US courts may find infringement but this is a sovereign government. It isn't like suing a company or an individual. They can just say "oh well nice court ruling but we don't accept it". For the most part there is nothing you can do about that. In this case you can't even bring it to the WTO, which is what they'd normally do, because this is a WTO sanctioned action. The US could freeze any assets they hold in US banks. Even then they generally only prevent access to the assets of sovereign nations. It is very rare for them to actually seize those assets.
My guess here is that this is a negotiating tactic. They have been tied up in negotiations with the US that haven't moved an inch in years. This is an attempt to force the US to either make a serious offer of restitution or allow them access. From the last article I believe it said that Antigua was losing hundreds of millions a year because of the US action. I found a listing online that said Antigua's GDP was something like 1.10 billion in 2010. So we are talking about a major chunk of their entire economy being harmed. This doesn't even come close to making up for that. The goal here is to make it so that US companies share the pain and complain to congress. My guess is if this goes live it won't just be the RIAA, MPAA etc complaining. Apple, Amazon and the other online retailers are not going to like having something like this undercutting them.
As far as how many movies we are talking about it hard to say without being a lawyer and having access to the entire ruling. My guess is that the $21 million is either defined in some unpublished formula in the ruling or that it means profits. If it means profits Antigua could put a real hurt on the US entertainment industry. For example they could charge based on cost recover, no profits at all, and just pump out vast amounts of stuff.
Nobody in their right mind is going to sit around shooting at helicopters, tanks or any other armored vehicle with small arms. If there were some sort of guerrilla action going on you'd do what they do in every other guerrilla war which is get under cover, disperse and evade. The whole point of Asymmetrical warfare is that is that you avoid the other sides primary strength and hit them where they are either weak or unprepared. When the Taliban or other guerrilla army gets into a stand up fight with a professional army it usually means somebody has made a terrible mistake. Because in a stand up fight professional soldiers with real military equipment will win 99 out a 100 times. Guerrilla actions win by disrupting supply lines, by forcing their enemy to expend ever more resources to protect against them, and by making their enemy take every more sever measures that negatively impact the public. Because at the end of the day they can't win militarily vs. a professional army. What they can do is make the conflict so painful for the powers that be and the public that somebody cracks. Either the government decides that it can't win and looks for an accommodation of some sort or the public turns on the government. Most of the time guerrilla forces are looking for a political victory rather than a purely military one.
China only likes NK as they don't want to deal with them falling and having to deal with all people coming over the boarder.
I have read a number of times that all of the surrounding governments are terrified that North Korea will collapse. Basically they are all concerned about having to deal with 24 million starving North Koreans.
You are projecting American thinking on to the Chinese. They don't want to grab land from Russia, and they don't fear imminent attack from Japan (whose constitution forbids them from doing it anyway). What they care about is protecting themselves both militarily and economically, and which the US takes as a threat to itself.
His information on China wanting to grab land from Russia isn't wrong, it is just outdated. They did in fact want to grab land from Russia. China had a long running border dispute with Russia. They actually came to blows over it in the 1960s. The dispute was only settled in 2004 when Russia gave them what they wanted in exchange for closer economic ties and an easing of tensions. So at this time I don't think there going to be any problem there.
China's military spending is far beyond what is required to merely "protect themselves". They are actively building a navy along the lines of what the US has. Which is only necessary if you want to be able to project power to distant places. Now they may have very good reasons to do that. Like the US they have a far flung trade network with their nationals living and working in almost every country. So I suspect that many of the underlying motivations are exactly the same as those of the US. In that if you need to protect such a trade system you have to be able to get there.
Where we get into trouble is there is a bit of a difference in tone and style. They are actively threatening their neighbors which any, even cursory, reading of the regional press will show you. The response to that is that Vietnam has started building up its military. In Japan almost every major party is now talking about "amending" article 9 of the Japanese constitution to allow a more aggressive stance. In fact it featured prominently in the new prime ministers acceptance speech. So so whatever their intentions maybe the current result of China's military build up and aggressive territorial demands is to drive their neighbors to take a more aggressive stance themselves. Japan's military isn't incapable. It has both modern weapons and reasonable numbers. What they don't have is any mechanisms for projecting power. They could make life real hard for anybody near Japan but they just aren't capable of actually taking the war to the enemy. That is entirely due to the restrictions they have put on themselves as part of Article 9. With the current rhetoric that may well start to change. If it does China will be in part responsible. The other major motivator being North Korea.
Apparently, at least in this case, you have absolutely nothing against vice, as long as the resulting profit goes to US companies.
His point is that US is broken up into a lot of jurisdictions with their own laws. So it isn't quite as simple as gambling in the is legal but Antigua is being blocked to preserve US profits. In fairly large parts of the US gambling is actually illegal. So the US Government's beef is that online gambling sites pretty much defeat these local laws by making gambling available anywhere. You would think there would be a way to address the WTO objections by making it so that Antigua's gambling sites could operate anywhere in the US where gambling is actually legal. Anyway such a mechanism should allow Antigua a fair chance at the market while letting states have their laws. It would seem there should be some reasonable accommodation possible here. So far the US side isn't budging on making that accomodation so Antigua is playing the card of threatening US copyrights. Which is the only card the WTO handed them.
I think the difference here is that their gambling business needs direct access to the US consumer to work. This warez site has a broader appeal in that many people in countries other than the US watch movies. Especially since their WTO ruling only lets them sell $21 million a year in this stuff. We aren't talking all that much. Heck my guess is they could consume most of that just with domestic consumption. So essentially the WTO is saying "oh well too bad about the US screwing up your economy like that. Here you can have all the free movies, music and television you can stand".
Must be nice. Here the power company is a monopoly. The phone company is a duopoly, Verizon and Comcast in my case. If they have a service outage about the most they will do for you is say "we are aware of the problem and will fix it as soon as possible". My personally suspicion is that they are actually sitting there reveling in their power to torment you. Frankly I am surprised that they haven't implemented a bidding system to see whose power / phone gets turned back on first, or at all.
"The system" has been built bit by bit by those "sane and normal" American. You live in republic not dictatorship, remember? You can either have that warm feeling of superiority over you "land of free" OR you can pretend that "the system" is something you have no responsibility for. So next time you read about teen hounded to death by "the system", remember: it is also YOUR fault.
The citizens are responsible for the system. I see two real problems. One is we have an electorate where a major percentage of the people cannot tell you anything much about how the system works. They can't tell you anything useful about the bill of rights or the constitution. Everyone knows about the first amendment and maybe the 2nd but ask them about the others and few can tell you anything. They certainly have no understanding of the issues currently being debated beyond whatever 30 second news byte they have seen. There is a sizable portion of the electorate who votes on things like who is most attractive, who has the best hair, who went on their favorite talk show or who makes the biggest claims about whatever pet cause they have. The end result of all of this is that the political system has effectively been on auto pilot for decades.
The other problem we have is that congress, in large part because the system has been on autopilot, has gotten really lazy and corrupt. A lot of the abuses we see are because of the run away power of administrative agencies. It used to be that congress passed actual laws that said in some detail what was to happen. Now they pass vague laws that say things like "administrative agency X will write regulations to achieve result Y". Where those regulations have the force of the law under which they were written. So a huge percentage of the "laws" that exist in this country are actually administrative regulations. In all probability most members of congress probably could not tell you what actual regulations came out of any given law that they passed. So in effect the vast majority of "laws" that we live under aren't laws at all they are regulations developed by a whole host of agencies that are, at best, minimally supervised by congress.
Where all of this becomes a problem is that the people at the agencies aren't elected. They don't really change, other than the appointed heads, after elections. Other than the budget process congress has very little ability to even impact what these people do. The end result is an ever more powerful bureaucracy. A Bureaucracy which is so vast, so powerful and so entrenched that even the President, who is supposed to control it, can't really tell what it is doing most of the time. Congress, having outsourced most of their job, is free to engage in the kind of shenanigans we have come to expect from them.
I don't know how we fix this. At this point the problem is so vast it maybe beyond fixing. I hope not because it is an ill omen for all of us if that is true. It would help a lot if the various administrative regulations had to be voted on by congress before they could go into effect. Unfortunately I have no idea how we would force them to do that. They certainly aren't going to volunteer since as it stands now they are relieved of all manner of drudgery involved with actually doing their jobs. My only suggestion is encouraging people to actually learn about the system. Learn about the hows and whys of how it is setup and operates. Learn about this history. An informed electorate is our only real hope. Sadly the electorate is going the other way fast.
Does anyone ever do an analysis of the costs of doing a cost analysis?
This is modded funny but we, in the US, should really be asking this question. Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is so unwieldy and requires so much man power and bureaucracy that I would not be at all surprised to find that it sometimes doubles the cost of things the US government buys.
You also have to consider, (trying not to sound too Luddite in the process), that replacing a human in a paying job with a robot is scarcely better than off-shoring the job.
While I see your point about the impact on the people losing their jobs. There is a big difference between outsourcing and automation. Even if the factory is totally automated it would still be better for us to have the factory here than to outsource it. If it stays here they pay property taxes on the factory and the equipment. They pay income taxes on their profits. Indirectly the local community still benefits even though there are no workers in the factory.
If the factory goes abroad it still pays those property taxes only now they benefit a community in some other country. The income is typically held in foreign subsidiaries and only rarely repatriated to the home country. So even in a hypothetical factory that employed nobody, which isn't possible with today's technology, it would still be substantially more beneficial to keep that factory here rather than have it abroad.
The reality of the world is that manufacturing jobs are going to become ever more scarce. Even as the world makes mores stuff. Long term cheap labor can't compete with automation. Even China is moving to industrial automation in a major way. That situation is only going to get worse. The industrial robots are becoming cheaper and more capable everyday. The days of rooms full of people standing around assembling things are numbered. I don't see any real alternative to that. Companies that don't follow that trend will end up being put out of business by those that do. Countries that adopt policies to try and prevent it are taking a real risk of making their entire manufacturing sector unable to compete. While I understand why it upsets people, frankly I am not too thrilled myself, the truth is that complaining about it is like complaining about the rain. You can do it but it won't stop raining. Our time would be better spent figuring out other ways to put people to productive use.
Personally I think something along these lines is perfectly reasonable. Also lets not forget that just because something goes out of copyright doesn't mean that the original author, or his heirs, can't continue to exploit it. They just can't exclusively exploit it. So somebody else could come along and say do a reprint or something. Doesn't mean the original creator couldn't also come along and re-release it. Though it may require him put in some sort of value add to compete vs. other people publishing the same work. Something like additional material, background material or something to set his version apart.
The real problem is that there are many rights holders, among them many very rich people and corporations, who have literally billions of dollars a year at stake in the current system. These people will fight to the death to keep their gravy train running. Most elected officials realize this. They realize that if they pander to these people they can get a lot of money. If they challenge them they can crushed when they spend vast sums supporting their opponent in the next election. Under circumstances like that the general welfare just becomes secondary to the political survival of the politician. I just don't see a reasonable way to change this.
The problem is, you can't vote against someone. You have to vote for someone. For your vote to be meaningful, there has to be someone worth voting for. Those people are culled before they get in a position to be included on a ballot.
This is a huge problem in my view. A big part of it is because so few people vote in the primaries. To few American's realize that we have a two vote system in this country. First there is the primary which is where the parties really decide who will run and what their platforms will be and then there is the general election. If we really want to change politics in the US we should seriously think about getting organized for primary elections. One thing both Moveon.org and the Teaparty have shown is that a motivated core of people can bring down even powerful politicians by beating them in the much smaller, and thus easier to influence, primary elections. Potentially if we got organized enough we could drive some of these people out of office with a few thousand votes. As it stands now basically the real decisions have mostly been made before the vast majority of people ever even hear who is running.
That is true. Though the prices where coming down fast. In 73 my parents bought a Montgomery ward branded version of a Texas Instruments calculator for my brother to take to college. Cost them a bit more than $100, which was something like $50 less than the actual TI version. By 77-78 they got me a similar calculator for about $25. Very few people carried them around though because they were fairly bulky compared to the ones you'd get a few years later.
Yeah let's fire the IT guy who suggested all data to be encrypted and not the managers who overruled the IT guy because encryption is annoying.
That pretty much jives with my experience. I had an experience where I warned my management over and over about a single point of failure in our customer supporting infrastructure. They didn't want to hear it. Didn't want to fix it. Didn't want to spend any money on it. Then one day it blew up. Cost the company a small fortune in blown SLA's. Of course their knee jerk reaction was to blame the IT person. The only reason I kept my job was by pulling out the documentation, which I purposely saved, of me telling my management about the problem and having everyone shoot me down over and over again. So the lesson is that if you tell them the truth they don't want to hear make sure you have a record of it. Make sure you have them refusing to listen to you documented in writing. I'd say it gives you a 50/50 chance of avoiding being the scape goat vs. being the automatic scape goat.
That was very true. My father was very good at doing the conversions in his head and got very annoyed when he realized that the metric stations where charging a huge premium over the non-metric ones. I also remember there being similar things done with milk. The end result was that my father would do the math and would do business in either as long as the price was right. My mother, who couldn't do the conversions in her head, simply refused to buy anything that was sold in a metric measure. Which is what millions of Americans did. That reaction is a big part of what defeated the conversion to metric in the US the last time it was tried.
Which is why I believe that the only way we will get this to work, and prevent this sort of abuse, is to require dual marking. So that there is no ability to pull stuff like that on people who aren't used to the new measures because whichever one you use the price is the same.
If we ever want the US to go to the metric system we have to realize a couple of things. The first is that it can't be the chaotic mess it was the last time they tried back in the 70's. It was poorly planned and executed and failed horribly. Realistically it set the effort back at least 30 years. The second is that the US is a large country changing is going to cost a fortune. I wouldn't be surprised if we aren't talking billions of dollars worth of road signs alone. I suspect that just about the only hope of getting this country to change is to spend the next few decades preparing for it. Doing things like having a mandate that after X date all new signs, gas pumps, scales etc must have both metric and Imperial measures displayed on them. So that the infrastructure can be put into place without bankrupting the country. It will also get people used to seeing the metric equivalent next to the imperial measures they are used to. So that people will realize, for example, that 1 gallon is roughly 3.78 liters without thinking about it. Because they have seen both values on the gas pump for the last 20 years. Then after people are used to it you just start dropping the Imperial measures from things. I just don't see a fast way to transition that dose not cost vast sums of money or result in chaos and confusion. You have, at least, a couple of hundred million people who are ingrained with the imperial system. You are going to have to ease them into the metric system.
I have been avoiding Sony products for at least the last ten years. They are just to prone to putting some poison pill into their stuff that benefits them and screws their customers. Filing patents like this just convinces me that I have been correct in doing so.
The only question is whether you die in the blast, or die watching other humans abandon every single thing you consider to be their humanity as the survivors murder kids, the sick, and everyone who is weaker than them for a can of beans. When the can goods are gone, they'll start eating each other. Then they'll die themselves in their own filth.
Possibly, though there are tons of things that will kill off much of society that won't involve any of that. Where people who prepared, and many who didn't, will simply come out afterwards and go on with their lives. Odds are the people who prepared will come out of in better shape than those who didn't.
I didn't see anything in that about having things like stocks of seeds to start farming, arms for defense / hunting, or any type of survival training of the occupants. The folks buying these bunkers are actually counting on society basically surviving. So realistically what they are planning for isn't the destruction of the world so much as some sort of major disruption of society. After which they will be able to come back out and find things restored by the folks who didn't go hide out. In essence they are counting on the rest of us to save civilization for them. Which if that is your thing go for it.
The will to survive is strong in people. There are a lot of "apocalyptic" scenarios that don't give you such a clean death. For example what if the crisis is in the form of a new plague that rips through the population like the black death. Under such a scenario people in an isolated facility like that may well actually survive into a world that isn't that much different, other than far fewer people and a harder life, than what they left. The really bad scenarios; such as a full out nuclear war, killer asteroid, or massive solar flare, will probably kill them as well. Whatever form it takes, no matter how hopeless the situation, there will be a lot of people who will try to survive. If that is your bent then being the most prepared guy can't hurt.
The business is basically buying up old government shelters for cheap, put some furniture in and then sell it for 100 times more. However much would this guy like to portray himself as a modern-day Noah, he is just a smart businessman preying on people's fears.
I don't have a problem with him "preying" on people's fears as long as he is really providing them what he claims. My fear with any bunker that stays locked up for decades after you buy it is who is maintaining this thing? How do you know that the food hasn't spoiled or wasn't simply removed as soon as they sold it out? After all the thing requires two of the residents to come open it up in order to see what is in there. For that matter how do you know that a couple of your co-residents haven't opened up and cleaned the place out? Anyway if he provides what he advertises then more power to him. People are free to buy or not buy and it isn't my place to tell them where to spend their money.
I really feel that an uprising would be very hypocritical.
> 50% of the population voted in a government
< 50% dislikes the government so they decided to take it down by force
= not very democratic.
It takes more than a majority vote to have legitimate government. Hypothetically speaking we have "Country A". In Country A lets say that the government has enough support to consistently win election. They then decide that they are going to strip the < 50% of their property, and possibly their lives, and put them into camps. From the point of view of your statement the < 50% who don't support the government would be wrong to rebel. Their are bounds that a government cannot go beyond and still remain a legitimate government no matter how many people vote for them.
We are seeing a lot of regimes right now that have the popular support to win elections but who then treat minorities or opponents as, at best, second class citizens. In my view the only difference between those governments and some place like China is that they are confident enough in their popularity to put it to a vote. On the other hand you have to question how honest the votes are when the opposition is treated in such a way. Russia comes to mind but there are several other countries in that position.
No we can't really fight the government and win. But we have the option to do so, if we so choose. It would be going down in a blaze of glory. We would probably be utterly annihilated. But maybe not. I know a lot of soldiers. They wouldn't fire on the American people.
I agree that the citizenry can't stand up against the US military in a stand up fight and win. On the other hand if enough citizens ever got pissed off enough at the government they could make this country ungovernable. Basically if the government ever did something that was so objectionable to a large enough portion of the population they could inflict a lot of pain. Ideally enough pain that the government might step back and reconsider whether they really wanted to do whatever it was pissed off the public. The 2nd Amendment is designed to preserve that ability.
The other thing to consider is that people said this could never happen in Syria either. After all Assad had a large reasonably well trained and decently equipped military. At the start of this he was mopping the floor with the rebels. Now it looks dodgy for him. Most of the rebels are armed with small arms only a somewhat better than what the citizens of the US have. The lesson there is that if you piss off a large enough chunk of the population they are dangerous if they have nothing. Just because of their sheer numbers. If they have even rudimentary weapons they become extremely dangerous. Also if you have done something that makes the members of your own military decide you have lost your legitimacy they may well turn on you. Just as large chunks of the Syrian army have on Assad.
While I am not sympathetic to the fanatics at Westboro I think this will end up being counter productive. They are already a bunch of crazed fanatics. This sort of thing is likely to just feed into that. Right now they are loud, obnoxious, hateful and generally unpleasant to deal with. My fear with playing into their delusions is that they add violent to that list of unpleasant traits. Unfortunately that is the typical trend of these sorts of cults. I don't have an answer as to what you do with people like this that wouldn't destroy liberty for the rest of us. Could be that putting up with a bunch of fanatics is part of the price of freedom for the rest of us. At least until they add the trait of violent then it becomes an issue for the swat team.
So if he's not getting extradited, and there are no charges in the UK, is McKinnon a free man?
From what the article said as long as he stays in the UK his a free man. If he goes to any other country that the US has an extradition treaty with he could find himself on a plane to the US. So basically his punishment here is that he can basically never leave the UK again.
All good points and very doable. Understand that it will take you at least five years to do this.
I agree that the trade off is time vs. cost. Which considering the situation so many students are in with student debt now seems like a reasonable trade off.
Another thing you could do to reduce costs, at the expense of more time, is get an associates degree while you are at the community college. Then use that degree to get an entry level job at a company with an education assistance plan. You will be trading still more time for reduced expense. On the other hand when you get out of school you have some work experience on your resume, no (or very little debt), plus you have been paid, gotten health benefits, paid time off etc while you completed your degree. That is pretty much what I did. The plus is no debt the cost is it took me almost 10 years to complete my degree.
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US courts may find infringement but this is a sovereign government. It isn't like suing a company or an individual. They can just say "oh well nice court ruling but we don't accept it". For the most part there is nothing you can do about that. In this case you can't even bring it to the WTO, which is what they'd normally do, because this is a WTO sanctioned action. The US could freeze any assets they hold in US banks. Even then they generally only prevent access to the assets of sovereign nations. It is very rare for them to actually seize those assets.
My guess here is that this is a negotiating tactic. They have been tied up in negotiations with the US that haven't moved an inch in years. This is an attempt to force the US to either make a serious offer of restitution or allow them access. From the last article I believe it said that Antigua was losing hundreds of millions a year because of the US action. I found a listing online that said Antigua's GDP was something like 1.10 billion in 2010. So we are talking about a major chunk of their entire economy being harmed. This doesn't even come close to making up for that. The goal here is to make it so that US companies share the pain and complain to congress. My guess is if this goes live it won't just be the RIAA, MPAA etc complaining. Apple, Amazon and the other online retailers are not going to like having something like this undercutting them.
As far as how many movies we are talking about it hard to say without being a lawyer and having access to the entire ruling. My guess is that the $21 million is either defined in some unpublished formula in the ruling or that it means profits. If it means profits Antigua could put a real hurt on the US entertainment industry. For example they could charge based on cost recover, no profits at all, and just pump out vast amounts of stuff.
Nobody in their right mind is going to sit around shooting at helicopters, tanks or any other armored vehicle with small arms. If there were some sort of guerrilla action going on you'd do what they do in every other guerrilla war which is get under cover, disperse and evade. The whole point of Asymmetrical warfare is that is that you avoid the other sides primary strength and hit them where they are either weak or unprepared. When the Taliban or other guerrilla army gets into a stand up fight with a professional army it usually means somebody has made a terrible mistake. Because in a stand up fight professional soldiers with real military equipment will win 99 out a 100 times. Guerrilla actions win by disrupting supply lines, by forcing their enemy to expend ever more resources to protect against them, and by making their enemy take every more sever measures that negatively impact the public. Because at the end of the day they can't win militarily vs. a professional army. What they can do is make the conflict so painful for the powers that be and the public that somebody cracks. Either the government decides that it can't win and looks for an accommodation of some sort or the public turns on the government. Most of the time guerrilla forces are looking for a political victory rather than a purely military one.
China only likes NK as they don't want to deal with them falling and having to deal with all people coming over the boarder.
I have read a number of times that all of the surrounding governments are terrified that North Korea will collapse. Basically they are all concerned about having to deal with 24 million starving North Koreans.
You are projecting American thinking on to the Chinese. They don't want to grab land from Russia, and they don't fear imminent attack from Japan (whose constitution forbids them from doing it anyway). What they care about is protecting themselves both militarily and economically, and which the US takes as a threat to itself.
His information on China wanting to grab land from Russia isn't wrong, it is just outdated. They did in fact want to grab land from Russia. China had a long running border dispute with Russia. They actually came to blows over it in the 1960s. The dispute was only settled in 2004 when Russia gave them what they wanted in exchange for closer economic ties and an easing of tensions. So at this time I don't think there going to be any problem there.
China's military spending is far beyond what is required to merely "protect themselves". They are actively building a navy along the lines of what the US has. Which is only necessary if you want to be able to project power to distant places. Now they may have very good reasons to do that. Like the US they have a far flung trade network with their nationals living and working in almost every country. So I suspect that many of the underlying motivations are exactly the same as those of the US. In that if you need to protect such a trade system you have to be able to get there.
Where we get into trouble is there is a bit of a difference in tone and style. They are actively threatening their neighbors which any, even cursory, reading of the regional press will show you. The response to that is that Vietnam has started building up its military. In Japan almost every major party is now talking about "amending" article 9 of the Japanese constitution to allow a more aggressive stance. In fact it featured prominently in the new prime ministers acceptance speech. So so whatever their intentions maybe the current result of China's military build up and aggressive territorial demands is to drive their neighbors to take a more aggressive stance themselves. Japan's military isn't incapable. It has both modern weapons and reasonable numbers. What they don't have is any mechanisms for projecting power. They could make life real hard for anybody near Japan but they just aren't capable of actually taking the war to the enemy. That is entirely due to the restrictions they have put on themselves as part of Article 9. With the current rhetoric that may well start to change. If it does China will be in part responsible. The other major motivator being North Korea.
Apparently, at least in this case, you have absolutely nothing against vice, as long as the resulting profit goes to US companies.
His point is that US is broken up into a lot of jurisdictions with their own laws. So it isn't quite as simple as gambling in the is legal but Antigua is being blocked to preserve US profits. In fairly large parts of the US gambling is actually illegal. So the US Government's beef is that online gambling sites pretty much defeat these local laws by making gambling available anywhere. You would think there would be a way to address the WTO objections by making it so that Antigua's gambling sites could operate anywhere in the US where gambling is actually legal. Anyway such a mechanism should allow Antigua a fair chance at the market while letting states have their laws. It would seem there should be some reasonable accommodation possible here. So far the US side isn't budging on making that accomodation so Antigua is playing the card of threatening US copyrights. Which is the only card the WTO handed them.
I think the difference here is that their gambling business needs direct access to the US consumer to work. This warez site has a broader appeal in that many people in countries other than the US watch movies. Especially since their WTO ruling only lets them sell $21 million a year in this stuff. We aren't talking all that much. Heck my guess is they could consume most of that just with domestic consumption. So essentially the WTO is saying "oh well too bad about the US screwing up your economy like that. Here you can have all the free movies, music and television you can stand".
Must be nice. Here the power company is a monopoly. The phone company is a duopoly, Verizon and Comcast in my case. If they have a service outage about the most they will do for you is say "we are aware of the problem and will fix it as soon as possible". My personally suspicion is that they are actually sitting there reveling in their power to torment you. Frankly I am surprised that they haven't implemented a bidding system to see whose power / phone gets turned back on first, or at all.
"The system" has been built bit by bit by those "sane and normal" American. You live in republic not dictatorship, remember? You can either have that warm feeling of superiority over you "land of free" OR you can pretend that "the system" is something you have no responsibility for. So next time you read about teen hounded to death by "the system", remember: it is also YOUR fault.
The citizens are responsible for the system. I see two real problems. One is we have an electorate where a major percentage of the people cannot tell you anything much about how the system works. They can't tell you anything useful about the bill of rights or the constitution. Everyone knows about the first amendment and maybe the 2nd but ask them about the others and few can tell you anything. They certainly have no understanding of the issues currently being debated beyond whatever 30 second news byte they have seen. There is a sizable portion of the electorate who votes on things like who is most attractive, who has the best hair, who went on their favorite talk show or who makes the biggest claims about whatever pet cause they have. The end result of all of this is that the political system has effectively been on auto pilot for decades.
The other problem we have is that congress, in large part because the system has been on autopilot, has gotten really lazy and corrupt. A lot of the abuses we see are because of the run away power of administrative agencies. It used to be that congress passed actual laws that said in some detail what was to happen. Now they pass vague laws that say things like "administrative agency X will write regulations to achieve result Y". Where those regulations have the force of the law under which they were written. So a huge percentage of the "laws" that exist in this country are actually administrative regulations. In all probability most members of congress probably could not tell you what actual regulations came out of any given law that they passed. So in effect the vast majority of "laws" that we live under aren't laws at all they are regulations developed by a whole host of agencies that are, at best, minimally supervised by congress.
Where all of this becomes a problem is that the people at the agencies aren't elected. They don't really change, other than the appointed heads, after elections. Other than the budget process congress has very little ability to even impact what these people do. The end result is an ever more powerful bureaucracy. A Bureaucracy which is so vast, so powerful and so entrenched that even the President, who is supposed to control it, can't really tell what it is doing most of the time. Congress, having outsourced most of their job, is free to engage in the kind of shenanigans we have come to expect from them.
I don't know how we fix this. At this point the problem is so vast it maybe beyond fixing. I hope not because it is an ill omen for all of us if that is true. It would help a lot if the various administrative regulations had to be voted on by congress before they could go into effect. Unfortunately I have no idea how we would force them to do that. They certainly aren't going to volunteer since as it stands now they are relieved of all manner of drudgery involved with actually doing their jobs. My only suggestion is encouraging people to actually learn about the system. Learn about the hows and whys of how it is setup and operates. Learn about this history. An informed electorate is our only real hope. Sadly the electorate is going the other way fast.
Does anyone ever do an analysis of the costs of doing a cost analysis?
This is modded funny but we, in the US, should really be asking this question. Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is so unwieldy and requires so much man power and bureaucracy that I would not be at all surprised to find that it sometimes doubles the cost of things the US government buys.
You also have to consider, (trying not to sound too Luddite in the process), that replacing a human in a paying job with a robot is scarcely better than off-shoring the job.
While I see your point about the impact on the people losing their jobs. There is a big difference between outsourcing and automation. Even if the factory is totally automated it would still be better for us to have the factory here than to outsource it. If it stays here they pay property taxes on the factory and the equipment. They pay income taxes on their profits. Indirectly the local community still benefits even though there are no workers in the factory.
If the factory goes abroad it still pays those property taxes only now they benefit a community in some other country. The income is typically held in foreign subsidiaries and only rarely repatriated to the home country. So even in a hypothetical factory that employed nobody, which isn't possible with today's technology, it would still be substantially more beneficial to keep that factory here rather than have it abroad.
The reality of the world is that manufacturing jobs are going to become ever more scarce. Even as the world makes mores stuff. Long term cheap labor can't compete with automation. Even China is moving to industrial automation in a major way. That situation is only going to get worse. The industrial robots are becoming cheaper and more capable everyday. The days of rooms full of people standing around assembling things are numbered. I don't see any real alternative to that. Companies that don't follow that trend will end up being put out of business by those that do. Countries that adopt policies to try and prevent it are taking a real risk of making their entire manufacturing sector unable to compete. While I understand why it upsets people, frankly I am not too thrilled myself, the truth is that complaining about it is like complaining about the rain. You can do it but it won't stop raining. Our time would be better spent figuring out other ways to put people to productive use.
Personally I think something along these lines is perfectly reasonable. Also lets not forget that just because something goes out of copyright doesn't mean that the original author, or his heirs, can't continue to exploit it. They just can't exclusively exploit it. So somebody else could come along and say do a reprint or something. Doesn't mean the original creator couldn't also come along and re-release it. Though it may require him put in some sort of value add to compete vs. other people publishing the same work. Something like additional material, background material or something to set his version apart.
The real problem is that there are many rights holders, among them many very rich people and corporations, who have literally billions of dollars a year at stake in the current system. These people will fight to the death to keep their gravy train running. Most elected officials realize this. They realize that if they pander to these people they can get a lot of money. If they challenge them they can crushed when they spend vast sums supporting their opponent in the next election. Under circumstances like that the general welfare just becomes secondary to the political survival of the politician. I just don't see a reasonable way to change this.
The problem is, you can't vote against someone. You have to vote for someone. For your vote to be meaningful, there has to be someone worth voting for. Those people are culled before they get in a position to be included on a ballot.
This is a huge problem in my view. A big part of it is because so few people vote in the primaries. To few American's realize that we have a two vote system in this country. First there is the primary which is where the parties really decide who will run and what their platforms will be and then there is the general election. If we really want to change politics in the US we should seriously think about getting organized for primary elections. One thing both Moveon.org and the Teaparty have shown is that a motivated core of people can bring down even powerful politicians by beating them in the much smaller, and thus easier to influence, primary elections. Potentially if we got organized enough we could drive some of these people out of office with a few thousand votes. As it stands now basically the real decisions have mostly been made before the vast majority of people ever even hear who is running.
That is true. Though the prices where coming down fast. In 73 my parents bought a Montgomery ward branded version of a Texas Instruments calculator for my brother to take to college. Cost them a bit more than $100, which was something like $50 less than the actual TI version. By 77-78 they got me a similar calculator for about $25. Very few people carried them around though because they were fairly bulky compared to the ones you'd get a few years later.
Yeah let's fire the IT guy who suggested all data to be encrypted and not the managers who overruled the IT guy because encryption is annoying.
That pretty much jives with my experience. I had an experience where I warned my management over and over about a single point of failure in our customer supporting infrastructure. They didn't want to hear it. Didn't want to fix it. Didn't want to spend any money on it. Then one day it blew up. Cost the company a small fortune in blown SLA's. Of course their knee jerk reaction was to blame the IT person. The only reason I kept my job was by pulling out the documentation, which I purposely saved, of me telling my management about the problem and having everyone shoot me down over and over again. So the lesson is that if you tell them the truth they don't want to hear make sure you have a record of it. Make sure you have them refusing to listen to you documented in writing. I'd say it gives you a 50/50 chance of avoiding being the scape goat vs. being the automatic scape goat.
That was very true. My father was very good at doing the conversions in his head and got very annoyed when he realized that the metric stations where charging a huge premium over the non-metric ones. I also remember there being similar things done with milk. The end result was that my father would do the math and would do business in either as long as the price was right. My mother, who couldn't do the conversions in her head, simply refused to buy anything that was sold in a metric measure. Which is what millions of Americans did. That reaction is a big part of what defeated the conversion to metric in the US the last time it was tried.
Which is why I believe that the only way we will get this to work, and prevent this sort of abuse, is to require dual marking. So that there is no ability to pull stuff like that on people who aren't used to the new measures because whichever one you use the price is the same.
If we ever want the US to go to the metric system we have to realize a couple of things. The first is that it can't be the chaotic mess it was the last time they tried back in the 70's. It was poorly planned and executed and failed horribly. Realistically it set the effort back at least 30 years. The second is that the US is a large country changing is going to cost a fortune. I wouldn't be surprised if we aren't talking billions of dollars worth of road signs alone. I suspect that just about the only hope of getting this country to change is to spend the next few decades preparing for it. Doing things like having a mandate that after X date all new signs, gas pumps, scales etc must have both metric and Imperial measures displayed on them. So that the infrastructure can be put into place without bankrupting the country. It will also get people used to seeing the metric equivalent next to the imperial measures they are used to. So that people will realize, for example, that 1 gallon is roughly 3.78 liters without thinking about it. Because they have seen both values on the gas pump for the last 20 years. Then after people are used to it you just start dropping the Imperial measures from things. I just don't see a fast way to transition that dose not cost vast sums of money or result in chaos and confusion. You have, at least, a couple of hundred million people who are ingrained with the imperial system. You are going to have to ease them into the metric system.
I have been avoiding Sony products for at least the last ten years. They are just to prone to putting some poison pill into their stuff that benefits them and screws their customers. Filing patents like this just convinces me that I have been correct in doing so.
The only question is whether you die in the blast, or die watching other humans abandon every single thing you consider to be their humanity as the survivors murder kids, the sick, and everyone who is weaker than them for a can of beans. When the can goods are gone, they'll start eating each other. Then they'll die themselves in their own filth.
Possibly, though there are tons of things that will kill off much of society that won't involve any of that. Where people who prepared, and many who didn't, will simply come out afterwards and go on with their lives. Odds are the people who prepared will come out of in better shape than those who didn't.
I didn't see anything in that about having things like stocks of seeds to start farming, arms for defense / hunting, or any type of survival training of the occupants. The folks buying these bunkers are actually counting on society basically surviving. So realistically what they are planning for isn't the destruction of the world so much as some sort of major disruption of society. After which they will be able to come back out and find things restored by the folks who didn't go hide out. In essence they are counting on the rest of us to save civilization for them. Which if that is your thing go for it.
The will to survive is strong in people. There are a lot of "apocalyptic" scenarios that don't give you such a clean death. For example what if the crisis is in the form of a new plague that rips through the population like the black death. Under such a scenario people in an isolated facility like that may well actually survive into a world that isn't that much different, other than far fewer people and a harder life, than what they left. The really bad scenarios; such as a full out nuclear war, killer asteroid, or massive solar flare, will probably kill them as well. Whatever form it takes, no matter how hopeless the situation, there will be a lot of people who will try to survive. If that is your bent then being the most prepared guy can't hurt.
The business is basically buying up old government shelters for cheap, put some furniture in and then sell it for 100 times more. However much would this guy like to portray himself as a modern-day Noah, he is just a smart businessman preying on people's fears.
I don't have a problem with him "preying" on people's fears as long as he is really providing them what he claims. My fear with any bunker that stays locked up for decades after you buy it is who is maintaining this thing? How do you know that the food hasn't spoiled or wasn't simply removed as soon as they sold it out? After all the thing requires two of the residents to come open it up in order to see what is in there. For that matter how do you know that a couple of your co-residents haven't opened up and cleaned the place out? Anyway if he provides what he advertises then more power to him. People are free to buy or not buy and it isn't my place to tell them where to spend their money.
I really feel that an uprising would be very hypocritical. > 50% of the population voted in a government < 50% dislikes the government so they decided to take it down by force = not very democratic.
It takes more than a majority vote to have legitimate government. Hypothetically speaking we have "Country A". In Country A lets say that the government has enough support to consistently win election. They then decide that they are going to strip the < 50% of their property, and possibly their lives, and put them into camps. From the point of view of your statement the < 50% who don't support the government would be wrong to rebel. Their are bounds that a government cannot go beyond and still remain a legitimate government no matter how many people vote for them.
We are seeing a lot of regimes right now that have the popular support to win elections but who then treat minorities or opponents as, at best, second class citizens. In my view the only difference between those governments and some place like China is that they are confident enough in their popularity to put it to a vote. On the other hand you have to question how honest the votes are when the opposition is treated in such a way. Russia comes to mind but there are several other countries in that position.
No we can't really fight the government and win. But we have the option to do so, if we so choose. It would be going down in a blaze of glory. We would probably be utterly annihilated. But maybe not. I know a lot of soldiers. They wouldn't fire on the American people.
I agree that the citizenry can't stand up against the US military in a stand up fight and win. On the other hand if enough citizens ever got pissed off enough at the government they could make this country ungovernable. Basically if the government ever did something that was so objectionable to a large enough portion of the population they could inflict a lot of pain. Ideally enough pain that the government might step back and reconsider whether they really wanted to do whatever it was pissed off the public. The 2nd Amendment is designed to preserve that ability.
The other thing to consider is that people said this could never happen in Syria either. After all Assad had a large reasonably well trained and decently equipped military. At the start of this he was mopping the floor with the rebels. Now it looks dodgy for him. Most of the rebels are armed with small arms only a somewhat better than what the citizens of the US have. The lesson there is that if you piss off a large enough chunk of the population they are dangerous if they have nothing. Just because of their sheer numbers. If they have even rudimentary weapons they become extremely dangerous. Also if you have done something that makes the members of your own military decide you have lost your legitimacy they may well turn on you. Just as large chunks of the Syrian army have on Assad.
While I am not sympathetic to the fanatics at Westboro I think this will end up being counter productive. They are already a bunch of crazed fanatics. This sort of thing is likely to just feed into that. Right now they are loud, obnoxious, hateful and generally unpleasant to deal with. My fear with playing into their delusions is that they add violent to that list of unpleasant traits. Unfortunately that is the typical trend of these sorts of cults. I don't have an answer as to what you do with people like this that wouldn't destroy liberty for the rest of us. Could be that putting up with a bunch of fanatics is part of the price of freedom for the rest of us. At least until they add the trait of violent then it becomes an issue for the swat team.
So if he's not getting extradited, and there are no charges in the UK, is McKinnon a free man?
From what the article said as long as he stays in the UK his a free man. If he goes to any other country that the US has an extradition treaty with he could find himself on a plane to the US. So basically his punishment here is that he can basically never leave the UK again.
All good points and very doable. Understand that it will take you at least five years to do this.
I agree that the trade off is time vs. cost. Which considering the situation so many students are in with student debt now seems like a reasonable trade off.
Another thing you could do to reduce costs, at the expense of more time, is get an associates degree while you are at the community college. Then use that degree to get an entry level job at a company with an education assistance plan. You will be trading still more time for reduced expense. On the other hand when you get out of school you have some work experience on your resume, no (or very little debt), plus you have been paid, gotten health benefits, paid time off etc while you completed your degree. That is pretty much what I did. The plus is no debt the cost is it took me almost 10 years to complete my degree.