economy improves, lowering the dollar amount of taxes collected per mile driven.
An ad valorem tax where the percentage automatically adjusts as average fuel economy increases would address these issues, but given the enormous difficulty states have had in switching their own gas taxes from specific to ad valorem, it doesn't seem likely that we'll see this anytime in the near future.
It's not perfect, but it's a straight way of spreading the costs of road maintenance to those who cause their proportion of road damage.
Another way to do that is to charge registration fees based on vehicle weight and number of tires, as they do in the UK. There are actually three-wheeled cars, because they have lower registration fees.
I just think that the most high-tech method of solving the problem isn't always the most efficient. That was my only point.
I would agree with that as a general statement, but in this case, by the time you adjust a lower-tech system to the point that it gives you a reasonable approximation, you're not that far removed from the higher-tech system that gives you a much better metering system.
I know they are somewhat conflicting numbers but they both seem to come from presumably reliable sources.
They do... but the fact that they are orders of magnitude apart shows that either (a) the sources are not as reliable as they might seem, or (b) it is extremely difficult to derive accurate statistics about this subject. How do we know, if the best numbers we have available are a range x to 1.167x, and a fixed value that is 3.33x, that the true number isn't actually x/2, or x/10, or x*10?
You're probably right that the risk of being struck by lightning is lower... but when you get down to tenths of a percent, it's hard to tell the difference between the relative risks, is I think the issue.
But the comparison may help us in another way: even if your chance of being struck by lightning was 1 in 560, I don't think there would be the level of massive media exposure for the risks of lightning, legislation instituted to protect people from lightning, etc. Kidnapping is a very emotional subject, and that emotion magnifies the true risk... while often masking other, more prevalent, risks to children.
It works beautifully where they've implemented it. The 91 Express Lanes in Orange County, CA have a toll system that reflects the peak usage; tolls are highest when usage is highest, and lowest when it's lowest. Between this and live camera surveillance so that obstructions can be cleared immediately, these two lanes carry 50% of the traffic in each direction... even though there are FOUR free lanes alongside. IOW, half the lane-miles carry the same amount of traffic, because dynamic tolls and improved hazard clearance keep traffic free-flowing 95% of the time.
Or, of course, they can simply tax the gasoline which essentially does the same thing, or maybe they already do that :).
Gasoline taxes are a fairly poor proxy for travel volume. First of all, there's a huge range of fuel efficiency, and it doesn't correspond perfectly with other impacts of car use; a Prius on the road a rush hour has a very similar effect on total congestion as an Explorer.
Furthermore, average fuel efficiency improves over time, so to keep taxes per mile at a more or less constant rate, you have to continually raise the gas tax.
Finally, as the poster mentioned, they're also disincentivizing peak-period Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), which is totally impossible with aggregate readings.
Nor should you get your statistics from websites that, on the very same page, list conflicting data:
Of the 800,000 children reported missing annually, approximately 69,000 are abducted:
Family members account for the majority of these reported cases (82 percent)
Non-family abductions account for 12,000 of these reported cases (18 percent)
Farther down on the same page:
Each year 3,600 to 4,200 children are abducted by someone outside the family; 1/2 of them are age 12 or older; 2/3 are female; at least 19% of these abductors are not strangers to their victims-Finklehor, p. 10. *The chance of a minor being kidnapped by a stranger is 1 in 560, by a family member 1 in 180. - Discover Magazine as reported by Gannett News Service 5/28/96.
Now, if you take that 12,000 number, multiply it by 18 (years of childhood), and then take that result (216,000) and determine the percentage that represents of the child population in the US (82,457,018... I grabbed a number off the Census website that's for the 2007 American Community survey, but I had to total up percentages of population by age group and then take that percentage of the total population), you get about a .26% chance of being kidnapped by a stranger... but 1 in 560 is more like .17%. And the ratio of those two percentages don't match the annual statistics, where one lists a number that's 3-4 times as high as the other. Notice that the much higher number is listed prominently at the top of the page, without a footnote as to the conflicting measures from other sources.
Couldn't you just wrap your passport in tinfoil, so that the RFID chip only worked when it was open? Then it would still work for valid uses and would be undetectable the rest of the time.
Maybe, not sure how well that would actually shield it.
You could just follow the instructions for building your own sniffer/cloner, and test it yourself....
Passports aren't even the biggest concern here though, it's more the move to put RFID into all manner if inappropriate items like credit cards, phones (which are then tied to credit cards), clothing (yes really, and not just for inventory tracking), and probably lots of other things we haven't thought of yet. It's one thing for them to clone your passport, it's another entirely for them to clone your credit card.
But what if RFID technology was used to ensure that your credit card would stop working if it was outside of your wallet for too long, for example? Or too far away from your driver's license?
I think that, rather than creating a scary woo-woo they're going to get me scenario, ubiquitous RFID will actually dilute the effectiveness of privacy invasions, cloning, etc. I don't gather that these things broadcast a whole lot of data; if everything in your wallet has a tag, how does the cloner figure out what he's looking at and what to do with it? In a crowded place, how does he match people with tags?
Besides... if everything everyone carries has an RFID tag, it will only take a few cloning/counterfeiting debacles before every wallet has built-in masking. As long as its only used for a few specialized circumstances, ThinkGeek will remain the only supplier of such things (and I want one in a more ladylike format!)
If the banks and credit card companies are incorporated in the US, using US dollars, they are. Which covers most transactions. You can evade it if you use a Swiss bank or send gold coins to a mailbox, of course.
Ok, so if my bank does something illegal, someone can do something about it... but if *I* authorize a transaction via their usual means, and the person on the other end of the transaction is breaking US laws but is outside the US, what happens then?
Anyway, the idea is not to stop trade where the customer knows what's up and what they're getting, but scammers.
I thought the idea was to stop SPAM. Spam is often selling "legitimate" items, but through illegitimate means. (I use quotes because the items frequently don't really do what they appear to claim, but they have the proper disclaimers and it would be difficult to sue them for straight-up fraud.)
Someone who buys a pill that's supposed to enlarge their member knows it probably won't work, but they're willing to try it. The problem is that, for that ONE person who buys it, hundreds of thousands of people have to delete that same email. That's the problem they're trying to address.