"Pretty sure the PCIe bus can supply 1GByte/s to a 10Gbit card."
Depends on the number of lanes. Each PCIe lane is about 250MB/s, so you'd need at least a 4 lane slot/card.
Ordinary PCI, including its 66MHz and 64bit bastard children, which has a fair installed base in the server space and which I suspect the grandparent meant, tops out at around 500MB/s. And with the severe drawbacks of the bus downgrading to the least common denominator, it's not exactly certain you'll actually get anything close to that.
Dude, take a look at PCIe. PCIe is itself layered with physical layer, packet based data layer (including CRC's and packet numbers) and a transaction layer on top of that. It aint that far from ethernet as it is. Heck, take a look at how latency on PCIe is solved today, with credit buffers to avoid waiting for acks from devices...
"I have yet to hear of any decent ways to change it."
Solving that problem depends on refactoring the foundations of the concept and realizing that copyright in itself is an actual tax (extracted from the economy by means of legal monopoly pricing).
Once you realize that copyright _is_ a tax, despite its masquerade, it becomes a problem no more or less difficult to solve than any other government incentives and financing situations (ie, is the tax base as equitable as possible, does the taxation do as little secondary economic damage as possible, is the money going to the intended recipients and achieving its purpose, etc).
Heck, with 100Gb ethernet, who says you have to _have_ PCIe; once you reach those speeds it would be entirely viable to move most PC components to their own ethernet bus/network. Imagine having your NVidia graphics units connected to your LAN and usable from any of your PC's; plugging another unit into the network makes it instantly accessible by all devices as tho it was more or less local hardware. Etc.
SAN is storage moving that way, we might very well expect other components to move in the same direction.
Of course, expect a horde of crap patent applications for shit like 'graphics acceleration _over a network_' just because the technology becomes feasible. Which may drive prices through the roof and/or hold development back a decade or five.
However, MMORPG items have no enforced scarcity, which makes them about as valuable from an investment point of view as cereal decoder rings, or stock in a company where new stock is issued by simply running the photocopier (as much as possible, and buying more photocopiers from the issued stock...).
For any kind of real economic recognition, unless the IRS and the state department feels it's a good idea to essentially hand a money printing permit to the MMORPG companies, with the associated real-world currency inflation, the virtual worlds economy engines would need to be under SEC and/or central bank control.
How many dupe bugs, run-amok sysadmins, random item rarity changes, and outright company _sales_ of the virtual items would it take before we'd get Sarbanes-Oxley for MMORPG's? New profession coming in the new expansion; Accountant. No players may loot items without an Accountant in the group...
"it's not as though dollars actually represent any stable tangible assets anymore."
A particular dollar in your bank account does, however, represent a physical dollar payable to you. If the bank allowed a teller to multiply your account balance with a billion, that bank would have a problem, as they themselves, unlike the MMORPG vendor, cannot simply print more to give you.
At any realistic distance? Having done some rip/encode of my own DVD's, I fairly quickly found out that I could barely tell the difference between DVD resolution and half that rescaled and reencoded. I mean, sure, 5 inches away, on a still picture I could, but on a moving picture at ordinary viewing distance? I'd have to have a damn good reason to imagine I saw any appreciative difference.
Heck, I can recall reading a survey they did on HDTV owners a few years ago. Most were very impressed with the much better image quality; however, it turned out not even half had actually tuned to the HD channels...
I suspect that most people would get a much larger improvement in actual picture quality by getting new prescription lenses than a higher resolution TV. Or even better, an eye upgrade.
Not really, as they have it both ways anyway, and the artists dont get the money.
If we want a real "music tax" it should be applied against sales of _the music_, ie, on Universals (and iTunes) sales, and the money given to the _artists_ and _composers_.
"If you want people to stop using 1$ bills, STOP PRINTING THEM."
You're assuming it's the treasury that's actually printing the $1 bills.
Seriously tho, it's been done lots of times in a lot of countries; you not only stop printing them, you set a deadline for validity. After that, shops wont take them and you have, like, a year or something during which banks will trade them in. Then you have several years when it's possible to trade them in at the treasury, or something. After that, it's the collectors market.
Personally, I suspect that the invalidation is what scares the treasury and/or politicians. With the dollar (unlike more regularly upgraded and less distributed currencies), there's the risk that there's actually so much unaccounted for mattress and black market (real and/or counterfeit) currency that its sudden reentry into circulation might even cause fluctuations in the exchange rates, which would further devalue the dollar as a general exchange medium.
"a similarly priced legit store would make a fortune for the RIAA."
Revenue for monopoly protected goods is maximized at a pricing point where a lot of consumers cannot afford the product. A similarly priced legit store may mean more sold tracks, but _less total revenue_ for each particular track. It might mean more money to smaller artists and composers, it might mean more diffrentiated music, it might benefit consumers, but it would not benefit the *AA, so you're not going to get that until the *AA are eradicated.
"these goods and services have a value set by the vendor;"
Oh, bull. The price is set with the assistance of coercive government monopoly powers; as such most of the price is entirely derived _from_ that particular legal construct, and has little to do with the inherent value of the good. And has nothing whatsoever to do with morality.
"if the market doesn't want to pay the price demanded, the market can simply not purchase them."
Yes, that's how monopolies work and why they're such a destructive force on the wealth of an economy.
In a competetive market, the market can simply purchase the good from another vendor. I dont see five brands of specific modern recordings for sale that often, yet I have no trouble finding five brands of spaghetti in the store.
"Its not like theres a steep barrier to entry."
Mmmhmm. Try duplicating hammers and selling them for a while, then try duplicating a number of CD's and selling them, and I'll betcha you'll notice the barrier to entry fairly soon.
But even ignoring that, and playing along with your train of thought, pick up that guitar and go compete with the payola radio and monopoly financed media blitzes, and you'll find that, oddly, the 'protection' of copyright appears mainly to be protecting the *AA from playing on a level field.
But you knew that already. So, really, take a good look and examine that barrier.
"As opposed to building it with AAAs where you can either buy new ones every few days"
My iRiver lasts 50+ hours on an AA battery, so I can go a few weeks without changing battery. And 'faster to recharge' isnt really an issue when you can have a pile of charged batteries lying around.
If the current mess wrt copyright goes on, local storage and local darknet mass duplication may very well become the predominant way to distribute media, as the more sensible approaches may find themselves being illegal and heavily monitored.
"The granularity is not there to pick and choose at that level."
I'd suggest you lobby for proportional representation. As long as the US is a predominantly two-party winner-takes-all system, you wont get the finer granularity available in multi-party systems.
Of course, considering the vested interest of the current parties and the lobbyists for whom it's much more practical to have to buy only two candidates, reforms in the direction of more representative democracy may not be likely to happen.
"then there are currently no reliable digital archive systems for long term storage."
Actually, there are reliable digital archive systems, you just need to get rid of the conceptual fallacy that 'archive' means some 'special' form of storage.
Consider the data you want 'archived' the same as stored live data and dont have that particular problem anymore. The problem for long term live data storage in that case merely becomes issues of migration, redundancy and maintenance (the issues one tries to ignore or drastically reduce when thinking 'archive', with expected results). And, of course, you need to store your data in an accessible format; any proprietary and/or drm'ed data you might as well just run through the shredder today and save the bother. You likely wont be able to read it in a decade, never mind half a century, anyway.
"Some sort of patent system is necessary to protect genuine innovators."
Some sort of incentive system may be necessary. A patent system isnt.
Just as patents were originally covert taxation, their nature hasnt really changed; it's still a covert taxation of the economy for specific purposes. Only it serves those purposes even worse than usual taxes, hinders competition, hinders production of some combinatory inventions, slows down the rate of technological adoption, the effective 'taxation rate' is decided by barely qualified civil servants (who have even been rated on how high they effectively jack the rate), it has no accountability and has no way to measure cost vs benefit ratios.
We'd be better off with an actual outright tax system with a general innovation VAT, where any inventors of specific parts of a product obtain their innovation incentive as monetary grants (related to use levels, or whatever) by a state agency responsible for that particular budget. If the patent office runs amok, well, then that budget runs out and nobody gets anything. And next year, we could politically dicker about wether we need to divert 1.5 or 1.6% of the budget to innovation, everyone could use any 'patented' matter without fear, and inventors could concentrate on innovation, not litigation.
"Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography."
Not a very good example, considering there is ample incentive for governments to do it, and that they have been doing it since planes and cameras were invented.
But even if we ignore that, you can be sure that _someone_ will take the pictures (landowners, tourism industry, scouts, heck, I'd pay to map my hometown if it were a gray blob on a global map), and that as long as the information is shared, it becomes only a problem of aggregation (something that opensource has proven is most eminently possible).
"To me, this means that intellectual property laws are even more important today"
Why? The monopoly right gives you no guarantee of money back for your invested time, it merely guarantees that circulation will be below the economic optimum and that efforts and resources will be spent promoting specific works in competition with yours, thus reducing the amount of capital going to the original producers.
If you want a system that actually promotes creators and creativity, IP isnt it. IP was originally intended to protect merchants from competition in exchange for services to the crown; the rest was just propaganda.
To have any chance at coming up with a useful system you need to go to the bottom and reconstruct the system from the actual intent instead. If that intent is to maximize the rate of information production and progress, the system would be vastly different from the current one.
Some of the best suggestions I've seen are directed levies/benefits; for example for books, free up reproduction so anyone could reproduce them (with the caveat that they have to register the number of copies of the work they reproduce). Put a direct tax of, say, 50% of sales price on any sales (and/or advertizing derived revenue) of such works. Pay the derived revenues to the authors (possibly with a max payout per work over a period, to allow maximizing the number of authors able to make a living off writing, while encouraging continued writing). With competition restored in the reproduction and distribution sectors we'd get cheaper books, _and_ more money to the authors, _and_ more innovative forms (on-demand printing of _any_ book you want, any desireable format, etc).
Similar systems would work for larger productions like films; you could have a limit of 2-3 times invested production capital instead.
Same would work for patents; you could even imagine things like applying the taxation base to undesireable products like older cars or older medicines, in favour of new and better technology, thus _increasing_ technological adoption rate rather than slowing it down.
Very true. That would be one of the great upsides if my employer actually paid me to be sociable, and if 'chatting with coworkers' had it's own fully financed timesheet code.
I dont dislike open plan offices, and I'd like them even more if they came with beer. But frankly, they're just not very conductive to actual work.
"If we remove all software patents, we also remove part of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software."
Nice theory. It's also completely and utterly at odds with the foundation of modern free market competition.
The free market has one fundamental incentive; you do it cheaper and you do it better than the competition or you _lose your investment_.
'Protect' investments and you lose that incentive; you end up no better than protected state monopolies. See the former Soviet union for indications on the particular efficiency of state protected monopolies.
'Protection' is for investors who dont want to work for their money (aka, rent-seeking); the fundamental nature of 'investment' is that you _risk_ your money for a return.
"There needs to be some protections, they just need to be smart."
No there doesnt. In a functional market there is no god-given right to make a profit off investments, there's only an eternal struggle to be slightly more efficient and thus more profitable than the competition. You spend that billion (or preferably much less on incremental improvements instead of huge-ass failure-prone glitz projects) because if you dont the competition is going to wipe the floor with you and you might just as well liquidate while the going is still good (thus freeing up investor capital to go to some more forward looking venture).
"It will break the very idea of the Internet as a common when URLs can't even be typed in on all keyboards"
You know, when one sees comments like that, it's not strange that non-7bit ascii countries find themselves rather exasperated with the rate of progress. If you take a few seconds to actually research the issue you'll find both a suggestive lack of multi-thousand key keyboards, as well as a whole host of solutions to that problem.
I mean, I can cut'n'paste chinese and japanese into vi, save the file with a unicode filename, and it'll just work. Earlier valid technical reasons are gone, everyone else has solved this; now the excuses start sounding really hollow.
It's time to drag DNS kicking and screaming out of the dark ages.
"A solution to this problem could be what Google does right now with accents:"
An even better solution to this problem would be for the user to simply use a search engine and query for solo tea store, which would get him to the right place whatever their domain name is.
Dont make more of domain names than what they are. These days they're usually cut'n'pasted, linked or found through searches anyway, so the problem just isnt that big of a deal.
The roots of trademark law have gone far from the current actual situation. Most 'brands' are more or less generic products produced by the same factories, which rather negates the whole point of trustworthiness.
"someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't."
Neither should someone be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by him if it wasnt.
"Would it really be so bad to have the government run with a more business like model?"
You mean the current one isnt? Take a look at Enron...
Running a company 'like a business' does not necessarily, despite regulations, mean you primarily have the interest of the stockholders (or citizens, or workers) in mind. Especially if they are not, to a large extent, you. Enriching yourself at the stockholders expense is at least as good and old a tradition as for politicians enriching themselves at the taxpayers expense.
"I can see some good things coming from his presidency."
Gates has shown himself very capable of enriching himself. I have no doubt he'd be as proficient at that as a politician. His currently still expresses his good old behaviour on many occasions.
"Bill Gates is actually quite a philanthropist."
Melinda Gates may be a philanthropist. Bill Gates appears more concerned with the legacy of his name. As president, it's a toss up wether that'll show in curing AIDS, yet another 'made in the US' wall of flame across some badmouthed nation, a number of states and cities renamed to things like New Gates and South Gates or a five hundred meters high, fifty miles long nametag visible from space in the middle of the US. Or all of the above.
"It won't be zero, but it also can't be very high or else it wouldn't be cost effective for the police."
You're assuming they want to nail _the_ perpetrator, not _a_ suspect. Consider the number of times that US prosecutors have actually opposed conceivable exonerating DNA tests even for convicts on death row, and you might not think a high false positive rate would be a showstopper at all.
From what I've seen of facial recognition software, the error rates are horrible. Set it to sensitive and you get error rates in the percentages, set it less sensitive and you fail the matches all the time. That's ok for building entry systems where you have a small sample to compare against and the person wanting to enter can try repeatedly with varying angles and light, but it's absolutely crap when you have a large database matched against images taken under dubious conditions.
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"Pretty sure the PCIe bus can supply 1GByte/s to a 10Gbit card."
Depends on the number of lanes. Each PCIe lane is about 250MB/s, so you'd need at least a 4 lane slot/card.
Ordinary PCI, including its 66MHz and 64bit bastard children, which has a fair installed base in the server space and which I suspect the grandparent meant, tops out at around 500MB/s. And with the severe drawbacks of the bus downgrading to the least common denominator, it's not exactly certain you'll actually get anything close to that.
Dude, take a look at PCIe. PCIe is itself layered with physical layer, packet based data layer (including CRC's and packet numbers) and a transaction layer on top of that. It aint that far from ethernet as it is. Heck, take a look at how latency on PCIe is solved today, with credit buffers to avoid waiting for acks from devices...
"I have yet to hear of any decent ways to change it."
Solving that problem depends on refactoring the foundations of the concept and realizing that copyright in itself is an actual tax (extracted from the economy by means of legal monopoly pricing).
Once you realize that copyright _is_ a tax, despite its masquerade, it becomes a problem no more or less difficult to solve than any other government incentives and financing situations (ie, is the tax base as equitable as possible, does the taxation do as little secondary economic damage as possible, is the money going to the intended recipients and achieving its purpose, etc).
Heck, with 100Gb ethernet, who says you have to _have_ PCIe; once you reach those speeds it would be entirely viable to move most PC components to their own ethernet bus/network. Imagine having your NVidia graphics units connected to your LAN and usable from any of your PC's; plugging another unit into the network makes it instantly accessible by all devices as tho it was more or less local hardware. Etc.
SAN is storage moving that way, we might very well expect other components to move in the same direction.
Of course, expect a horde of crap patent applications for shit like 'graphics acceleration _over a network_' just because the technology becomes feasible. Which may drive prices through the roof and/or hold development back a decade or five.
However, MMORPG items have no enforced scarcity, which makes them about as valuable from an investment point of view as cereal decoder rings, or stock in a company where new stock is issued by simply running the photocopier (as much as possible, and buying more photocopiers from the issued stock...).
For any kind of real economic recognition, unless the IRS and the state department feels it's a good idea to essentially hand a money printing permit to the MMORPG companies, with the associated real-world currency inflation, the virtual worlds economy engines would need to be under SEC and/or central bank control.
How many dupe bugs, run-amok sysadmins, random item rarity changes, and outright company _sales_ of the virtual items would it take before we'd get Sarbanes-Oxley for MMORPG's? New profession coming in the new expansion; Accountant. No players may loot items without an Accountant in the group...
"it's not as though dollars actually represent any stable tangible assets anymore."
A particular dollar in your bank account does, however, represent a physical dollar payable to you. If the bank allowed a teller to multiply your account balance with a billion, that bank would have a problem, as they themselves, unlike the MMORPG vendor, cannot simply print more to give you.
"but it really is remarkable."
At any realistic distance? Having done some rip/encode of my own DVD's, I fairly quickly found out that I could barely tell the difference between DVD resolution and half that rescaled and reencoded. I mean, sure, 5 inches away, on a still picture I could, but on a moving picture at ordinary viewing distance? I'd have to have a damn good reason to imagine I saw any appreciative difference.
Heck, I can recall reading a survey they did on HDTV owners a few years ago. Most were very impressed with the much better image quality; however, it turned out not even half had actually tuned to the HD channels...
I suspect that most people would get a much larger improvement in actual picture quality by getting new prescription lenses than a higher resolution TV. Or even better, an eye upgrade.
Not really, as they have it both ways anyway, and the artists dont get the money.
If we want a real "music tax" it should be applied against sales of _the music_, ie, on Universals (and iTunes) sales, and the money given to the _artists_ and _composers_.
"If you want people to stop using 1$ bills, STOP PRINTING THEM."
You're assuming it's the treasury that's actually printing the $1 bills.
Seriously tho, it's been done lots of times in a lot of countries; you not only stop printing them, you set a deadline for validity. After that, shops wont take them and you have, like, a year or something during which banks will trade them in. Then you have several years when it's possible to trade them in at the treasury, or something. After that, it's the collectors market.
Personally, I suspect that the invalidation is what scares the treasury and/or politicians. With the dollar (unlike more regularly upgraded and less distributed currencies), there's the risk that there's actually so much unaccounted for mattress and black market (real and/or counterfeit) currency that its sudden reentry into circulation might even cause fluctuations in the exchange rates, which would further devalue the dollar as a general exchange medium.
"a similarly priced legit store would make a fortune for the RIAA."
Revenue for monopoly protected goods is maximized at a pricing point where a lot of consumers cannot afford the product. A similarly priced legit store may mean more sold tracks, but _less total revenue_ for each particular track. It might mean more money to smaller artists and composers, it might mean more diffrentiated music, it might benefit consumers, but it would not benefit the *AA, so you're not going to get that until the *AA are eradicated.
"these goods and services have a value set by the vendor;"
Oh, bull. The price is set with the assistance of coercive government monopoly powers; as such most of the price is entirely derived _from_ that particular legal construct, and has little to do with the inherent value of the good. And has nothing whatsoever to do with morality.
"if the market doesn't want to pay the price demanded, the market can simply not purchase them."
Yes, that's how monopolies work and why they're such a destructive force on the wealth of an economy.
In a competetive market, the market can simply purchase the good from another vendor. I dont see five brands of specific modern recordings for sale that often, yet I have no trouble finding five brands of spaghetti in the store.
"Its not like theres a steep barrier to entry."
Mmmhmm. Try duplicating hammers and selling them for a while, then try duplicating a number of CD's and selling them, and I'll betcha you'll notice the barrier to entry fairly soon.
But even ignoring that, and playing along with your train of thought, pick up that guitar and go compete with the payola radio and monopoly financed media blitzes, and you'll find that, oddly, the 'protection' of copyright appears mainly to be protecting the *AA from playing on a level field.
But you knew that already. So, really, take a good look and examine that barrier.
"As opposed to building it with AAAs where you can either buy new ones every few days"
My iRiver lasts 50+ hours on an AA battery, so I can go a few weeks without changing battery. And 'faster to recharge' isnt really an issue when you can have a pile of charged batteries lying around.
If the current mess wrt copyright goes on, local storage and local darknet mass duplication may very well become the predominant way to distribute media, as the more sensible approaches may find themselves being illegal and heavily monitored.
"The granularity is not there to pick and choose at that level."
I'd suggest you lobby for proportional representation. As long as the US is a predominantly two-party winner-takes-all system, you wont get the finer granularity available in multi-party systems.
Of course, considering the vested interest of the current parties and the lobbyists for whom it's much more practical to have to buy only two candidates, reforms in the direction of more representative democracy may not be likely to happen.
"then there are currently no reliable digital archive systems for long term storage."
Actually, there are reliable digital archive systems, you just need to get rid of the conceptual fallacy that 'archive' means some 'special' form of storage.
Consider the data you want 'archived' the same as stored live data and dont have that particular problem anymore. The problem for long term live data storage in that case merely becomes issues of migration, redundancy and maintenance (the issues one tries to ignore or drastically reduce when thinking 'archive', with expected results). And, of course, you need to store your data in an accessible format; any proprietary and/or drm'ed data you might as well just run through the shredder today and save the bother. You likely wont be able to read it in a decade, never mind half a century, anyway.
"Some sort of patent system is necessary to protect genuine innovators."
Some sort of incentive system may be necessary. A patent system isnt.
Just as patents were originally covert taxation, their nature hasnt really changed; it's still a covert taxation of the economy for specific purposes. Only it serves those purposes even worse than usual taxes, hinders competition, hinders production of some combinatory inventions, slows down the rate of technological adoption, the effective 'taxation rate' is decided by barely qualified civil servants (who have even been rated on how high they effectively jack the rate), it has no accountability and has no way to measure cost vs benefit ratios.
We'd be better off with an actual outright tax system with a general innovation VAT, where any inventors of specific parts of a product obtain their innovation incentive as monetary grants (related to use levels, or whatever) by a state agency responsible for that particular budget. If the patent office runs amok, well, then that budget runs out and nobody gets anything. And next year, we could politically dicker about wether we need to divert 1.5 or 1.6% of the budget to innovation, everyone could use any 'patented' matter without fear, and inventors could concentrate on innovation, not litigation.
"Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography."
Not a very good example, considering there is ample incentive for governments to do it, and that they have been doing it since planes and cameras were invented.
But even if we ignore that, you can be sure that _someone_ will take the pictures (landowners, tourism industry, scouts, heck, I'd pay to map my hometown if it were a gray blob on a global map), and that as long as the information is shared, it becomes only a problem of aggregation (something that opensource has proven is most eminently possible).
"To me, this means that intellectual property laws are even more important today"
Why? The monopoly right gives you no guarantee of money back for your invested time, it merely guarantees that circulation will be below the economic optimum and that efforts and resources will be spent promoting specific works in competition with yours, thus reducing the amount of capital going to the original producers.
If you want a system that actually promotes creators and creativity, IP isnt it. IP was originally intended to protect merchants from competition in exchange for services to the crown; the rest was just propaganda.
To have any chance at coming up with a useful system you need to go to the bottom and reconstruct the system from the actual intent instead. If that intent is to maximize the rate of information production and progress, the system would be vastly different from the current one.
Some of the best suggestions I've seen are directed levies/benefits; for example for books, free up reproduction so anyone could reproduce them (with the caveat that they have to register the number of copies of the work they reproduce). Put a direct tax of, say, 50% of sales price on any sales (and/or advertizing derived revenue) of such works. Pay the derived revenues to the authors (possibly with a max payout per work over a period, to allow maximizing the number of authors able to make a living off writing, while encouraging continued writing). With competition restored in the reproduction and distribution sectors we'd get cheaper books, _and_ more money to the authors, _and_ more innovative forms (on-demand printing of _any_ book you want, any desireable format, etc).
Similar systems would work for larger productions like films; you could have a limit of 2-3 times invested production capital instead.
Same would work for patents; you could even imagine things like applying the taxation base to undesireable products like older cars or older medicines, in favour of new and better technology, thus _increasing_ technological adoption rate rather than slowing it down.
"I'd say it's harder to goof off in a cubicle."
It's harder to goof off alone in a cubicle. Cubicle goofing off tends to be done in crowds.
"but it can be more sociable too."
Very true. That would be one of the great upsides if my employer actually paid me to be sociable, and if 'chatting with coworkers' had it's own fully financed timesheet code.
I dont dislike open plan offices, and I'd like them even more if they came with beer. But frankly, they're just not very conductive to actual work.
"If we remove all software patents, we also remove part of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software."
Nice theory. It's also completely and utterly at odds with the foundation of modern free market competition.
The free market has one fundamental incentive; you do it cheaper and you do it better than the competition or you _lose your investment_.
'Protect' investments and you lose that incentive; you end up no better than protected state monopolies. See the former Soviet union for indications on the particular efficiency of state protected monopolies.
'Protection' is for investors who dont want to work for their money (aka, rent-seeking); the fundamental nature of 'investment' is that you _risk_ your money for a return.
"There needs to be some protections, they just need to be smart."
No there doesnt. In a functional market there is no god-given right to make a profit off investments, there's only an eternal struggle to be slightly more efficient and thus more profitable than the competition. You spend that billion (or preferably much less on incremental improvements instead of huge-ass failure-prone glitz projects) because if you dont the competition is going to wipe the floor with you and you might just as well liquidate while the going is still good (thus freeing up investor capital to go to some more forward looking venture).
"It will break the very idea of the Internet as a common when URLs can't even be typed in on all keyboards"
You know, when one sees comments like that, it's not strange that non-7bit ascii countries find themselves rather exasperated with the rate of progress. If you take a few seconds to actually research the issue you'll find both a suggestive lack of multi-thousand key keyboards, as well as a whole host of solutions to that problem.
I mean, I can cut'n'paste chinese and japanese into vi, save the file with a unicode filename, and it'll just work. Earlier valid technical reasons are gone, everyone else has solved this; now the excuses start sounding really hollow.
It's time to drag DNS kicking and screaming out of the dark ages.
"A solution to this problem could be what Google does right now with accents:"
An even better solution to this problem would be for the user to simply use a search engine and query for solo tea store, which would get him to the right place whatever their domain name is.
Dont make more of domain names than what they are. These days they're usually cut'n'pasted, linked or found through searches anyway, so the problem just isnt that big of a deal.
The roots of trademark law have gone far from the current actual situation. Most 'brands' are more or less generic products produced by the same factories, which rather negates the whole point of trustworthiness.
"someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't."
Neither should someone be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by him if it wasnt.
And rumour has it they're going to bring in the #1 expert on prequels and CGI characters.
I, for one, welcome George Lucas and our new taller, more prominently be-eared, rastafarian Gollum.
Meesa servsa the precious.
"Would it really be so bad to have the government run with a more business like model?"
You mean the current one isnt? Take a look at Enron...
Running a company 'like a business' does not necessarily, despite regulations, mean you primarily have the interest of the stockholders (or citizens, or workers) in mind. Especially if they are not, to a large extent, you. Enriching yourself at the stockholders expense is at least as good and old a tradition as for politicians enriching themselves at the taxpayers expense.
"I can see some good things coming from his presidency."
Gates has shown himself very capable of enriching himself. I have no doubt he'd be as proficient at that as a politician. His currently still expresses his good old behaviour on many occasions.
"Bill Gates is actually quite a philanthropist."
Melinda Gates may be a philanthropist. Bill Gates appears more concerned with the legacy of his name. As president, it's a toss up wether that'll show in curing AIDS, yet another 'made in the US' wall of flame across some badmouthed nation, a number of states and cities renamed to things like New Gates and South Gates or a five hundred meters high, fifty miles long nametag visible from space in the middle of the US. Or all of the above.
"It won't be zero, but it also can't be very high or else it wouldn't be cost effective for the police."
You're assuming they want to nail _the_ perpetrator, not _a_ suspect. Consider the number of times that US prosecutors have actually opposed conceivable exonerating DNA tests even for convicts on death row, and you might not think a high false positive rate would be a showstopper at all.
From what I've seen of facial recognition software, the error rates are horrible. Set it to sensitive and you get error rates in the percentages, set it less sensitive and you fail the matches all the time. That's ok for building entry systems where you have a small sample to compare against and the person wanting to enter can try repeatedly with varying angles and light, but it's absolutely crap when you have a large database matched against images taken under dubious conditions.