Fairly efficient such tho, and pretty deeply woven into architecture issues such as DMA, I/O TLB's and virtualized OS's. VM memory management isn't just about preventing programs writing all over eachother anymore, it's also about preventing the dozens of independent chips from writing all over your memory.
And whatever changes you make are immediately persisted.
I've heard of tries like this before; the thing is, with software bugs, logic problems and not entirely trustworthy storage, execution and memory you may not always want anything that happens to be persistent. You'll still want to have sane states to go back to, and most likely without code (think of the 'file' as simply an instruction for the code to reach the desired state).
This is what users expect.
You know, the 'killer feature' on electric typewriters was that things were not immediately persisted and, while perhaps not what users 'expect', it's certainly something they desired. In fact, I'd say many people would prefer _everything_, including reality, behaving in a non-persistent fashion with the ability to save certain states to restart from.
So I have to agree with the GP, this is not something I find particularly desirable.
As long as capped services are advertized as having their max sustainable speed, ie, cap/month. The ISP may provide higher 'burst' speed, but with a cap, the cap/month is what you get.
I've considered the business plan of collecting vacuum cleaner bags from public transport, hospitals and hairdressers and then packaging a bunch of the mixed crap in a box with a compressed air canister, which one could then sell at, eh, hardware stores or some place where criminals get their gear.
Poof. Instant demonstration of why having everyone on file is a bad idea.
Of course, with stories about labs first sticking the sampler needle in the suspects sample, then using the same uncleaned needle to sample the crime scene DNA (thus guaranteeing a match), they may not need any further confusion.
"She said that if such a law had been in place when her daughter was murdered"
Spoken like the mother of a crime victim. Of course, had such a law been in place when her daughter was murdered, then her daughter might very well have been in jail for a crime she hadn't committed because her DNA had happened to be there, or a lab had made a mistake, etc. Then she would have been teary eyed in the newspaper about the evil DNA laws that got her daughter jailed and killed (or, well, she wouldn't, as nobody gives a shit about criminals, wether they're guilty or not).
If the bank doesn't have any opportunity to make a profit, why should it operate?
100% reserve doesn't mean the bank cant make a profit. It simply means it has to explicitly state that where you put your money is an _investment_ that can be _gone_. There's nothing stopping the bank from issuing bonds that customers can buy, having interest on investments accounts, etc. But _deposit_ accounts where the money is claimed to be available at will and at once would be pay-for money storage.
Ignoring the last 5 years or so, the Fed has ~never encouraged inflation
Apart from the short term of Volkers money supply targeting the Fed and politicians have been cooperating to drive inflation. The CPI is so deeply flawed as to be meaningless as an instrument; by the more useful measures such as some variants of money supply the expansion has been close to constant and much higher than the CPI.
If they don't want to help us, what do they want, exactly?
The Fed board probably wants to help us in their own way. However, their capacity to actually 'help' is strictly limited to postponing payment and/or engaging in mass-taxation through inflation. The very theory of central economic control that central banking is based upon is flawed in itself, leading to the situation where we are now; serial bubbles followed by the final contraction when unsustainable debt has been built and someone either has to spend everything paying interest and amortizing lost asset values or someone else has to see their savings get wiped out in a credit collapse.
If the Fed had been somehow "pressuring" them into doing this (by a mechanism still opaque to me)
By keeping centrally controlled interest rates below (actual) inflation rate you have to option of seeing your money go up in smoke from inflation, or investing/lending it out at a rate that will hopefully match inflation. That's the whole point of lowering interest rates: 'encourage' investments and loans. By various values of 'encourage'.
Would you mind explaining (or better yet linking) what, exactly, is Austrian school economics?
but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution.
On a Xen or KVM solution you simply use the distribution's clustering software. Moving VM's is much simpler than most HA clustered applications usually run by such software.
We'll be using the integrated Xen on RHEL5 for most linux virtualization needs, the price of ESX is one part, performance is another large part, and then add the lack of a linux VIC client, various driver issues yet another. And yes, that's in a datacenter setting.
Personally I consider the debate pretty much passe by now; it's like discussing wether to run a third-party TCP/IP stack in the 1990's. Virtualization will be a built in feature like anything else, no more 'third party' than 'fork'. The attempts by VMWare to play up their management tools are irrelevant, the very fact that the built-in techs can utilize the entire OS as underlying capabilities for management and leverage every new development immediately simply means a single company working on proprietary tech hasn't got a chance to keep up.
It's sad to see it happen, but IMO, VMWare have been sitting on their arse for five years cashing in. They could have been far ahead, and they could have dealt with most issues if they'd tried. Instead they're now stuck with a load of customers who use their products only for want of alternatives and who are now ditching ESX et al as each gets their requirements fulfilled elsewhere.
Not at all. Reading and storing peoples RFID keys would be a great way to make targeted IED'd. RFID passports and ID cards have to be the assassins or terrorists wet dream.
Oh, no worries, cooked books taste just as good with SOX as without. As predicted, SOX hasn't changed jack; take a look at the average financial institution today and they have the vast majority of their liabilities in special purpose off balance sheet vehicles (see, as long as you only own 49% of the subsidiary, and the rest is owned by your cousins neighbours grammas old dog you don't have to bring the liabilities onto your balance sheet).
And when rules to change that (strongly opposed by Citigroup, etc) were supposed to enter into force last november, it was suddenly 'impractical' and got delayed by the FASB.
Right, 'impractical' as in 'the banks are insolvent and unless they get to cook their books it's going to be bloody obvious that actual bailout requirements are in the tens of trillions, which might be a bit unpalatable for taxpayers'.
So SOX has merely added a bunch of expensive administrative crap with no actual extra security for stock holders; they'll get screwed anyway as politically expedient.
Of course, in an actual 'free trade' world people could also buy the 'cheaper and better' copy of windows off the copyguy at the streetcorner, anyone would be allowed to sell 'Nike' shoes from the same factory for the $25 production cost, workers would be able to move between countries at will as well (or even subcontract their own job as they felt like), etc.
Of course, most politicians and corporations approval of 'free trade' is strictly limited to the specific cases where it gives them an advantage, which is why we have the much (rightfully) maligned implementation we currently have, where most of the benefits are kept as far from the actual workers as possible, and the main purpose is to be able to keep costs low in one place while maintaining price in another, leading to one of the most efficient ways possible of siphoning wealth off the middle and lower classes.
The economic crisis derives directly from the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, neither of which is free market. Centrally controlled interest rates are not in any way 'free market', and fractional reserve banking is simply fraud (which should be replaced with 100% reserve deposits and the option to invest at the customers discretion and the customers risk).
Blaming the market for doing what the Fed told them to is pointless; when the Fed policy threatens to inflate away any money people have that they don't invest, people are going to invest it. Regulation to prevent it would be ineffective, as you'll currently note, when the Fed doesn't get what it wants it'll go on lowering rates and then simply printing money until people do what it wants. This is the fundamental nature of the Fed, and until it's abolished it's going to continue to mismanage rates and cause bubbles and collapses like this.
With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass; as demand for capital increased, so would the interest that depositors demanded, borrowers would have to compete for money to borrow. Only with infinite credit and artificially low rates is it possible to build unsustainable bubbles of the kinds we've seen.
I haven't seen any of the prophecies
You probably haven't looked too carefully. Austrian school economists predicted exactly what happened. Unless, of course, by 'free-market' you mean the self-serving monetarist clowns running a lot of US finance, most of whose approval of 'free markets' is strictly limited to the features that serve them and their friends.
CCTV: I see you Mr. Screamustache. Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply. Scrameustache: Who? What? That's not me, and I'm not armed!
CCTV: You now have 15 seconds to comply Scrameustache: I'm not the face you're looking for!
CCTV: You are in direct violation of Penal Code 1.13, Section 9. CCTV: You have 5 seconds to comply.
Scrameustache: Help! CCTV: Four... three... two... one... I am now authorized to use physical force!
From the actual effects and the specific implementation of copyright law that we have? The GP's assertion isn't that far from reality.
Copyright at its most fundamental level is a legal enforcement of proper attribution... and certainly don't assert that you wrote something or made something
You don't need to go further than to ghost writers or works for hire to ascertain that proper attribution is at best a secondary consideration, if any consideration at all. It's certainly not a fundamental aspect that the designers of copyright law have had as a priority.
Protecting the actual artists, composers, writers, producers and filmmakers through copyright
Personally, were I designing copyright law, I'd prioritize proper attribution and monetary incentive directly to the creators designed to maximize productive output (and there are many ways to do that).
But that's never been what copyright law was all about. Originally the purpose was to protect the Crowns influence and the profit of the friends of the Crown from cheap printers in Scotland, and the only reason authors got jack was that the laws would otherwise have been very hard to pass. Handing authors an incentive was simply political expediency and marketing; the creators have historically always been in a bargaining position without much power anyway, so giving them whatever pittance they could negotiate as an alternative to unpublished starvation was never seen as much of a problem.
Copyright is a monopoly right, not to serve creators, but to serve those with the financial resources to exploit creators. It's a monopoly right to serve businessmen and to allow the exercise of control. Like all government granted monopolies it fosters a co-dependence between capital and state, to the detritement of everyone else.
Had copyright law ever been about the creators it would have been formulated to ensure the author got a cut of every book or product sold, and let the publishers battle it out in the free market. The very design and effects of the laws belies the claim that they're intended for the benefit of the creators.
Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term.
As long as the currency, the fundamental measurement of value, is intrinsically unsound and the rules of the game are changed at whim there basically is no way to determine what investments have a long term profitability. Central banks inherently mismanage interest rates to generate demand that isn't real, leading to an eventual collapse of the kind we're currently seeing.
they generally won't go to zero.
Any leveraged company, ie, any company with loans can go to zero in a very short time and with a very small change in asset values. Most banks today are far, far below zero and unlikely to recover in the next decade at least.
they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.
The long term investor is the one most likely getting caught holding the bag. as many tend to hang on all the way to the bottom and the bitter end. Short term traders never lose 'everything' as they define the parameters for a trade and set stop-loss when they buy. Without that discipline you get caught up emotionally, thinking the long term will recover your losses, thinking as long as you don't sell you haven't lost, etc.
In the end, the game is rigged and you're not pulling the strings. Unless you've got the clout to get your ass covered on the taxpayers dime the only way you're going to win is if you can and will act in the very short term.
You could always try Samsung. I've bought 4 of their Spinpoint F1 750GB drives that I'm happy with. Very silent, fast and reliable this far (going on 2 years now).
And in case TP cabling is impractical, consider a network over powerline solution like HomePlug. Frankly, if you have a problem with your wireless being slow and unreliable, you shouldn't be using wireless. Wireless is great for intermittent asynchronous low bandwidth communications, like the occasional mail or web page on a laptop, but being slow and unreliable is pretty much part of its nature in many cases.
It would be interesting to see that google query tho; I have a hard time seeing the most obvious searches resulting in scammer links.
Of course, to answer my own question, googling 'openoffice scam' turned up the way it appears to be done: buying first link type google ads. I guess that might be a fairly efficient way of scamming unaware google users. Add another of those things to educate users about, or add a firefox plugin translating 'sponsored links' to 'scammers links' on google.com.
There is some hope in me yet that there will be at least one MP who isn't like that
Well, for the parliament there are usually many options you can vote for that aren't in among the worst.
the constant interference of what basically are foreign powers in our national politics
A lot of the time it's basically our national politicians using a scapegoat. The commission and council are our own/largely loyal to our own politicians, and they love to shove things through in the EU and then say 'it's the EU!', even if they were the ones proposing it in the first place.
The problem isn't inherent in the involvement of other EU countries and politics, the problem is the lack of accountability and the way it gets used for denial of responsibility.
The fact that Google also insists on text ads saves large amounts of power; the power consumed by looping flash ads that constantly keeps CPU utilization up and prevents power saving is significant.
whereas the e-waste has to go through quite a bit of processing
Still, it contains higher concentrations of metals than many ores that can be profitably processed. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to treat it as raw ore material and just dump it in an ore smelter at a couple of thousand degrees. I guess it might contain problematic compounds that would complicate extraction, but compared to other ores it shouldn't be an insurmountable problem.
You need to ask yourself why Israel has kept the West Bank and Gaza territories occupied for so long rather than integrating them into Israel. For an explanation you don't need to look much further than the demographic makeup and guess how interested Israeli politicians are in having that many Palestinian voters. The same applies to the right of return for Palestinian refugees; integration of the displaced populations would mean the end of Israel as a democratic Jewish state.
Some Israeli politicians even go so far as to suggest administratively transferring Arab Israeli citizens to the West bank to prevent political shifts. So you see, a one state solution is unlikely to happen.
Monetary policy is controlled by The Fed, which not print money.
Ah, you're a couple of months out of date. You may have heard of the new policy called 'quantitative easing'. Quantitative, as in quantity, easing, as in making more of it. The Fed has more than doubled its balance sheet already, creating money, taking crap assets off the books of bank in exchange for minty fresh dollars.
Rate controlled monetary policy, as the Fed has belatedly noticed, is useless once you reach peak credit and nobody wants to borrow or lend anymore, leaving it with making more money as the only option for reinflating.
Of course, some would claim that screwing around with the monetary base is the very thing that causes the bubbles and busts. A theory which the current situation appears to validate quite throughly.
Ah, see, that doesn't work either. When the market moves against the wrong players they'll use their political influence and get the rules changed. Many hedge funds and others who were 'correct' eventually lost out anyways, as the Fed simply prints money to fill the holes for the right people.
Fundamentally large parts of the market should be liquidated and shut down; overcapacity is rampant and consumers do not want the products in question at the prices they can be produced, the demand that seemed to be there was just a reflection of demand when money was free.
Do you want to bet that will be allowed to happen? Or do you want to be that the Fed and government will simply confiscate your resources through printing and borrowing and keep their friends in the green at your expense, without you having any say?
You can be the most rational market player in the world, yet you can't win when they'll change the rules at whim and confiscate any profit you make either way. The only way to even avoid losing money is to move them elsewhere and not participate in the rigged markets. Not that it's easy to find free and unmanipulated markets; guess why 'coordinated action' has come into such a vogue; debase all currencies and savers cant protect their money.
Well, even calling it "property" is the result of an addled brain. Or a deliberate misdirection.
effectively taxing them twice
Calling it "intellectual taxation" would be much more appropriate (or various other terms). From a macroeconomic point of view IP is fairly close to taxes in effect; worse in some aspects, combining the less socioeconomic desireable effects of both into a single really destructive form.
For example, even apart from the vast damage to combinatory inventions, the very function, adding high price to new and theoretically better products slows down adoption and spread of those products, when the best economic advantage would be derived if adoption of new products was maximized (green tech, medical tech, etc) and the older less efficient tech was deprecated. Reducing use rate may be appropriate for some forms of taxes, such as those on cigarettes or alcohol, but it's hardly good for inventions.
Basically, the only productive way to consider the usefulness and efficiency of IP is to frame the concept as a taxation form, and then discuss it from that point. And it usually doesn't take long to figure out it's a very badly implemented one.
Claiming that such a scenario would be "trivial" for a government or anyone else is just nonsense.
Many governments already do siphon off traffic to proxies and/or interfere in ISP DNS services for child porn blocking, as well as for various intelligence purposes. To think that's hard to do when it's already done is rather disingenious.
they can just as well rubberhose a privately owned CA into doing it for them today
They probably do it regularly. I can't see Verisign objecting to a national security letter. But this thread was originally about having the government _as_ CA.
They can get all the information contained in these transactions for much cheaper after the fact
For some types of information and under certain legal circumstances, sure. Making it even easier and with even fewer parties involved is not in the interest of privacy and security.
They must sell as many certs as possible - or they go out of business.
Oh, don't think I'm a fan of private CA's either, I've made the economic interest point against private CA's myself. Third party trust is inherently flawed; there simply is no third party with more interest in keeping your communications secure than you and whoever you are communicating with. To have any chance at being protected against defection you'd need several independent signers; for practical purposes you're better off just using self-signed certificates and importing private CA certificates valid for specific domains you communicate with under controlled circumstances (physical distribution or other out of band distribution).
You need to look up how man in the middle attacks work. As long as they can create a signed certificate saying their server is the destination server they can transparently proxy your communications.
For non-government CA's it's tricky, as they'd have to spoof or control DNS for the domain in question, but for a government it would be trivial. There's already many examples of redirects and censorship proxying being done, and as long as a government can either produce, or compel to be produced, signed certificates authenticating their proxies as the destination they can proxy and read SSL traffic as well.
Why would they need your private key? As long as they can sign any key as being valid for being 'you' they can make their own signed public/private key pair purporting to be you and MITM any communications to you. To get around that you'd still need out-of-band exchanges of the keys in which case the government signing serves no purpose.
In addition, the web of trust needs to be more configurable in any case.
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There is quite a bit of legwork that the CPU does
Fairly efficient such tho, and pretty deeply woven into architecture issues such as DMA, I/O TLB's and virtualized OS's. VM memory management isn't just about preventing programs writing all over eachother anymore, it's also about preventing the dozens of independent chips from writing all over your memory.
And whatever changes you make are immediately persisted.
I've heard of tries like this before; the thing is, with software bugs, logic problems and not entirely trustworthy storage, execution and memory you may not always want anything that happens to be persistent. You'll still want to have sane states to go back to, and most likely without code (think of the 'file' as simply an instruction for the code to reach the desired state).
This is what users expect.
You know, the 'killer feature' on electric typewriters was that things were not immediately persisted and, while perhaps not what users 'expect', it's certainly something they desired. In fact, I'd say many people would prefer _everything_, including reality, behaving in a non-persistent fashion with the ability to save certain states to restart from.
So I have to agree with the GP, this is not something I find particularly desirable.
As long as capped services are advertized as having their max sustainable speed, ie, cap/month. The ISP may provide higher 'burst' speed, but with a cap, the cap/month is what you get.
I've considered the business plan of collecting vacuum cleaner bags from public transport, hospitals and hairdressers and then packaging a bunch of the mixed crap in a box with a compressed air canister, which one could then sell at, eh, hardware stores or some place where criminals get their gear.
Poof. Instant demonstration of why having everyone on file is a bad idea.
Of course, with stories about labs first sticking the sampler needle in the suspects sample, then using the same uncleaned needle to sample the crime scene DNA (thus guaranteeing a match), they may not need any further confusion.
"She said that if such a law had been in place when her daughter was murdered"
Spoken like the mother of a crime victim. Of course, had such a law been in place when her daughter was murdered, then her daughter might very well have been in jail for a crime she hadn't committed because her DNA had happened to be there, or a lab had made a mistake, etc. Then she would have been teary eyed in the newspaper about the evil DNA laws that got her daughter jailed and killed (or, well, she wouldn't, as nobody gives a shit about criminals, wether they're guilty or not).
If the bank doesn't have any opportunity to make a profit, why should it operate?
100% reserve doesn't mean the bank cant make a profit. It simply means it has to explicitly state that where you put your money is an _investment_ that can be _gone_. There's nothing stopping the bank from issuing bonds that customers can buy, having interest on investments accounts, etc. But _deposit_ accounts where the money is claimed to be available at will and at once would be pay-for money storage.
Ignoring the last 5 years or so, the Fed has ~never encouraged inflation
Apart from the short term of Volkers money supply targeting the Fed and politicians have been cooperating to drive inflation. The CPI is so deeply flawed as to be meaningless as an instrument; by the more useful measures such as some variants of money supply the expansion has been close to constant and much higher than the CPI.
If they don't want to help us, what do they want, exactly?
The Fed board probably wants to help us in their own way. However, their capacity to actually 'help' is strictly limited to postponing payment and/or engaging in mass-taxation through inflation. The very theory of central economic control that central banking is based upon is flawed in itself, leading to the situation where we are now; serial bubbles followed by the final contraction when unsustainable debt has been built and someone either has to spend everything paying interest and amortizing lost asset values or someone else has to see their savings get wiped out in a credit collapse.
If the Fed had been somehow "pressuring" them into doing this (by a mechanism still opaque to me)
By keeping centrally controlled interest rates below (actual) inflation rate you have to option of seeing your money go up in smoke from inflation, or investing/lending it out at a rate that will hopefully match inflation. That's the whole point of lowering interest rates: 'encourage' investments and loans. By various values of 'encourage'.
Would you mind explaining (or better yet linking) what, exactly, is Austrian school economics?
One of the (several) large branches of economic thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school.
but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution.
On a Xen or KVM solution you simply use the distribution's clustering software. Moving VM's is much simpler than most HA clustered applications usually run by such software.
We'll be using the integrated Xen on RHEL5 for most linux virtualization needs, the price of ESX is one part, performance is another large part, and then add the lack of a linux VIC client, various driver issues yet another. And yes, that's in a datacenter setting.
Personally I consider the debate pretty much passe by now; it's like discussing wether to run a third-party TCP/IP stack in the 1990's. Virtualization will be a built in feature like anything else, no more 'third party' than 'fork'. The attempts by VMWare to play up their management tools are irrelevant, the very fact that the built-in techs can utilize the entire OS as underlying capabilities for management and leverage every new development immediately simply means a single company working on proprietary tech hasn't got a chance to keep up.
It's sad to see it happen, but IMO, VMWare have been sitting on their arse for five years cashing in. They could have been far ahead, and they could have dealt with most issues if they'd tried. Instead they're now stuck with a load of customers who use their products only for want of alternatives and who are now ditching ESX et al as each gets their requirements fulfilled elsewhere.
cloning somebody else's RFID is pointless
Not at all. Reading and storing peoples RFID keys would be a great way to make targeted IED'd. RFID passports and ID cards have to be the assassins or terrorists wet dream.
Oh, no worries, cooked books taste just as good with SOX as without. As predicted, SOX hasn't changed jack; take a look at the average financial institution today and they have the vast majority of their liabilities in special purpose off balance sheet vehicles (see, as long as you only own 49% of the subsidiary, and the rest is owned by your cousins neighbours grammas old dog you don't have to bring the liabilities onto your balance sheet).
And when rules to change that (strongly opposed by Citigroup, etc) were supposed to enter into force last november, it was suddenly 'impractical' and got delayed by the FASB.
Right, 'impractical' as in 'the banks are insolvent and unless they get to cook their books it's going to be bloody obvious that actual bailout requirements are in the tens of trillions, which might be a bit unpalatable for taxpayers'.
So SOX has merely added a bunch of expensive administrative crap with no actual extra security for stock holders; they'll get screwed anyway as politically expedient.
In a 'free trade' world
Of course, in an actual 'free trade' world people could also buy the 'cheaper and better' copy of windows off the copyguy at the streetcorner, anyone would be allowed to sell 'Nike' shoes from the same factory for the $25 production cost, workers would be able to move between countries at will as well (or even subcontract their own job as they felt like), etc.
Of course, most politicians and corporations approval of 'free trade' is strictly limited to the specific cases where it gives them an advantage, which is why we have the much (rightfully) maligned implementation we currently have, where most of the benefits are kept as far from the actual workers as possible, and the main purpose is to be able to keep costs low in one place while maintaining price in another, leading to one of the most efficient ways possible of siphoning wealth off the middle and lower classes.
put us all in an economical crisis
The economic crisis derives directly from the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, neither of which is free market. Centrally controlled interest rates are not in any way 'free market', and fractional reserve banking is simply fraud (which should be replaced with 100% reserve deposits and the option to invest at the customers discretion and the customers risk).
Blaming the market for doing what the Fed told them to is pointless; when the Fed policy threatens to inflate away any money people have that they don't invest, people are going to invest it. Regulation to prevent it would be ineffective, as you'll currently note, when the Fed doesn't get what it wants it'll go on lowering rates and then simply printing money until people do what it wants. This is the fundamental nature of the Fed, and until it's abolished it's going to continue to mismanage rates and cause bubbles and collapses like this.
With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass; as demand for capital increased, so would the interest that depositors demanded, borrowers would have to compete for money to borrow. Only with infinite credit and artificially low rates is it possible to build unsustainable bubbles of the kinds we've seen.
I haven't seen any of the prophecies
You probably haven't looked too carefully. Austrian school economists predicted exactly what happened. Unless, of course, by 'free-market' you mean the self-serving monetarist clowns running a lot of US finance, most of whose approval of 'free markets' is strictly limited to the features that serve them and their friends.
CCTV: I see you Mr. Screamustache. Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
Scrameustache: Who? What? That's not me, and I'm not armed!
CCTV: You now have 15 seconds to comply
Scrameustache: I'm not the face you're looking for!
CCTV: You are in direct violation of Penal Code 1.13, Section 9.
CCTV: You have 5 seconds to comply.
Scrameustache: Help!
CCTV: Four... three... two... one... I am now authorized to use physical force!
Yay. _Safe_.
I don't understand where you get this idea.
From the actual effects and the specific implementation of copyright law that we have? The GP's assertion isn't that far from reality.
Copyright at its most fundamental level is a legal enforcement of proper attribution... and certainly don't assert that you wrote something or made something
You don't need to go further than to ghost writers or works for hire to ascertain that proper attribution is at best a secondary consideration, if any consideration at all. It's certainly not a fundamental aspect that the designers of copyright law have had as a priority.
Protecting the actual artists, composers, writers, producers and filmmakers through copyright
Personally, were I designing copyright law, I'd prioritize proper attribution and monetary incentive directly to the creators designed to maximize productive output (and there are many ways to do that).
But that's never been what copyright law was all about. Originally the purpose was to protect the Crowns influence and the profit of the friends of the Crown from cheap printers in Scotland, and the only reason authors got jack was that the laws would otherwise have been very hard to pass. Handing authors an incentive was simply political expediency and marketing; the creators have historically always been in a bargaining position without much power anyway, so giving them whatever pittance they could negotiate as an alternative to unpublished starvation was never seen as much of a problem.
Copyright is a monopoly right, not to serve creators, but to serve those with the financial resources to exploit creators. It's a monopoly right to serve businessmen and to allow the exercise of control. Like all government granted monopolies it fosters a co-dependence between capital and state, to the detritement of everyone else.
Had copyright law ever been about the creators it would have been formulated to ensure the author got a cut of every book or product sold, and let the publishers battle it out in the free market. The very design and effects of the laws belies the claim that they're intended for the benefit of the creators.
Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term.
As long as the currency, the fundamental measurement of value, is intrinsically unsound and the rules of the game are changed at whim there basically is no way to determine what investments have a long term profitability. Central banks inherently mismanage interest rates to generate demand that isn't real, leading to an eventual collapse of the kind we're currently seeing.
they generally won't go to zero.
Any leveraged company, ie, any company with loans can go to zero in a very short time and with a very small change in asset values. Most banks today are far, far below zero and unlikely to recover in the next decade at least.
they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.
The long term investor is the one most likely getting caught holding the bag. as many tend to hang on all the way to the bottom and the bitter end. Short term traders never lose 'everything' as they define the parameters for a trade and set stop-loss when they buy. Without that discipline you get caught up emotionally, thinking the long term will recover your losses, thinking as long as you don't sell you haven't lost, etc.
In the end, the game is rigged and you're not pulling the strings. Unless you've got the clout to get your ass covered on the taxpayers dime the only way you're going to win is if you can and will act in the very short term.
You could always try Samsung. I've bought 4 of their Spinpoint F1 750GB drives that I'm happy with. Very silent, fast and reliable this far (going on 2 years now).
And in case TP cabling is impractical, consider a network over powerline solution like HomePlug. Frankly, if you have a problem with your wireless being slow and unreliable, you shouldn't be using wireless. Wireless is great for intermittent asynchronous low bandwidth communications, like the occasional mail or web page on a laptop, but being slow and unreliable is pretty much part of its nature in many cases.
She googled for it
It would be interesting to see that google query tho; I have a hard time seeing the most obvious searches resulting in scammer links.
Of course, to answer my own question, googling 'openoffice scam' turned up the way it appears to be done: buying first link type google ads. I guess that might be a fairly efficient way of scamming unaware google users. Add another of those things to educate users about, or add a firefox plugin translating 'sponsored links' to 'scammers links' on google.com.
There is some hope in me yet that there will be at least one MP who isn't like that
Well, for the parliament there are usually many options you can vote for that aren't in among the worst.
the constant interference of what basically are foreign powers in our national politics
A lot of the time it's basically our national politicians using a scapegoat. The commission and council are our own/largely loyal to our own politicians, and they love to shove things through in the EU and then say 'it's the EU!', even if they were the ones proposing it in the first place.
The problem isn't inherent in the involvement of other EU countries and politics, the problem is the lack of accountability and the way it gets used for denial of responsibility.
The fact that Google also insists on text ads saves large amounts of power; the power consumed by looping flash ads that constantly keeps CPU utilization up and prevents power saving is significant.
whereas the e-waste has to go through quite a bit of processing
Still, it contains higher concentrations of metals than many ores that can be profitably processed. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to treat it as raw ore material and just dump it in an ore smelter at a couple of thousand degrees. I guess it might contain problematic compounds that would complicate extraction, but compared to other ores it shouldn't be an insurmountable problem.
You need to ask yourself why Israel has kept the West Bank and Gaza territories occupied for so long rather than integrating them into Israel. For an explanation you don't need to look much further than the demographic makeup and guess how interested Israeli politicians are in having that many Palestinian voters. The same applies to the right of return for Palestinian refugees; integration of the displaced populations would mean the end of Israel as a democratic Jewish state.
Some Israeli politicians even go so far as to suggest administratively transferring Arab Israeli citizens to the West bank to prevent political shifts. So you see, a one state solution is unlikely to happen.
Monetary policy is controlled by The Fed, which not print money.
Ah, you're a couple of months out of date. You may have heard of the new policy called 'quantitative easing'. Quantitative, as in quantity, easing, as in making more of it. The Fed has more than doubled its balance sheet already, creating money, taking crap assets off the books of bank in exchange for minty fresh dollars.
Rate controlled monetary policy, as the Fed has belatedly noticed, is useless once you reach peak credit and nobody wants to borrow or lend anymore, leaving it with making more money as the only option for reinflating.
Of course, some would claim that screwing around with the monetary base is the very thing that causes the bubbles and busts. A theory which the current situation appears to validate quite throughly.
Ah, see, that doesn't work either. When the market moves against the wrong players they'll use their political influence and get the rules changed. Many hedge funds and others who were 'correct' eventually lost out anyways, as the Fed simply prints money to fill the holes for the right people.
Fundamentally large parts of the market should be liquidated and shut down; overcapacity is rampant and consumers do not want the products in question at the prices they can be produced, the demand that seemed to be there was just a reflection of demand when money was free.
Do you want to bet that will be allowed to happen? Or do you want to be that the Fed and government will simply confiscate your resources through printing and borrowing and keep their friends in the green at your expense, without you having any say?
You can be the most rational market player in the world, yet you can't win when they'll change the rules at whim and confiscate any profit you make either way. The only way to even avoid losing money is to move them elsewhere and not participate in the rigged markets. Not that it's easy to find free and unmanipulated markets; guess why 'coordinated action' has come into such a vogue; debase all currencies and savers cant protect their money.
"Property" addles the brain.
Well, even calling it "property" is the result of an addled brain. Or a deliberate misdirection.
effectively taxing them twice
Calling it "intellectual taxation" would be much more appropriate (or various other terms). From a macroeconomic point of view IP is fairly close to taxes in effect; worse in some aspects, combining the less socioeconomic desireable effects of both into a single really destructive form.
For example, even apart from the vast damage to combinatory inventions, the very function, adding high price to new and theoretically better products slows down adoption and spread of those products, when the best economic advantage would be derived if adoption of new products was maximized (green tech, medical tech, etc) and the older less efficient tech was deprecated. Reducing use rate may be appropriate for some forms of taxes, such as those on cigarettes or alcohol, but it's hardly good for inventions.
Basically, the only productive way to consider the usefulness and efficiency of IP is to frame the concept as a taxation form, and then discuss it from that point. And it usually doesn't take long to figure out it's a very badly implemented one.
Claiming that such a scenario would be "trivial" for a government or anyone else is just nonsense.
Many governments already do siphon off traffic to proxies and/or interfere in ISP DNS services for child porn blocking, as well as for various intelligence purposes. To think that's hard to do when it's already done is rather disingenious.
they can just as well rubberhose a privately owned CA into doing it for them today
They probably do it regularly. I can't see Verisign objecting to a national security letter. But this thread was originally about having the government _as_ CA.
They can get all the information contained in these transactions for much cheaper after the fact
For some types of information and under certain legal circumstances, sure. Making it even easier and with even fewer parties involved is not in the interest of privacy and security.
They must sell as many certs as possible - or they go out of business.
Oh, don't think I'm a fan of private CA's either, I've made the economic interest point against private CA's myself. Third party trust is inherently flawed; there simply is no third party with more interest in keeping your communications secure than you and whoever you are communicating with. To have any chance at being protected against defection you'd need several independent signers; for practical purposes you're better off just using self-signed certificates and importing private CA certificates valid for specific domains you communicate with under controlled circumstances (physical distribution or other out of band distribution).
You need to look up how man in the middle attacks work. As long as they can create a signed certificate saying their server is the destination server they can transparently proxy your communications.
For non-government CA's it's tricky, as they'd have to spoof or control DNS for the domain in question, but for a government it would be trivial. There's already many examples of redirects and censorship proxying being done, and as long as a government can either produce, or compel to be produced, signed certificates authenticating their proxies as the destination they can proxy and read SSL traffic as well.
without ever seeing your private key
Why would they need your private key? As long as they can sign any key as being valid for being 'you' they can make their own signed public/private key pair purporting to be you and MITM any communications to you. To get around that you'd still need out-of-band exchanges of the keys in which case the government signing serves no purpose.
In addition, the web of trust needs to be more configurable in any case.
Without a doubt.