Yeah, let's wait for a perfect, 100% pure solution before replacing the ugly, dirty, nasty coal energy plants we have right now.
Well, it's better than replacing the ugly, dirty, nasty coal energy plants we have right now with expensive, under-developed, and potentially dangerous alternatives.
At least in this country, the standards of evidence and what is permissible and what isn't is based on previous court rulings. These are called precidents. Secondly, precidents set by higher courts affect all courts beneath it, however precidents can (and are) reinterpreted to fit local circumstance. What does this have to do with wikipedia? Nothing -- yet.
Here's the problem: The life of the law isn't knowledge (the present), it's experience (the past). The law can only ever look backwards. Which means that it is always at least one step behind the state of the art. It also depends on every judgment made remaining correct in perpetuity; If copying a music file is wrong now, then unless the law changes, it will always be wrong, even if the methods, economy, societal attitudes, etc., change -- the law will continue to get it's pound of flesh from hapless victims because the law can only look backwards. Because all of these flaws are systemic and cannot be amended, the system is highly dependent on the integrity of the decision-making process. And like all systems, unless standards are rigorously enforced, the margins will start to decay -- whether it's a safety margin, error margin, or civil rights margin, it will decay.
Introducing a source of information which is inherently unreliable into a process that absolutely depends on the integrity of information put into it is not just merely incompetent -- it's grossly negligent.
I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner.
Because people are inherently honest. Dishonesty is an abnormality. Even in this case, it took $5,000 in immediate real life needs for this person to cause harm in a video game to a fictional economy, and the only punishment is that a few ones and zeroes got flipped around so they didn't like a few other ones and zeroes anymore. It's this very fact that pisses game theorists off to no end -- agents in the system continue to act completely irrationally (ie, to trust) when the rules clearly indicate every advantage for the "cheater" and next to no consequences.
Trust is inherently illogical and irrational and yet it works. Society is built on networks of trust -- most of our institutions and infrastructure that allow life to go on the way it does right now depends on the vast majority of people playing by the rules. Rules which, for the most part, are arbitrary. There are very few rules that are "naturally derived" -- For example, not murdering people is a naturally derived rule because we can't exactly make going extinct legal. O.o Traffic laws are, for the most part, arbitrary -- red means stop, green means go, drive on the left (or right), etc. But we'd never be able to use the shared public resource (the highway) without them.
Human beings are social creatures. In order to survive, we have to trust one another. Every social organizational structure is derived from this basic concept -- it simply varies in how we trust, to what degree, and to whom.
Cyclists are already huge douches (atleast here in the twin cities). They ride 8 feet out from the curb, blocking the lane to motorists, and yet bitch when periodically one of them becomes a speed bump. We have dedicated lanes for bicyclists downtown -- and everywhere else there are sidewalks. Yes, it's a little more work. Yes, you'll have to use your brakes and be more alert to pedestrians -- but a bike/pedestrian accident usually results in profanity. A bike/motor vehicle accident almost always ends in tears. Not only that, but it's not like they're helping their cause -- mounting strobe lights as a "safety feature"? Events like "Critical Mass" that clog streets and result in clashes with the police?
I'm sorry, but nobody's going to be fooled by your latest bike accessory -- they're still going to side-swipe you in the middle of the night because you're in the middle of the lane and it's hard to have compassion for someone doing 15 in a 45, especially when nobody's around to protest reducing them to a twisted mass of aluminum and hamburger. If you have a problem with this, ride on the shoulder or near the curb, which is what every safety instructor has told you, along with wearing a helmet and reflective clothing. But you don't do either because you want to feel liberated when a twig jams your front wheel and you face plant, or get run over by a car because wearing all black at night makes you feel like a bad-ass. Don't laugh -- it's more common than you think. Every motorist in the Twin Cities that has more than about 20,000 miles under their belt has witnessed one of these kamikazi nut jobs.
Americans will tolerate just about anything so long as it doesn't obstruct the flow of traffic. Many bicyclists are the anti-thesis of this statement. You may now mod me down, because it's easier to write a pleasant fiction that sounds socially sophisticated and intellectual than to write down a blunt truth.
There is no average efficiency, because unfortunately the bastard that designed this version of Earth didn't make solar radiation distribution gaussian. You could file a complaint with Him, but I understand there's quite a backlog. In the meantime, I'd suggest moving to a desert near the equator if you want to eek out those few extra watts. Whatever you do, don't move to Minnesota -- For some reason, snow and solar panels get along like a big house on fire.
Solar power is economical for large-scale deployments. That's why Worldwide Energy and Manufacturing has a $52 million backlog.
For an industry that in 2007 had an operating revenue of $253 billion in this country? They're going to need a few more zeros in their backlog. It was only this year that the solar cell industry celebrated break the $1/watt barrier. Meanwhile, I'm getting power piped into my home at a few cents a kilowatt from a nuke plant ten minutes drive from here. And the power plant will last a lot longer than solar cells stapled to some roof will.
They're quite environmentally sound. They're made of arsenic, and many caustic chemicals being used to refine and produce them. In short -- not suitable for mass alternative energy (like just about every other thing called "green").
Reality: Solar power's only economical use right now is for remote sensors and in locations where the power grid cannot reasonably be extended and delivering fuel is impractical.
Why don't they ask the group who has been using multiband equipment for several decades. Amateur Radio operators.
Mostly because nobody under the age of 35 even knows what it is, let alone has an interest in it. It's a dying hobby, partly because of expense, mostly because we've let two entire generations slip past the net and failed to educate them on the importance of being trained and ready for an emergency, which is the major public service amateur radio offers.
If I handed the average 20-something a mobile amateur radio (like you can still buy at Radioshack), think they'd be able to find a voice on the other end before the battery died? There's something to be said for that -- if it doesn't have a USB port or a LCD screen, it's probably junk... And they'd be right, until a flood wipes out the cell towers, internet, electricity, and the bridges. Then I bet knowing how to use a radio would be pretty cool, huh.
The Department of Homeland Security only gives the kiss of death to public works projects. Here's what's going to happen; A bunch of committees will be called, and they're going to make a whole bunch of suggestions about what it "should" do. Each organization will want to have at least one feature included, a vote, etc. Tens (possibly hundreds) of millions will be lost doing this. It'll be filed under "R&D costs". At least a third of those suggestions will be crap or impossible/unfeasible to implement. It'll be recycled a few times on the General Schedule before some hapless corporation wins the contract. Then all hell breaks loose as delays in the project force reductions in scope, and the process of defining "core features" begins. By this point, everyone will be pointing fingers, and it'll be half-implemented and broken in many places. The project's surviving assets will be quietly transferred after a GAO inquiry regarding cost overruns and lack of deliverables -- just ahead of a congressional committee being called on the matter. Two years later, someone gets the idea that the US should have a multi-band radio project...
I only say this, because they've tried it with different scopes over and over and over and over again. Their technology department is understaffed due to high turnover and leadership problems.
Fundamentally, these things never leave the pilot phase, or if they do, they face deployment problems because the requirements are so obtuse and ambitious that existing technology can't adapt. Even if it can, bureaucratic problems usually end a project before it sees wide-scale deployment due to reluctance to adopt new technology and failures in leadership -- namely, not communicating with people in the field before trying to put something there.
For those who don't have a degree in oh-shit-that's-a-big-number, can someone give a comparative analysis of what "2^119" complexity means? I mean what else is "2^119" hard to solve? And yes, the math nerds are undoubtedly either dying of laughter or yelling at the screen for my abuse of powers of two... I don't care.
They're hemming and hawing about the costs? It's about $6 per tag today. Economy of scale could drive that a lot lower. And the tags can be removed and recycled into a new animal (betcha didn't know that!) -- after being properly sterilized, of course. They last about a 100+ years. The reader itself, as a handheld model runs anywhere from $150 to $1000 depending on range and other options. It's not necessary for it to connect to the internet or anything like that -- and the amount of data we're talking about could be handled via a 9600 baud modem! It's just a serial number for crissakes. Yes, farmers have teh intarwebs too. -_-
Each beef cow is worth about $800. Assuming 10% of the chips need to be replaced per... that's 60 cents. For something worth $800. The overhead here really is negligible, especially for a CAFO. That's an industrial feed lot, for those of you who don't know -- they're fed corn and kept in stalls, not grass-fed and left in fields. And did I mention it's all tax-deductible? Most everything on a farm is. Well, except you, that is. hehe.
So, in short... It's bull. Literally and figuratively.//Disclaimers: I have five dots in Lore:Rural. I am also a computer geek.
Hey dammit, we had the idea of reducing everyone to a number long before you did, and we're the only ones that should have to suffer with that kind of stupidity. You can steal our jobs, but don't steal our retarded government ideas -- as a patriot, I simply must draw the line there!
You bought it before you went to the save point. Now you'll have to lose several days of your life to restore from an earlier copy. You've played these games enough -- you should know better than to buy something new from the store where the stats aren't on the screen before saving. Jeez, hasn't gaming taught you anything???
If by stable, you mean strangled, then he's right. ICANN's only functional purpose is to maintain the status quo. It's stated purpose is to hand out IP addresses, protocol number assignment, and manage the DNS. And towards that end, it's been a complete cock-up, and has only survived because it's burrowed its way into the infrastructure like a parasite and can't be easily removed now. Oh, ICANN, how you've screwed up... let us count the ways;
They've massively extended the number of TLDs to the point that most people don't even know what they all are, and plan on making the number go from "barely comprehensible" to "infinite" soon. They've thrown the RFCs right out the window when it comes to domain naming convention, and have turned domain name management into a mangled corporate turf war that costs us billions of dollars in litigation globally every year, and despite the fact that it has repeatedly pledged to serve the international community, it remains based in, and under the complete control of, the United States. And the changing of the guards -- they're replacing the existing president, Paul Twomey, a man who was very international and worked with goverments all over the world, and was exceptionally well-educated and cultured (for a CEO) with Rod Beckstrom, who's lifetime achievements have been... creating a wiki, selling off a risk management company, and authoring a book on some whack management style about starfish, spiders, and Al Queta. His education got as far as... you guessed it.. he's an MBA. So they're replacing a cultured world-wise man with some delusional middle-management type who doesn't know much about international anything.
This institution is crap on a stick, and it's set to be salted to perfection with the tears of billions of consumers who will be forced to watch the internet steam along, captained by a man who been hand-picked by the US Government to be a total patsy. We are sooo f--ked.
The FBI is institutionally one of the least efficient and bureaucratic law enforcement agencies in the country. They're pumping billions into "modernization" efforts, but they still file their cases largely in paper format, use fax machines instead of e-mail, and "IT" is what they say happens in the men's room after 5pm.
They have every reason to be secretive--Not because they're malicious, but because they're just so damned bad at what they do it'd be embarrassing to the country to realize how much money we put towards largely futile efforts. In the 60s, the FBI was busy snapping pictures of protesters... and at the same time devoting forensic resources to finding out who (or rather, what) crapped on J. Edgar Hoover's front porch. You might have heard of him--he had a real temper, hated communists, and had a garter belt and fishnet fetish.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Capitalism doesn't recognize anything that cannot be monetized. And capitalism is also averse to anything being public -- the argument being the tragedy of the commons, which is this: For any shared responsibility, the more people sharing that responsibility, the less responsible each person will be, until everyone is effectively irresponsible, thus the public utility becomes useless/abused/less valuable.
Capitalism is a fine concept for tangible items. But it's not very good at all for intangibles. Nonetheless, as we moved from a production-based economy to a service-based one, these intangibles had to be protected by businesses somehow, so as to ensure their continued relevance and profitability. The hasty modifications to trade secret, copyright, and patent law, was a poor attempt to bridge this gap, and there was little or no public input. Simply put, society didn't have the time or attention devoted to addressing the changing landscape, because most of us at that time either weren't educated about it, or struggling to put food on the table and change careers to adapt to the changing economy. We were so focused on the immediate result that we all but ignored future consequences.
Using bait terms won't solve the problem. "Copyfraud" sounds great, but it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of other terms -- "Net neutrality" comes to mind -- to the uninformed, it sounds good but isn't very descriptive. "Copy fraud" could mean "copying as a means of fraud" -- which is exactly what many businesses are calling the free sharing of digitized information.
We have three options here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy products that have an effective cost of zero to own. Put another way - stop buying anything in a purely digital format. Instead, only buy periphery products -- such as warranties, service level agreements, support, or mp3 players, televisions, etc. This will eventually starve out business models that depend on selling products that should be free, and allow business models that support this paradigm shift to free information to flourish.
2. Stay in the system. Buy out public product and design licensing that ensures they remain public, and then put those rights in a shell corporate. GNU comes to mind, with their GPL licensing, and the many derivatives thereof. By gaming the system in this fashion, GNU is ensuring that copyright enforcement actions will always be in their favor. Over a long enough time frame, they will win the "war", because companies that cannot provide alternatives to public-domain product will go out of business. Ironically, it's one of the best arguments for innovation out there. The only catch is--Placing something in the public domain or having it remain there still has a monentary cost, however low. So far, the community hasn't addressed this systemically.
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
So if there's only three distinct ethnic groups, who's the minority now? It's very important for political correctness. Wait... Minorities are an invention of mass-delusions by the public...
Apple isn't a technology company. I know saying that's going to piss off a lot of people, but it's true. They don't sell technology -- they sell experiences, status, and other social intangibles. When you see a commercial of Miller Lite, they aren't selling beer. They are selling sex appeal, social status, and "having a good time".
Please try to remember that when discussing the faux-secrecy surrounding Apple. It's no secret what they do -- they sell computer hardware that in many (if not most) comparisons with competing products has fewer features, and is more expensive. But it's very pretty. And shiny. Oh, and that whole ease of use thing.
Similarly, alcohol does a lot of that stuff, yet more people use it and its legal.
That's not an argument for legalization, or at least, it's a very poor one. A similar logic would be to argue that smoking cigarettes is legal, that it eventually kills the user, and therefore murdering smokers should be legal. killing them would save hundreds of thousands in medical costs, and have a clear social benefit.
Logic like this is very dangerous. Stick to the original question: What is the monentary benefit from legalization of marijuana (private sector profits, revenue from taxation, cost benefits from ending law enforcement) versus the monentary cost -- health care, loss of productivity, and secondary effects (crime, addiction, etc).
The financial argument here is anything but clear cut; I assure you it won't be resolved in a simple slashdot post daring anyone to come up with an argument against it. There are some very, very good arguments against it, but they're far too complex for a public forum like this to appreciate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, let's wait for a perfect, 100% pure solution before replacing the ugly, dirty, nasty coal energy plants we have right now.
Well, it's better than replacing the ugly, dirty, nasty coal energy plants we have right now with expensive, under-developed, and potentially dangerous alternatives.
At least in this country, the standards of evidence and what is permissible and what isn't is based on previous court rulings. These are called precidents. Secondly, precidents set by higher courts affect all courts beneath it, however precidents can (and are) reinterpreted to fit local circumstance. What does this have to do with wikipedia? Nothing -- yet.
Here's the problem: The life of the law isn't knowledge (the present), it's experience (the past). The law can only ever look backwards. Which means that it is always at least one step behind the state of the art. It also depends on every judgment made remaining correct in perpetuity; If copying a music file is wrong now, then unless the law changes, it will always be wrong, even if the methods, economy, societal attitudes, etc., change -- the law will continue to get it's pound of flesh from hapless victims because the law can only look backwards. Because all of these flaws are systemic and cannot be amended, the system is highly dependent on the integrity of the decision-making process. And like all systems, unless standards are rigorously enforced, the margins will start to decay -- whether it's a safety margin, error margin, or civil rights margin, it will decay.
Introducing a source of information which is inherently unreliable into a process that absolutely depends on the integrity of information put into it is not just merely incompetent -- it's grossly negligent.
I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner.
Because people are inherently honest. Dishonesty is an abnormality. Even in this case, it took $5,000 in immediate real life needs for this person to cause harm in a video game to a fictional economy, and the only punishment is that a few ones and zeroes got flipped around so they didn't like a few other ones and zeroes anymore. It's this very fact that pisses game theorists off to no end -- agents in the system continue to act completely irrationally (ie, to trust) when the rules clearly indicate every advantage for the "cheater" and next to no consequences.
Trust is inherently illogical and irrational and yet it works. Society is built on networks of trust -- most of our institutions and infrastructure that allow life to go on the way it does right now depends on the vast majority of people playing by the rules. Rules which, for the most part, are arbitrary. There are very few rules that are "naturally derived" -- For example, not murdering people is a naturally derived rule because we can't exactly make going extinct legal. O.o Traffic laws are, for the most part, arbitrary -- red means stop, green means go, drive on the left (or right), etc. But we'd never be able to use the shared public resource (the highway) without them.
Human beings are social creatures. In order to survive, we have to trust one another. Every social organizational structure is derived from this basic concept -- it simply varies in how we trust, to what degree, and to whom.
Was it given to an eight year old boy? Those tender little blossoms can destroy anything.
Cyclists are already huge douches (atleast here in the twin cities). They ride 8 feet out from the curb, blocking the lane to motorists, and yet bitch when periodically one of them becomes a speed bump. We have dedicated lanes for bicyclists downtown -- and everywhere else there are sidewalks. Yes, it's a little more work. Yes, you'll have to use your brakes and be more alert to pedestrians -- but a bike/pedestrian accident usually results in profanity. A bike/motor vehicle accident almost always ends in tears. Not only that, but it's not like they're helping their cause -- mounting strobe lights as a "safety feature"? Events like "Critical Mass" that clog streets and result in clashes with the police?
I'm sorry, but nobody's going to be fooled by your latest bike accessory -- they're still going to side-swipe you in the middle of the night because you're in the middle of the lane and it's hard to have compassion for someone doing 15 in a 45, especially when nobody's around to protest reducing them to a twisted mass of aluminum and hamburger. If you have a problem with this, ride on the shoulder or near the curb, which is what every safety instructor has told you, along with wearing a helmet and reflective clothing. But you don't do either because you want to feel liberated when a twig jams your front wheel and you face plant, or get run over by a car because wearing all black at night makes you feel like a bad-ass. Don't laugh -- it's more common than you think. Every motorist in the Twin Cities that has more than about 20,000 miles under their belt has witnessed one of these kamikazi nut jobs.
Americans will tolerate just about anything so long as it doesn't obstruct the flow of traffic. Many bicyclists are the anti-thesis of this statement. You may now mod me down, because it's easier to write a pleasant fiction that sounds socially sophisticated and intellectual than to write down a blunt truth.
But what if you injure yourself? How would you call for help if you have wrecked the phone?
Use the banana phone. But beware, it carries a terrible curse...
There is no average efficiency, because unfortunately the bastard that designed this version of Earth didn't make solar radiation distribution gaussian. You could file a complaint with Him, but I understand there's quite a backlog. In the meantime, I'd suggest moving to a desert near the equator if you want to eek out those few extra watts. Whatever you do, don't move to Minnesota -- For some reason, snow and solar panels get along like a big house on fire.
Solar power is economical for large-scale deployments. That's why Worldwide Energy and Manufacturing has a $52 million backlog.
For an industry that in 2007 had an operating revenue of $253 billion in this country? They're going to need a few more zeros in their backlog. It was only this year that the solar cell industry celebrated break the $1/watt barrier. Meanwhile, I'm getting power piped into my home at a few cents a kilowatt from a nuke plant ten minutes drive from here. And the power plant will last a lot longer than solar cells stapled to some roof will.
Umm, TONS of electronics use As, that doesn't make them dangerous. When its covalently bonded to things like Ga its pretty safe.
The bonds do eventually break down...
They're quite environmentally sound. They're made of arsenic, and many caustic chemicals being used to refine and produce them. In short -- not suitable for mass alternative energy (like just about every other thing called "green").
Reality: Solar power's only economical use right now is for remote sensors and in locations where the power grid cannot reasonably be extended and delivering fuel is impractical.
Why don't they ask the group who has been using multiband equipment for several decades. Amateur Radio operators.
Mostly because nobody under the age of 35 even knows what it is, let alone has an interest in it. It's a dying hobby, partly because of expense, mostly because we've let two entire generations slip past the net and failed to educate them on the importance of being trained and ready for an emergency, which is the major public service amateur radio offers.
If I handed the average 20-something a mobile amateur radio (like you can still buy at Radioshack), think they'd be able to find a voice on the other end before the battery died? There's something to be said for that -- if it doesn't have a USB port or a LCD screen, it's probably junk... And they'd be right, until a flood wipes out the cell towers, internet, electricity, and the bridges. Then I bet knowing how to use a radio would be pretty cool, huh.
The Department of Homeland Security only gives the kiss of death to public works projects. Here's what's going to happen; A bunch of committees will be called, and they're going to make a whole bunch of suggestions about what it "should" do. Each organization will want to have at least one feature included, a vote, etc. Tens (possibly hundreds) of millions will be lost doing this. It'll be filed under "R&D costs". At least a third of those suggestions will be crap or impossible/unfeasible to implement. It'll be recycled a few times on the General Schedule before some hapless corporation wins the contract. Then all hell breaks loose as delays in the project force reductions in scope, and the process of defining "core features" begins. By this point, everyone will be pointing fingers, and it'll be half-implemented and broken in many places. The project's surviving assets will be quietly transferred after a GAO inquiry regarding cost overruns and lack of deliverables -- just ahead of a congressional committee being called on the matter. Two years later, someone gets the idea that the US should have a multi-band radio project...
I only say this, because they've tried it with different scopes over and over and over and over again. Their technology department is understaffed due to high turnover and leadership problems.
Fundamentally, these things never leave the pilot phase, or if they do, they face deployment problems because the requirements are so obtuse and ambitious that existing technology can't adapt. Even if it can, bureaucratic problems usually end a project before it sees wide-scale deployment due to reluctance to adopt new technology and failures in leadership -- namely, not communicating with people in the field before trying to put something there.
For those who don't have a degree in oh-shit-that's-a-big-number, can someone give a comparative analysis of what "2^119" complexity means? I mean what else is "2^119" hard to solve? And yes, the math nerds are undoubtedly either dying of laughter or yelling at the screen for my abuse of powers of two... I don't care.
Dude. You don't exist, remember? Stop posting.
Summary, n.: a comprehensive and usually brief abstract, recapitulation, or compendium of previously stated facts or statements.
That is exactly what this slashdot post isn't.
They're hemming and hawing about the costs? It's about $6 per tag today. Economy of scale could drive that a lot lower. And the tags can be removed and recycled into a new animal (betcha didn't know that!) -- after being properly sterilized, of course. They last about a 100+ years. The reader itself, as a handheld model runs anywhere from $150 to $1000 depending on range and other options. It's not necessary for it to connect to the internet or anything like that -- and the amount of data we're talking about could be handled via a 9600 baud modem! It's just a serial number for crissakes. Yes, farmers have teh intarwebs too. -_-
Each beef cow is worth about $800. Assuming 10% of the chips need to be replaced per... that's 60 cents. For something worth $800. The overhead here really is negligible, especially for a CAFO. That's an industrial feed lot, for those of you who don't know -- they're fed corn and kept in stalls, not grass-fed and left in fields. And did I mention it's all tax-deductible? Most everything on a farm is. Well, except you, that is. hehe.
So, in short... It's bull. Literally and figuratively. //Disclaimers: I have five dots in Lore:Rural. I am also a computer geek.
Hey dammit, we had the idea of reducing everyone to a number long before you did, and we're the only ones that should have to suffer with that kind of stupidity. You can steal our jobs, but don't steal our retarded government ideas -- as a patriot, I simply must draw the line there!
You bought it before you went to the save point. Now you'll have to lose several days of your life to restore from an earlier copy. You've played these games enough -- you should know better than to buy something new from the store where the stats aren't on the screen before saving. Jeez, hasn't gaming taught you anything???
If by stable, you mean strangled, then he's right. ICANN's only functional purpose is to maintain the status quo. It's stated purpose is to hand out IP addresses, protocol number assignment, and manage the DNS. And towards that end, it's been a complete cock-up, and has only survived because it's burrowed its way into the infrastructure like a parasite and can't be easily removed now. Oh, ICANN, how you've screwed up... let us count the ways;
They've massively extended the number of TLDs to the point that most people don't even know what they all are, and plan on making the number go from "barely comprehensible" to "infinite" soon. They've thrown the RFCs right out the window when it comes to domain naming convention, and have turned domain name management into a mangled corporate turf war that costs us billions of dollars in litigation globally every year, and despite the fact that it has repeatedly pledged to serve the international community, it remains based in, and under the complete control of, the United States. And the changing of the guards -- they're replacing the existing president, Paul Twomey, a man who was very international and worked with goverments all over the world, and was exceptionally well-educated and cultured (for a CEO) with Rod Beckstrom, who's lifetime achievements have been... creating a wiki, selling off a risk management company, and authoring a book on some whack management style about starfish, spiders, and Al Queta. His education got as far as... you guessed it.. he's an MBA. So they're replacing a cultured world-wise man with some delusional middle-management type who doesn't know much about international anything.
This institution is crap on a stick, and it's set to be salted to perfection with the tears of billions of consumers who will be forced to watch the internet steam along, captained by a man who been hand-picked by the US Government to be a total patsy. We are sooo f--ked.
No doubt you thought that was a cute quote and copy-pasted it.
Nope. Original.
Please provide some proof that Hoover was a cross-dresser other than Anthony Summers' discredited book.
Citation.
The FBI is institutionally one of the least efficient and bureaucratic law enforcement agencies in the country. They're pumping billions into "modernization" efforts, but they still file their cases largely in paper format, use fax machines instead of e-mail, and "IT" is what they say happens in the men's room after 5pm.
They have every reason to be secretive--Not because they're malicious, but because they're just so damned bad at what they do it'd be embarrassing to the country to realize how much money we put towards largely futile efforts. In the 60s, the FBI was busy snapping pictures of protesters... and at the same time devoting forensic resources to finding out who (or rather, what) crapped on J. Edgar Hoover's front porch. You might have heard of him--he had a real temper, hated communists, and had a garter belt and fishnet fetish.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Capitalism doesn't recognize anything that cannot be monetized. And capitalism is also averse to anything being public -- the argument being the tragedy of the commons, which is this: For any shared responsibility, the more people sharing that responsibility, the less responsible each person will be, until everyone is effectively irresponsible, thus the public utility becomes useless/abused/less valuable.
Capitalism is a fine concept for tangible items. But it's not very good at all for intangibles. Nonetheless, as we moved from a production-based economy to a service-based one, these intangibles had to be protected by businesses somehow, so as to ensure their continued relevance and profitability. The hasty modifications to trade secret, copyright, and patent law, was a poor attempt to bridge this gap, and there was little or no public input. Simply put, society didn't have the time or attention devoted to addressing the changing landscape, because most of us at that time either weren't educated about it, or struggling to put food on the table and change careers to adapt to the changing economy. We were so focused on the immediate result that we all but ignored future consequences.
Using bait terms won't solve the problem. "Copyfraud" sounds great, but it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of other terms -- "Net neutrality" comes to mind -- to the uninformed, it sounds good but isn't very descriptive. "Copy fraud" could mean "copying as a means of fraud" -- which is exactly what many businesses are calling the free sharing of digitized information.
We have three options here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy products that have an effective cost of zero to own. Put another way - stop buying anything in a purely digital format. Instead, only buy periphery products -- such as warranties, service level agreements, support, or mp3 players, televisions, etc. This will eventually starve out business models that depend on selling products that should be free, and allow business models that support this paradigm shift to free information to flourish.
2. Stay in the system. Buy out public product and design licensing that ensures they remain public, and then put those rights in a shell corporate. GNU comes to mind, with their GPL licensing, and the many derivatives thereof. By gaming the system in this fashion, GNU is ensuring that copyright enforcement actions will always be in their favor. Over a long enough time frame, they will win the "war", because companies that cannot provide alternatives to public-domain product will go out of business. Ironically, it's one of the best arguments for innovation out there. The only catch is--Placing something in the public domain or having it remain there still has a monentary cost, however low. So far, the community hasn't addressed this systemically.
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
So if there's only three distinct ethnic groups, who's the minority now? It's very important for political correctness. Wait... Minorities are an invention of mass-delusions by the public...
Apple isn't a technology company. I know saying that's going to piss off a lot of people, but it's true. They don't sell technology -- they sell experiences, status, and other social intangibles. When you see a commercial of Miller Lite, they aren't selling beer. They are selling sex appeal, social status, and "having a good time".
Please try to remember that when discussing the faux-secrecy surrounding Apple. It's no secret what they do -- they sell computer hardware that in many (if not most) comparisons with competing products has fewer features, and is more expensive. But it's very pretty. And shiny. Oh, and that whole ease of use thing.
Similarly, alcohol does a lot of that stuff, yet more people use it and its legal.
That's not an argument for legalization, or at least, it's a very poor one. A similar logic would be to argue that smoking cigarettes is legal, that it eventually kills the user, and therefore murdering smokers should be legal. killing them would save hundreds of thousands in medical costs, and have a clear social benefit.
Logic like this is very dangerous. Stick to the original question: What is the monentary benefit from legalization of marijuana (private sector profits, revenue from taxation, cost benefits from ending law enforcement) versus the monentary cost -- health care, loss of productivity, and secondary effects (crime, addiction, etc).
The financial argument here is anything but clear cut; I assure you it won't be resolved in a simple slashdot post daring anyone to come up with an argument against it. There are some very, very good arguments against it, but they're far too complex for a public forum like this to appreciate.