With analogy to long term erosion, everything disappears. Privacy would be completely gone. How would be achieved? Imagine machines that can read everything. Already, there are radar devices and whatnot to probe beneath the ground, inside of oceans, etc. Is it such a stretch for machines to observe your actions behind walls, to the level of detail, say, to know what your are typing on a keyboard. You would be at risk of losing not only privacy but also identity.
What would the world be like then? At the very least some people will hide behind thick walls or Faraday cages. Some will opt out of being registered anywhere, but may carry many aliases. Anonymity cannot be attacked or usurped. The identity basis of contract law would be tested to its limits. A world devoid of privacy may suffer from the dual of being devoid of foolproof biometrics.
One option would be to plot out in minutiae the details of the days ahead so that an alibi can be established at all times. This might be a workable ounce of prevention. Another option is to hoard and hide physical assets and stake out as much dominion as possible. Technology just doesn't make it easier for people.
Seriously. Anyone earning a bachelors (let alone a masters or a PhD) in a "hard" science or a list of accepted majors (CS, EE/ME/etc.) should have a green card stapled to their diploma at their commencement ceremony
For some that green card won't be used. There are two major incentives to import education to the developing world. For one, it's developing, so there can be enormous opportunity to anyone with education. For two, businesses looking for outsourcing to cut their labor will fund brain drain in spite of the hazards of building up a competing economy.
A competing economy is a better customer for exports anyways, so how bad can it be?
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I'm pretty sure all the energy that the sun will dump into these greenhouses was going to end up there anyway
Even though the waste heat from the greenhouse towers will be sent into the atmosphere, the mechanism works. The way the towers work is to extract energy from the temperature difference between the trapped air and the outside air - and the towers will be a lot hotter than the outside air, global warming or not. Indeed, waste heat from any process is dumped into the environment.
Global warming itself cannot be used as a source of energy for an Earth-based energy production machine unless the waste heat is transported into space, the ground, the colder latitudes, or water bodies, which are colder. The waste heat of a global-warming powered generator could not be dumped into the local atmosphere, which is already hot to begin with.
BTW, if the towers built to 2400 feet are successful, it would only be a matter of time for taller towers to be tried. The Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai) at 2717 feet might only hold the record for a few years in spite of being a quantum leap above other structures. So much for unassailable dominance.
Another old regular was that I figured things out when I was walking home, about 300 meters along the way. Nowadays a common time is in the morning brushing my teeth.
In other words, staying in the office for the full day is complete waste of time anyways. It's always best to just leave whenever, and after a good night's sleep, there's no one better to do the job than you.
They aren't going to sit down, do 8 straight hours of work, then go home. You'll burn out even trying
Closer to the truth may be the gap between boss pay and worker pay. Every year around New Year's you see an article exclaiming how some people get up in the morning and earn more than the average hourly worker will in the whole year, all before breakfast. There's no incentive for workers to actually work every hour they're paid for. Is there anyone or anything to blame? Perhaps the education system. Most teachers can't tell students how to become high earners - and if more of them could tell, they would probably take their own advice and not be teaching.
So if anyone wants to Ask Slashdot, maybe ask how to get paid mega money just for doing work.
The Pi computation is I/O bound, so it needs very high communication speed between the nodes on a parallel supercomputer. So the full power of the supercomputer cannot really be used.
The algorithm I used (Chudnovsky series evaluated using the binary splitting algorithm) is asymptotically slower than the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean algorithm used by Daisuke Takahashi, but it makes a more efficient use of the various CPU caches, so in practice it can be faster.
Before the next Top 500 list is published in June, maybe the benchmarking needs to be shaken up a little, huh? Intuition suggests the supercomputer could be reprogrammed to calculate more digits by a few orders of magnitude. We still have a lot to learn when it comes to taken advantage of multiprocessors, as well as algorithms.
Mars has been doing the cleaning. The wind has been cleaning the solar panels, and maybe the wind will have to either clear away the sand from the rover wheels or bury it.
I wonder is snake locomotion has been tried. Turn the steering wheels to the side (or is it steered like a tank?) and slither around to smooth out the ground underneath. Typically when a wheel is stuck, it is in a depression surrounded by loose material - slithering pushes aways the surrounding hills and permits a hill-free space to create momentum. The momentum should be used to plow away the hills by a back and forth motion though. Trying to drive over the mini hills can be futile because you end up in fresh loose material and have to start over.
The only thing possibly taller would be offshore oil rigs, but I can't remember how those stack up against it
In the open sea height is not your friend. Some platforms that have legs all the way down operate at depths up to 170 m. The above-water portion is about the size of a regular office tower. The deep water platforms float, so their height doesn't include the water depth.
Almost every aspect of open source/creative commons etc. requires attribution, and even pirates don't bother removing credits. Your 'artistic ownership' goes nowhere.
There's another angle to this. In spite of how open source rules are meant to give credit to pieces of source code that are copied into a new programm, these rules may well be inadequate for literary or artistic open source. If I wanted to write an open source novel and use a little wording from 7 or 17 other open source novels, what am I going to do to give credit, especially if the other open source books were already 5 levels deep? There is even a raging debate as to whether Shakespeare was entirely original, but only his name survived so far as the layman is concerned if there was any plagiarism.
With so many books and so little time, it is open source that may bring salvation to artistic ownership though. If authors submit all their works to be digitized, including the time of origin, and then if anyone wanted to claim artistic triumph of an elegant substring, the search engine will be the judge. Open source might technically not bring direct deposit from royalties, but it could prove over the eons who laid the foundation to particular creative areas. Possibly, good authors or artists will find lucrative sponsorships. Also, a pool of money can be used to pay for good works, polls can be used to determine how to allocate the money. For example, the player software can report how many times a user opened a particular document, search engines can report on the number of requests and hits, etc.
We all love our entertainment and leisure, and there are those who love to entertain. There is fear in both parties: technology should bring more affordable entertainment and knowledge. Creative work should be compensated in proportion to the value and number of beneficiaries. This is not as hard a problem as it seems. The administrative grunt work for supporting creative work and the technology for distributing creative output just has to adjust to the new era where a Library of Congress of back-breaking books fits into highly accessible media with the physical measurements of a ham sandwich. If the technical world has come so far, why not let it find solutions for the fears of the artists as well as the fears of the users?
Much as I respect Steve Jobs, I think Apple is all about offering an alternative, although not an alternative that has enticed me to buy yet, while Google hasn't even asked for my money and has already offered me much benefit. That is not to say Apple hasn't brought roundabout benefits to people. Apple, which would have fallen if it wasn't for Jobs, became a very visible concept, and brought balance to the computer industry and some of the electronics industry. In a way, Steve Jobs was a messiah who brought salvation and redemption to a market segment while Google was a Moses leading people to a better place. Perhaps people prefer to become Jobs more than Google, become someone who can find a way against the odds instead of Google, which appears inevitable.
Being as this is Slashdot, we need to think of a technological solution.
Flying is flexible high-speed transportation, so this objective needs to be maintained while safety is improved.
Having nothing in the lap? That doesn't ensure safety once a device has been smuggled. Such restrictions are on the silly sliding slope to passengers being forced to be heavily sedated nudists.
Some options come to mind, that can be implemented:
1. More security staff. Nothing beats trained people for identifying and nullifying threats. Detection on the ground is ideal, but the moment of truth is in the air.
2. Walls, to contain explosives, chemicals, etc.
3. Automated detection of suspicious movement or noise.
4. TakeYourChances Airlines. There should be a more liberal airline available, where passengers are willing to take a chance of being hijacked or blown up, in exchange for less security hassles. The caveat to hijackers may be to have the plane automatically land if the planned flight is not followed.
5. Restricted fly zones. Commercial planes automatically cannot enter certain microairspaces that are close to buildings, low altitudes not above airports, close to other planes, etc.
The thanks never comes down to the programmers. When the product is completed, it's likely they'll be let go, since no more work needs to be done. The sales staff could continue selling it for years, and making a profit.
Cry me a river. If a programmer wants lots of money, let him/her make and sell a product or service. It's a free country, and anyone who aspires can make the effort. Even people who aren't "smart" or "productive" can sell vast quantities of crapola for a fortune.
The way to measure who is consistently the best programmer is to have a long-term competition where the goals are uniform.
With modern distribution copyright durations should be decreasing not increasing
Actually, modern distribution is precisely why copyright should be increasing not decreasing. If it takes forever to ship something, who wants to order and wait? Let people take a copy of the "local cache". It wouldn't hurt revenues.
The counter reason in favor of decreasing copyright duration comes from the ease of copying and the sheer quantity of competition. Material that has been published and then produced in limited supply without a good reason in spite of demand should be taken out of bloody copyright.
I have seen this computer. What bugs me: the extra column of keys, very normal looking and feeling keys, beside the typical Tab-caps lock-shift-control. If you search for the shift key, you could end up starting a calculator window. Miss the tab key? You just started a web browser. Miss the Esc? Now you started your mail program. Kudos to Windows 7 for letting me start 100 browsers without cauing bizarre behavior. Why do well-designed machines always end up with completely rediculous annoyances--because no matter how much moolah is soaked from you, dear purchaser, you must come to hate it enough to want to buy a better one. You would think that spending double for a computer entitles you to hassle freedom, but instead it just proves how desperate you have to be to spend so much.
Are you an emacs user? If so, then I definitely recommend org-mode
Good Lord! When I tried emacs for the first time, it was this editor that was useful because the cursor could be moved in two dimensions, although not with the arrow keys. A couple years later there was a version that did many wonderful things like screen splitting and more with the use of convoluted keystroke sequences. I watched Emacs evolve over a few years, and then I got involved in work requiring Microsoft Office, which also changed by leaps over the years. I wish I had enough hardware to keep up with all this software.
IF this thing will eventually blow (spewing movie credits all over the northern hemisphere, some might say), is there a way to stop it from happening? Can the volcano be "tapped" to allow the molten rock to ooze out and relieve some of the pressure?
Pressure is a function of temperature, but the energy may be diminished by a cooling mechanism. Even removal of a small fraction of the energy might be enough to delay or prevent an eruption.
The crust of the earth is basically a big blanket that traps the heat, but just as a car engine can be cooled by running a watery coolant through some ducts in the engine block, it is possible to drill a network of ducts parallel to the magma chamber and run water through, and then use the heated water or steam to run turbines.
There is a tremendous amount of energy in the magma, probably more than mankind has generated artificially, but as we are seeking to reduce emissions while producing energy, here is a huge energy source that is begging to be released. The power that may be extracted likely will have to be at least 10 TW to be meaningful in delaying an eruption. Such a stone would kill another bird: unemployment. Don't like cash for caulkers? How about cash for corkers? for keeping the cork on this bubbly.
Re:high quality digital cameras doom textbooks
on
The DIY Book Scanner
·
· Score: 1
This is a market that relies on outrageous reproduction prices just like cd's used to. They are equally doomed. I know a LOT of college students who no longer buy books... they rent them for free by buying them, shooting them, and returning them.
At the price of a book, it is understandable... but if the revenues drop from book sales, they will go up in tuition. After all, who writes the books? Profs. Where do profs work? Schools.
In fact, the higher tuition has some possibilities. Book prices can be reduced, perhaps even to zero as free downloads. The camera industry might suffer a bit, but everyone is buying a camera anyways.
Indeed, what business model would befit this new era? Perhaps a subscription or a tax is the way, where downloads are free but based on the number of copies a publisher would receive a portion of a pool of funds? Newspapers may as well get something from this too, and the world will stay spinning.
I have found that I get metamoderated into oblivion (and therefore lose my mod-points) if I moderate a discussion in a way which does not fit the general opinion of most
Confining your moderation to one discussion tends to make any of your biases appear as a pattern. However, if you use your points in different discussions, maybe you look like a better moderator.
Be disciplined and law-abiding, not chaotic and lawless; Live plainly, work hard, do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures...
Sounds good in principle, but sheer peacetime economics enforces this anyways. We don't need a government to keep hammering on it. Even in capitalist countries, people can't get away too long with bending/breaking the rules. The subprime crisis has shown that banks can fail.
Ultimately, there is unpleasantness in both capitalist and communist environments. Under communism people are told to endure their poverty without complaining, while in America 10% unemployment is causing its share of hardship.
One shudders to think of a world where every government is communist, but capitalism seems to be limited by the law of dimishing returns too. Perhaps the capitalist-minded people need a central guiding message to unite them in order to improve the opportunities for the lowest classes because businesses seek only to enhance their own narrow position. In the separation of church and state, is there anything to look to. Segments of the Old Testament suggest that religion had many economic and social motivations, but it's hard to find anything in the religious messages nowadays that even relates to economics (aside from Christmas shopping). The New Testament has Jesus throwing out the money changers while conjuring up fishes for free. In this era of turmoil we are fortunate that there is still genius that goes beyond wishes making fishes, in spite of pressures from communism and anticompetitive business people.
Advisor: "Sir, we don't need to stop 100% of Pirating sites, we just need to stop the top 50% so that the underlying 50% are so overburdened by requests that they can't function! It's like a DDOS attack without hacking!"
Just as I was thinking along the same line, the other line of thought started up - "There's always tomorrow". If the sites are jammed today but nothing stops them, sooner or later people will realize that downloads are still working.
The big BUT: if the Chinese government wants to show how powerful it is, it should just pay to have everything streamed so people don't even have to try to own it. Maybe that's too captialist communist, sort of like country rock, where something unappealing is made appealing.
Slashdot Mirror
With analogy to long term erosion, everything disappears. Privacy would be completely gone. How would be achieved? Imagine machines that can read everything. Already, there are radar devices and whatnot to probe beneath the ground, inside of oceans, etc. Is it such a stretch for machines to observe your actions behind walls, to the level of detail, say, to know what your are typing on a keyboard. You would be at risk of losing not only privacy but also identity.
What would the world be like then? At the very least some people will hide behind thick walls or Faraday cages. Some will opt out of being registered anywhere, but may carry many aliases. Anonymity cannot be attacked or usurped. The identity basis of contract law would be tested to its limits. A world devoid of privacy may suffer from the dual of being devoid of foolproof biometrics.
One option would be to plot out in minutiae the details of the days ahead so that an alibi can be established at all times. This might be a workable ounce of prevention. Another option is to hoard and hide physical assets and stake out as much dominion as possible. Technology just doesn't make it easier for people.
Seriously. Anyone earning a bachelors (let alone a masters or a PhD) in a "hard" science or a list of accepted majors (CS, EE/ME/etc.) should have a green card stapled to their diploma at their commencement ceremony
For some that green card won't be used. There are two major incentives to import education to the developing world. For one, it's developing, so there can be enormous opportunity to anyone with education. For two, businesses looking for outsourcing to cut their labor will fund brain drain in spite of the hazards of building up a competing economy.
A competing economy is a better customer for exports anyways, so how bad can it be?
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I'm pretty sure all the energy that the sun will dump into these greenhouses was going to end up there anyway
Even though the waste heat from the greenhouse towers will be sent into the atmosphere, the mechanism works. The way the towers work is to extract energy from the temperature difference between the trapped air and the outside air - and the towers will be a lot hotter than the outside air, global warming or not. Indeed, waste heat from any process is dumped into the environment.
Global warming itself cannot be used as a source of energy for an Earth-based energy production machine unless the waste heat is transported into space, the ground, the colder latitudes, or water bodies, which are colder. The waste heat of a global-warming powered generator could not be dumped into the local atmosphere, which is already hot to begin with.
BTW, if the towers built to 2400 feet are successful, it would only be a matter of time for taller towers to be tried. The Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai) at 2717 feet might only hold the record for a few years in spite of being a quantum leap above other structures. So much for unassailable dominance.
Another old regular was that I figured things out when I was walking home, about 300 meters along the way. Nowadays a common time is in the morning brushing my teeth.
In other words, staying in the office for the full day is complete waste of time anyways. It's always best to just leave whenever, and after a good night's sleep, there's no one better to do the job than you.
They aren't going to sit down, do 8 straight hours of work, then go home. You'll burn out even trying
Closer to the truth may be the gap between boss pay and worker pay. Every year around New Year's you see an article exclaiming how some people get up in the morning and earn more than the average hourly worker will in the whole year, all before breakfast. There's no incentive for workers to actually work every hour they're paid for. Is there anyone or anything to blame? Perhaps the education system. Most teachers can't tell students how to become high earners - and if more of them could tell, they would probably take their own advice and not be teaching.
So if anyone wants to Ask Slashdot, maybe ask how to get paid mega money just for doing work.
The Pi computation is I/O bound, so it needs very high communication speed between the nodes on a parallel supercomputer. So the full power of the supercomputer cannot really be used.
The algorithm I used (Chudnovsky series evaluated using the binary splitting algorithm) is asymptotically slower than the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean algorithm used by Daisuke Takahashi, but it makes a more efficient use of the various CPU caches, so in practice it can be faster.
Before the next Top 500 list is published in June, maybe the benchmarking needs to be shaken up a little, huh? Intuition suggests the supercomputer could be reprogrammed to calculate more digits by a few orders of magnitude. We still have a lot to learn when it comes to taken advantage of multiprocessors, as well as algorithms.
No parts, no cleaning
Mars has been doing the cleaning. The wind has been cleaning the solar panels, and maybe the wind will have to either clear away the sand from the rover wheels or bury it.
I wonder is snake locomotion has been tried. Turn the steering wheels to the side (or is it steered like a tank?) and slither around to smooth out the ground underneath. Typically when a wheel is stuck, it is in a depression surrounded by loose material - slithering pushes aways the surrounding hills and permits a hill-free space to create momentum. The momentum should be used to plow away the hills by a back and forth motion though. Trying to drive over the mini hills can be futile because you end up in fresh loose material and have to start over.
The only thing possibly taller would be offshore oil rigs, but I can't remember how those stack up against it
In the open sea height is not your friend. Some platforms that have legs all the way down operate at depths up to 170 m. The above-water portion is about the size of a regular office tower. The deep water platforms float, so their height doesn't include the water depth.
Almost every aspect of open source/creative commons etc. requires attribution, and even pirates don't bother removing credits. Your 'artistic ownership' goes nowhere.
There's another angle to this. In spite of how open source rules are meant to give credit to pieces of source code that are copied into a new programm, these rules may well be inadequate for literary or artistic open source. If I wanted to write an open source novel and use a little wording from 7 or 17 other open source novels, what am I going to do to give credit, especially if the other open source books were already 5 levels deep? There is even a raging debate as to whether Shakespeare was entirely original, but only his name survived so far as the layman is concerned if there was any plagiarism.
With so many books and so little time, it is open source that may bring salvation to artistic ownership though. If authors submit all their works to be digitized, including the time of origin, and then if anyone wanted to claim artistic triumph of an elegant substring, the search engine will be the judge. Open source might technically not bring direct deposit from royalties, but it could prove over the eons who laid the foundation to particular creative areas. Possibly, good authors or artists will find lucrative sponsorships. Also, a pool of money can be used to pay for good works, polls can be used to determine how to allocate the money. For example, the player software can report how many times a user opened a particular document, search engines can report on the number of requests and hits, etc.
We all love our entertainment and leisure, and there are those who love to entertain. There is fear in both parties: technology should bring more affordable entertainment and knowledge. Creative work should be compensated in proportion to the value and number of beneficiaries. This is not as hard a problem as it seems. The administrative grunt work for supporting creative work and the technology for distributing creative output just has to adjust to the new era where a Library of Congress of back-breaking books fits into highly accessible media with the physical measurements of a ham sandwich. If the technical world has come so far, why not let it find solutions for the fears of the artists as well as the fears of the users?
Great Goulessarian!
To WOOT or not to WOOT?
Vootie.
Much as I respect Steve Jobs, I think Apple is all about offering an alternative, although not an alternative that has enticed me to buy yet, while Google hasn't even asked for my money and has already offered me much benefit. That is not to say Apple hasn't brought roundabout benefits to people. Apple, which would have fallen if it wasn't for Jobs, became a very visible concept, and brought balance to the computer industry and some of the electronics industry. In a way, Steve Jobs was a messiah who brought salvation and redemption to a market segment while Google was a Moses leading people to a better place. Perhaps people prefer to become Jobs more than Google, become someone who can find a way against the odds instead of Google, which appears inevitable.
Another reason for me not to fly
Being as this is Slashdot, we need to think of a technological solution.
Flying is flexible high-speed transportation, so this objective needs to be maintained while safety is improved.
Having nothing in the lap? That doesn't ensure safety once a device has been smuggled. Such restrictions are on the silly sliding slope to passengers being forced to be heavily sedated nudists.
Some options come to mind, that can be implemented:
1. More security staff. Nothing beats trained people for identifying and nullifying threats. Detection on the ground is ideal, but the moment of truth is in the air.
2. Walls, to contain explosives, chemicals, etc.
3. Automated detection of suspicious movement or noise.
4. TakeYourChances Airlines. There should be a more liberal airline available, where passengers are willing to take a chance of being hijacked or blown up, in exchange for less security hassles. The caveat to hijackers may be to have the plane automatically land if the planned flight is not followed.
5. Restricted fly zones. Commercial planes automatically cannot enter certain microairspaces that are close to buildings, low altitudes not above airports, close to other planes, etc.
The thanks never comes down to the programmers. When the product is completed, it's likely they'll be let go, since no more work needs to be done. The sales staff could continue selling it for years, and making a profit.
Cry me a river. If a programmer wants lots of money, let him/her make and sell a product or service. It's a free country, and anyone who aspires can make the effort. Even people who aren't "smart" or "productive" can sell vast quantities of crapola for a fortune.
The way to measure who is consistently the best programmer is to have a long-term competition where the goals are uniform.
But in 2012 I will no longer be a child :(
Only signed software can be installed, so there will be no way around the DRM.
Can the computer industry really go along with this? There are bajillions of software packages that have never been signed.
With modern distribution copyright durations should be decreasing not increasing
Actually, modern distribution is precisely why copyright should be increasing not decreasing. If it takes forever to ship something, who wants to order and wait? Let people take a copy of the "local cache". It wouldn't hurt revenues.
The counter reason in favor of decreasing copyright duration comes from the ease of copying and the sheer quantity of competition. Material that has been published and then produced in limited supply without a good reason in spite of demand should be taken out of bloody copyright.
new HP Envy laptop
I have seen this computer. What bugs me: the extra column of keys, very normal looking and feeling keys, beside the typical Tab-caps lock-shift-control. If you search for the shift key, you could end up starting a calculator window. Miss the tab key? You just started a web browser. Miss the Esc? Now you started your mail program. Kudos to Windows 7 for letting me start 100 browsers without cauing bizarre behavior. Why do well-designed machines always end up with completely rediculous annoyances--because no matter how much moolah is soaked from you, dear purchaser, you must come to hate it enough to want to buy a better one. You would think that spending double for a computer entitles you to hassle freedom, but instead it just proves how desperate you have to be to spend so much.
Are you an emacs user? If so, then I definitely recommend org-mode
Good Lord! When I tried emacs for the first time, it was this editor that was useful because the cursor could be moved in two dimensions, although not with the arrow keys. A couple years later there was a version that did many wonderful things like screen splitting and more with the use of convoluted keystroke sequences. I watched Emacs evolve over a few years, and then I got involved in work requiring Microsoft Office, which also changed by leaps over the years. I wish I had enough hardware to keep up with all this software.
IF this thing will eventually blow (spewing movie credits all over the northern hemisphere, some might say), is there a way to stop it from happening? Can the volcano be "tapped" to allow the molten rock to ooze out and relieve some of the pressure?
Pressure is a function of temperature, but the energy may be diminished by a cooling mechanism. Even removal of a small fraction of the energy might be enough to delay or prevent an eruption.
The crust of the earth is basically a big blanket that traps the heat, but just as a car engine can be cooled by running a watery coolant through some ducts in the engine block, it is possible to drill a network of ducts parallel to the magma chamber and run water through, and then use the heated water or steam to run turbines.
There is a tremendous amount of energy in the magma, probably more than mankind has generated artificially, but as we are seeking to reduce emissions while producing energy, here is a huge energy source that is begging to be released. The power that may be extracted likely will have to be at least 10 TW to be meaningful in delaying an eruption. Such a stone would kill another bird: unemployment. Don't like cash for caulkers? How about cash for corkers? for keeping the cork on this bubbly.
This is a market that relies on outrageous reproduction prices just like cd's used to. They are equally doomed. I know a LOT of college students who no longer buy books ... they rent them for free by buying them, shooting them, and returning them.
At the price of a book, it is understandable ... but if the revenues drop from book sales, they will go up in tuition. After all, who writes the books? Profs. Where do profs work? Schools.
In fact, the higher tuition has some possibilities. Book prices can be reduced, perhaps even to zero as free downloads. The camera industry might suffer a bit, but everyone is buying a camera anyways.
Indeed, what business model would befit this new era? Perhaps a subscription or a tax is the way, where downloads are free but based on the number of copies a publisher would receive a portion of a pool of funds? Newspapers may as well get something from this too, and the world will stay spinning.
For the audacious, pump the water back out and refill when a new climate is desired ...
I have found that I get metamoderated into oblivion (and therefore lose my mod-points) if I moderate a discussion in a way which does not fit the general opinion of most
Confining your moderation to one discussion tends to make any of your biases appear as a pattern. However, if you use your points in different discussions, maybe you look like a better moderator.
Be disciplined and law-abiding, not chaotic and lawless; Live plainly, work hard, do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures...
Sounds good in principle, but sheer peacetime economics enforces this anyways. We don't need a government to keep hammering on it. Even in capitalist countries, people can't get away too long with bending/breaking the rules. The subprime crisis has shown that banks can fail.
Ultimately, there is unpleasantness in both capitalist and communist environments. Under communism people are told to endure their poverty without complaining, while in America 10% unemployment is causing its share of hardship.
One shudders to think of a world where every government is communist, but capitalism seems to be limited by the law of dimishing returns too. Perhaps the capitalist-minded people need a central guiding message to unite them in order to improve the opportunities for the lowest classes because businesses seek only to enhance their own narrow position. In the separation of church and state, is there anything to look to. Segments of the Old Testament suggest that religion had many economic and social motivations, but it's hard to find anything in the religious messages nowadays that even relates to economics (aside from Christmas shopping). The New Testament has Jesus throwing out the money changers while conjuring up fishes for free. In this era of turmoil we are fortunate that there is still genius that goes beyond wishes making fishes, in spite of pressures from communism and anticompetitive business people.
Advisor: "Sir, we don't need to stop 100% of Pirating sites, we just need to stop the top 50% so that the underlying 50% are so overburdened by requests that they can't function! It's like a DDOS attack without hacking!"
Just as I was thinking along the same line, the other line of thought started up - "There's always tomorrow". If the sites are jammed today but nothing stops them, sooner or later people will realize that downloads are still working.
The big BUT: if the Chinese government wants to show how powerful it is, it should just pay to have everything streamed so people don't even have to try to own it. Maybe that's too captialist communist, sort of like country rock, where something unappealing is made appealing.
How?
Without even trying.