In order to be porn, the individuals must be engaging in a sexual activity.
There's a situation in Australia with a guy who makes "ball busting" videos. (The fetish here is people who like being kicked in the balls.) He had made a few videos with girls 14-16 kicking him in the nuts (fully clothed.) I don't know where the case is now, but they did try to charge him with kiddie porn, given the idea that the videos were made with sexual gratification in mind.
Ohio does not have a "churning" legislature. What I mean is, some legislatures (like California's) introduce every single damn bill that they could and then try to pass it. Many state legislatures work this way, the culture being that they measure their productivity on how much they pass.
Ohio doesn't, they like to have lots of meetings to make perfect little bills, of which only 150-200 will be enacted in a two year time period. A state rep told me (I'm an amateur lobbyist) that Ohio legislators are scared to pass anything that another state doesn't have, in fear of making a mistake. It's like their primary day to day job is to make sure they get re-elected.
The law was enacted with HB 179 The original purpose of HB 179 was to allow for driver's license revocation/suspension for a person who drives off without paying for gasoline. (A bill spearheaded in the Senate Transportation Committee cuz the guy who's the head of the committee owns a bunch of Shell stations.) At any rate, I guess the movie industry successfully lobbied some committee to have this stuff added, and it meets the single subject rule (I guess) because both parts of the bill deal with "theft." And the penalties of the bill can be explained by virtue of the fact that they link directly to the general theft code (and I suspect that the penalty for theft of gasoline was compared and they decided to make it similar.)
Michigan's penalty probably came about because their law was enacted through a unique bill, but I'm not sure. The fact that penalties are so wildly different indicates that the movie industry is working very hard to get the bills introduced as quickly as possible, since the national conference of legislators hadn't discussed these bills yet in order to ascertain a model penalty.
Isn't it entirely possible that the next wave of new storage technology was on the horizon? One which has the potential to store 8GB or more, is shock proof, *very* small, and fast.
$1.5 billion to potentially benefit the entire country is better than $16 billion wasted on one city....at least it was federal money wasted on a national system, not federal money wasted on a local system.
Point taken. I'm sure, however, that the people of Boston have paid for it by idling in traffic, using up gasoline and therefore paying gas tax, for many years now. There are so many productivity gains to be had that in 50 years the big dig will pay for itself, like all roads do.
And anyway, the Boston road system is likely no more expensive than the money invested in any other large city, like Dallas, which has more multi-billion dollar highways than you can shake a stick at.
who the hell in Marketing thought Charlie Chaplin's 'Little Tramp' would make people want to buy a computer?"
Whoa. I would love to see such a commercial.:-)
(obscure joke...Chaplin had four wives, ranging in age from 16-19. His controversial, albeit, legal, penchant for girls that age kept him from knighthood until the 70's. "Little Tramp" made me think of that.)
Were it not for the fact that I live in a provice with socialized insurance on my car, I'd be paying about 3-4 grand per year to insure my car (worth about 1500$ CDN), rather than the 720$/year I pay now.
According to your site, you live in Saskatchewan, which, with all due respect to Saskatchewan, is not Southern Ontario. (And with your car being $1500 CDN, it doesn't have a big price tag for replacement.)
But having said that, the socialization of car insurance brings with it three advantages:
a.) in order to get license and license plates, you have to have insurance; generally this reduces people driving without insurance
b.) it reduces insurance company paperwork
c.) It's a less regulated industry up there (since it's the government after all...and you can add other companies if you want...overburdensome state regulation of insurance companies kills states like New Jersey and Texas)...wait for it...
d.) Most importantly, Canada simply doesn't have the very expensive insurance company pay outs that we have in many states. It's the government paying out the insurance claim, and you're only going to get the maximum liability limits from the government. Courts are loath to sock the government insurance companies with big payouts.
An ATM system that uses those as verification could improve security.
Magnetic stripes are easily read, magnetized and remagnetized. This does indeed happen with credit cards, less often with ATM cards (since the person would have to have the PIN to pull it off, hence fake bank machines being setup to capture both stripe and PIN) and it does happen with licenses (someone under 21 goes to a bar with a magnetic card reader...often they don't check age on the card, they only care what the reader says.)
Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not
That's interesting that you should say that...many of the alternative medicine communities (such as doctors of Traditional Chinese Medicine) often say that one of the main failings of western doctors is that they are too concerned with figuring out the why as opposed to the how. This is a result of their training, which is coming from lots of scientists who are also fascinated with figuring out how things work, as opposed to treating people.
Which is probably good for several reasons; for instance, we won't be inundated with Potter books that could have been better...each one will be painstakingly written all unto itself.
But, otoh, I hate seeing them grow up. It was also very peculiar for me to read the first three books in a 6-8 week time period and see them add three years to their lives. I had to stop reading them alltogether otherwise my sense of time was going to become very corrupted.
Roads are actually more efficient; every mile of road can carry 30,000 cars per day, however every mile of light rail line can carry only 10,000 people per day.
Clearly you haven't spent enough time in places like New York City, or London.
Hence my use of the term light rail line. 99% of new public transportation rail projects, in the US, come in the form of light rail, not in the form of the very very heavy rail system used in the NYC area, which is very expensive and has flexibility issues that would make it a poor choice for cities other than NYC, Washington or London.
I'm convinced that massive public construction projects are simply a money drain.
Interestingly the Japanese government was notorious for building shimmery 4 lane highways from nowhere to nowhere, simply to keep construction levels stable and to show stuff happening in the economy. The Economist had much uglyness to say about this peculiar habit.
the actual residents would have benefitted a great deal more if the money were spent on improving the subways and light rail systems in the city.
The case for public transportation is fairly ugly. The cities that have the most people using public transporation are so crowded that driving a car and parking it is impossible or at the very least, very impractical. People love the privacy and freedom afforded by cars. Indeed, the best way of getting people to use public transport is to simply make it impossible for them to drive.
This means that massive funds should not be spent on these highways which are essentially a subsidy for the megacorporations that build the cars....Those who don't own cars should not have their tax dollars spent on such projects.
The Big Dig was financed by federal highway funds which was obtained through...federal gasoline taxes. Every state in the country funds its roads through:
a.) tolls b.) state gasoline taxes c.) driver and motor vehicle licensing fees
Roads are not financed through sales, property or income taxes. If you don't own a car, you're not paying for the roads...drivers are actually paying for the roads. Furthermore, the beauty of the gasoline tax is...if you use the road more, you pay more tax. The heavier your car is, the more it chews up the road, the more gas tax you pay. If you're a farmer buying gas for your tractor, you don't pay gas tax since it's not being used on a road.
In many instances, drivers subsidize public transportation. The $7 toll on the Verrazano Narrows bridge into Brooklyn is not because it costs that much to maintain the bridge...the majority of that toll (as well as tolls on other MTA tunnels and bridges) is used to subsidize the public transport system.
Roads are actually more efficient; every mile of road can carry 30,000 cars per day, however every mile of light rail line can carry only 10,000 people per day.
Interestingly, at the turn of the century my hometown of Cleveland had more trolley lines than you can shake a stick at...all of them affordable and furthermore, all owned by a bunch of different companies in competition with each other. The construction of the lines was often funded by industries who needed to get labor from home to work. I actually am going to bring your anti-car maker rant into this and hypothesize that having the government take over public transporation was done so that it would be marginalized to allow the growth of the automobile culture.
Today the Cleveland regional transportation authority is violently expensive, and is spending large sums of money on lines and projects that benefit few. Rail lines costing hundreds of millions of dollars have been built with the best justification being that they will be heavily used during home games of the Browns (6 times a year.) Often public transportation systems refuse to collect the data showing that the lines/bus routes are financially absurd, in order to hide these issues. Here in Columbus, there was a group fighting a public transport tax that showed that several bus routes had so few people that it was cheaper to buy each rider a new Ford Explorer than to continue running the route.
That may not apply to Boston, since it's still very densely populated and has some complex geography.
Re:16 year olds can get a learner's permit...
on
Perl is Sweet Sixteen
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Teenagers have an extremely high accident rate.
I believe that one of the main failures here is the conservativeness of driving schools. They believe the way to do things is to put teens behind the wheel and make em drive like grandmas, with the completely absurd expectation that they will continue driving like grandmas for the rest of their lives.
The fact is, they don't, and neither does anyone else. All of that driver's training is worth shit because accidents don't happen when a car is being driven normally; it occurs at the very edge of the vehicle's performance. Sometimes you may be dumb and on the offense, other times you are defending yourself because of another driver's mistake, but either way, if you don't know how your car handles at the limit, you may not do the right thing.
Saab used to give everyone who bought a new 9-3 Viggen a chance to drive it on a closed course with professional drivers (an intensive three day course as I recall.) Everyone I've heard who's been through the program said they learned more about driving there than many years of experience.
Expensive, yes, but a $500-$2000 investment in a professional driving training on a closed course like the one mentioned above is what our new drivers really need.
Not to mention that you get the added benefit of (potentially) getting all the high speed stupid driving out of the teen before they get on the road.
I believe that you're on a good track. Not necessarily that the War on Spam will drive spammers into international crime, but the War on Drugs likely does serve as a good economic model for spam.
Right now states are taking out the dozen or so really big spammers. With time, it's possible that spamming will be changing scales, from a bunch of big spammers with a few little ones, to all little ones, which will prove much harder to find and prosecute.
The economic equivalent to this is catching large drug shipments as they are imported, and that causing a reduction in supply, increasing the price of drugs, and therefore the potential profits, for new entrants. There is after all.1% or something, of people who buy products from spam, as long as that does not go down (and it's at the very least stable) there will always be a place for new entrants. The internet has minimal barriers of entry and is very decentralized, and profits are likely worth it for the one individual spamming a few hours per day (unlike drug smuggling, which reaps rewards from centralizing services, and has the profits to justify the bureaucracy.) With that in mind, I can't see spamming going into the international crime rackets, except possibly as a way of protecting the spammers from legal action.
Actually, as I write this, I think a great economic based argument can be made that taking out the big spammers will increase spam. After all, any one big spammer selling penis enlargment pills was not in competition with himself. If we now have ten smaller spammers taking his place, and they are vying for that.1% who may possibly glance at the email, they will be differentiating themselves through more emails that are more creative. And that's when economic realities whack you in the head....
Prohibition doesn't work when it conflicts with what the majority want. The majority wanted alcohol during the 1920's, and were willing to violate the law to get it.
Prohibition included a major conflict of the people. After all, the people had been convinced of the merits of prohibition, and either through their state legislature's, or through direct voting, the majority of voters did indeed approve the 18th amendment. It is unlikely that they were all teetotalers however (I would say that Prohibition was likely upended by a minority.)
If you look at the historical records, you will see a marked jump in the percent of people who die of cancer after the introduction of antibiotics. Food does the same thing. In times of famine and wars (for that matter) very few people die of cancer.
I read a book several years ago that said that cancer is a "disease of luxury." (I think the book was Anatomy of the Spirit by Carol Meiss ) If your body is dealing with other problems (like TB, or other diseases which we now have under control) cancer tends not to appear. (One idea to defend this thought is the notion that cancer occurs when the immune system lapses into a phase of doing nothing...so it doesn't notice the cancerous growth. Vaccines work not just by introducing a specific form of the virus to your immune system, but also by "waking it up.")
It's hard to say if its just living longer or the harder to qualify reasoning above that leads to higher cancer with time. People who live longer have a higher chance of getting cancer only because they're around longer than other people, but that shouldn't imply causation.
It makes sense to fight disease with disease.
Technically that's what the immune system is, if you think about it. It's a "disease" system that's under control in such a way so that it doesn't attack you. There are of course lots of very ugly situations in which it does attack you (allergies are a mild form of your immune system going berserk. Some believe that Type I diabetes is caused by the immune system going haywire on a poor child's pancreas. I've got a friend who is essentially bald all over her body because her immune system attacks hair follicles (only with lots of pills and special shampoos can she grow hair on her head.) The list goes on and on.) One of the biggest challenges faced by modern, western medicine is simply figuring out how to make the immune system work better in some instances, and how to stop it from doing its thing in others.
In the meantime, I take my zinc and astragalus and do pretty well.:-)
It sort of is, but few people go through the process. Any DVD the average American would want is available to them (and since that's the case, and few people know about region coding anyway, stores will stock players on which you can't change the region codes.)
Individuals who want unusual DVDs (or myself, who want a DVD in a different format because I'm a polyglot and I enjoy watching films with subtitles/langauge tracks from languages other than French or Spanish) will go through the hassle of having a multi region player.
Credit card companies make a certain amount per transaction from the merchant. They want you to charge your transaction as opposed to running it as a "debit" transaction that they don't make money on.
Credit card companies also know that people hate signing receipts, and that PIN numbers are more trusted (publicly) than signatures for credit card transactions (the reality is that the PIN adds little.) Indeed, a lot of restaurants (Chipotle, Wendys, ans gas stations of course) allow you to make CC purchases without signature.
So they are developing this system, which may or may not include a PIN, to differentiate the experience of using a credit card versus using your debit card. With any luck, just the little bit of convenience offered in not having to have your debit card swiped will convince you to use your V/MC/AMEX card instead.
If I'm right on this, V/C/AMEX will (temporarily) reduce merchant charges, if the merchant agrees to install the new equipment.
Passwords are authentication. Passports are identification.
That depends on how you define "identification."
Does a passport need your name on it to fufill its main task? The answer is a resounding no. The main purpose of the passport is to identify you as belonging to the class of citizens from country X. Most "name and face" transactions, wherein the name is significant, is not done with passports (it's done with normal photo ID cards. Now this is partially disingenuous...on your typical international trip, your passport is used for "name and face" on checkin to make sure your name doesn't appear on a list o'terrorists, and then a class transaction with immigration. But, having said that, the main purpose of the passport is still class authentication and not personal identification.)
Which is why, incidentally, passports are rarely counterfeited just for name and face transactions. They are mostly counterfeited for class transactions.
You know that some people fuck their children? And I mean that literally. What happens when school is over for the day and the kidnapped kid has to go home?
a.) we're talking about estranged family and stuff here. these people are probably no more likely to fuck their children than anyone else.
b.) if a child is being fucked at home by whomever, it'll show up real fast at school
It does happen that a child will be abducted by a parent who, for one reason or another, does not have legal custody.
I would be surprised if this system would be able to do a facial match on these kids based on the family photos that the family provided to law enforcement. It's unlikely that they have any good "driver's license" (digital on a particular background, full face) photos.
They would still be "missing", and could still be in danger.
Missing yes. But if they are going to school, I'm a lot less concerned about their safety. It's the poor kids locked up at home who may be in danger.
Highways are public. Where you go is [largely] public information.
You could make this argument about regular interstate highways better than you can with EZ-PASS highways.
The New Jersey turnpike is run by a quasi-governmental organization, it could be very easily privatized since it runs entirely off of tolls.
I could drive an electric car on a regular interstate all over the place, and not be paying my fair share, since gasoline taxes pay for the majority of road maintainance costs.
On the other hand, I will always pay for my time on the NJTP. With that in mind, my toll for the NJTP is essentially a license to use it from exit X to exit Y at a particular vehicle weight. Nothing about this agreement would imply that it's an arrangement that is in the public eye.
Another way to look at it is this...in spite of your assertion that highways are "public" I can't call up my DMV and ask them for a list of every driver in my town. I can't call in a random license plate number and ask whom that car is registered to. Law enforcement can ask these questions with good reason, but I can't, so highways are defendable not "public" entities in the way that you claim them to be.
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In order to be porn, the individuals must be engaging in a sexual activity.
There's a situation in Australia with a guy who makes "ball busting" videos. (The fetish here is people who like being kicked in the balls.) He had made a few videos with girls 14-16 kicking him in the nuts (fully clothed.) I don't know where the case is now, but they did try to charge him with kiddie porn, given the idea that the videos were made with sexual gratification in mind.
Ohio does not have a "churning" legislature. What I mean is, some legislatures (like California's) introduce every single damn bill that they could and then try to pass it. Many state legislatures work this way, the culture being that they measure their productivity on how much they pass.
Ohio doesn't, they like to have lots of meetings to make perfect little bills, of which only 150-200 will be enacted in a two year time period. A state rep told me (I'm an amateur lobbyist) that Ohio legislators are scared to pass anything that another state doesn't have, in fear of making a mistake. It's like their primary day to day job is to make sure they get re-elected.
The law was enacted with HB 179 The original purpose of HB 179 was to allow for driver's license revocation/suspension for a person who drives off without paying for gasoline. (A bill spearheaded in the Senate Transportation Committee cuz the guy who's the head of the committee owns a bunch of Shell stations.) At any rate, I guess the movie industry successfully lobbied some committee to have this stuff added, and it meets the single subject rule (I guess) because both parts of the bill deal with "theft." And the penalties of the bill can be explained by virtue of the fact that they link directly to the general theft code (and I suspect that the penalty for theft of gasoline was compared and they decided to make it similar.)
Michigan's penalty probably came about because their law was enacted through a unique bill, but I'm not sure. The fact that penalties are so wildly different indicates that the movie industry is working very hard to get the bills introduced as quickly as possible, since the national conference of legislators hadn't discussed these bills yet in order to ascertain a model penalty.
Isn't it entirely possible that the next wave of new storage technology was on the horizon? One which has the potential to store 8GB or more, is shock proof, *very* small, and fast.
Sony calls it the Memory Stick.
$1.5 billion to potentially benefit the entire country is better than $16 billion wasted on one city....at least it was federal money wasted on a national system, not federal money wasted on a local system.
Point taken. I'm sure, however, that the people of Boston have paid for it by idling in traffic, using up gasoline and therefore paying gas tax, for many years now. There are so many productivity gains to be had that in 50 years the big dig will pay for itself, like all roads do.
And anyway, the Boston road system is likely no more expensive than the money invested in any other large city, like Dallas, which has more multi-billion dollar highways than you can shake a stick at.
who the hell in Marketing thought Charlie Chaplin's 'Little Tramp' would make people want to buy a computer?"
:-)
Whoa. I would love to see such a commercial.
(obscure joke...Chaplin had four wives, ranging in age from 16-19. His controversial, albeit, legal, penchant for girls that age kept him from knighthood until the 70's. "Little Tramp" made me think of that.)
Were it not for the fact that I live in a provice with socialized insurance on my car, I'd be paying about 3-4 grand per year to insure my car (worth about 1500$ CDN), rather than the 720$/year I pay now.
...wait for it...
According to your site, you live in Saskatchewan, which, with all due respect to Saskatchewan, is not Southern Ontario. (And with your car being $1500 CDN, it doesn't have a big price tag for replacement.)
But having said that, the socialization of car insurance brings with it three advantages:
a.) in order to get license and license plates, you have to have insurance; generally this reduces people driving without insurance
b.) it reduces insurance company paperwork
c.) It's a less regulated industry up there (since it's the government after all...and you can add other companies if you want...overburdensome state regulation of insurance companies kills states like New Jersey and Texas)
d.) Most importantly, Canada simply doesn't have the very expensive insurance company pay outs that we have in many states. It's the government paying out the insurance claim, and you're only going to get the maximum liability limits from the government. Courts are loath to sock the government insurance companies with big payouts.
An ATM system that uses those as verification could improve security.
Magnetic stripes are easily read, magnetized and remagnetized. This does indeed happen with credit cards, less often with ATM cards (since the person would have to have the PIN to pull it off, hence fake bank machines being setup to capture both stripe and PIN) and it does happen with licenses (someone under 21 goes to a bar with a magnetic card reader...often they don't check age on the card, they only care what the reader says.)
Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not
That's interesting that you should say that...many of the alternative medicine communities (such as doctors of Traditional Chinese Medicine) often say that one of the main failings of western doctors is that they are too concerned with figuring out the why as opposed to the how. This is a result of their training, which is coming from lots of scientists who are also fascinated with figuring out how things work, as opposed to treating people.
They can work with each other....
I'm thinking the old thermal paper fax machines where the paper came on a roll, and physicaly cut when it reached the end of page.
I'm not sure if any of those units are left in service
Oh yeah...your cheap fax machines that aren't printers are still thermal paper jobs.
each book is one year in the series
Which is probably good for several reasons; for instance, we won't be inundated with Potter books that could have been better...each one will be painstakingly written all unto itself.
But, otoh, I hate seeing them grow up. It was also very peculiar for me to read the first three books in a 6-8 week time period and see them add three years to their lives. I had to stop reading them alltogether otherwise my sense of time was going to become very corrupted.
You bought a Packard Bell too then huh?
Dude, you needed the one with the turbo button.
It was big endian.
Roads are actually more efficient; every mile of road can carry 30,000 cars per day, however every mile of light rail line can carry only 10,000 people per day.
Clearly you haven't spent enough time in places like New York City, or London.
Hence my use of the term light rail line. 99% of new public transportation rail projects, in the US, come in the form of light rail, not in the form of the very very heavy rail system used in the NYC area, which is very expensive and has flexibility issues that would make it a poor choice for cities other than NYC, Washington or London.
I'm convinced that massive public construction projects are simply a money drain.
Interestingly the Japanese government was notorious for building shimmery 4 lane highways from nowhere to nowhere, simply to keep construction levels stable and to show stuff happening in the economy. The Economist had much uglyness to say about this peculiar habit.
the actual residents would have benefitted a great deal more if the money were spent on improving the subways and light rail systems in the city.
The case for public transportation is fairly ugly. The cities that have the most people using public transporation are so crowded that driving a car and parking it is impossible or at the very least, very impractical. People love the privacy and freedom afforded by cars. Indeed, the best way of getting people to use public transport is to simply make it impossible for them to drive.
This means that massive funds should not be spent on these highways which are essentially a subsidy for the megacorporations that build the cars....Those who don't own cars should not have their tax dollars spent on such projects.
The Big Dig was financed by federal highway funds which was obtained through...federal gasoline taxes. Every state in the country funds its roads through:
a.) tolls
b.) state gasoline taxes
c.) driver and motor vehicle licensing fees
Roads are not financed through sales, property or income taxes. If you don't own a car, you're not paying for the roads...drivers are actually paying for the roads. Furthermore, the beauty of the gasoline tax is...if you use the road more, you pay more tax. The heavier your car is, the more it chews up the road, the more gas tax you pay. If you're a farmer buying gas for your tractor, you don't pay gas tax since it's not being used on a road.
In many instances, drivers subsidize public transportation. The $7 toll on the Verrazano Narrows bridge into Brooklyn is not because it costs that much to maintain the bridge...the majority of that toll (as well as tolls on other MTA tunnels and bridges) is used to subsidize the public transport system.
Roads are actually more efficient; every mile of road can carry 30,000 cars per day, however every mile of light rail line can carry only 10,000 people per day.
Interestingly, at the turn of the century my hometown of Cleveland had more trolley lines than you can shake a stick at...all of them affordable and furthermore, all owned by a bunch of different companies in competition with each other. The construction of the lines was often funded by industries who needed to get labor from home to work. I actually am going to bring your anti-car maker rant into this and hypothesize that having the government take over public transporation was done so that it would be marginalized to allow the growth of the automobile culture.
Today the Cleveland regional transportation authority is violently expensive, and is spending large sums of money on lines and projects that benefit few. Rail lines costing hundreds of millions of dollars have been built with the best justification being that they will be heavily used during home games of the Browns (6 times a year.) Often public transportation systems refuse to collect the data showing that the lines/bus routes are financially absurd, in order to hide these issues. Here in Columbus, there was a group fighting a public transport tax that showed that several bus routes had so few people that it was cheaper to buy each rider a new Ford Explorer than to continue running the route.
That may not apply to Boston, since it's still very densely populated and has some complex geography.
Teenagers have an extremely high accident rate.
I believe that one of the main failures here is the conservativeness of driving schools. They believe the way to do things is to put teens behind the wheel and make em drive like grandmas, with the completely absurd expectation that they will continue driving like grandmas for the rest of their lives.
The fact is, they don't, and neither does anyone else. All of that driver's training is worth shit because accidents don't happen when a car is being driven normally; it occurs at the very edge of the vehicle's performance. Sometimes you may be dumb and on the offense, other times you are defending yourself because of another driver's mistake, but either way, if you don't know how your car handles at the limit, you may not do the right thing.
Saab used to give everyone who bought a new 9-3 Viggen a chance to drive it on a closed course with professional drivers (an intensive three day course as I recall.) Everyone I've heard who's been through the program said they learned more about driving there than many years of experience.
Expensive, yes, but a $500-$2000 investment in a professional driving training on a closed course like the one mentioned above is what our new drivers really need.
Not to mention that you get the added benefit of (potentially) getting all the high speed stupid driving out of the teen before they get on the road.
I believe that you're on a good track. Not necessarily that the War on Spam will drive spammers into international crime, but the War on Drugs likely does serve as a good economic model for spam.
.1% or something, of people who buy products from spam, as long as that does not go down (and it's at the very least stable) there will always be a place for new entrants. The internet has minimal barriers of entry and is very decentralized, and profits are likely worth it for the one individual spamming a few hours per day (unlike drug smuggling, which reaps rewards from centralizing services, and has the profits to justify the bureaucracy.) With that in mind, I can't see spamming going into the international crime rackets, except possibly as a way of protecting the spammers from legal action.
.1% who may possibly glance at the email, they will be differentiating themselves through more emails that are more creative. And that's when economic realities whack you in the head....
Right now states are taking out the dozen or so really big spammers. With time, it's possible that spamming will be changing scales, from a bunch of big spammers with a few little ones, to all little ones, which will prove much harder to find and prosecute.
The economic equivalent to this is catching large drug shipments as they are imported, and that causing a reduction in supply, increasing the price of drugs, and therefore the potential profits, for new entrants. There is after all
Actually, as I write this, I think a great economic based argument can be made that taking out the big spammers will increase spam. After all, any one big spammer selling penis enlargment pills was not in competition with himself. If we now have ten smaller spammers taking his place, and they are vying for that
Prohibition doesn't work when it conflicts with what the majority want. The majority wanted alcohol during the 1920's, and were willing to violate the law to get it.
Prohibition included a major conflict of the people. After all, the people had been convinced of the merits of prohibition, and either through their state legislature's, or through direct voting, the majority of voters did indeed approve the 18th amendment. It is unlikely that they were all teetotalers however (I would say that Prohibition was likely upended by a minority.)
If you look at the historical records, you will see a marked jump in the percent of people who die of cancer after the introduction of antibiotics. Food does the same thing. In times of famine and wars (for that matter) very few people die of cancer.
:-)
I read a book several years ago that said that cancer is a "disease of luxury." (I think the book was Anatomy of the Spirit by Carol Meiss ) If your body is dealing with other problems (like TB, or other diseases which we now have under control) cancer tends not to appear. (One idea to defend this thought is the notion that cancer occurs when the immune system lapses into a phase of doing nothing...so it doesn't notice the cancerous growth. Vaccines work not just by introducing a specific form of the virus to your immune system, but also by "waking it up.")
It's hard to say if its just living longer or the harder to qualify reasoning above that leads to higher cancer with time. People who live longer have a higher chance of getting cancer only because they're around longer than other people, but that shouldn't imply causation.
It makes sense to fight disease with disease.
Technically that's what the immune system is, if you think about it. It's a "disease" system that's under control in such a way so that it doesn't attack you. There are of course lots of very ugly situations in which it does attack you (allergies are a mild form of your immune system going berserk. Some believe that Type I diabetes is caused by the immune system going haywire on a poor child's pancreas. I've got a friend who is essentially bald all over her body because her immune system attacks hair follicles (only with lots of pills and special shampoos can she grow hair on her head.) The list goes on and on.) One of the biggest challenges faced by modern, western medicine is simply figuring out how to make the immune system work better in some instances, and how to stop it from doing its thing in others.
In the meantime, I take my zinc and astragalus and do pretty well.
Ain't it the same way there in the States?
It sort of is, but few people go through the process. Any DVD the average American would want is available to them (and since that's the case, and few people know about region coding anyway, stores will stock players on which you can't change the region codes.)
Individuals who want unusual DVDs (or myself, who want a DVD in a different format because I'm a polyglot and I enjoy watching films with subtitles/langauge tracks from languages other than French or Spanish) will go through the hassle of having a multi region player.
Credit card companies make a certain amount per transaction from the merchant. They want you to charge your transaction as opposed to running it as a "debit" transaction that they don't make money on.
Credit card companies also know that people hate signing receipts, and that PIN numbers are more trusted (publicly) than signatures for credit card transactions (the reality is that the PIN adds little.) Indeed, a lot of restaurants (Chipotle, Wendys, ans gas stations of course) allow you to make CC purchases without signature.
So they are developing this system, which may or may not include a PIN, to differentiate the experience of using a credit card versus using your debit card. With any luck, just the little bit of convenience offered in not having to have your debit card swiped will convince you to use your V/MC/AMEX card instead.
If I'm right on this, V/C/AMEX will (temporarily) reduce merchant charges, if the merchant agrees to install the new equipment.
Passwords are authentication. Passports are identification.
That depends on how you define "identification."
Does a passport need your name on it to fufill its main task? The answer is a resounding no. The main purpose of the passport is to identify you as belonging to the class of citizens from country X. Most "name and face" transactions, wherein the name is significant, is not done with passports (it's done with normal photo ID cards. Now this is partially disingenuous...on your typical international trip, your passport is used for "name and face" on checkin to make sure your name doesn't appear on a list o'terrorists, and then a class transaction with immigration. But, having said that, the main purpose of the passport is still class authentication and not personal identification.)
Which is why, incidentally, passports are rarely counterfeited just for name and face transactions. They are mostly counterfeited for class transactions.
You know that some people fuck their children? And I mean that literally. What happens when school is over for the day and the kidnapped kid has to go home?
a.) we're talking about estranged family and stuff here. these people are probably no more likely to fuck their children than anyone else.
b.) if a child is being fucked at home by whomever, it'll show up real fast at school
What problem is it that they are trying to fix?
Poor sales of facial recognition systems.
It does happen that a child will be abducted by a parent who, for one reason or another, does not have legal custody.
I would be surprised if this system would be able to do a facial match on these kids based on the family photos that the family provided to law enforcement. It's unlikely that they have any good "driver's license" (digital on a particular background, full face) photos.
They would still be "missing", and could still be in danger.
Missing yes. But if they are going to school, I'm a lot less concerned about their safety. It's the poor kids locked up at home who may be in danger.
Highways are public. Where you go is [largely] public information.
You could make this argument about regular interstate highways better than you can with EZ-PASS highways.
The New Jersey turnpike is run by a quasi-governmental organization, it could be very easily privatized since it runs entirely off of tolls.
I could drive an electric car on a regular interstate all over the place, and not be paying my fair share, since gasoline taxes pay for the majority of road maintainance costs.
On the other hand, I will always pay for my time on the NJTP. With that in mind, my toll for the NJTP is essentially a license to use it from exit X to exit Y at a particular vehicle weight. Nothing about this agreement would imply that it's an arrangement that is in the public eye.
Another way to look at it is this...in spite of your assertion that highways are "public" I can't call up my DMV and ask them for a list of every driver in my town. I can't call in a random license plate number and ask whom that car is registered to. Law enforcement can ask these questions with good reason, but I can't, so highways are defendable not "public" entities in the way that you claim them to be.