In my experience with Government procurement the top 5% of the Government gets the latest greatest hardware that then sits on their desks unused. The people actually doing the work are using some ancient machine that the rest of the world retired five to ten years ago. Usually configured in such a way that they have to hand out "suicide prevention" kits with the machines.
I agree that LEED has a better model. Though it is important to note that they are really looking at different things. When you are dealing with a building the major environmental impact isn't in its disposal. The major impact is in its operation. So LEED spends a lot of time looking at things like power usage, water usage, type of materials used in construction, how far those materials were shipped and whether those materials are difficult to dispose of at the end of their life. After they look at all of that the score you. LEED is a much more comprehensive standard than EPEAT. EPEAT is just about recycling
I can see an argument for a LEED like standard that looks at all aspects of a device and scores it. That would have the advantage that in addition to whether a device is recyclable they would look at how its made, what it is made of, how much energy it uses when it operates, does it contain toxic components etc. Then they would render a score for it. That would encourage companies to do things like upgrade their factories to be more efficient and look at aspects of their products other than just recycling that have environmental impacts
Apple claims they are working on their own standard. Perhaps they will follow a more LEED like model. Though you have to wonder why they didn't make their own standard first then quit EPEAT. This whole thing would look better if they said "The EPEAT standard isn't comprehensive enough so we are going to use the new and improved STANDARD X". Rather than just abandoning the standard and looking foolish.
What is interesting to me in all of this is that they are removing the certifications from products already certified. I really have a difficult time understanding why they would do that? It isn't like they can go back and make the iMac on your desk less recyclable. Though my guess is this is going to matter more to institutional buyers than the general public. If you took a poll I suspect you'd find that maybe 10% of the laptop buying public even knows what EPEAT is.
My problem with executive orders is they are nearly impossible to over turn. The courts have been reluctant to over turn them and doing it via legislation is next to impossible. Since in order to do so you have to be able to override the President's veto of the legislation. It is kind of disturbing that a President, if he so desires, can very nearly rule by decree.
Who are you going to fine? The manager that signed off on something his bosses probably decided and delegated to him to enact? The president of the company? Maybe the union? It can be hard to find out where a decision came from when you work within a corporation. It is even harder from outside of it.
I would argue that the problem is the fines don't fit the crime. In these business cases you always hear the same scenario. Company A does some slimy, and illegal, thing and makes 100 million dollars in profit from it. They get caught and end up paying a fine of say $2 million and has to promise not to do it again. Which leaves them $98 in profit. Now with that kind of punishment scheme is it any surprise that the companies break the law at will? If you could break the law make a fortune and your punishment was to pay 2% of your profits and promise not to do it again how much would you worry about the law? If you want to take make them take this seriously the fine should be calculated in a way to take into account what they made from the crime. So instead of $2 million in my example the fine would be the $100 million in illegally obtained profits plus $2 million. I suspect under such a scheme where they know that they would lose all their profits on such scheme plus some of the money from their other operations they'd take it a bit more seriously.
Does Comcast have to make it any easier for customers to find the stand alone-packages? I don't see that requirement anywhere in the summary or article..
Yes, It is in one of the paragraphs toward the end of the article.
"Comcast didn’t admit fault as part of the settlement, but it did lay out some cash and pledge to make its cheaper stand-alone service more visible. It will train its call agents, make sure the offering is visible on its web site and it committed to a major marketing campaign around the Performance Started service for 2013."
I'd like a link to some information on this assertion. I did a quick check and the only military action I can find a record of US military action in China prior to Pearl harbor is the sinking of the USS Panay (PR-5) by the Japanese on December 12, 1937. The Panay was a patrol boat on the Yantgze river. Even the Panay wasn't there to do anything to the Japanese the ship was tasked with keeping river navigation open due to the frequent unrest in China during the 20's and 30's.
What I can't find is any reference anywhere to the military action against Japan that you are referring to. So I would be interested in seeing a source that talks about it. If true it is worth knowing about
Starting at about six my mother read a lot of books to me. I'd say try a number of different genre's and see what he likes. I remember her reading me; "The Time Machine", "War of the Worlds", "Have Spacesuit - Will Travel", "Space Cadet", "The Hobbit", all of "The Borrowers" books and about 20 others I don't remember the titles of. She read them a chapter or two at a time just as John is describing. I enjoyed it and it turned me into an avid reader.
But this is story is about the real money auction house, the banning of accounts, the bots being banned, perhaps false positives etc...
I am actually starting to think that D3 is basically a mechanism for testing the real money auction house. I was reading the terms of this thing on Blizzard's web page and they are going to be making $1 per trade on item sales and 15% on commodity sales. If people actually use this, and I am betting they will, the amount of money they will be bringing in will be staggering. Oh and you have two options for where your money goes. It can go into your battle.net account where you can spend it on selected blizzard products or it can go to PayPal, who charges another 15% for the transfer. So Blizzard is going to be making a ton of money on these transactions. They are also likely to end up holding onto a ton of non-refundable player money attached to various battle.net accounts. Money that they will collect interest on the entire time they hold it. My expectation is that this is a dry run for what we will see in their next MMO or possibly even a future expansion of WOW.
Employers don't want you to discuss with your co-workers what your pay and benefits packages are, because they offer sweet deals to people they like, and that favoritism is not always above board.
In my experience one of the reasons that employers don't want people discussing salaries is that they know their pay raises don't keep up with the market. They hire employee A at a fair rate on day 1 then given him 2% raises for 5 years. While the market increases 5% a year for new hires. So one day employee A is talking to employee B who was just hired and finds out that employee B is making 15% more than him. Usually inspiring employee A to either ask for a raise, which they are loath to give, or prepare his resume and look for another job. Basically if they can squelch that discussion employee A keeps happily working without ever realizing he isn't getting the going rate for his labor. If the employer can get by with that his ability to pay lower salaries over time lowers his costs and makes his business more profitable. I think I have gotten this prohibition about talking about salaries from every company I have ever worked with. As far as I can tell the benefit to not talking is pretty much all to the employer.
That's what happens when you have a judge who programs as a hobby. It would be great if all lawsuits that affect an entire industry like this had to be decided by a judge familiar with the industry. Not going to happen of course, but it would be awesome if judges deciding software patent cases had to have some sort of programming background.
You would think that a basic understanding of the issues to be decided in a case would be a requirement for a judge. Unfortunately it isn't. So if you get a judge that just happens to understand what the case is about rejoice because there is no guarantee of that.
A former employer lost a court case because he could not make an 80 year old judge understand the concept of a client / server application or how the Internet allowed a person in city A to commit actions on a server located in city B. So basically if you get a judge that knows what is going on and isn't half senile it was dumb luck.
Heinlein was exactly right when it comes to what should be. Unfortunately where his quote falls down is they have become very good at getting their business models enshrined in statute. Congress has shown itself all to willing to provide legislation to the benefit of those entrenched interests whose future profits are being threatened by change. Which then opens the courts to these people for exactly the unreasonable purpose he describes. On the upside no matter what the law and courts say to a certain degree trying to prevent change through regulation and law is sort of like passing a law that says no earth quakes allowed. You can do it but don't expect the earth to obey it.
The story goes that when TVs first got digital remote controls, the salesmen would show the customer the remote because, at the time, the ability to change the channel from across the room was new and novel and pretty cool! But the customer would always say the same thing: "I'm not so lazy that I can't get off the damn couch and change the channel!"
They didn't need a fancy remote not because they were not lazy but because they had kids for those jobs. I can clearly remember my father, in particular, yelling for my siblings and I to come change the channel and do any additional tuning necessary. So not only did he already have a remote it was one that would fetch iced tea, sandwiches and mow the lawn.
Your end result assumes the courts do the right thing. Which isn't necessarily a safe assumption. The courts do not have a very good record with the fourth amendment.
You should also add a #9 they still continue to gather the information no matter what the court says about its use. The big problem with these monitoring schemes is once the people in power get hold of the information they realize they can combine it with other information and learn all manner of things. That is a big part of why these databases never go away once created.
I find this trend of putting cameras and various monitoring systems everywhere rather disturbing. As far as I have been able to read these things don't really deter crime. Yet we are putting them in all over the country in the name of crime prevention. I am really starting to wonder if Orwell was just a few decades off in his time estimate
The NSF is a federal agency of course they are run by congress. Sure they have an appointed board of imminent scientists but congress still pays the bills and still controls their charter. Should the urge ever appear congress could run the NSF just like any other agency.
Also I remember having to deal with the NSF back when they ran the Internet and it wasn't the joy you seem to remember. They used to require signed affidavits saying any of your traffic that transited the NSF portions of the Internet were of a "non-commercial" nature. There was all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense that ended up requiring us to configure routing based on whether you where "NSF approved" or not. Getting the Internet out of the hands of the NSF was second in joy only to getting it out of DARPA's hands. I for one don't want to see them anywhere near the Internet again
You see, the world we live today is so fucked up, that if you invent something really brand new and you do not patent it, you just _might_ get sued !
In my mind this and the proliferation of, at best, highly questionable patents is the real problem. I don't see a huge problem with the duration of patents. In part because some really innovative technologies, medications for example, cost billions of dollars to develop and the time to recoup that investment is going to be longer than five years.
The duration of copyrights on the other hand are absolutely obscene. Even there five years is really short. I think the danger with such a short term would be that it would empower large corporations to some degree. After all other companies have the resources to go out there and compete head to head even if there is no copyright. The small content creator, without a major corporation behind him, is basically forced to try and compete in a wide open market. My guess is the small creator would just get crushed if anything he made caught the eye of a major company.
I think the real problem is that patents and copyrights have been corrupted. Both are good ideas and encourage people to invent and create things. The problem is they've both been corrupted to the benefit of a few entrenched interests. Copyrights in particular bear little resemblance to what they were supposed to be. I mean the whole point of them was to encourage people to create things so that the public domain would be enriched. Now they've become a tool for the virtual destruction of the public domain. Which is clearly not what was intended.
The Government didn't build this thing because they saw some farsighted need for a giant industrial press. They built it because they needed to make components for military equipment for the cold war. Also it doesn't take all that much Government to build something like this. In terms of Governmental procurement even a giant machine like this is fairly trivial. Also note that Government didn't do this themselves they had industry build it under contract. The fact that it paid back massively is mostly due to industry finding other uses for industrial equipment originally procured to make military hardware. If there is a unique Government role here it was that they needed a lot of weapons nobody else really has a need to procure and they had the money to order up specialized equipment. So we do all benefit from it, I just see no evidence that there was any plan to that effect when the Government built it.
I think he maybe referring to this case in Iraq. Basically they, presumable Al-Qaida, strapped remote control bombs to two mentally handicapped women with down syndrome and sent them into the target area and detonated them. Odds are the two bombers had no comprehension of what was happening. I don't have the articles but I know I have read of this tactic in other places as well.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22945797/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/handicapped-bombers-kill-dozens-iraq/#.T5lY3tWt0tU
I don't think the issue is that they fire people. Rather it is how they fire people. Firing somebody via email is just low in my view. Basically means the company doesn't think enough of their employees to have a reasonable procedure for firing people in place. In my experience companies that think like that when letting people go tend to think like that with all employee interactions. Which is usually a bad sign for your work environment. So if I worked at this company I think I'd be polishing up my resume after this.
It has been my observation that is how it goes with every idea popular with the political class but unpopular with the public. They trot it out, the public gets upset, they table it. Then a few months later version two gets trotted out under a different name. Maybe the public notices maybe they don't. If not they pass it and we all realize after the fact when it is next to impossible to remove it. Or they go back and do the whole rebranding thing again. If that fails then the really dirty tricks come out. In the past we have had copyright nonsense literally snuck into the text of bills over night. Then there are things like Internet monitoring that the public has knocked down multiple times. It appears, if recent news reports are to be believed, that they must moved it deep into classified land at the NSA and simply refuse to admit that they are doing it. The corporations are part of the political class as are other major groups like industry associations ( RIAA/MPAA), unions, various political groups (environmental groups, National Rifle Association etc) and then the political parties themselves. The fact of life is these groups organize on a more or less permanent basis. They have continuous fund raising and/or large memberships. Which gives them clout. The public as a whole can come together to oppose or support something but they lack staying power. Just look at two recent large public movements, the "Tea Party" and the "Occupy Movement". Both started out as fairly sizable groups of disaffected citizens. They both managed to keep up fairly high levels of activity for a year or so. Now they are both having trouble keeping their large bases motivated. After all average citizens can't dedicated themselves to politics 24/7. They have careers to manage, classes to attend, families to take care of, debts to pay etc. Politicians pay attention to such mass movements because if you have an election while they are still moving bad things happen to you. As the Democrats in the house found out when they had to stand for election while the "Tea Party" was in full swing or the Republicans found out when "anti-Bush" sentiment was at its height. Thing is everyone in the power structure knows those movements won't last. These full time pressure groups are here to stay and congress knows it. Really our only long term chance is to form our own groups. When these groups talk congress looks at two things, how much money they have and how many members they have. Problem right now is groups representing the right things have too few of both where as groups pushing the policies we don't like tend to be well funded and/or large.
We still use Blackberry devices almost exclusively at work. We have done pilot projects on both Android phones and the iPhone and neither one has all of the features we need in order to integrate the phones into our corporate environment. As long as that remains the case I think they are going to have a lock on a certain portion of the corporate and government markets. The real question is whether that is a large enough and profitable enough market to keep them in business. If any of the other smart phone makers starts offering phones with all the features that companies need RIM is in big trouble.
As far as creating a culture, outside the corporation, for themselves that is going to be an uphill battle. At this point if you see somebody with a blackberry the first thing you think is "company phone".
It sounds like the city had a policy of doing this. So you have some officials of the city saying arrest people with the cameras. Even though it is likely illegal (they didn't have precedent yet so they can claim they where acting on their understanding of the law) and most likely won't stand up in court. They are not going to do anything to the officers who enforced the policy. If they do the logical next thing for the officers to do is to start pointing the finger at whomever is above them that ordered them to do this. The last thing the city government is going to want is for accountability to start moving up the chain of command. From their point of view it is much better to let the guys on the bottom of as lightly as they can legally get away with so that this goes away.
In a Republic, aka "rule by corrupt politicians", you can create a system of laws and customs in an attempt to limit the action of those politicians. For example you can install an independent judiciary and charge them with enforcing a bill of rights. The voter's role is not so much in deciding policy but in providing a check on those who decide policy. In practice true democracy is unrestricted tyranny of the masses. Where pretty much anything the masses vote for becomes law. Lets just say it is much better to be a minority in a Republic than it is in a Democracy. True Democracy, such as Athens had, tends to be very unstable. Since all public policy is decided by majority vote you have a very difficult time maintaining any sort of coherent policy about anything. Can you imagine trying to manage a vote of the entire populace every time the government needed to decide something? Look how much trouble we have running a nationwide election for president every four years. If we had to do that say four or more times per year I can't imagine how big a mess it would be. As flawed as it is a Republic is the best idea so far in preserving public participation in government without sowing chaos in society.
If the local media are to be believed the last year has seen a dramatic up swing in violent crime in DC. Though the murder rate has not followed suite. Still there are enough murders that hardly a weekend goes by without there being another group of them for the media to talk about.
Even if they do not regard law enforcement as the enemy. I can see where people who live in neighborhoods virtually ruled by criminal gangs are hesitant to get involved. Such gangs are usually heavily armed and extremely violent. Reprisals for people who talk are the norm. Worse if they can't get the actual witness they frequently go after their friends and relatives. Under those conditions I am not surprised witnesses are hard to come by.
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In my experience with Government procurement the top 5% of the Government gets the latest greatest hardware that then sits on their desks unused. The people actually doing the work are using some ancient machine that the rest of the world retired five to ten years ago. Usually configured in such a way that they have to hand out "suicide prevention" kits with the machines.
I agree that LEED has a better model. Though it is important to note that they are really looking at different things. When you are dealing with a building the major environmental impact isn't in its disposal. The major impact is in its operation. So LEED spends a lot of time looking at things like power usage, water usage, type of materials used in construction, how far those materials were shipped and whether those materials are difficult to dispose of at the end of their life. After they look at all of that the score you. LEED is a much more comprehensive standard than EPEAT. EPEAT is just about recycling
I can see an argument for a LEED like standard that looks at all aspects of a device and scores it. That would have the advantage that in addition to whether a device is recyclable they would look at how its made, what it is made of, how much energy it uses when it operates, does it contain toxic components etc. Then they would render a score for it. That would encourage companies to do things like upgrade their factories to be more efficient and look at aspects of their products other than just recycling that have environmental impacts
Apple claims they are working on their own standard. Perhaps they will follow a more LEED like model. Though you have to wonder why they didn't make their own standard first then quit EPEAT. This whole thing would look better if they said "The EPEAT standard isn't comprehensive enough so we are going to use the new and improved STANDARD X". Rather than just abandoning the standard and looking foolish.
What is interesting to me in all of this is that they are removing the certifications from products already certified. I really have a difficult time understanding why they would do that? It isn't like they can go back and make the iMac on your desk less recyclable. Though my guess is this is going to matter more to institutional buyers than the general public. If you took a poll I suspect you'd find that maybe 10% of the laptop buying public even knows what EPEAT is.
My problem with executive orders is they are nearly impossible to over turn. The courts have been reluctant to over turn them and doing it via legislation is next to impossible. Since in order to do so you have to be able to override the President's veto of the legislation. It is kind of disturbing that a President, if he so desires, can very nearly rule by decree.
Who are you going to fine? The manager that signed off on something his bosses probably decided and delegated to him to enact? The president of the company? Maybe the union? It can be hard to find out where a decision came from when you work within a corporation. It is even harder from outside of it.
I would argue that the problem is the fines don't fit the crime. In these business cases you always hear the same scenario. Company A does some slimy, and illegal, thing and makes 100 million dollars in profit from it. They get caught and end up paying a fine of say $2 million and has to promise not to do it again. Which leaves them $98 in profit. Now with that kind of punishment scheme is it any surprise that the companies break the law at will? If you could break the law make a fortune and your punishment was to pay 2% of your profits and promise not to do it again how much would you worry about the law? If you want to take make them take this seriously the fine should be calculated in a way to take into account what they made from the crime. So instead of $2 million in my example the fine would be the $100 million in illegally obtained profits plus $2 million. I suspect under such a scheme where they know that they would lose all their profits on such scheme plus some of the money from their other operations they'd take it a bit more seriously.
Does Comcast have to make it any easier for customers to find the stand alone-packages? I don't see that requirement anywhere in the summary or article ..
Yes, It is in one of the paragraphs toward the end of the article.
"Comcast didn’t admit fault as part of the settlement, but it did lay out some cash and pledge to make its cheaper stand-alone service more visible. It will train its call agents, make sure the offering is visible on its web site and it committed to a major marketing campaign around the Performance Started service for 2013."
I'd like a link to some information on this assertion. I did a quick check and the only military action I can find a record of US military action in China prior to Pearl harbor is the sinking of the USS Panay (PR-5) by the Japanese on December 12, 1937. The Panay was a patrol boat on the Yantgze river. Even the Panay wasn't there to do anything to the Japanese the ship was tasked with keeping river navigation open due to the frequent unrest in China during the 20's and 30's.
You can find a short write up about the ship and the incident on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Panay_(PR-5)
They also have a page on the first military actions of WWII which starts with the Panay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_American_engagement_in_World_War_II
What I can't find is any reference anywhere to the military action against Japan that you are referring to. So I would be interested in seeing a source that talks about it. If true it is worth knowing about
Thanks
Starting at about six my mother read a lot of books to me. I'd say try a number of different genre's and see what he likes. I remember her reading me; "The Time Machine", "War of the Worlds", "Have Spacesuit - Will Travel", "Space Cadet", "The Hobbit", all of "The Borrowers" books and about 20 others I don't remember the titles of. She read them a chapter or two at a time just as John is describing. I enjoyed it and it turned me into an avid reader.
But this is story is about the real money auction house, the banning of accounts, the bots being banned, perhaps false positives etc...
I am actually starting to think that D3 is basically a mechanism for testing the real money auction house. I was reading the terms of this thing on Blizzard's web page and they are going to be making $1 per trade on item sales and 15% on commodity sales. If people actually use this, and I am betting they will, the amount of money they will be bringing in will be staggering. Oh and you have two options for where your money goes. It can go into your battle.net account where you can spend it on selected blizzard products or it can go to PayPal, who charges another 15% for the transfer. So Blizzard is going to be making a ton of money on these transactions. They are also likely to end up holding onto a ton of non-refundable player money attached to various battle.net accounts. Money that they will collect interest on the entire time they hold it. My expectation is that this is a dry run for what we will see in their next MMO or possibly even a future expansion of WOW.
Employers don't want you to discuss with your co-workers what your pay and benefits packages are, because they offer sweet deals to people they like, and that favoritism is not always above board.
In my experience one of the reasons that employers don't want people discussing salaries is that they know their pay raises don't keep up with the market. They hire employee A at a fair rate on day 1 then given him 2% raises for 5 years. While the market increases 5% a year for new hires. So one day employee A is talking to employee B who was just hired and finds out that employee B is making 15% more than him. Usually inspiring employee A to either ask for a raise, which they are loath to give, or prepare his resume and look for another job. Basically if they can squelch that discussion employee A keeps happily working without ever realizing he isn't getting the going rate for his labor. If the employer can get by with that his ability to pay lower salaries over time lowers his costs and makes his business more profitable. I think I have gotten this prohibition about talking about salaries from every company I have ever worked with. As far as I can tell the benefit to not talking is pretty much all to the employer.
That's what happens when you have a judge who programs as a hobby. It would be great if all lawsuits that affect an entire industry like this had to be decided by a judge familiar with the industry. Not going to happen of course, but it would be awesome if judges deciding software patent cases had to have some sort of programming background.
You would think that a basic understanding of the issues to be decided in a case would be a requirement for a judge. Unfortunately it isn't. So if you get a judge that just happens to understand what the case is about rejoice because there is no guarantee of that.
A former employer lost a court case because he could not make an 80 year old judge understand the concept of a client / server application or how the Internet allowed a person in city A to commit actions on a server located in city B. So basically if you get a judge that knows what is going on and isn't half senile it was dumb luck.
Heinlein was exactly right when it comes to what should be. Unfortunately where his quote falls down is they have become very good at getting their business models enshrined in statute. Congress has shown itself all to willing to provide legislation to the benefit of those entrenched interests whose future profits are being threatened by change. Which then opens the courts to these people for exactly the unreasonable purpose he describes. On the upside no matter what the law and courts say to a certain degree trying to prevent change through regulation and law is sort of like passing a law that says no earth quakes allowed. You can do it but don't expect the earth to obey it.
The story goes that when TVs first got digital remote controls, the salesmen would show the customer the remote because, at the time, the ability to change the channel from across the room was new and novel and pretty cool! But the customer would always say the same thing: "I'm not so lazy that I can't get off the damn couch and change the channel!"
They didn't need a fancy remote not because they were not lazy but because they had kids for those jobs. I can clearly remember my father, in particular, yelling for my siblings and I to come change the channel and do any additional tuning necessary. So not only did he already have a remote it was one that would fetch iced tea, sandwiches and mow the lawn.
Your end result assumes the courts do the right thing. Which isn't necessarily a safe assumption. The courts do not have a very good record with the fourth amendment.
You should also add a #9 they still continue to gather the information no matter what the court says about its use. The big problem with these monitoring schemes is once the people in power get hold of the information they realize they can combine it with other information and learn all manner of things. That is a big part of why these databases never go away once created.
I find this trend of putting cameras and various monitoring systems everywhere rather disturbing. As far as I have been able to read these things don't really deter crime. Yet we are putting them in all over the country in the name of crime prevention. I am really starting to wonder if Orwell was just a few decades off in his time estimate
The NSF isn't run by Congress or Corporations...
The NSF is a federal agency of course they are run by congress. Sure they have an appointed board of imminent scientists but congress still pays the bills and still controls their charter. Should the urge ever appear congress could run the NSF just like any other agency.
Also I remember having to deal with the NSF back when they ran the Internet and it wasn't the joy you seem to remember. They used to require signed affidavits saying any of your traffic that transited the NSF portions of the Internet were of a "non-commercial" nature. There was all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense that ended up requiring us to configure routing based on whether you where "NSF approved" or not. Getting the Internet out of the hands of the NSF was second in joy only to getting it out of DARPA's hands. I for one don't want to see them anywhere near the Internet again
You see, the world we live today is so fucked up, that if you invent something really brand new and you do not patent it, you just _might_ get sued !
In my mind this and the proliferation of, at best, highly questionable patents is the real problem. I don't see a huge problem with the duration of patents. In part because some really innovative technologies, medications for example, cost billions of dollars to develop and the time to recoup that investment is going to be longer than five years.
The duration of copyrights on the other hand are absolutely obscene. Even there five years is really short. I think the danger with such a short term would be that it would empower large corporations to some degree. After all other companies have the resources to go out there and compete head to head even if there is no copyright. The small content creator, without a major corporation behind him, is basically forced to try and compete in a wide open market. My guess is the small creator would just get crushed if anything he made caught the eye of a major company.
I think the real problem is that patents and copyrights have been corrupted. Both are good ideas and encourage people to invent and create things. The problem is they've both been corrupted to the benefit of a few entrenched interests. Copyrights in particular bear little resemblance to what they were supposed to be. I mean the whole point of them was to encourage people to create things so that the public domain would be enriched. Now they've become a tool for the virtual destruction of the public domain. Which is clearly not what was intended.
The Government didn't build this thing because they saw some farsighted need for a giant industrial press. They built it because they needed to make components for military equipment for the cold war. Also it doesn't take all that much Government to build something like this. In terms of Governmental procurement even a giant machine like this is fairly trivial. Also note that Government didn't do this themselves they had industry build it under contract. The fact that it paid back massively is mostly due to industry finding other uses for industrial equipment originally procured to make military hardware. If there is a unique Government role here it was that they needed a lot of weapons nobody else really has a need to procure and they had the money to order up specialized equipment. So we do all benefit from it, I just see no evidence that there was any plan to that effect when the Government built it.
I think he maybe referring to this case in Iraq. Basically they, presumable Al-Qaida, strapped remote control bombs to two mentally handicapped women with down syndrome and sent them into the target area and detonated them. Odds are the two bombers had no comprehension of what was happening. I don't have the articles but I know I have read of this tactic in other places as well. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22945797/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/handicapped-bombers-kill-dozens-iraq/#.T5lY3tWt0tU
I don't think the issue is that they fire people. Rather it is how they fire people. Firing somebody via email is just low in my view. Basically means the company doesn't think enough of their employees to have a reasonable procedure for firing people in place. In my experience companies that think like that when letting people go tend to think like that with all employee interactions. Which is usually a bad sign for your work environment. So if I worked at this company I think I'd be polishing up my resume after this.
It has been my observation that is how it goes with every idea popular with the political class but unpopular with the public. They trot it out, the public gets upset, they table it. Then a few months later version two gets trotted out under a different name. Maybe the public notices maybe they don't. If not they pass it and we all realize after the fact when it is next to impossible to remove it. Or they go back and do the whole rebranding thing again. If that fails then the really dirty tricks come out. In the past we have had copyright nonsense literally snuck into the text of bills over night. Then there are things like Internet monitoring that the public has knocked down multiple times. It appears, if recent news reports are to be believed, that they must moved it deep into classified land at the NSA and simply refuse to admit that they are doing it. The corporations are part of the political class as are other major groups like industry associations ( RIAA/MPAA), unions, various political groups (environmental groups, National Rifle Association etc) and then the political parties themselves. The fact of life is these groups organize on a more or less permanent basis. They have continuous fund raising and/or large memberships. Which gives them clout. The public as a whole can come together to oppose or support something but they lack staying power. Just look at two recent large public movements, the "Tea Party" and the "Occupy Movement". Both started out as fairly sizable groups of disaffected citizens. They both managed to keep up fairly high levels of activity for a year or so. Now they are both having trouble keeping their large bases motivated. After all average citizens can't dedicated themselves to politics 24/7. They have careers to manage, classes to attend, families to take care of, debts to pay etc. Politicians pay attention to such mass movements because if you have an election while they are still moving bad things happen to you. As the Democrats in the house found out when they had to stand for election while the "Tea Party" was in full swing or the Republicans found out when "anti-Bush" sentiment was at its height. Thing is everyone in the power structure knows those movements won't last. These full time pressure groups are here to stay and congress knows it. Really our only long term chance is to form our own groups. When these groups talk congress looks at two things, how much money they have and how many members they have. Problem right now is groups representing the right things have too few of both where as groups pushing the policies we don't like tend to be well funded and/or large.
We still use Blackberry devices almost exclusively at work. We have done pilot projects on both Android phones and the iPhone and neither one has all of the features we need in order to integrate the phones into our corporate environment. As long as that remains the case I think they are going to have a lock on a certain portion of the corporate and government markets. The real question is whether that is a large enough and profitable enough market to keep them in business. If any of the other smart phone makers starts offering phones with all the features that companies need RIM is in big trouble. As far as creating a culture, outside the corporation, for themselves that is going to be an uphill battle. At this point if you see somebody with a blackberry the first thing you think is "company phone".
It sounds like the city had a policy of doing this. So you have some officials of the city saying arrest people with the cameras. Even though it is likely illegal (they didn't have precedent yet so they can claim they where acting on their understanding of the law) and most likely won't stand up in court. They are not going to do anything to the officers who enforced the policy. If they do the logical next thing for the officers to do is to start pointing the finger at whomever is above them that ordered them to do this. The last thing the city government is going to want is for accountability to start moving up the chain of command. From their point of view it is much better to let the guys on the bottom of as lightly as they can legally get away with so that this goes away.
In a Republic, aka "rule by corrupt politicians", you can create a system of laws and customs in an attempt to limit the action of those politicians. For example you can install an independent judiciary and charge them with enforcing a bill of rights. The voter's role is not so much in deciding policy but in providing a check on those who decide policy. In practice true democracy is unrestricted tyranny of the masses. Where pretty much anything the masses vote for becomes law. Lets just say it is much better to be a minority in a Republic than it is in a Democracy. True Democracy, such as Athens had, tends to be very unstable. Since all public policy is decided by majority vote you have a very difficult time maintaining any sort of coherent policy about anything. Can you imagine trying to manage a vote of the entire populace every time the government needed to decide something? Look how much trouble we have running a nationwide election for president every four years. If we had to do that say four or more times per year I can't imagine how big a mess it would be. As flawed as it is a Republic is the best idea so far in preserving public participation in government without sowing chaos in society.
If the local media are to be believed the last year has seen a dramatic up swing in violent crime in DC. Though the murder rate has not followed suite. Still there are enough murders that hardly a weekend goes by without there being another group of them for the media to talk about.
Even if they do not regard law enforcement as the enemy. I can see where people who live in neighborhoods virtually ruled by criminal gangs are hesitant to get involved. Such gangs are usually heavily armed and extremely violent. Reprisals for people who talk are the norm. Worse if they can't get the actual witness they frequently go after their friends and relatives. Under those conditions I am not surprised witnesses are hard to come by.