How to make yourself unpopular on a US based system...
However, seriously, between 1845 and 1849 Ireland had successive years of record harvests, and in each year exported huge amounts of grain. What's famous about those years? Yes, that's the Great Famine. People worked all day producing wheat which they couldn't afford to buy, so it was exported and they starved. There was no shortage of food in Ireland during the famine; there was a shortage of food ordinary Irish people could afford to buy. Similarly, in the Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s which led to the formation of Live Aid, Ethiopia - so plagued with drought that it could not feed its people - was exporting so many water melons to Europe that it could afford to buy helicopter gunships with the proceeds. Again, people starved not because there was no food, but because they could not afford the food that was plentiful.
The world's agricultural system is at full stretch at present producing enough food for (most of) the world's population. But our machines consume far more calories than we do ourselves. So if we switch our machines from consuming fossil fuels to consuming bio-fuels, then all the worlds agricultural land put together is not enough.
One of the inevitable consequences of capitalism is that it distributes scarce goods inequitably. In a drought, the poor go thirsty while the rich water their golf courses. In a famine, the poor starve while the rich put biodiesel into their SUVs. This flies in the face of every system of ethics we know, and yet it is the inevitable consequence of capitalism. Ghandi said 'the earth produces enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed'. Personally, I think he was an optimist; but nevertheless, one person's biodiesel is - inevitably - another person's hunger.
"Reasonable" is probably the first human attribute to leave a lawyer when he becomes one. The thing about lawyers is that they probably don't even believe their own bullshit. This is bullshit generated on behalf of their clients intended to do the most thorough and complete job possible. Compromise comes during the settlement phase which you were attempting to bring on sooner whether wittingly or not.
Their first step is to say "you owe us BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS!" Yours should be "I owe you nothing!" Then theirs would be "let's settle this now or go to court!" You should then decide what is next. Got a case? Take it to court. You don't? Settle. If you're settling, put up a good fight and act like you're ready to take it to court.
This may be good advice in a US context - I don't know. It's really, really bad advice in a UK context. Most UK lawyers are reasonable; and, furthermore, UK courts cannot be bought and are always reasonable. But one thing they won't tolerate is unreasonableness.
If you go to a UK law firm and say, 'look, I messed up, it was an honest mistake, I won't do it again, I'll happily pay your reasonable costs for sending that letter', you'll probably end up with a bill for under US$100. If they refuse and take the matter to court, then the judge will certainly look positively at that sort of approach. But if you attempt to do anything 'tough' or 'clever' you are going to be in such deep trouble.
Be humble. Be contrite. Be apologetic. Grovel. It will save a whole heap of trouble and money.
The little () about consultation is your answer. You need to talk to a lawyer.
Is the wrong answer in this case.
As this is in the hands of a UK law firm, talking to a US law firm is going to do you exactly no good at all - except run up a huge legal bill as they consult a UK firm.
My first approach would be to phone the person who sent the letter (yes, I know, international call charges - tough) and speak to them directly. The UK is not as litigious as the US, and it's quite possible that if you're humble enough and apologetic enough they'll agree not to pursue the action further. Don't be embarrassed to grovel - it could save you a lot of money. Be very, very polite. If Corbis have effectively farmed out their UK collections business to this firm, they may feel that they have costs to recover, in which case get them to tell you - over the phone - what they will accept.
The next question is what your business - and personal - relationship with your friend is worth. If you want to keep those relationships, you can't walk away from the problem - you have to indemnify your friend and your friend's customer against this action.
If, in the end, you cannot get Corbis' law firm to agree to a sum you can afford, then you should get yourself a lawyer. You need to find out whether they propose to take action under English or Scottish law (which are quite different) and get yourself an English or Scottish lawyer as appropriate. I strongly recommend that if there is a hearing you come personally across to the UK. British judges are much more likely to be persuaded by a polite and apologetic personal appearance than by any letter.
Best of luck, my sympathies, and in future take your own photographs.
Especially if you are travelling light, take just one device. A possibility would be the HP IPAQ 6515, which incorporates GSM/GPRS phone; general purpose computer with word-processor, spreadsheet, web browsing, email, etc; camera of reasonable quality; MP3 player (obviously); and (useful when travelling) a GPS receiver. If you're travelling you may want to keep it in an Otterbox.
I first started using these for a project for fisheries inspectors working in very tough environments; I now use one as my own single device. I confess I haven't tried to get Linux running on it, but it works OK with Microsoft.
If I download a track from my favourite band, then I see that I morally ought to be making a payment to that specific band. I don't see that the RIAA, or any recording company, come into the deal at all. I don't see why they should. They're anachronisms. Same with movies. If I download a movie, I need to make a payment to the people who made it. I don't see why I need to make a payment to MPAA, or any other similar body.
But did the lower temperature actually cause the failures? Such a counterintuitive conclusion seems like it'd be worth some further examination...
Looks like it from the data, and TBH I don't find it at all counter-intuitive. Many materials contract when cold, expand when warm - but different materials do so at different rates. Mechanical tolerances in a hard disk drive are very close, so running at the wrong temperature will inevitably cause more failures. Drives must be designed to run fairly warm, because 99% of all drives live in computer enclosures with other drives, processors etc pumping out heat. The ambient temperature in a machine in a server rack is way above normal room temperature.
You forgot one metric of comparison: the warranty. As far as I'm concerned, this number alone is the most important in determining the reliability of the hard drive. If the manufacturer is willing to say "This drive will last for X years or we replace it free," it speaks volumes about their confidence behind their product. When buying hard drives, I actively seek out drives with at least a 3 (preferably 5) year warranty (some Hitachis and Seagates IIRC) and explicitly avoid those with only a 1 year warranty period (I'm looking at you WD).
You know, I don't give a monkey's. What you lose when a disk goes down (if you haven't done your backups properly) is typically far more valuable than the disk mechanism itself. Any manufacturer can put a five-year warranty on a disk mechanism as a gimmick. Most users won't remember the warranty when the disk goes down, and, even if they have to replace 10% of the units 'free', it doesn't take much on the retail price to cover that.
20 years ago we had a spate of failures on Western Digital drives on machines which were out with customers. That really hurt - giving our customers free drives would not have cheered them up. 10 years ago we had a spate of failures of Samsung drives in a server farm. That was more under control, but it was still a bloody nuisance. I don't want a drive which fails, but when it fails I get a new one free. I want a drive that doesn't fail. The warranty has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I'm 51 now, I've been programming for twenty-two years. I expect to keep programming till the day I drop, because I don't have a pension (my own choice). But the industry thinks it wants young people, and doesn't value experience. And it particularly won't value experience which you have gathered as a hobbyist. Having said that I don't think it's impossible. Experience genuinely is valuable.
The dimensions of the device break the interface: it's 120.7 x 62 x 18.7 mm -- 4.5" x 2.25" x 2/3". The thing if a FREAKING BRICK.
Small phones are no use if you want to do anything interesting with them. If you only want to phone your girlfriend, then fine, get a totty little device. But if you want to present or work with data it's useless. And increasingly as we move into location-aware, network connected devices there is a huge number of applications which just weren't possible before. I've moved from a Sony-Ericsson P910i to a Hewlett Packard IPAQ 6515 - the Sony-Ericson is bigger than OpenMoko, the IPAQ a lot bigger. Why? Because to run real applications you need more screen real estate (and the IPAQ has built-in GPS, which I need for the applications I'm building, but so does OpenMoko). 640x480 pixels is great news. Open API is even better news. I will definitely be playing with one of these, and soon.
What these games have in common is that they are abstract strategy games, zero sum, played under perfect information. Luck plays no part, nor does memory; nothing is random or chance. These are games - but they are very serious, highbrow games.
They're not changing away from sailing vessels now, the whole industry changed over 100 years ago. They are using a solar-powered, propellor driven vessel which - if the tachnology advances - will have many quite obvious advantages over traditional sailing vessels.
Yes, but modern sailing vessels have many quite obvious advantages over photovoltaic, as well as over traditional sailing vessels. Sailing technology hasn't stood still in the last hundred years, you know. Sailing vessels are faster - a lot faster - and a lot more reliable than this. The 'deck' for the photovoltaic panels on this design is going to have a lot of windage and be very vulnerable to damage in storm conditions - and cannot be reefed, docked or furled.
Sailing vessels have the downside that when the wind drops, they stop - but a small amount of auxiliary power (perhaps photovoltaic) gets around that problem.
Not funny, but not a great hassle either. I have to get my blood tested every three or four weeks, and get my warfarin dose adjusted. It's a nuisance when I fall off my bike, because I tend to bleed a lot.
I'm supposed to get up and move about fairly regularly during the day, and mostly I remember to do that. And I do need to take regular exercise (which is why I cycle a lot). But it's something you can live with. I don't like having to take warfarin, but it isn't the end of the world.
Does anyone think this is the first time this problem has come up? In the early 90s, a 'big' screen was 800x600 pixels. Lots of people were still using 640x480. That is what all the advice which we have been giving you for a decade about NEVER using absolute positioning and absolute sizes on the Web is all about.
You do not control the size of the real estate your page is rendered on. You do not control the number of pixels per inch. You do not control the visual acuity of your users' eyes. And you never did! If your site does not work as well on a mobile phone as on a 3000x2000 pixel display, then, as a web designer, you've failed. No-one else is to blame, you're to blame. You can't do your job.
Messing about with pixel values is pointless, because if you're using pixel values you have already failed. Of course, yes, there is a problem with the size of graphic elements. That's why we should be using Scalable Vector Graphics wherever possible; this is why it's serious that some browser vendors are still dragging their feet on native SVG support. But that doesn't excuse you, the designer. Your job as a designer is to work with the web you've got, which includes crappy antique browsers. Get on with it.
British cars are just excellent all round, well I would say that wouldn't I.
Face it, laddie, we don't make any 'British cars' any longer. And there's a very good reason for that. Minis are now BMWs, as are Rolls Royce (German). Bentley are Volkswagen (also German). Land Rovers are now Fords, as are Jaguar and Aston Martin (American). Vauxhall have been General Motors ('what's good for General Motors is good for America') for generations. Even Lotuses are now Malaysian. And Rover are bust.
Why?
Crap engineering? I don't think so. The current generation Mini, Land Rover, and Lotus cars are all examples of British engineering, and there isn't much wrong with their design. Crap assembly? I don't think so. Honda and Nissan and BMW manage to assemble perfectly good cars here. Crap industrial management? H'mmm... might be on to something there.
Now let us pretend for a moment that this actually is some computer user who has already mastered implementing RSS+Atom into their blog, yet simultaneously never even noticed that Windows has existed alongside the Mac OS, nor ever even dabbled in it until the release of boot camp last week(I can hardly imagine them rushing out to a store and purchasing a copy of MS Windows for their not-even year old Intel Mac) So why would they be interested in beta software like MS Max? (Which is really only ever going to be as good as last years version of Apple's iLife?) And why is it that their top 10 Mac apps seem to resemble the top rated list from macupdate.com.
There's nothing particularly surprising about someone who knows how to implement syndication feeds but doesn't have experience of Windows. Yes, I do now have a Windows XP machine - but only for games, and I honestly can't see myself using it for anything else. It just isn't very good, when compared to UN*X. And that's the way it's always been, in my experience, ever since Windows 1.0. Gimmicky, flashy graphics, but nothing spectacular in the way of useful applications.
Oh, and, I last used a Mac in 1986. I hear they've changed a bit since then.
"What an extraordinary response to the court's orders. As IBM points out, because SCO fails to "identify with specificity the versions, files and lines of System V, AIX, Dynix and Linux material that IBM is alleged to have misused," as a practical matter, it just isn't possible to evaluate SCO's claims. We're talking about a lot of code. IBM references a Declaration of Todd Shaughnessy, which we don't yet have, which says "there are at least 11 versions, 112,622 files and 23,802,817 lines of System V code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. There are at least 9 versions, 1,079,986 files and 1,216,698,259 lines of AIX code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. There are at least 37 versions of the base operating system, and 472,176 files and 156,757,842 lines of Dynix code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. And there are at least 597 versions, 3,485,859 files and 1,394,381,543 lines of Linux code potentially implicated to SCO's claims." Precisely where in this massive pile of code should IBM start digging?
...
"I feel sure we'll hear more on this topic at the hearing coming up. I have this vague memory that SCO told Magistrate Judge Wells, when she asked them at a recent hearing if they'd found anything of use in those materials, that they had."
The niche that Brittanica used to fill is simply closing - I suggest Brittanica concentrates on expanding its scope rather then attacking criticism if it wants to survive in future.
Indeed. Nevertheless it ought to be said that a product - and a business model - which survives for 240 years has done pretty well. Nothing lasts forever. Brittanica may have had its day, but it was a good long day while it lasted.
For doubters, read Robert Malloy's book. I love and hate this book. It's hard to dispute empirical research... you dress for your audience or risk losing them.
If your bosses don't like the way you dress, sack your bosses. Resign. Go and work for someone else, or for yourself. If you're any good, you'll do all right. If you aren't any good, you'll soon find that out, and that's good learning experience.
I wrote about five paragraphs after this sentance and deleted it all. I'll just throw out some names of some of the biggest supporters of population control:
Stalin, Hitler, Sanger, Blavatsky..
The same four people also supported the thesis that the earth is round. This does not mean that the earth is flat. Just because evil people can see the obvious does not mean that the obvious isn't obvious. The earth has only so much stored energy; it receives only so much energy from the sun. The more people the energy has to be shared with, the less there is for each. The faster we use up the stored energy, the sooner we're forced back onto just the energy we get from the sun. That's just straightforward.
We cannot sustain our present rate of population increase; we probably cannot even sustain our present population indefinitly, once cheap energy runs out. This is obvious; so obvious that you don't need to be an evil genius to understand it.
What you may need to be an evil genius to do is to come up with a good solution, because this problem looks intractable in a free society.
In zoology, there is ample evidence to show that population growth is self-restraining. That there are several factors...
There are indeed. Their names are Famine, Pestilence, Predation and Death. If we don't come up with a better solution, the Four Horsemen will be along shortly with one of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already been done. It's called the bicycle. Here's one of mine...
How to make yourself unpopular on a US based system...
However, seriously, between 1845 and 1849 Ireland had successive years of record harvests, and in each year exported huge amounts of grain. What's famous about those years? Yes, that's the Great Famine. People worked all day producing wheat which they couldn't afford to buy, so it was exported and they starved. There was no shortage of food in Ireland during the famine; there was a shortage of food ordinary Irish people could afford to buy. Similarly, in the Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s which led to the formation of Live Aid, Ethiopia - so plagued with drought that it could not feed its people - was exporting so many water melons to Europe that it could afford to buy helicopter gunships with the proceeds. Again, people starved not because there was no food, but because they could not afford the food that was plentiful.
The world's agricultural system is at full stretch at present producing enough food for (most of) the world's population. But our machines consume far more calories than we do ourselves. So if we switch our machines from consuming fossil fuels to consuming bio-fuels, then all the worlds agricultural land put together is not enough.
One of the inevitable consequences of capitalism is that it distributes scarce goods inequitably. In a drought, the poor go thirsty while the rich water their golf courses. In a famine, the poor starve while the rich put biodiesel into their SUVs. This flies in the face of every system of ethics we know, and yet it is the inevitable consequence of capitalism. Ghandi said 'the earth produces enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed'. Personally, I think he was an optimist; but nevertheless, one person's biodiesel is - inevitably - another person's hunger.
This may be good advice in a US context - I don't know. It's really, really bad advice in a UK context. Most UK lawyers are reasonable; and, furthermore, UK courts cannot be bought and are always reasonable. But one thing they won't tolerate is unreasonableness.
If you go to a UK law firm and say, 'look, I messed up, it was an honest mistake, I won't do it again, I'll happily pay your reasonable costs for sending that letter', you'll probably end up with a bill for under US$100. If they refuse and take the matter to court, then the judge will certainly look positively at that sort of approach. But if you attempt to do anything 'tough' or 'clever' you are going to be in such deep trouble.
Be humble. Be contrite. Be apologetic. Grovel. It will save a whole heap of trouble and money.
Is the wrong answer in this case.
As this is in the hands of a UK law firm, talking to a US law firm is going to do you exactly no good at all - except run up a huge legal bill as they consult a UK firm.
My first approach would be to phone the person who sent the letter (yes, I know, international call charges - tough) and speak to them directly. The UK is not as litigious as the US, and it's quite possible that if you're humble enough and apologetic enough they'll agree not to pursue the action further. Don't be embarrassed to grovel - it could save you a lot of money. Be very, very polite. If Corbis have effectively farmed out their UK collections business to this firm, they may feel that they have costs to recover, in which case get them to tell you - over the phone - what they will accept.
The next question is what your business - and personal - relationship with your friend is worth. If you want to keep those relationships, you can't walk away from the problem - you have to indemnify your friend and your friend's customer against this action.
If, in the end, you cannot get Corbis' law firm to agree to a sum you can afford, then you should get yourself a lawyer. You need to find out whether they propose to take action under English or Scottish law (which are quite different) and get yourself an English or Scottish lawyer as appropriate. I strongly recommend that if there is a hearing you come personally across to the UK. British judges are much more likely to be persuaded by a polite and apologetic personal appearance than by any letter.
Best of luck, my sympathies, and in future take your own photographs.
Especially if you are travelling light, take just one device. A possibility would be the HP IPAQ 6515, which incorporates GSM/GPRS phone; general purpose computer with word-processor, spreadsheet, web browsing, email, etc; camera of reasonable quality; MP3 player (obviously); and (useful when travelling) a GPS receiver. If you're travelling you may want to keep it in an Otterbox.
I first started using these for a project for fisheries inspectors working in very tough environments; I now use one as my own single device. I confess I haven't tried to get Linux running on it, but it works OK with Microsoft.
If I download a track from my favourite band, then I see that I morally ought to be making a payment to that specific band. I don't see that the RIAA, or any recording company, come into the deal at all. I don't see why they should. They're anachronisms. Same with movies. If I download a movie, I need to make a payment to the people who made it. I don't see why I need to make a payment to MPAA, or any other similar body.
Looks like it from the data, and TBH I don't find it at all counter-intuitive. Many materials contract when cold, expand when warm - but different materials do so at different rates. Mechanical tolerances in a hard disk drive are very close, so running at the wrong temperature will inevitably cause more failures. Drives must be designed to run fairly warm, because 99% of all drives live in computer enclosures with other drives, processors etc pumping out heat. The ambient temperature in a machine in a server rack is way above normal room temperature.
You know, I don't give a monkey's. What you lose when a disk goes down (if you haven't done your backups properly) is typically far more valuable than the disk mechanism itself. Any manufacturer can put a five-year warranty on a disk mechanism as a gimmick. Most users won't remember the warranty when the disk goes down, and, even if they have to replace 10% of the units 'free', it doesn't take much on the retail price to cover that.
20 years ago we had a spate of failures on Western Digital drives on machines which were out with customers. That really hurt - giving our customers free drives would not have cheered them up. 10 years ago we had a spate of failures of Samsung drives in a server farm. That was more under control, but it was still a bloody nuisance. I don't want a drive which fails, but when it fails I get a new one free. I want a drive that doesn't fail. The warranty has absolutely nothing to do with it.
What part of:
did you not understand?
I'm 51 now, I've been programming for twenty-two years. I expect to keep programming till the day I drop, because I don't have a pension (my own choice). But the industry thinks it wants young people, and doesn't value experience. And it particularly won't value experience which you have gathered as a hobbyist. Having said that I don't think it's impossible. Experience genuinely is valuable.
Small phones are no use if you want to do anything interesting with them. If you only want to phone your girlfriend, then fine, get a totty little device. But if you want to present or work with data it's useless. And increasingly as we move into location-aware, network connected devices there is a huge number of applications which just weren't possible before. I've moved from a Sony-Ericsson P910i to a Hewlett Packard IPAQ 6515 - the Sony-Ericson is bigger than OpenMoko, the IPAQ a lot bigger. Why? Because to run real applications you need more screen real estate (and the IPAQ has built-in GPS, which I need for the applications I'm building, but so does OpenMoko). 640x480 pixels is great news. Open API is even better news. I will definitely be playing with one of these, and soon.
Chess? Go?
What these games have in common is that they are abstract strategy games, zero sum, played under perfect information. Luck plays no part, nor does memory; nothing is random or chance. These are games - but they are very serious, highbrow games.
Yes, but modern sailing vessels have many quite obvious advantages over photovoltaic, as well as over traditional sailing vessels. Sailing technology hasn't stood still in the last hundred years, you know. Sailing vessels are faster - a lot faster - and a lot more reliable than this. The 'deck' for the photovoltaic panels on this design is going to have a lot of windage and be very vulnerable to damage in storm conditions - and cannot be reefed, docked or furled. Sailing vessels have the downside that when the wind drops, they stop - but a small amount of auxiliary power (perhaps photovoltaic) gets around that problem.
When one small woman, by herself, can get a sailing boat around the world at an average speed more than twice this solar electric boats maximum, it's a bit idiotic to say that solar power has 'obvious advantages' over sail.
Not funny, but not a great hassle either. I have to get my blood tested every three or four weeks, and get my warfarin dose adjusted. It's a nuisance when I fall off my bike, because I tend to bleed a lot.
I'm supposed to get up and move about fairly regularly during the day, and mostly I remember to do that. And I do need to take regular exercise (which is why I cycle a lot). But it's something you can live with. I don't like having to take warfarin, but it isn't the end of the world.
It is
Does anyone think this is the first time this problem has come up? In the early 90s, a 'big' screen was 800x600 pixels. Lots of people were still using 640x480. That is what all the advice which we have been giving you for a decade about NEVER using absolute positioning and absolute sizes on the Web is all about.
You do not control the size of the real estate your page is rendered on. You do not control the number of pixels per inch. You do not control the visual acuity of your users' eyes. And you never did! If your site does not work as well on a mobile phone as on a 3000x2000 pixel display, then, as a web designer, you've failed. No-one else is to blame, you're to blame. You can't do your job.
Messing about with pixel values is pointless, because if you're using pixel values you have already failed. Of course, yes, there is a problem with the size of graphic elements. That's why we should be using Scalable Vector Graphics wherever possible; this is why it's serious that some browser vendors are still dragging their feet on native SVG support. But that doesn't excuse you, the designer. Your job as a designer is to work with the web you've got, which includes crappy antique browsers. Get on with it.
Face it, laddie, we don't make any 'British cars' any longer. And there's a very good reason for that. Minis are now BMWs, as are Rolls Royce (German). Bentley are Volkswagen (also German). Land Rovers are now Fords, as are Jaguar and Aston Martin (American). Vauxhall have been General Motors ('what's good for General Motors is good for America') for generations. Even Lotuses are now Malaysian. And Rover are bust.
Why?
Crap engineering? I don't think so. The current generation Mini, Land Rover, and Lotus cars are all examples of British engineering, and there isn't much wrong with their design. Crap assembly? I don't think so. Honda and Nissan and BMW manage to assemble perfectly good cars here. Crap industrial management? H'mmm... might be on to something there.
There's nothing particularly surprising about someone who knows how to implement syndication feeds but doesn't have experience of Windows. Yes, I do now have a Windows XP machine - but only for games, and I honestly can't see myself using it for anything else. It just isn't very good, when compared to UN*X. And that's the way it's always been, in my experience, ever since Windows 1.0. Gimmicky, flashy graphics, but nothing spectacular in the way of useful applications.
Oh, and, I last used a Mac in 1986. I hear they've changed a bit since then.
Grocklaw's take here, and it makes good reading:
...
Indeed. Nevertheless it ought to be said that a product - and a business model - which survives for 240 years has done pretty well. Nothing lasts forever. Brittanica may have had its day, but it was a good long day while it lasted.
Here, take one of these blue pills and lie down...
Yeah, yeah, we believe you. And we're all from somewhere in the region of Betelgeuse.
Seeing how quickly an innocent sight-gag on /. can turn into a flame-war!
If your bosses don't like the way you dress, sack your bosses. Resign. Go and work for someone else, or for yourself. If you're any good, you'll do all right. If you aren't any good, you'll soon find that out, and that's good learning experience.
The same four people also supported the thesis that the earth is round. This does not mean that the earth is flat. Just because evil people can see the obvious does not mean that the obvious isn't obvious. The earth has only so much stored energy; it receives only so much energy from the sun. The more people the energy has to be shared with, the less there is for each. The faster we use up the stored energy, the sooner we're forced back onto just the energy we get from the sun. That's just straightforward.
We cannot sustain our present rate of population increase; we probably cannot even sustain our present population indefinitly, once cheap energy runs out. This is obvious; so obvious that you don't need to be an evil genius to understand it.
What you may need to be an evil genius to do is to come up with a good solution, because this problem looks intractable in a free society.
There are indeed. Their names are Famine, Pestilence, Predation and Death. If we don't come up with a better solution, the Four Horsemen will be along shortly with one of their own.