Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
I think from a competitive free market versus regulation perspective the question is whether or not there was some resource constraint on bandwidth that meant that the government had a good reason to want to make sure that only Internet Service could be provided over the network rather than a closed network. If we are talking about EM spectrum, then it has been long established that the government has an interest in specifying to some degree of detail the types of services that license holders may provide. It makes sense to me that India would say that only full Internet access could be provided over cellular networks as spectrum is a limited resource and to allow walled off services is to squander a public resource.
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
That eventually became the case, but originally AOL didn't provide any Internet service and was a completely closed network. Only eventually did they allow things like "email" that could actually be sent outside of AOL's network and then eventually an AOL browser. Only much later did it essentially become an ISP with a homepage/splash screen that came up when you used the client to login.
I agree you shouldn't call it "Internet Service" if it is a closed network or even if you are throttling various competing services. That should be a matter of stopping fraudulent advertising rather than preventing companies from offering BBN or old school AOL style service.
You would have thought that our government would have learned when they attempted to ban PGP, decades ago.
For those of you who don't remember, the software got classified as a munition, people who sold it could be arrested as arms trafficers. Downloads instantly moved from US servers to those in Finland (and elsewhere) and the end result was a big spectacular nothing.
Calmer heads prevailed, in the long run.
The technology is out there, the knowledge of how to do encryption is impossible to stuff back into the bottle.
Yes, I remember the bad old days when a Netscape web browser was considered as a weapon of war and it was illegal to export it outside the US and there was a check box on the EULA saying you agree that you wouldn't export it.
If ITAR is again applied to encryption then the US will stop being able to sell pretty much any technology overseas and most people in the US who aren't complete morons will just import hardware and software from free countries where encryption is allowed.
The researchers focused on two outcomes of the DAWBA: risk for depression, and risk for “conduct disorder,” which is a term describing antisocial behaviors in children.
Finding no significant correlation between video gaming and those outcomes does not really prove the broad conclusion of the headline that "Video Gamers From the '90s Have Turned Out Mostly OK".
Right. And I don't think the supposition has ever been that video games increase the prevalence or incidence of any particular disorders in children, but rather what negative (or positive?) effects certain types of video games and length of time playing would have on children already prone to behavioral or psychological issues. Whether gaming (amount of time spent, and types of games played) makes things better or worse for those kids both in the short term and longer run... But good luck finding a control group. Really you are going to have to just look at estimated time spent gaming along with preferred games to make any meaningful comparison.
There's a reason people dismiss claims of IRL "harm" the from Tipper Gores or Jack Thompsons or Anita Sarkeesians of the world. The burden of proof is always squarely on them, they almost always fail to meet it, and years later we (as often as not) get scientific evidence showing the opposite.
Population studies usually drown out subtle influences and factors. I think you have to look at individuals that do have issues and then see how the availability of games, drugs, booze, television, social interactions all come together to make their problems worse or better.
had it replaced with a licensing agreement which the company can change at will.
Courts should throw out licensing agreements unless for every change the person can pass a quiz covering the major points of the license agreement. And then only those subject areas tested should be honored by the courts.
The issue isn't the money. $5 Billion is a pittance in Federal terms. The issue is the meddling. The potential for excessive mandates. Autonomous cars should be on the roads as soon as they can demonstrate they have an equivalent or better ability to drive than human drivers on existing roads.
It is that simple. And that is the type of simple uniform state and federal laws that we should be working towards. A car company should be able to certify that their autonomous system is safe and effective on existing roads and then that vehicle should be able to drive.
No additional infrastructure. That infrastructure approach has failed again and again since the 1950s. What we need is just roads and cars. Sure better roads would be great and benefit everyone and make it easier for autonomous cars to drive safely. Autonomous cars can't be relying on guide wires or smart signs or whatever. That is an old approach that just doesn't work because it puts an elaborate and expensive infrastructure before the utility. That infrastructure first approach is a recipe for having a couple roads where you can have autonomous cars and then decades of wasted time shaking rich people down to fund more infrastructure while the rest of us keep getting killed.
Having a dumb road system and vehicles that become smarter as technology improves is precisely the way we need to move forward to get this technology adopted as fast as possible and save lives.
Without government involvement and support, maintaining and upgrading the highways & byways to accommodate driver-less vehicles,the whole enterprise is an exercise in futility. Smart highways are the next logical step.
Like it or not, government giveaways of your tax dollars will likely christen even the projects you support.
That is completely the wrong approach to autonomous driverless vehicles. These vehicles will have to be able to use existing infrastructure. Smart highways are a bad idea.
Why is he getting involved in this at all? We already have several companies working toward this goal. The only answer that makes sense is that he wants to fund those companies closest to him or his party.
Or maybe he thinks the government should know at all times where you are, where you're going, where you stay when you get there, and how long you stay there.
Mostly not for law enforcement or nefarious statism, although that is a very valid concern. Having manufacturers put transponders on cars by default is mostly so the government can impose really elaborate tax schemes on road use beyond just a simple odometer tax or even just an excise tax or flat road use fee.
The current gasoline tax funding mechanism doesn't work for electric and alternative fuel vehicles. That is a real problem. And vehicle to "vehicle" communication is mostly intended to be used to detect the use of specific roads and send people a bill. Really what is being talked about is putting transponders on cars, which is almost completely useless for autonomous collision avoidance and navigation.
Transponders will allow things like a dynamic congestion tax, where just reading in the odometer and charging a flat road tax based on total miles driven won't allow the kind of fine grained taxation and control that makes bureaucrats giddy. From their perspective wouldn't it be great to be able to control traffic at the push of a button simply by increasing the cost of certain routes. That is a win-win. You could clear a route and make more money at the same time.
For that and other reasons I oppose government mandates around vehicle transponders. Transponders don't help with autonomous vehicles. It is a tax thing. And could very easily be used as a tool of oppression.
It is the road network equivalent of the Internet network neutrality debate. But it is being marketed as something to do with autonomous vehicles.
What we're seeing here folks is an outgoing president going into full "my legacy" mode. This frequently looks similar to "full retard" but the prez gets a pass...
It is an Al Gore "I invented the Internet" moment... except Al Gore actually did help lift the ban on commercial use of the Internet. Obama is just kinda suggesting that the Federal government and states shouldn't ban autonomous cars yet. But if anything the whole vehicle to vehicle communications issue is going to delay autonomous cars if they end up requiring some trillion dollar roll out of vehicle to vehicle communications before they allow cars to stop killing people.
The best thing that can result in this type of divide and conquer approach is when you realize a thousand lines of code is pretty much necessary for doing one thing and there is a one line code solution for that functionality. That feels good and it has happened to me more than once... with other people's code of course.
The most important keys on the programmers keyboard are backspace and delete keys. Followed closely by or preceded by Ctrl-a.
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
The president's study on the future of human space flight suggested a manned mission to an asteroid as a next step because it would be a more doable milestone, we could pick the easiest asteroid to get to and back from and it would give us experience in deep space without having to also get us back off the surface of Mars which essentially doubles all the mission cost and risk.
An asteroid mission was a practical milestone (despite my own initially poor reaction) but not very sexy, so they went back to the 'Ya sure we are going to Mars' because that has captured the public imagination and Hollywood more than any other destination. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your view) it has not captured the public's wallets enough to fund it and it isn't clear that NASA actually has any intention to fund it, but it is still using Mars as a PR tool to help fund all the incremental stuff they are doing.
I think in the long term it further undermines NASA's credibility to be using Mars as PR for a bunch of other potentially worthwhile stuff they are doing. But for now, everything is about Mars, and getting there, and then... studying the shit out of a bunch of dead rocks. Except it really isn't.
Yes. But that's not "freedom", it's something else. Perhaps the EFF should rename itself to the Electronic Ethics Police if they're going to change roles to enforcing an ethical code on others using governments and courts.
A company intimately collaborating with any government to suppress freedom of speech is very much a threat to Freedom and a worthwhile cause.
That isn't a personal code of ethics. That is about what we as a society have chosen the courts to do. If someone harms someone else, the courts are there to find equity.
But why is it the EFF's concern? Shouldn't the EFF be arguing against court actions that encumber data equipment sales?
Are they for electronic freedom, or are they just another leftist grievance profiteer?
Filing Amicus briefs are what organizations like EFF, ACLU and NRA do in cases they want to support or oppose. In this case, I think it depends on the facts of the case which should come out in discovery. It could be that CISCO did in fact have people actually customizing code and hardware to specifically target these groups, in which case they crossed a line that should make them liable.
EFF exists to promote freedom. If companies are actively engaged in suppressing free speech and harming people that are expressing themselves in ways that don't promote violence online then they damn well should be making those companies pay a high price for their unethical behavior. On the other hand if CISCO just provided some technology and it happened to be used for unethical purposes without their active participation then I agree that companies should be free to sell their technology without being liable for how others choose to use it. And EFF would be on the wrong side if they were claiming a broader form of liability. Like saying Ford should be liable if someone it sells a car to decides to mow down a bunch of pedestrians.
The key is whether CISCO crossed a line and whether there is enough evidence that they did in order to trigger discovery which would force CISCO to provide relevant documents and witnesses. Without reading the case I think that is hard to say. But often these types of products come with support packages that could have involved specific customization.
Is it "freedom" to try to tell Cisco -- retroactively -- who they can and can't do business with? Shouldn't Cisco be free to sell electronic equipment to whomever will pay? Should Cisco be neutral and sell to everyone, or should Cisco discriminate? Why is this any of this the EFF's business at all?
I think it comes down to whether Cisco actually wrote code or built hardware specifically to target this group instead of just providing the tool to do so..
If Cisco sold a foreign government this tool and helped them specifically target a particular group, say customized the software to include specific keywords that targeted that group, then sure they should be liable. That is like selling them a gun and helping them aim it at the target versus just selling the gun knowing it could be used that way.
Liability should clearly be with the manufacturer if it is shown to be a defect or design flaw in the collision avoidance system. Otherwise, you will have a full set of sensor data to show if it is another drivers fault or no-fault due to road conditions.
... from what I can tell they haven't even begun to test snow and ice. I totally understand why they start with making it work under optimal conditions, but it also means they have a looooooooong way to go with non-optimal conditions.
Data centers suffer from very rapid capital depreciation. Kryder's Law means your storage hardware loses half its value every 13 months. It is a very competitive business, and only large scale automated data centers can be competitive. This is the start of the shake out, not the end. You will soon see more companies exit the business.
Until someone tells them data centers = cloud infrastructure. Seriously, if they want to be a cloud provider then they need the biggest most massive and efficient data centers. Or are we talking purely about small and medium data centers and colocs?
Sure, co-location is far too expensive relative to provisioning on-demand cloud infrastructure to justify for small and medium size businesses. And large businesses can set up their own data centers in-house. I could see some medium to large businesses buying these data centers just to avoid having to build their own from scratch.
The cloud will always suffer from the problem of physical custody of data. Where some data is too sensitive to trust to someone else's security even if that security is probably better than your own.
But for everything else the cloud is where it is at.
I am more concerned that this is public information and it isn't being made available online. Besides an "opt out" provision for your specific address to address the concerns of police officers, judges or anyone who is afraid of stalking or whatever, just like you might have for a telephone directory, this information could be used by individuals, local groups, and others to find people that are registered democrats and registered republicans or independents. This data is already being used to target those individuals based on party affiliation and voting history, but now all the power to do so is controlled by organizations with a big enough bankroll to gather the data and make it available to whomever they choose. And I certainly don't like the big party politics that results from centralized control by a few. Everyone from researchers and students at Universities, to local grass roots activists could use the information to save time and money in their activities. We are already paying for the information to be collected and stored, so why should only the rich and powerful be able to access it?
This is complete bullshit. Laws are not complicated just so they can be used for oppression, they are complicated because they deal strictly with human beings, and humans are complicated.
Here's a simple law - if you kill another human you are put to death. Easy to understand, right? Now don't go complicating it up by adding conditions like accidental, or self defense, or unable to know right from wrong, or heat of the moment, or anything else. You really think that is better?
Some of the very worst laws are the simplest. Things like zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing.
And that doesn't even get into the whole area of civil law.
Now that is complete Bullshit. We have laws that are being passed that the people passing them have no time to even read through.
Laws regarding things like murder are relatively simple despite how you might portray them. Most criminal law is relatively simple. Tax law, environmental law, real estate law, business regulation, or basically anything having to do with making money have laws and regulations that run into the tens of thousands of pages which are pretty clearly there to ensure that the government and lawyers and corrupt regulators themselves get a cut of your business. It is a shakedown racket, pure and simple.
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Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
I think from a competitive free market versus regulation perspective the question is whether or not there was some resource constraint on bandwidth that meant that the government had a good reason to want to make sure that only Internet Service could be provided over the network rather than a closed network. If we are talking about EM spectrum, then it has been long established that the government has an interest in specifying to some degree of detail the types of services that license holders may provide. It makes sense to me that India would say that only full Internet access could be provided over cellular networks as spectrum is a limited resource and to allow walled off services is to squander a public resource.
How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
That eventually became the case, but originally AOL didn't provide any Internet service and was a completely closed network. Only eventually did they allow things like "email" that could actually be sent outside of AOL's network and then eventually an AOL browser. Only much later did it essentially become an ISP with a homepage/splash screen that came up when you used the client to login.
I agree you shouldn't call it "Internet Service" if it is a closed network or even if you are throttling various competing services. That should be a matter of stopping fraudulent advertising rather than preventing companies from offering BBN or old school AOL style service.
You would have thought that our government would have learned when they attempted to ban PGP, decades ago.
For those of you who don't remember, the software got classified as a munition, people who sold it could be arrested as arms trafficers. Downloads instantly moved from US servers to those in Finland (and elsewhere) and the end result was a big spectacular nothing.
Calmer heads prevailed, in the long run.
The technology is out there, the knowledge of how to do encryption is impossible to stuff back into the bottle.
Yes, I remember the bad old days when a Netscape web browser was considered as a weapon of war and it was illegal to export it outside the US and there was a check box on the EULA saying you agree that you wouldn't export it.
If ITAR is again applied to encryption then the US will stop being able to sell pretty much any technology overseas and most people in the US who aren't complete morons will just import hardware and software from free countries where encryption is allowed.
From TFA:
Finding no significant correlation between video gaming and those outcomes does not really prove the broad conclusion of the headline that "Video Gamers From the '90s Have Turned Out Mostly OK".
Right. And I don't think the supposition has ever been that video games increase the prevalence or incidence of any particular disorders in children, but rather what negative (or positive?) effects certain types of video games and length of time playing would have on children already prone to behavioral or psychological issues. Whether gaming (amount of time spent, and types of games played) makes things better or worse for those kids both in the short term and longer run... But good luck finding a control group. Really you are going to have to just look at estimated time spent gaming along with preferred games to make any meaningful comparison.
There's a reason people dismiss claims of IRL "harm" the from Tipper Gores or Jack Thompsons or Anita Sarkeesians of the world. The burden of proof is always squarely on them, they almost always fail to meet it, and years later we (as often as not) get scientific evidence showing the opposite.
Population studies usually drown out subtle influences and factors. I think you have to look at individuals that do have issues and then see how the availability of games, drugs, booze, television, social interactions all come together to make their problems worse or better.
had it replaced with a licensing agreement which the company can change at will.
Courts should throw out licensing agreements unless for every change the person can pass a quiz covering the major points of the license agreement. And then only those subject areas tested should be honored by the courts.
More people are bringing guns or the TSA is getting better at finding them?
More likely it is because it has become more expensive to check bags.
The issue isn't the money. $5 Billion is a pittance in Federal terms. The issue is the meddling. The potential for excessive mandates. Autonomous cars should be on the roads as soon as they can demonstrate they have an equivalent or better ability to drive than human drivers on existing roads.
It is that simple. And that is the type of simple uniform state and federal laws that we should be working towards. A car company should be able to certify that their autonomous system is safe and effective on existing roads and then that vehicle should be able to drive.
No additional infrastructure. That infrastructure approach has failed again and again since the 1950s. What we need is just roads and cars. Sure better roads would be great and benefit everyone and make it easier for autonomous cars to drive safely. Autonomous cars can't be relying on guide wires or smart signs or whatever. That is an old approach that just doesn't work because it puts an elaborate and expensive infrastructure before the utility. That infrastructure first approach is a recipe for having a couple roads where you can have autonomous cars and then decades of wasted time shaking rich people down to fund more infrastructure while the rest of us keep getting killed.
Having a dumb road system and vehicles that become smarter as technology improves is precisely the way we need to move forward to get this technology adopted as fast as possible and save lives.
Without government involvement and support, maintaining and upgrading the highways & byways to accommodate driver-less vehicles,the whole enterprise is an exercise in futility. Smart highways are the next logical step.
Like it or not, government giveaways of your tax dollars will likely christen even the projects you support.
That is completely the wrong approach to autonomous driverless vehicles. These vehicles will have to be able to use existing infrastructure. Smart highways are a bad idea.
Why is he getting involved in this at all? We already have several companies working toward this goal. The only answer that makes sense is that he wants to fund those companies closest to him or his party.
Or maybe he thinks the government should know at all times where you are, where you're going, where you stay when you get there, and how long you stay there.
Mostly not for law enforcement or nefarious statism, although that is a very valid concern. Having manufacturers put transponders on cars by default is mostly so the government can impose really elaborate tax schemes on road use beyond just a simple odometer tax or even just an excise tax or flat road use fee.
The current gasoline tax funding mechanism doesn't work for electric and alternative fuel vehicles. That is a real problem. And vehicle to "vehicle" communication is mostly intended to be used to detect the use of specific roads and send people a bill. Really what is being talked about is putting transponders on cars, which is almost completely useless for autonomous collision avoidance and navigation.
Transponders will allow things like a dynamic congestion tax, where just reading in the odometer and charging a flat road tax based on total miles driven won't allow the kind of fine grained taxation and control that makes bureaucrats giddy. From their perspective wouldn't it be great to be able to control traffic at the push of a button simply by increasing the cost of certain routes. That is a win-win. You could clear a route and make more money at the same time.
For that and other reasons I oppose government mandates around vehicle transponders. Transponders don't help with autonomous vehicles. It is a tax thing. And could very easily be used as a tool of oppression.
It is the road network equivalent of the Internet network neutrality debate. But it is being marketed as something to do with autonomous vehicles.
It's also the argument used against the drug war. But that's enough ad hominems. I don't think punishing people is freedom.
Punishing people isn't itself freedom, but punishing people that deprive other people of liberty is fundamentally essential to freedom.
What we're seeing here folks is an outgoing president going into full "my legacy" mode. This frequently looks similar to "full retard" but the prez gets a pass...
It is an Al Gore "I invented the Internet" moment... except Al Gore actually did help lift the ban on commercial use of the Internet. Obama is just kinda suggesting that the Federal government and states shouldn't ban autonomous cars yet. But if anything the whole vehicle to vehicle communications issue is going to delay autonomous cars if they end up requiring some trillion dollar roll out of vehicle to vehicle communications before they allow cars to stop killing people.
The best thing that can result in this type of divide and conquer approach is when you realize a thousand lines of code is pretty much necessary for doing one thing and there is a one line code solution for that functionality. That feels good and it has happened to me more than once... with other people's code of course.
The most important keys on the programmers keyboard are backspace and delete keys. Followed closely by or preceded by Ctrl-a.
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
The president's study on the future of human space flight suggested a manned mission to an asteroid as a next step because it would be a more doable milestone, we could pick the easiest asteroid to get to and back from and it would give us experience in deep space without having to also get us back off the surface of Mars which essentially doubles all the mission cost and risk.
An asteroid mission was a practical milestone (despite my own initially poor reaction) but not very sexy, so they went back to the 'Ya sure we are going to Mars' because that has captured the public imagination and Hollywood more than any other destination. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your view) it has not captured the public's wallets enough to fund it and it isn't clear that NASA actually has any intention to fund it, but it is still using Mars as a PR tool to help fund all the incremental stuff they are doing.
I think in the long term it further undermines NASA's credibility to be using Mars as PR for a bunch of other potentially worthwhile stuff they are doing. But for now, everything is about Mars, and getting there, and then... studying the shit out of a bunch of dead rocks. Except it really isn't.
That "ethical code" they are seeking to enforce is called Liberty.
Yes. But that's not "freedom", it's something else. Perhaps the EFF should rename itself to the Electronic Ethics Police if they're going to change roles to enforcing an ethical code on others using governments and courts.
A company intimately collaborating with any government to suppress freedom of speech is very much a threat to Freedom and a worthwhile cause.
That isn't a personal code of ethics. That is about what we as a society have chosen the courts to do. If someone harms someone else, the courts are there to find equity.
But why is it the EFF's concern? Shouldn't the EFF be arguing against court actions that encumber data equipment sales?
Are they for electronic freedom, or are they just another leftist grievance profiteer?
Filing Amicus briefs are what organizations like EFF, ACLU and NRA do in cases they want to support or oppose. In this case, I think it depends on the facts of the case which should come out in discovery. It could be that CISCO did in fact have people actually customizing code and hardware to specifically target these groups, in which case they crossed a line that should make them liable.
EFF exists to promote freedom. If companies are actively engaged in suppressing free speech and harming people that are expressing themselves in ways that don't promote violence online then they damn well should be making those companies pay a high price for their unethical behavior. On the other hand if CISCO just provided some technology and it happened to be used for unethical purposes without their active participation then I agree that companies should be free to sell their technology without being liable for how others choose to use it. And EFF would be on the wrong side if they were claiming a broader form of liability. Like saying Ford should be liable if someone it sells a car to decides to mow down a bunch of pedestrians.
The key is whether CISCO crossed a line and whether there is enough evidence that they did in order to trigger discovery which would force CISCO to provide relevant documents and witnesses. Without reading the case I think that is hard to say. But often these types of products come with support packages that could have involved specific customization.
Is it "freedom" to try to tell Cisco -- retroactively -- who they can and can't do business with? Shouldn't Cisco be free to sell electronic equipment to whomever will pay? Should Cisco be neutral and sell to everyone, or should Cisco discriminate? Why is this any of this the EFF's business at all?
I think it comes down to whether Cisco actually wrote code or built hardware specifically to target this group instead of just providing the tool to do so..
If Cisco sold a foreign government this tool and helped them specifically target a particular group, say customized the software to include specific keywords that targeted that group, then sure they should be liable. That is like selling them a gun and helping them aim it at the target versus just selling the gun knowing it could be used that way.
If the roads are that bad, only stupid drivers even attempt to go out in the first place.
Yes, if your car tells you it is too dangerous for it to drive because of road conditions then you should listen to it.
Liability should clearly be with the manufacturer if it is shown to be a defect or design flaw in the collision avoidance system. Otherwise, you will have a full set of sensor data to show if it is another drivers fault or no-fault due to road conditions.
... from what I can tell they haven't even begun to test snow and ice. I totally understand why they start with making it work under optimal conditions, but it also means they have a looooooooong way to go with non-optimal conditions.
You can say that about most human drivers...
Data centers suffer from very rapid capital depreciation. Kryder's Law means your storage hardware loses half its value every 13 months. It is a very competitive business, and only large scale automated data centers can be competitive. This is the start of the shake out, not the end. You will soon see more companies exit the business.
Until someone tells them data centers = cloud infrastructure. Seriously, if they want to be a cloud provider then they need the biggest most massive and efficient data centers. Or are we talking purely about small and medium data centers and colocs?
Sure, co-location is far too expensive relative to provisioning on-demand cloud infrastructure to justify for small and medium size businesses. And large businesses can set up their own data centers in-house. I could see some medium to large businesses buying these data centers just to avoid having to build their own from scratch.
The cloud will always suffer from the problem of physical custody of data. Where some data is too sensitive to trust to someone else's security even if that security is probably better than your own.
But for everything else the cloud is where it is at.
I am more concerned that this is public information and it isn't being made available online. Besides an "opt out" provision for your specific address to address the concerns of police officers, judges or anyone who is afraid of stalking or whatever, just like you might have for a telephone directory, this information could be used by individuals, local groups, and others to find people that are registered democrats and registered republicans or independents. This data is already being used to target those individuals based on party affiliation and voting history, but now all the power to do so is controlled by organizations with a big enough bankroll to gather the data and make it available to whomever they choose. And I certainly don't like the big party politics that results from centralized control by a few. Everyone from researchers and students at Universities, to local grass roots activists could use the information to save time and money in their activities. We are already paying for the information to be collected and stored, so why should only the rich and powerful be able to access it?
This is complete bullshit. Laws are not complicated just so they can be used for oppression, they are complicated because they deal strictly with human beings, and humans are complicated.
Here's a simple law - if you kill another human you are put to death. Easy to understand, right? Now don't go complicating it up by adding conditions like accidental, or self defense, or unable to know right from wrong, or heat of the moment, or anything else. You really think that is better?
Some of the very worst laws are the simplest. Things like zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing.
And that doesn't even get into the whole area of civil law.
Now that is complete Bullshit. We have laws that are being passed that the people passing them have no time to even read through.
Laws regarding things like murder are relatively simple despite how you might portray them. Most criminal law is relatively simple. Tax law, environmental law, real estate law, business regulation, or basically anything having to do with making money have laws and regulations that run into the tens of thousands of pages which are pretty clearly there to ensure that the government and lawyers and corrupt regulators themselves get a cut of your business. It is a shakedown racket, pure and simple.