Yes, that's true. There is no possible way to make Linux support networks without a text editor. Certainly not by plugging a network cable into a network interface and then the network is configured automatically by DHCP, exactly as it works on every other operating system.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
Yes and no. Obviously they'll continue to collect the usual tithe for each new PC sold by most major OEMs, but if that's all they've got going for them then they're right on schedule for a slow decline into irrelevance.
Microsoft has to keep their customers on the upgrade treadmill, even if they're still getting paid for selling the old version, because they have to keep their platform a moving target. How are they supposed to keep Linux from running all recent games if half the gamers are still using Windows XP and in consequence some game developers continue to release games compatible with its older version of DirectX, which has better support on Linux than later versions? How are they supposed to make OpenOffice and LibreOffice users feel like they're in an alien environment if people keep using Office 2003 instead of 2007/2010? How are people supposed to stay locked into Windows on the desktop if they have iOS or Android on their phones and developers are making apps for mobile devices that once ran on desktops?
That's debatable. 10 Mbps is plenty for current home uses
Sure, if everything you could possibly ever think of to do as a home user involves streaming some kind of media from a website. But what if I want to download something?
Exactly. On top of that, there are a large number of perfectly sensible reasons why ISPs should be installing gigabit networks today:
Even if 1Gpbs is not materially more useful today than e.g. 100Mbps, we don't actually have 100Mbps connections. And any 100+ connection is materially more useful today than the existing 10-20Mbps connections. So if you already have to roll a truck to do an upgrade you might as well not half ass it, because you can save money in the long run by making it all that much longer before you have to do it again.
On top of that, even if nobody actually needs a 1Gbps connection right now, if you can offer one and your competitors can only offer 50Mbps then you capture a big marketing advantage. "20 times faster than Verizon FIOS" etc. It also puts you in a stronger position for the next black swan event. If somebody invents a cheap holodeck and it turns out to require 150Mbps per person to interact with others over the internet, you can cash in immediately while your competitor has to run around frantically upgrading their equipment while they hemorrhage customers to you.
No. This does impose a cost, but the cost is the same for all companies in the market, so it doesn't disadvantage the small company (well, possibly there are economies of scale in favor of the larger company but that's not necessarily true and, in any case, those economies of scale apply to lots of things that have nothing to do with regulation).
Yes, but regulatory compliance costs add to the stack. Large companies tend to be inefficient and bureaucratic, in large part because economies of scale allow them to do so for the sake of stability and risk-avoidance without necessarily losing their competitiveness. But when a large company is too inefficient, it provides an opportunity for a smaller company to make up for their own lack of economies of scale by operating with greater efficiency and less bureaucracy.
The more regulatory compliance costs there are, the more inefficient and bureaucratic the large companies can be before a smaller company can out-compete them based on greater efficiency, because the larger entity gains the same sort of economies of scale in regulatory compliance as it does for anything else. Which is that much more disadvantage that the smaller company has to overcome.
In any case, the cost is really small. Documenting non-discrimination is basically documenting how the company came up with the rate. If they don't already document that, then they aren't going to survive long.
This assuming that documenting it for internal purposes is sufficient for the government. And the trouble is that even to answer the question of whether it is, you have to pay a lawyer $500/hr for some number of hours and then you have to go around and train all your staff and make sure they're doing what the lawyer said. Essentially, it requires you to implement a certain amount of bureaucracy, which the larger entity probably already does, but which the smaller entity might have been willing to risk going without in order to keep their heads above water -- and then the government comes in and imposes it on both, which at the margin will drive the smaller entity out of business.
So look at anti-discrimination regulations. Insurance companies, for example, are not allowed to price based on race, even if their research shows that race is a predictor of life expectancy.
The thing I find ridiculous is the extent to which such regulations are self-defeating. If it is actually the case that race correlates with bad insurance risk, the reverse correlation will also be true: Bad insurance risk will correlate with race. So you say that they can't use race, but they can use credit rating, occupation, etc., which are also predictors of bad insurance risk but, since insurance risk correlates with race, are also predictors of race. So at the end of the day you end up with the same situation: People of different races pay different insurance rates.
The thing most people do not understand is that all government regulation stifles competition to one degree or another, even regulations whose purpose is to encourage competition.
The flaw in your logic is that you've turned a reasonable heuristic into an absolute rule. Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose there exists a regulation that says that if two companies want to merge and the combined entity will have more than 5000 employees and more than $50,000,000 in annual revenue, it has to undergo review by the FTC. This regulation has literally zero impact on small companies, because it doesn't apply to them whatsoever.
Furthermore, the valid criticism that large corporations have an undue influence on the regulations implemented does not lead to the conclusion that there should be no regulation of large corporations. It should lead to measures to reduce the influence of large corporations on regulations. Your alternative would be like saying that laws should not be enforced against government officials because they have greater influence over what laws get passed than other citizens -- just because the premise is true doesn't make the conclusion any less ridiculous, because the logic is flawed. Greater influence than is desirable is not the same thing as complete control, and to the extent that normal citizens can cause sensible regulations to be enacted, they should.
Why are you fixated on what the bulk of consumers who are not a part of this discussion will do? What I mean by calling their bluff is to preserve the status quo until they are willing to give up and do the right thing by repealing the use tax. It has nothing to do with civil disobedience -- the people who are not paying their use tax are not the ones who are most affected by the state's posturing, they are merely useful idiots who can be counted on to do what they have always done.
Let's try it again and see if I can do any better this time: Suppose I operate a retailer in a state with a lower sales tax than a neighboring state. In consequence of the lower sales tax, I either end up paying higher non-sales taxes (e.g. property, income) in order to receive the same level of government services, or I receive fewer government services and subsidies and have to pay more out of pocket for e.g. my employees' healthcare. The higher taxes or costs get built into the price of my products.
This is fine and good so long as when I sell my products to customers from the neighboring state, they don't have to pay the higher sales tax of their home state, whether de jure or de facto, because it leaves me competitive with that state's retailers who have lower taxes/costs but then have to add the sales tax to the price of their goods.
Naturally the populous states with the largest customer bases would rather that as many of the retailers in other states as possible close up shop in the other states and move to their state, where they will pay local income and property tax and employ local people etc. They want to create as much of an unfair advantage for their local retailers as possible. Fortunately the federal constitution pretty much says they aren't allowed to do that, but they still want to.
So what they've done is manufacture a crisis: They pass a use tax which is in reality a tariff on interstate commerce but is structured in such a way that it avoids the constitutional prohibition at the cost (which they know full-well) that in practice they can't collect it, then they scream bloody murder because they can't collect it. And naturally the only "acceptable" solution to the manufactured crisis is for the out-of-state retailers to collect a tariff on interstate commerce that isn't supposed to exist, which creates an unfair advantage for local retailers. Basically, they're counting on your indignation over people not paying the use tax to induce the "something must be done" response in the population, and then trying to convince everyone that the only thing that can be done is the one thing they want.
So I say, don't be indignant. If they want to manufacture a crisis, let there be a crisis. When it gets bad enough (and all of the local retailers in populous states flee for states that can sell competitively to "tax cheats" in populous states), they'll back down and level the interstate playing field by removing the sales tax on everybody.
Success is one thing. The trouble is when it leads to a lack of competition because the companies in an industry are each so large that only a small number of companies produce the products consumed by all customers, and with so few competitors it becomes trivial for them to engage in "conscious parallelism" if not outright forming a cartel.
Boeing makes planes*, it takes hundreds of people to build a plane. How do you split that up?
I suspect in much the same way that they make them right now. In pieces. Some companies make landing gear, some companies make navigation systems, some companies design the planes, some companies do final assembly, etc.
Whether it is the solution or not, it is the inherent consequence of the existing law.
The trouble is that the ideal solution (removing the use tax) is not politically viable. The state politicians passed the use tax in order to claim that mail order retailers (and now Amazon) are helping tax cheats and in so doing they advance their policy goal of imposing taxes on out-of-state businesses and using the money to subsidize in-state businesses. The same state politicians would have to repeal it, and it is still serving their purposes. They could do so with minimal impact over the status quo to the state's coffers, since hardly anybody is paying it anyway, but naturally they will refuse because they instead want their preferred alternative of taxing the out-of-state retailers.
So given the three choices, having no use tax, having one but without the possibility of enforcement, or imposing it on out-of-state retailers, they refuse the first with the hope that all will agree that the second is untenable and accept the third. They put right-minded people in the position of having to call their bluff, refuse the third and accept the second until they reinstate the first. It is hardly ideal but it is preferable to the alternative.
And possibly even win on that accusation, combined with an accusation of failure to log or retain DHCP leases.
What would even that get you? You would then have the MAC address -- does that help if it was some random passerby and you still have no clue who owns that computer?
Copyright owner trade associations might argue that you've made it your job to run the censorship board by opening your AP to the public.
Copyright owner trade associations might argue that someone who has committed copyright infringement should pay to the tune of one trillion dollars, or that people should be kicked off the internet for downloading music, or that you need a license to play a CD that you bought on your computer because the computer copies it while playing it. And these are not even exaggerations. Copyright owner trade associations are completely out of touch with reality.
Not yet, but see previous stories about Microsoft's strategy VP Craig Mundie and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke sincerely floating the idea of "Internet driver's licenses".
These people have done nothing but demonstrate that they are fools. The internet is a right, not a privilege. It is replacing all of its predecessor communications media, and the day is not far when it supplants them entirely and the other media cease to exist in any significant way. Consider how ridiculous it sounds to propose licensing printing presses or punishing someone by refusing to deliver their mail. It would never pass constitutional scrutiny, it would never be enforceable in practice anyway, and even if it somehow was it remains nothing but the morally bankrupt refuge of desperate dinosaurs longing for a police state.
The point here is "reasonable precautions", eg. logging, site whitelisting or even just limiting available bandwidth.
How does any of that help? You have a log that says an unknown device you haven't turned over is the one that downloaded the thing; they'll just accuse you of not turning it over. Someone can pirate material just as well with a rate limiter, it just takes longer. And a white list impinges too much on basic functionality unless you add everything in the world to it, but if you do then it isn't doing what you want it to -- it isn't my job to run the censorship board.
Let me turn it into a car analogy
This is just going in circles. If someone commits a crime, that person should not be punished, not arbitrary people they've come into contact with. Moreover, a car is a violent implement, unlike an internet connection. You don't need a license to use the internet. And you don't arrest the guy who sells bolt cutters to the general public when someone uses one to commit a crime, even if they accept cash and have no video cameras or customer names.
Again the city example is crooked because the city doesn't even own the streets, it's public property.
That still isn't helping you. You don't go after a landlord when a tenant is a criminal.
I obviously didn't mean that there are literally zero people who pay it. What I'm saying is that the law is completely unenforceable at scale and for that reason is widely disregarded. Such laws should not exist because they promote that exact widespread lawlessness and disrespect for the rule of law, and I think in that regard we agree.
It's just that my solution is to repeal it and your solution is to find a way to enforce it, but it seems that your entire argument is that we need to find an enforcement mechanism because people are in violation. And it just doesn't follow. Repealing the use tax would be more effective at reducing lawlessness, if that is your concern, and would be preferable as a policy matter in any event because it would prevent the taxation of entities that exist outside of the jurisdiction, which have no vote in the matter and which do not receive the large bulk of the benefits the taxes pay for.
And if that means, for the sake of fairness, repealing the sales tax as well, then what is wrong with that? Sales tax is regressive, expensive to collect, results in inconvenience when paying in cash because the numbers never come out clean, etc. Just raise the income tax or the property tax or cut some spending to compensate and be done with it.
Right, because identity theft is completely impossible and no one has ever done it before. Especially not a criminal who knows they're going to commit a criminal act and wants to hide their identity.
Not running out of IPv4 space.. not logic.. but the ability to identify traffic as coming from a specific computer vice "it came from that network". (yes I know there is IPv6 NAT.. but we are talking about the masses).
I suspect you're going to be disappointed there, because an IPv6 address doesn't actually identify anything either. The only reason that you can even connect an IPv4 address to an account holder is that the ISP keeps records and people have been willing to assume that those records are accurate. With IPv6, the ISP will allocate a block of address to each account holder and the account holder will use them for their devices. The ISP won't have any idea which address allocated to the account holder was used for which device, and the address assigned to each device may change arbitrarily according to the whim of the account holder, who is not likely to keep any records and whose records naturally could not be trusted in any event.
I have a dog, the purpose of which is naturally to scare off criminals who might use my wifi. The dog, however, has encountered some difficulty in discriminating between criminals using my wifi for criminal purposes and perfectly honest people who are merely checking their email and the like, in much the same way as the police can't always tell whether the guy who goes into a shop with cash and walks out with a brown paper back is buying drugs or a sandwich, so the dog is not 100% effective.
Unless your point is that people should not allow honest members of the public to use their wifi, in which case I will respond that the state should stop allowing honest members of the public to use their streets, since there could be drug dealers etc.
So then the solution is easy: You eliminate the sales tax and then nobody has to collect it.
Doing it the other way just reverses the inequity: Amazon has to collect sales tax which goes to fund local subsidies and services for their competitors. You make the state collect their revenue from income and property tax and only the companies who benefit from the tax money have to pay it.
Give me a break. The only reason they passed the law requiring people to remit sales tax is so that people like you can say things like you say. They never actually expected anybody to do it and nobody ever has.
If you do not like the tax code work to change it, instead of just being a tax cheat.
Isn't that what Amazon was trying to do with their initiative to eliminate the online sales tax? Before California beat them into submission with some combination of threats and bribery?
The real problem for AMD is that they didn't expect Intel to turn it around so quickly with Conroe. They had an excellent design and they expected to continue extracting reasonable margins from it in order to fund Fusion development, but when Core 2 came around they lost that.
The thing is, Bulldozer is a great direction for them. It will not beat Intel's best at single-thread performance, but it isn't supposed to. What it's supposed to do is offer better performance per watt and per rack unit for common server workloads, which it very much does. And that gets them back into the server room with reasonable margins and keeps AMD alive to continue developing new products.
The real interesting thing is that I'm not sure Intel has a good way to respond to it. SB is designed to be the fastest processor for single threaded performance, and it does that. The trouble is that the server rack is where the high margins are and most of those people don't care about single thread performance, they care about the things that AMD has designed for. So Intel ends up with a bad choice: Choice one is that they can try to adapt SB to be more like Bulldozer, i.e. SMT with more execution units so that you can get nearly two cores worth of performance out of substantially less than two cores worth of silicon and power budget, with the consequent hit to single threaded performance. Or choice two is to continue developing SB on its existing goals for the desktop and for the relatively small number of non-threadable server applications and then dump a billion dollars into developing an entirely new processor to meet Bulldozer for the lucrative parallel server market.
Well what do you expect? That they would make a Bulldozer with no memory controller and a 100MHz bus so you can drop it into Socket 7 motherboards? The idea is that you can buy a motherboard, then a year or two later get the next generation processor and drop it in. After that it doesn't even make any sense -- the bottleneck stops being the CPU and becomes the fact that the older socket is using two channels of DDR2 instead of four channels of DDR3 etc., which is the whole reason that sockets change in the first place.
The reason for the pinless chips is obviously to reduce returns. With a chip with 1000+ pins, it's easy for one to get bent during transit and then you have customers returning them. On top of that, they pretty much have to use gold conductors for the pins, and have you seen the price of gold lately?
You put the pins on the motherboard and you shift the liability and cost to the motherboard manufacturer. And since Intel designs the socket, that's what they did.
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On top of that you get the support for Windows apps, which is a huge deal.
Even if Windows 8 runs on ARM processors, none of the apps will, so it doesn't seem like much of an advantage.
Yes, that's true. There is no possible way to make Linux support networks without a text editor. Certainly not by plugging a network cable into a network interface and then the network is configured automatically by DHCP, exactly as it works on every other operating system.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
Yes and no. Obviously they'll continue to collect the usual tithe for each new PC sold by most major OEMs, but if that's all they've got going for them then they're right on schedule for a slow decline into irrelevance.
Microsoft has to keep their customers on the upgrade treadmill, even if they're still getting paid for selling the old version, because they have to keep their platform a moving target. How are they supposed to keep Linux from running all recent games if half the gamers are still using Windows XP and in consequence some game developers continue to release games compatible with its older version of DirectX, which has better support on Linux than later versions? How are they supposed to make OpenOffice and LibreOffice users feel like they're in an alien environment if people keep using Office 2003 instead of 2007/2010? How are people supposed to stay locked into Windows on the desktop if they have iOS or Android on their phones and developers are making apps for mobile devices that once ran on desktops?
That's debatable. 10 Mbps is plenty for current home uses
Sure, if everything you could possibly ever think of to do as a home user involves streaming some kind of media from a website. But what if I want to download something?
Exactly. On top of that, there are a large number of perfectly sensible reasons why ISPs should be installing gigabit networks today:
Even if 1Gpbs is not materially more useful today than e.g. 100Mbps, we don't actually have 100Mbps connections. And any 100+ connection is materially more useful today than the existing 10-20Mbps connections. So if you already have to roll a truck to do an upgrade you might as well not half ass it, because you can save money in the long run by making it all that much longer before you have to do it again.
On top of that, even if nobody actually needs a 1Gbps connection right now, if you can offer one and your competitors can only offer 50Mbps then you capture a big marketing advantage. "20 times faster than Verizon FIOS" etc. It also puts you in a stronger position for the next black swan event. If somebody invents a cheap holodeck and it turns out to require 150Mbps per person to interact with others over the internet, you can cash in immediately while your competitor has to run around frantically upgrading their equipment while they hemorrhage customers to you.
No. This does impose a cost, but the cost is the same for all companies in the market, so it doesn't disadvantage the small company (well, possibly there are economies of scale in favor of the larger company but that's not necessarily true and, in any case, those economies of scale apply to lots of things that have nothing to do with regulation).
Yes, but regulatory compliance costs add to the stack. Large companies tend to be inefficient and bureaucratic, in large part because economies of scale allow them to do so for the sake of stability and risk-avoidance without necessarily losing their competitiveness. But when a large company is too inefficient, it provides an opportunity for a smaller company to make up for their own lack of economies of scale by operating with greater efficiency and less bureaucracy.
The more regulatory compliance costs there are, the more inefficient and bureaucratic the large companies can be before a smaller company can out-compete them based on greater efficiency, because the larger entity gains the same sort of economies of scale in regulatory compliance as it does for anything else. Which is that much more disadvantage that the smaller company has to overcome.
In any case, the cost is really small. Documenting non-discrimination is basically documenting how the company came up with the rate. If they don't already document that, then they aren't going to survive long.
This assuming that documenting it for internal purposes is sufficient for the government. And the trouble is that even to answer the question of whether it is, you have to pay a lawyer $500/hr for some number of hours and then you have to go around and train all your staff and make sure they're doing what the lawyer said. Essentially, it requires you to implement a certain amount of bureaucracy, which the larger entity probably already does, but which the smaller entity might have been willing to risk going without in order to keep their heads above water -- and then the government comes in and imposes it on both, which at the margin will drive the smaller entity out of business.
So look at anti-discrimination regulations. Insurance companies, for example, are not allowed to price based on race, even if their research shows that race is a predictor of life expectancy.
The thing I find ridiculous is the extent to which such regulations are self-defeating. If it is actually the case that race correlates with bad insurance risk, the reverse correlation will also be true: Bad insurance risk will correlate with race. So you say that they can't use race, but they can use credit rating, occupation, etc., which are also predictors of bad insurance risk but, since insurance risk correlates with race, are also predictors of race. So at the end of the day you end up with the same situation: People of different races pay different insurance rates.
The thing most people do not understand is that all government regulation stifles competition to one degree or another, even regulations whose purpose is to encourage competition.
The flaw in your logic is that you've turned a reasonable heuristic into an absolute rule. Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose there exists a regulation that says that if two companies want to merge and the combined entity will have more than 5000 employees and more than $50,000,000 in annual revenue, it has to undergo review by the FTC. This regulation has literally zero impact on small companies, because it doesn't apply to them whatsoever.
Furthermore, the valid criticism that large corporations have an undue influence on the regulations implemented does not lead to the conclusion that there should be no regulation of large corporations. It should lead to measures to reduce the influence of large corporations on regulations. Your alternative would be like saying that laws should not be enforced against government officials because they have greater influence over what laws get passed than other citizens -- just because the premise is true doesn't make the conclusion any less ridiculous, because the logic is flawed. Greater influence than is desirable is not the same thing as complete control, and to the extent that normal citizens can cause sensible regulations to be enacted, they should.
Why are you fixated on what the bulk of consumers who are not a part of this discussion will do? What I mean by calling their bluff is to preserve the status quo until they are willing to give up and do the right thing by repealing the use tax. It has nothing to do with civil disobedience -- the people who are not paying their use tax are not the ones who are most affected by the state's posturing, they are merely useful idiots who can be counted on to do what they have always done.
Let's try it again and see if I can do any better this time: Suppose I operate a retailer in a state with a lower sales tax than a neighboring state. In consequence of the lower sales tax, I either end up paying higher non-sales taxes (e.g. property, income) in order to receive the same level of government services, or I receive fewer government services and subsidies and have to pay more out of pocket for e.g. my employees' healthcare. The higher taxes or costs get built into the price of my products.
This is fine and good so long as when I sell my products to customers from the neighboring state, they don't have to pay the higher sales tax of their home state, whether de jure or de facto, because it leaves me competitive with that state's retailers who have lower taxes/costs but then have to add the sales tax to the price of their goods.
Naturally the populous states with the largest customer bases would rather that as many of the retailers in other states as possible close up shop in the other states and move to their state, where they will pay local income and property tax and employ local people etc. They want to create as much of an unfair advantage for their local retailers as possible. Fortunately the federal constitution pretty much says they aren't allowed to do that, but they still want to.
So what they've done is manufacture a crisis: They pass a use tax which is in reality a tariff on interstate commerce but is structured in such a way that it avoids the constitutional prohibition at the cost (which they know full-well) that in practice they can't collect it, then they scream bloody murder because they can't collect it. And naturally the only "acceptable" solution to the manufactured crisis is for the out-of-state retailers to collect a tariff on interstate commerce that isn't supposed to exist, which creates an unfair advantage for local retailers. Basically, they're counting on your indignation over people not paying the use tax to induce the "something must be done" response in the population, and then trying to convince everyone that the only thing that can be done is the one thing they want.
So I say, don't be indignant. If they want to manufacture a crisis, let there be a crisis. When it gets bad enough (and all of the local retailers in populous states flee for states that can sell competitively to "tax cheats" in populous states), they'll back down and level the interstate playing field by removing the sales tax on everybody.
Success is one thing. The trouble is when it leads to a lack of competition because the companies in an industry are each so large that only a small number of companies produce the products consumed by all customers, and with so few competitors it becomes trivial for them to engage in "conscious parallelism" if not outright forming a cartel.
Boeing makes planes*, it takes hundreds of people to build a plane. How do you split that up?
I suspect in much the same way that they make them right now. In pieces. Some companies make landing gear, some companies make navigation systems, some companies design the planes, some companies do final assembly, etc.
Whether it is the solution or not, it is the inherent consequence of the existing law.
The trouble is that the ideal solution (removing the use tax) is not politically viable. The state politicians passed the use tax in order to claim that mail order retailers (and now Amazon) are helping tax cheats and in so doing they advance their policy goal of imposing taxes on out-of-state businesses and using the money to subsidize in-state businesses. The same state politicians would have to repeal it, and it is still serving their purposes. They could do so with minimal impact over the status quo to the state's coffers, since hardly anybody is paying it anyway, but naturally they will refuse because they instead want their preferred alternative of taxing the out-of-state retailers.
So given the three choices, having no use tax, having one but without the possibility of enforcement, or imposing it on out-of-state retailers, they refuse the first with the hope that all will agree that the second is untenable and accept the third. They put right-minded people in the position of having to call their bluff, refuse the third and accept the second until they reinstate the first. It is hardly ideal but it is preferable to the alternative.
And possibly even win on that accusation, combined with an accusation of failure to log or retain DHCP leases.
What would even that get you? You would then have the MAC address -- does that help if it was some random passerby and you still have no clue who owns that computer?
Copyright owner trade associations might argue that you've made it your job to run the censorship board by opening your AP to the public.
Copyright owner trade associations might argue that someone who has committed copyright infringement should pay to the tune of one trillion dollars, or that people should be kicked off the internet for downloading music, or that you need a license to play a CD that you bought on your computer because the computer copies it while playing it. And these are not even exaggerations. Copyright owner trade associations are completely out of touch with reality.
Not yet, but see previous stories about Microsoft's strategy VP Craig Mundie and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke sincerely floating the idea of "Internet driver's licenses".
These people have done nothing but demonstrate that they are fools. The internet is a right, not a privilege. It is replacing all of its predecessor communications media, and the day is not far when it supplants them entirely and the other media cease to exist in any significant way. Consider how ridiculous it sounds to propose licensing printing presses or punishing someone by refusing to deliver their mail. It would never pass constitutional scrutiny, it would never be enforceable in practice anyway, and even if it somehow was it remains nothing but the morally bankrupt refuge of desperate dinosaurs longing for a police state.
The point here is "reasonable precautions", eg. logging, site whitelisting or even just limiting available bandwidth.
How does any of that help? You have a log that says an unknown device you haven't turned over is the one that downloaded the thing; they'll just accuse you of not turning it over. Someone can pirate material just as well with a rate limiter, it just takes longer. And a white list impinges too much on basic functionality unless you add everything in the world to it, but if you do then it isn't doing what you want it to -- it isn't my job to run the censorship board.
Let me turn it into a car analogy
This is just going in circles. If someone commits a crime, that person should not be punished, not arbitrary people they've come into contact with. Moreover, a car is a violent implement, unlike an internet connection. You don't need a license to use the internet. And you don't arrest the guy who sells bolt cutters to the general public when someone uses one to commit a crime, even if they accept cash and have no video cameras or customer names.
Again the city example is crooked because the city doesn't even own the streets, it's public property.
That still isn't helping you. You don't go after a landlord when a tenant is a criminal.
I obviously didn't mean that there are literally zero people who pay it. What I'm saying is that the law is completely unenforceable at scale and for that reason is widely disregarded. Such laws should not exist because they promote that exact widespread lawlessness and disrespect for the rule of law, and I think in that regard we agree.
It's just that my solution is to repeal it and your solution is to find a way to enforce it, but it seems that your entire argument is that we need to find an enforcement mechanism because people are in violation. And it just doesn't follow. Repealing the use tax would be more effective at reducing lawlessness, if that is your concern, and would be preferable as a policy matter in any event because it would prevent the taxation of entities that exist outside of the jurisdiction, which have no vote in the matter and which do not receive the large bulk of the benefits the taxes pay for.
And if that means, for the sake of fairness, repealing the sales tax as well, then what is wrong with that? Sales tax is regressive, expensive to collect, results in inconvenience when paying in cash because the numbers never come out clean, etc. Just raise the income tax or the property tax or cut some spending to compensate and be done with it.
Right, because identity theft is completely impossible and no one has ever done it before. Especially not a criminal who knows they're going to commit a criminal act and wants to hide their identity.
Not running out of IPv4 space.. not logic.. but the ability to identify traffic as coming from a specific computer vice "it came from that network". (yes I know there is IPv6 NAT.. but we are talking about the masses).
I suspect you're going to be disappointed there, because an IPv6 address doesn't actually identify anything either. The only reason that you can even connect an IPv4 address to an account holder is that the ISP keeps records and people have been willing to assume that those records are accurate. With IPv6, the ISP will allocate a block of address to each account holder and the account holder will use them for their devices. The ISP won't have any idea which address allocated to the account holder was used for which device, and the address assigned to each device may change arbitrarily according to the whim of the account holder, who is not likely to keep any records and whose records naturally could not be trusted in any event.
I have a dog, the purpose of which is naturally to scare off criminals who might use my wifi. The dog, however, has encountered some difficulty in discriminating between criminals using my wifi for criminal purposes and perfectly honest people who are merely checking their email and the like, in much the same way as the police can't always tell whether the guy who goes into a shop with cash and walks out with a brown paper back is buying drugs or a sandwich, so the dog is not 100% effective.
Unless your point is that people should not allow honest members of the public to use their wifi, in which case I will respond that the state should stop allowing honest members of the public to use their streets, since there could be drug dealers etc.
So then the solution is easy: You eliminate the sales tax and then nobody has to collect it.
Doing it the other way just reverses the inequity: Amazon has to collect sales tax which goes to fund local subsidies and services for their competitors. You make the state collect their revenue from income and property tax and only the companies who benefit from the tax money have to pay it.
Amazon's shipping company is in the state.
Unlike Sears?
Give me a break. The only reason they passed the law requiring people to remit sales tax is so that people like you can say things like you say. They never actually expected anybody to do it and nobody ever has.
If you do not like the tax code work to change it, instead of just being a tax cheat.
Isn't that what Amazon was trying to do with their initiative to eliminate the online sales tax? Before California beat them into submission with some combination of threats and bribery?
The real problem for AMD is that they didn't expect Intel to turn it around so quickly with Conroe. They had an excellent design and they expected to continue extracting reasonable margins from it in order to fund Fusion development, but when Core 2 came around they lost that.
The thing is, Bulldozer is a great direction for them. It will not beat Intel's best at single-thread performance, but it isn't supposed to. What it's supposed to do is offer better performance per watt and per rack unit for common server workloads, which it very much does. And that gets them back into the server room with reasonable margins and keeps AMD alive to continue developing new products.
The real interesting thing is that I'm not sure Intel has a good way to respond to it. SB is designed to be the fastest processor for single threaded performance, and it does that. The trouble is that the server rack is where the high margins are and most of those people don't care about single thread performance, they care about the things that AMD has designed for. So Intel ends up with a bad choice: Choice one is that they can try to adapt SB to be more like Bulldozer, i.e. SMT with more execution units so that you can get nearly two cores worth of performance out of substantially less than two cores worth of silicon and power budget, with the consequent hit to single threaded performance. Or choice two is to continue developing SB on its existing goals for the desktop and for the relatively small number of non-threadable server applications and then dump a billion dollars into developing an entirely new processor to meet Bulldozer for the lucrative parallel server market.
Well what do you expect? That they would make a Bulldozer with no memory controller and a 100MHz bus so you can drop it into Socket 7 motherboards? The idea is that you can buy a motherboard, then a year or two later get the next generation processor and drop it in. After that it doesn't even make any sense -- the bottleneck stops being the CPU and becomes the fact that the older socket is using two channels of DDR2 instead of four channels of DDR3 etc., which is the whole reason that sockets change in the first place.
The reason for the pinless chips is obviously to reduce returns. With a chip with 1000+ pins, it's easy for one to get bent during transit and then you have customers returning them. On top of that, they pretty much have to use gold conductors for the pins, and have you seen the price of gold lately?
You put the pins on the motherboard and you shift the liability and cost to the motherboard manufacturer. And since Intel designs the socket, that's what they did.