That's a fair point. In practice, though, it seems as though the President asks for money, and Congress gives or denies it. As such, the President can simply ask for less money.
Oh. Another thing I'd do is veto any bill which includes riders.
The other clue was, "In sectors where the government was failing to make money." In theory, this should be just about every sector except for the IRS, which collects funds so that the government can function.
Done on a small scale, predatory lending isn't harmful to the industry (though it is, obviously, harmful to the homeowner.) I wouldn't even be terribly surprised if such practices weren't unofficially endorsed by upper-management. What's the worst that can happen? The borrower defaults and the lender gets the house, which they can probably sell for more than was remaining on the loan (except in some really wacky states where you can't lose your homestead.)
But such an idea doesn't scale without having a serious effect on the industry. Doing this too much inflates prices in the short term, then you can't sell the house to make back the money because so many people have defaulted. You've taken your customers and made sure that they won't be customers again for 7 years, at least (length of time that such a black mark can stay on your credit score.)
If I was the President, I'd do 1 and 2. The rest of what you've suggested aren't powers allocated to the president, so he can't do them (though he can try to convince Congress to do them.)
If I was the President, I'd try to return the Executive branch back to its Constitutional roots.
Consider this whole calendar thing. Of course you can't publish a Ford calendar withour Ford's consent. Right. Luckily, this wasn't a Ford calendar. It was a BMC (Black Mustang Club) calendar.
Confusion in the marketplace is one of the largest driving factors of this sort of copyright infringement. You, like so many, have confused "trademark infringement" with "copyright infringement." Confusion is not an issue with copyright--it's an issue with trademark.
Luckily, trademark is what Ford is talking about, here.
You can't go out, and take photographs of your car, and then publish an ad, a billboard, a newspaper full-page spread, and a television commercial advertising your car as the best/worst. I wouldn't say that without advice from a lawyer. Certainly I can take a picture of something I own and publish it. I can publish that it broke down 3 times in the first month. I can publish lots of things, generally. The question here is largely whether or not the picture of a trademarked object (it strikes me as weird that an object can be trademarked) can be published. It seems reasonable to me that it could be.
You can't pretend, and make people believe, that you are Ford. From what I've seen of the calendar, they weren't trying to.
Similarly, and for the exact same reason, you can't say that all Ford cars break, just because yours did. That's not entirely true. Slander and libel laws are a little bit different for public figures (in the US.) There's a much, much higher burden of proof that there was a reckless disregard for the truth. You also have to convince the judge/jury that the average person would believe that the claims are true. It's not likely that the average person would believe that "All Ford cars break," though this is a bad example anyway because all cars break, eventually. Parts simply wear out.
Since Netflix streaming is only a value-add, I don't think it's a big deal. Their core business is DVDs through the mail. Hell, their streaming selection is piss-poor, anyway.
DRM only stops the casual copier. Watermarking will only identify the casual copier.
They're in the same boat, only they piss off fewer customers--customers who, under DRM, couldn't play their music files in the player of their choice. With watermarking, they get to.
In fact, they'll gain a few customers who, like myself, won't buy DRM downloadables because of that very reason.
Generally, copyright mechanisms exist to defeast casual copying. Everyone knows that the big pirate distributors will get access to your media, and will release it. It's a given, and there's little that the media cartels can do about it.
Of course, people defeat DRM themselves so that they can have interoperability. People rip DVDs (with their awful, ineffective encryption) so that they can watch them on their media centers or iPods. People draw circles around the edges of their CDs so that they can rip them and play them on their computers. DRM still prevents some amount of copying, but it also infuriates people when they buy CD A, which can't be ripped just like all of the rest of their CDs, or when they get a new computer and can't transfer all of their old, downloaded, DRM media.
Watermarks solve that problem. People aren't going to want to defeat watermarks just to play their own media--they don't have to, because there is no DRM. The same impetus doesn't exist.
The people who try to defeat watermarks are the ones who want to be big sharers. They're the ones with no respect for copyright at all. Of course they're just going to download it, instead, unless they're the first one to get it, in which case they don't have the option.
As for the sound quality, that could be an issue. It's certainly possible to have unobtrusive watermarks, where the sound output can't be distingiushed from the original. This is particularly true of people who have any amount of hearing loss--even extremely slight (and almost every adult has extremely slight hearing loss--the people who constantly use their iPods tend to have more than that.)
But meh. Whatever floats your boat. Personally, I don't download DRM media, but I'd download watermarked media. I take issue with not being able to play purchased movies in the player of my choice, not with the concept of copyright, iteself.
I wish that I had the mod points for you. That sounds exactly like what I went through. In fact, I sometimes wonder what I might have made of myself if I'd spent all that Gentoo-tinker time in other ways.
Gentoo could be really spiffy, but the execution just isn't there.
I use FreeBSD for servers. It uses something similar to portage (I believe portage was even based upon it), and it's pretty damned stable and easy to administer. I do believe that they could learn something from the improvements that Gentoo made, as long as they actually got them right. For my workstations, though, I stick to Ubuntu, because it just works, and it doesn't require me to tinker.
Stability is a pretty important thing. Look at Debian, for example. Tracking stable on Debian means that you'll be using versions of software that are years old, with only security issues causing updates (and even then, the issue is usually patched against the original source, rather than requiring an upgrade that likely introduces new features and possibly new bugs.) Stable means stable, and it should be very explicit.
If you want the newest and greatest, run the the unstable branch.
Nuclear power gets a bad rap because of the word "nuclear", and because older designs of these plants have had meltdowns. As we both know, the're really quite safe, and the impact on the rest of the system is pretty well known. Aside from waste disposal (I say, ship it to mars--the technology to make this cheap enough would be useful in other applications, as well, so it's kinda win/win), the impact is extremely minimal. We don't know the impact of renewable energies just yet--though we've seen some environmental impact from giant wind farms. I'm actually more nervous about what might happen if we start deploying fields of solar panels than about the possible impacts of a couple of nuclear power plants 5 miles down the road from me. There just hasn't been any studies done (that I can find) on it.
I don't see nuclear power as a band-aid--more as the natural progression for energy generation. Maybe we'll come up with something better in the next couple of decades, and we can switch to that. If that is cheap, efficient, renewable power, I'd be ecstatic, but the truth is, we're just not there yet.
Education is always a preferred option, but it's not always the better one. The situations where remotely-controlled A/C reduction would be useful are in cases where the alternative is a rolling blackout--where you lose the A/C anyway, along with the rest of your electricity. While education might help some, there are always going to be assholes who just leave the A/C on (and on low temperatures) all of the time, and if there are enough of those, there are still likely to be power problems.
Also, we're not talking about quotas, here. We're talking about reducing the power that the A/C uses for 15 minutes, in order to help take the load off of the grid. Except in an extreme heatwave, this isn't going to cause damage (unlike your water or refrigerator suggestions, which were also asinine for reasons other than emergencies.) And again, if the grid is overloaded enough, you're going to lose it anyway.
My response was mostly tongue-in-cheek, anyway, but it's good to know that this is how it works. As long as you've got a modern air-conditioner, everything should be fine.
I have to believe there could come cases where someone was doing some important thing on an emergency basis and didn't get the power to do it. If they'd been ordinarily conservative, and if the system knew that, I could see allowing an exception. So perhaps a bank of credits for conserving energy overall would be good. This is why, by the way, people have suggested just using money as the basis tends to do the right thing. I have to wonder why everyone's trying to put a band-aid on the problem.
Here's a wacky idea--build a nuclear plant or two, and provide the energy that people are demanding.
its approved by the air conditioning companies. You mean that it's ok because it's approved by the people you'll buy a new unit from when your old one dies?
If I have to sit through one more stupid reused-4chan-image-with-stupid-red-speach-bubble accompanied by some half thoughtout and entirely unfunny "joke," I might just puke. You know, you could stop visiting the site....
You mean LOWER, so that kids can learn to drink sensibly while under parental supervision, rather than trying to learn to drink sensibly with a bunch of other clueless idiots. No, I meant higher. Kids can already legally drink while under parental supervision.
Once you start talking about drunk driving, that's a whole 'nother issue. To cure that you need to change the way people drink in this country. Before cars were common, summoned who walked to the corner pub, got totally drunk and then tried to get home, was very unlikely to kill anyone else. I didn't mention drunk driving anywhere in my post, so I'm not sure why you brought it up.
1) What authority does the federal government even have to regulate this? 2) Why is 9/11 used as a justification for the system, if it's not going to make us safer from future terrorist attacks?
On point one, ok, we've got the TSA. Assuming they even have a right to regulate the air transport industry, they can require specific ID requirements to let someone on a plan. The reason that a federal law getting states to comply is required is because several states passed laws against Real ID. Entire states worth of citizens who are not allowed to fly would basically make the system crumble--it would make the citizens too aware of what's going on, and make them likely to force a change. At best, it would remove these new requirements--at worst (from the feds perspective) it would corrupt the system of fear that's been built around terrorism in the past 6 years.
On point two, well, obviously if it's not making us safer, then it's just a power grab. The federal government wants this information, and they've learned that by throwing certain phrases around, they can get compliance.
On the surface, I, too, don't particularly mind better IDs. I think that taking the picture at the beginning of the process makes a lot of sense, from a fraud-prevention aspect. I also think that security on IDs is useful--the point of the ID is to prove that you are who you say you are. Things which make this better, without compromising any information on the card, is obviously a good thing.
The problem I have is that the federal government is doing it. This is a power that should be left to the states.
Further, there's no good reason to deny a driver's license to an immigrant. A driver's license should be something which states that this person can drive safely according to the rules of the state from which the driver's license was issued. It should have characteristics of an ID card--that is, a driver's license is fairly useless if it can't be tied to the person presenting it, in the case of a traffic stop.
Then there's the issue of requiring ID to fly, and whether or not this is useful at all. That's such an absurdly convoluted topic, that it probably bears having its own post.
Ooh, I'm guessing that you haven't read about the Real ID!
What you've described is exactly what was proposed, and what's being implemented. It's data sharing between the states and the federal government regarding IDs. It's not a "United States of America ID card." You'll still have your Nebraska ID, or your New York ID--there will just be a database which ties them all together.
A bigger question is why you need to be 21 to drink, but that's probably another discussion. You can vote Vote to change it.
be drafted On base, the drinking age is typically 18.
and smoke tobacco, but you can't legally buy booze. Yeah, that's fair. Tobacco does not impair your cognitive abilities. Alcohol does.
There's wisdom in a higher drinking age. It has to do with responsibility. Because when you drink, you can seriously affect other people, it becomes an issue.
Honestly, the drinking age should probably be higher. I saw plenty of friends in college get just plain stupid and destructive after binge drinking.
"Could have been" is rarely useful. There has to be reasonable doubt. Pulling possibilities out of the air isn't going to cut it. You're going to have to show that those possibilities were likely to get the jury to discount the fact that your IP address was used in this way.
For example:
Someone else was using my computer at the time. Moving over to a car analogy, the court usually won't accept this as a defense unless you can point to someone you know was using it at that time, or if you can prove that you didn't have possession of your car at that time (I was at Wal-Mart across town from the incident, here are my credit card receipts.)
My computer could have been compromised. This has been used as a valid defense, but only when numerous viruses were, in fact, found on the computer. To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't been tested without hard evidence that the computer was actually compromised.
Of course, a forensics expert ought to be able to tell with a pretty high certainty, so again, just throwing it out there as a possibility won't hold much weight.
The log files could have been fabricated. I honestly have no idea how this would work. It seems like if it did, it would be a magic bullet against all computer criminal charges.
Someone could have spoofed my IP. Highly unlikely with modern equipment.
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That's a fair point. In practice, though, it seems as though the President asks for money, and Congress gives or denies it. As such, the President can simply ask for less money.
Oh. Another thing I'd do is veto any bill which includes riders.
I think that you just fed a troll.
The other clue was, "In sectors where the government was failing to make money." In theory, this should be just about every sector except for the IRS, which collects funds so that the government can function.
Done on a small scale, predatory lending isn't harmful to the industry (though it is, obviously, harmful to the homeowner.) I wouldn't even be terribly surprised if such practices weren't unofficially endorsed by upper-management. What's the worst that can happen? The borrower defaults and the lender gets the house, which they can probably sell for more than was remaining on the loan (except in some really wacky states where you can't lose your homestead.)
But such an idea doesn't scale without having a serious effect on the industry. Doing this too much inflates prices in the short term, then you can't sell the house to make back the money because so many people have defaulted. You've taken your customers and made sure that they won't be customers again for 7 years, at least (length of time that such a black mark can stay on your credit score.)
I think that the "Interstate Commerce" clause fits as nicely for most of those as it does for most of the uses.
So chalk up another thing I'd do--nominate Supreme Court justices who don't like misusing that particular clause.
If I was the President, I'd do 1 and 2. The rest of what you've suggested aren't powers allocated to the president, so he can't do them (though he can try to convince Congress to do them.)
If I was the President, I'd try to return the Executive branch back to its Constitutional roots.
Luckily, trademark is what Ford is talking about, here. You can't go out, and take photographs of your car, and then publish an ad, a billboard, a newspaper full-page spread, and a television commercial advertising your car as the best/worst. I wouldn't say that without advice from a lawyer. Certainly I can take a picture of something I own and publish it. I can publish that it broke down 3 times in the first month. I can publish lots of things, generally. The question here is largely whether or not the picture of a trademarked object (it strikes me as weird that an object can be trademarked) can be published. It seems reasonable to me that it could be. You can't pretend, and make people believe, that you are Ford. From what I've seen of the calendar, they weren't trying to. Similarly, and for the exact same reason, you can't say that all Ford cars break, just because yours did. That's not entirely true. Slander and libel laws are a little bit different for public figures (in the US.) There's a much, much higher burden of proof that there was a reckless disregard for the truth. You also have to convince the judge/jury that the average person would believe that the claims are true. It's not likely that the average person would believe that "All Ford cars break," though this is a bad example anyway because all cars break, eventually. Parts simply wear out.
Since Netflix streaming is only a value-add, I don't think it's a big deal. Their core business is DVDs through the mail. Hell, their streaming selection is piss-poor, anyway.
So what?
DRM only stops the casual copier. Watermarking will only identify the casual copier.
They're in the same boat, only they piss off fewer customers--customers who, under DRM, couldn't play their music files in the player of their choice. With watermarking, they get to.
In fact, they'll gain a few customers who, like myself, won't buy DRM downloadables because of that very reason.
Generally, copyright mechanisms exist to defeast casual copying. Everyone knows that the big pirate distributors will get access to your media, and will release it. It's a given, and there's little that the media cartels can do about it.
Of course, people defeat DRM themselves so that they can have interoperability. People rip DVDs (with their awful, ineffective encryption) so that they can watch them on their media centers or iPods. People draw circles around the edges of their CDs so that they can rip them and play them on their computers. DRM still prevents some amount of copying, but it also infuriates people when they buy CD A, which can't be ripped just like all of the rest of their CDs, or when they get a new computer and can't transfer all of their old, downloaded, DRM media.
Watermarks solve that problem. People aren't going to want to defeat watermarks just to play their own media--they don't have to, because there is no DRM. The same impetus doesn't exist.
The people who try to defeat watermarks are the ones who want to be big sharers. They're the ones with no respect for copyright at all. Of course they're just going to download it, instead, unless they're the first one to get it, in which case they don't have the option.
As for the sound quality, that could be an issue. It's certainly possible to have unobtrusive watermarks, where the sound output can't be distingiushed from the original. This is particularly true of people who have any amount of hearing loss--even extremely slight (and almost every adult has extremely slight hearing loss--the people who constantly use their iPods tend to have more than that.)
But meh. Whatever floats your boat. Personally, I don't download DRM media, but I'd download watermarked media. I take issue with not being able to play purchased movies in the player of my choice, not with the concept of copyright, iteself.
Package managers USUALLY let you remove dependencies that are no longer required, too.
I wish that I had the mod points for you. That sounds exactly like what I went through. In fact, I sometimes wonder what I might have made of myself if I'd spent all that Gentoo-tinker time in other ways.
Gentoo could be really spiffy, but the execution just isn't there.
I use FreeBSD for servers. It uses something similar to portage (I believe portage was even based upon it), and it's pretty damned stable and easy to administer. I do believe that they could learn something from the improvements that Gentoo made, as long as they actually got them right. For my workstations, though, I stick to Ubuntu, because it just works, and it doesn't require me to tinker.
Stability is a pretty important thing. Look at Debian, for example. Tracking stable on Debian means that you'll be using versions of software that are years old, with only security issues causing updates (and even then, the issue is usually patched against the original source, rather than requiring an upgrade that likely introduces new features and possibly new bugs.) Stable means stable, and it should be very explicit.
If you want the newest and greatest, run the the unstable branch.
Nuclear power gets a bad rap because of the word "nuclear", and because older designs of these plants have had meltdowns. As we both know, the're really quite safe, and the impact on the rest of the system is pretty well known. Aside from waste disposal (I say, ship it to mars--the technology to make this cheap enough would be useful in other applications, as well, so it's kinda win/win), the impact is extremely minimal. We don't know the impact of renewable energies just yet--though we've seen some environmental impact from giant wind farms. I'm actually more nervous about what might happen if we start deploying fields of solar panels than about the possible impacts of a couple of nuclear power plants 5 miles down the road from me. There just hasn't been any studies done (that I can find) on it.
I don't see nuclear power as a band-aid--more as the natural progression for energy generation. Maybe we'll come up with something better in the next couple of decades, and we can switch to that. If that is cheap, efficient, renewable power, I'd be ecstatic, but the truth is, we're just not there yet.
Education is always a preferred option, but it's not always the better one. The situations where remotely-controlled A/C reduction would be useful are in cases where the alternative is a rolling blackout--where you lose the A/C anyway, along with the rest of your electricity. While education might help some, there are always going to be assholes who just leave the A/C on (and on low temperatures) all of the time, and if there are enough of those, there are still likely to be power problems.
Also, we're not talking about quotas, here. We're talking about reducing the power that the A/C uses for 15 minutes, in order to help take the load off of the grid. Except in an extreme heatwave, this isn't going to cause damage (unlike your water or refrigerator suggestions, which were also asinine for reasons other than emergencies.) And again, if the grid is overloaded enough, you're going to lose it anyway.
My response was mostly tongue-in-cheek, anyway, but it's good to know that this is how it works. As long as you've got a modern air-conditioner, everything should be fine.
Here's a wacky idea--build a nuclear plant or two, and provide the energy that people are demanding.
There are really two issues, here.
1) What authority does the federal government even have to regulate this?
2) Why is 9/11 used as a justification for the system, if it's not going to make us safer from future terrorist attacks?
On point one, ok, we've got the TSA. Assuming they even have a right to regulate the air transport industry, they can require specific ID requirements to let someone on a plan. The reason that a federal law getting states to comply is required is because several states passed laws against Real ID. Entire states worth of citizens who are not allowed to fly would basically make the system crumble--it would make the citizens too aware of what's going on, and make them likely to force a change. At best, it would remove these new requirements--at worst (from the feds perspective) it would corrupt the system of fear that's been built around terrorism in the past 6 years.
On point two, well, obviously if it's not making us safer, then it's just a power grab. The federal government wants this information, and they've learned that by throwing certain phrases around, they can get compliance.
On the surface, I, too, don't particularly mind better IDs. I think that taking the picture at the beginning of the process makes a lot of sense, from a fraud-prevention aspect. I also think that security on IDs is useful--the point of the ID is to prove that you are who you say you are. Things which make this better, without compromising any information on the card, is obviously a good thing.
The problem I have is that the federal government is doing it. This is a power that should be left to the states.
Further, there's no good reason to deny a driver's license to an immigrant. A driver's license should be something which states that this person can drive safely according to the rules of the state from which the driver's license was issued. It should have characteristics of an ID card--that is, a driver's license is fairly useless if it can't be tied to the person presenting it, in the case of a traffic stop.
Then there's the issue of requiring ID to fly, and whether or not this is useful at all. That's such an absurdly convoluted topic, that it probably bears having its own post.
Ooh, I'm guessing that you haven't read about the Real ID!
What you've described is exactly what was proposed, and what's being implemented. It's data sharing between the states and the federal government regarding IDs. It's not a "United States of America ID card." You'll still have your Nebraska ID, or your New York ID--there will just be a database which ties them all together.
There's wisdom in a higher drinking age. It has to do with responsibility. Because when you drink, you can seriously affect other people, it becomes an issue.
Honestly, the drinking age should probably be higher. I saw plenty of friends in college get just plain stupid and destructive after binge drinking.
Love that interstate commerce clause.
For example: Someone else was using my computer at the time. Moving over to a car analogy, the court usually won't accept this as a defense unless you can point to someone you know was using it at that time, or if you can prove that you didn't have possession of your car at that time (I was at Wal-Mart across town from the incident, here are my credit card receipts.) My computer could have been compromised. This has been used as a valid defense, but only when numerous viruses were, in fact, found on the computer. To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't been tested without hard evidence that the computer was actually compromised.
Of course, a forensics expert ought to be able to tell with a pretty high certainty, so again, just throwing it out there as a possibility won't hold much weight. The log files could have been fabricated. I honestly have no idea how this would work. It seems like if it did, it would be a magic bullet against all computer criminal charges. Someone could have spoofed my IP. Highly unlikely with modern equipment.
You don't have to present it that way. You can call it "Super Secret Voting Validation" for all I care, as long as it works like this.
Are you really having this much trouble with these concepts?