Which is ironic because a truly local phone call (i.e: one that stays within the same CO) costs the phone company nothing.
On a Strowger exchange local calls (as well as unanswered and incomming calls) certainly arn't without cost. All of the mechanical parts have a finite lifespan. On an SPC system there may be little difference in the actual costs between making a local call and one half way round the planet (unless the other end is a Strowger...) Rarely do call charges have anything to do with the actual cost of the call.
Define 'All ISP's'. Mine (SAPO.PT) certainly doesn't (described when you are buying) the only thing they do is offer speed upto.... But they have no problem hooking you up to a plan your line speed doesn't support. They don't even find it necessary to report this to you. So users can buy a 4 MB plan, think they get 4Mb where they actually are connected to a 2Mb line.
The way they get around this in the UK is by selling you "up to 4M". Though if the line will only do 2M and they have an "up to 2M" package then selling you anything higher than than is effectivly ripping you off. One possible solution would be to make the price "up to X pounds"...
Also your concept of a 'Buisness DSL' connection is misleading. I pose that there are as many plans and bandwidth distribution models as there are ISP's.
Something which can make any sort of meaningful comparison difficult.
What I don't get is where this cost of x pence per Gb comes from. If an ISP has the wires and the routers all running, why does it cost extra to be sending more data? I see that you might ramp up electricity costs slightly in the systems that route this data when it's processing lots of packets, but I have trouble seeing this being the source of the cost.
Once the infrastructure is in place, then where is the big cost? That's what I'm not getting.
Much the same applies to telephone calls. With a flat rate per call making more sense than a time based charge and charge bands often making no sense in terms of actual call routing.
It's similar to gas/electric hybrids, except it's gas/pneumatic instead, neatly avoiding all the messy battery fab/environmental issues that current hybrids have.
Replacing them with the environmental issues related to tanks which can store highly compressed gas.
The idiots who came up with this have no idea about the damage they're about to cause.
They are probably not idiots and it's more likely that they simply don't care. In the same way that the MPAA has been caught pirating software, the only thing they care about is their "intellectual property"...
Price is likely hardly an issue for the demographic that's most likely to download copyrighted material. The simple reason is that of convenience, nothing more. It is simply easiest to obtain such content by getting a.torrent file, throwing it into your BitTorrent client of choice, and in a few minutes or hours (depending on the media, connection speed, etc.), you're consuming the content.
In addition BitTorrent is cross platform and the "pirate content" tends to be cross platform and DRM free.
If the industry wants to sell more, they should make it more convenient. I'm not talking about using iTunes from your living room or other proprietary means that require huge amounts of personal information to be entered before purchasing media.
The other issue with proprietary systems is that they can be very restrictive about the platforms they will work with.
Next up, UK requires that automobile manufactures equip all autos with a buggy whip in their boot, in case the auto runs out of petrol and might then be pulled by horse.
IIRC there actually is a law requiring taxi drivers to carry food for a horse...
Interesting logic but you forget one important thing most drivers do see something wrong with their actions and if they get caught they may contest. They agree with the law in principle, if I speed through a zone and was caught fair enough I shouldn't have been speeding, maybe I won't take the offense seriously and will occasionally break it, but I recognise the need for the law.
It might help if speed limits where assigned in some non random way however.
Most people don't see copyright infringement as stealing,
Nor does copyright law.
they don't see it as wrong and think they should be allowed to do it.
As currently implimented copyright offers the general public little or nothing.
certainly true, in my eyes Hybrid vehicles are the half baked solution towards going either hydrogen and/or all electric cars because they still rely on gasoline and their CO2 cost of producing the batteries is high as well.
Hydrogen dosn't make a good vehicle fuel, either you need to store it highly compressed or use some reversable reaction to have it bond to a solid. Fuels which are liquids at normal temperatures and pressures are in comparison a lot easier to handle. They also don't have to be produced from petroleum, using food (or agricultural land which could otherwise produce food) probably isn't a smart idea. All electric cars would need batteries too, unless you had an internal combustion engine driving a generator powering electric motors. Something which appears to work better for trains than cars/trucks/buses/etc.
At the rate that IPv4 addresses are being used, even if all the/8's given to companies that got on the Internet first were freed for general use, that would only buy us a few months before we ran out of IPv4 addresses again.
The amount of time depending on what size pieces those/8's get chopped into and probably exactly who gets them.
Google isn't actually behind Microsoft, as Microsoft's implementation of healthvault is actually somewhat questionable. It's as if the company paid no attention to existing standards, and decided to implement a PHR system however they damn well pleased.
That dosn't sound that suprising considering that this is Microsoft. Microsoft paying no attention to standards is up there with the honesty of political figures, the Pope's religion and the toilet habits of bears.
While that might be true, it takes a while to build up an army, with a professional and experienced core to serve as the officers. You can expand an army to be 10 times the size fairly quickly but you need some core to start from and that can take up a generation to succeed. You need to train the pilots, design and acquire hardware all of which takes time in modern warfare.
Except that this dosn't appear to apply in the situation of a guerilla militia trying to get rid of a foreign army.
Examine the following formula:
F = (G * m1 * m2) / d^2
Where
m1 = mass of first body
m2 - mass of 2nd body
d^2 = Distance between two bodies centre of mass squared.
G = Einstein's Gravitational constant
This only predicts the attractive force between two bodies (m1, m2), if you try and apply it to three bodies you have to approximate two of the bodies into one. Sometimes this works well but sometimes it falls down.
If you wanted to try and apply this to more than two bodies you'd need a formula which took account of the forces being vector quantities. Which would be several times more complex a formula in the first place...
The other main issue is the value of G. 6.67 * 10^-11 is an awful number that Einstein hated.
We can observe that evolution has occurred, and quantify the rate at which it occurs. We have models of evolution and have tested those models against the available scientific evidence (hint: it's caused by genetic mutation of DNA at a measurable rate, and the fossil evidence matches our predictions).
There is plenty of non fossil data. Most obviously from domestic animal/plant breeding and parasites becoming resistant to drugs. Possibly the issue here is that there are people who dislike the idea of human activities being "natural selection" as much as a change in ecosystem created by soil erosion.
In science "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. A theory is a logical explanation or a testable model for a given natural phenomenon.
Actually unless you have some "facts" it's rather hard to come up with any "theories" in the first place.
In common language, however, theory refers to conjecture or opinion. Thus the confusion.
Confusion which those with certain political/religious viewpoints work hard to foster. N.B. Whilst these people may appear to be simply mistaken/naive this is often not the case. You see a similar thing happening with the term "conspiracy theory" being taken to mean all sorts of strange things. Even though conspiracy theories are fairly commonly advocated by prosecuting lawyers. (Of course things get really daft when skeptics of a politically correct conspiracy theory are derided as "conspiracy theorists" even without advocating any theory at all.)
If they're going to teach the theory of evolution, they should they should at least teach that it's more than a theory!
Or more usefully first teach what the term "theory" means in the context of "scientific theory". (Or for that matter what "theory" means in the context of court cases since the meaning is similar to it's usage in science.) Which would also show that "X is a theory not a fact" is a rather daft statement. Given that the whole point of a theory in science is to understand facts and observations.
Hey, my invisible guy doesn't want to kill me. He wants to give me beer and stripper factories. Unfortunately, he does want me to dress up like a pirate. I think that implies he wants me to go kill all the unbelievers (such as ninjas).
Or maybe the FSM just wants you to claim exemption from all forms of copyright on the basis on religion and thus obtain all your entertainments needs via thepiratebay.org...
Still, it's reassuring to know that cockup still beats conspiracy, given enough time and sufficient monkeys.
The problem is that there are too many "monkeys" in the first place. You fix a conspiracy by removing the conspirators, you fix a cockup by removing the incompetent.
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True but without class actions are really the only way to punish companies when it would be way too costly for a single person to go after them.
What about lots of small claims? The plaintiffs can file these in person, but the corporation must pay a lawyer to deal with them.
Which is ironic because a truly local phone call (i.e: one that stays within the same CO) costs the phone company nothing.
On a Strowger exchange local calls (as well as unanswered and incomming calls) certainly arn't without cost. All of the mechanical parts have a finite lifespan. On an SPC system there may be little difference in the actual costs between making a local call and one half way round the planet (unless the other end is a Strowger...)
Rarely do call charges have anything to do with the actual cost of the call.
Define 'All ISP's'. Mine (SAPO.PT) certainly doesn't (described when you are buying) the only thing they do is offer speed upto.... But they have no problem hooking you up to a plan your line speed doesn't support. They don't even find it necessary to report this to you. So users can buy a 4 MB plan, think they get 4Mb where they actually are connected to a 2Mb line.
The way they get around this in the UK is by selling you "up to 4M". Though if the line will only do 2M and they have an "up to 2M" package then selling you anything higher than than is effectivly ripping you off. One possible solution would be to make the price "up to X pounds"...
Also your concept of a 'Buisness DSL' connection is misleading. I pose that there are as many plans and bandwidth distribution models as there are ISP's.
Something which can make any sort of meaningful comparison difficult.
What I don't get is where this cost of x pence per Gb comes from. If an ISP has the wires and the routers all running, why does it cost extra to be sending more data? I see that you might ramp up electricity costs slightly in the systems that route this data when it's processing lots of packets, but I have trouble seeing this being the source of the cost.
Once the infrastructure is in place, then where is the big cost? That's what I'm not getting.
Much the same applies to telephone calls. With a flat rate per call making more sense than a time based charge and charge bands often making no sense in terms of actual call routing.
Could we do a better job if we could cache intelligently and do p2p and whatever else made sense in the absence of copyright restraints on the setup?
It would be kind of ironic if "pirating" were actually more efficent in the use of bandwidth.
Any diver has such an 'explosion-proof' compressed air container on their bare backs.
Air tanks attached to divers (or firemen) tend not to encounter high speed impacts.
It's similar to gas/electric hybrids, except it's gas/pneumatic instead, neatly avoiding all the messy battery fab/environmental issues that current hybrids have.
Replacing them with the environmental issues related to tanks which can store highly compressed gas.
The trouble, as we all know, is that there is no way to determine what is illegal and what is not.
Actually there is, it would just be impossibly expensive to take every case to court and persue it to judgement.
The idiots who came up with this have no idea about the damage they're about to cause.
They are probably not idiots and it's more likely that they simply don't care. In the same way that the MPAA has been caught pirating software, the only thing they care about is their "intellectual property"...
Price is likely hardly an issue for the demographic that's most likely to download copyrighted material. The simple reason is that of convenience, nothing more. It is simply easiest to obtain such content by getting a .torrent file, throwing it into your BitTorrent client of choice, and in a few minutes or hours (depending on the media, connection speed, etc.), you're consuming the content.
In addition BitTorrent is cross platform and the "pirate content" tends to be cross platform and DRM free.
If the industry wants to sell more, they should make it more convenient. I'm not talking about using iTunes from your living room or other proprietary means that require huge amounts of personal information to be entered before purchasing media.
The other issue with proprietary systems is that they can be very restrictive about the platforms they will work with.
But prohibition never went away, even though it never worked.
Depends on your definition of "work". If you want large black market it "works" very well.
In fact, it spread to other countries via "free trade" agreements, and continues to fund a vast worldwide criminal industry to this very day.
How closely are people in this "criminal industry" connected with governments?
Next up, UK requires that automobile manufactures equip all autos with a buggy whip in their boot, in case the auto runs out of petrol and might then be pulled by horse.
IIRC there actually is a law requiring taxi drivers to carry food for a horse...
Interesting logic but you forget one important thing most drivers do see something wrong with their actions and if they get caught they may contest. They agree with the law in principle, if I speed through a zone and was caught fair enough I shouldn't have been speeding, maybe I won't take the offense seriously and will occasionally break it, but I recognise the need for the law.
It might help if speed limits where assigned in some non random way however.
Most people don't see copyright infringement as stealing,
Nor does copyright law.
they don't see it as wrong and think they should be allowed to do it.
As currently implimented copyright offers the general public little or nothing.
certainly true, in my eyes Hybrid vehicles are the half baked solution towards going either hydrogen and/or all electric cars because they still rely on gasoline and their CO2 cost of producing the batteries is high as well.
Hydrogen dosn't make a good vehicle fuel, either you need to store it highly compressed or use some reversable reaction to have it bond to a solid. Fuels which are liquids at normal temperatures and pressures are in comparison a lot easier to handle. They also don't have to be produced from petroleum, using food (or agricultural land which could otherwise produce food) probably isn't a smart idea.
All electric cars would need batteries too, unless you had an internal combustion engine driving a generator powering electric motors. Something which appears to work better for trains than cars/trucks/buses/etc.
At the rate that IPv4 addresses are being used, even if all the /8's given to companies that got on the Internet first were freed for general use, that would only buy us a few months before we ran out of IPv4 addresses again.
/8's get chopped into and probably exactly who gets them.
The amount of time depending on what size pieces those
Google isn't actually behind Microsoft, as Microsoft's implementation of healthvault is actually somewhat questionable. It's as if the company paid no attention to existing standards, and decided to implement a PHR system however they damn well pleased.
That dosn't sound that suprising considering that this is Microsoft. Microsoft paying no attention to standards is up there with the honesty of political figures, the Pope's religion and the toilet habits of bears.
While that might be true, it takes a while to build up an army, with a professional and experienced core to serve as the officers. You can expand an army to be 10 times the size fairly quickly but you need some core to start from and that can take up a generation to succeed. You need to train the pilots, design and acquire hardware all of which takes time in modern warfare.
Except that this dosn't appear to apply in the situation of a guerilla militia trying to get rid of a foreign army.
And leave your 'Science teaches how, and religion teaches why' at home, please.
This appears to be a not uncommon opinion of scientists who are followers of a religion.
Science is happy to leave moral questions alone, but religion can't seem to keep its fingers out of questions of empirical knowledge.
Both "science" and "religion" are abstract concepts. It is people who hold such views.
Examine the following formula:
F = (G * m1 * m2) / d^2
Where m1 = mass of first body m2 - mass of 2nd body
d^2 = Distance between two bodies centre of mass squared. G = Einstein's Gravitational constant
This only predicts the attractive force between two bodies (m1, m2), if you try and apply it to three bodies you have to approximate two of the bodies into one. Sometimes this works well but sometimes it falls down.
If you wanted to try and apply this to more than two bodies you'd need a formula which took account of the forces being vector quantities. Which would be several times more complex a formula in the first place...
The other main issue is the value of G. 6.67 * 10^-11 is an awful number that Einstein hated.
How is this more "awful" than C or Pi?
We can observe that evolution has occurred, and quantify the rate at which it occurs. We have models of evolution and have tested those models against the available scientific evidence (hint: it's caused by genetic mutation of DNA at a measurable rate, and the fossil evidence matches our predictions).
There is plenty of non fossil data. Most obviously from domestic animal/plant breeding and parasites becoming resistant to drugs.
Possibly the issue here is that there are people who dislike the idea of human activities being "natural selection" as much as a change in ecosystem created by soil erosion.
In science "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. A theory is a logical explanation or a testable model for a given natural phenomenon.
Actually unless you have some "facts" it's rather hard to come up with any "theories" in the first place.
In common language, however, theory refers to conjecture or opinion. Thus the confusion.
Confusion which those with certain political/religious viewpoints work hard to foster. N.B. Whilst these people may appear to be simply mistaken/naive this is often not the case.
You see a similar thing happening with the term "conspiracy theory" being taken to mean all sorts of strange things. Even though conspiracy theories are fairly commonly advocated by prosecuting lawyers.
(Of course things get really daft when skeptics of a politically correct conspiracy theory are derided as "conspiracy theorists" even without advocating any theory at all.)
If they're going to teach the theory of evolution, they should they should at least teach that it's more than a theory!
Or more usefully first teach what the term "theory" means in the context of "scientific theory". (Or for that matter what "theory" means in the context of court cases since the meaning is similar to it's usage in science.) Which would also show that "X is a theory not a fact" is a rather daft statement. Given that the whole point of a theory in science is to understand facts and observations.
Hey, my invisible guy doesn't want to kill me. He wants to give me beer and stripper factories. Unfortunately, he does want me to dress up like a pirate. I think that implies he wants me to go kill all the unbelievers (such as ninjas).
Or maybe the FSM just wants you to claim exemption from all forms of copyright on the basis on religion and thus obtain all your entertainments needs via thepiratebay.org...
Still, it's reassuring to know that cockup still beats conspiracy, given enough time and sufficient monkeys.
The problem is that there are too many "monkeys" in the first place. You fix a conspiracy by removing the conspirators, you fix a cockup by removing the incompetent.
If we can't trust the FBI, who can we trust?
Ironically someone like UBL. You might not like his motives or goals, but at least he's honest about them.