I don't think people are giving the judge enough credit. The ruling doesn't say that every single thing that was put in RAM needs to be produced or recorded. The ruling was over a request that FUTURE connections be logged. The company tried to argue that they shouldn't be compelled to log connections because the connection information was only normally in RAM and not written to disk. The judge called that bullshit, and the judge was right - just because you don't write something to disk doesn't mean it's unreasonable to write it to disk.
Now, if the judge ordered the production of items that HAD BEEN in RAM, or ordered that EVERYTHING in RAM was logged, then you'd be right to complain, but that isn't what the judge said. A small set of data was asked for, and 'it's only in RAM' was correctly not accepted as an excuse to not be able to follow the order.
The lack of open land in urban areas is preventing urban areas from diversifying into agriculture! News at 11!
If your business depends on internet access, then locate it where there is inexpensive internet access, just like if your business depends on open land, you locate it where there is inexpensive open land.
If a farmer can't run a farm in downtown Chicago because there isn't any affordable land, the problem is not the lack of affordable land, the problem is the farmer is stupid. And if a web developer can't be a web developer in BFE NH, the problem is not that there isn't inexpensive broadband in BFE NH, the problem is that the web developer is, also, dumb.
The inability of rural areas to host high-tech business is NOT A PROBLEM! They're RURAL AREAS, the whole POINT of a RURAL AREA is that it supports RURAL BUSINESSES, like agriculture. If you want to run an URBAN business, MOVE TO AN URBAN AREA!
Trying to run broadband internet all over the country doesn't make any more sense than building multi-million dollar 4-lane highway bridges to remote islands in Alaska.
I should have made an exception for POTS - it's to my benefit that the telephone network is ubiquitous, even in rural areas, as the functionality of my phone decreases when I can't call people who live in rural areas.
But there is no such network affect for broadband service, electricity, cable, or water.
I don't think we should subsidize any of those services either.
If you live in a rural area, then you should pay the costs of living there, not anyone else. And that should go for everything.
There is no direct benefit to me to subsidize where you choose to live. If there's a compelling reason for you to be out there, pay for it.
Or, put another way, if you can live in a city where providing you with essential services is cheap, and you can live in the country where it's not, the only person who should pay for it if you choose to live in the country is YOU. Same goes for business - if it is more cost effective for you to be in a rural area than in the city (like you're farming), then pay the additional costs for services and charge more for your product. If not, set up your business in the city.
This whole article is about a guy who wants access to the internet, but can't get it in his rural location. Too bad - if his profession requires internet access, then he should move to where there is internet access.
Next we'll have an article about how the Open Land Crisis in urban areas is inhibiting development of farms in inner cities.
There is no reason that cable shouldn't be REQUIRED to service these areas if they want a monopoly
Uh, yeah there is. I don't want to pay twice as much for cable to support economically inefficient low-density cable service to people who live in BFE. You've entirely missed the reason the cable company gets a monopoly (setting aside whether it works or not): We should all theoretically get lower rates when you only have to build out one network instead of two or three.
The fact of the matter is, cable service isn't provided in rural areas because there isn't a market for it. And one or two people who want broadband AND a horse ranch is not a market. People in rural areas would simply generally not want to pay what it costs to provide cable service to rural areas. That's all there is to it.
If broadband service is important to you, live somewhere where there is broadband service.
They can't just lay the line and be done with it - they have to lay AND MAINTAIN that line, and they have to lay AND MAINTAIN that line on ONE SUBSCRIBER'S worth of revenue.
The problem is that the phone company has the ability to charge $450/month for laying the T1 line, but once the cable company lays the line, it's obligated to charge him the same price it charges all the other customers, which doesn't make financial sense for the cable company.
It's not that the cable company doesn't want to provide him service - I'm sure the cable company would have been happy to lay the line for free if they could charge him $450/month - it's that the laws governing the rates cable companies charge prevent the cable company from providing service in a manner that makes financial sense for them to do so.
Look, if you provide the facilities for someone to copy copywritten material, you should be liable. There is no other way for copyright to work.
The 'leaving your back door open' analogy is not a good one. A better analogy is buying a book, scanning it, and posting it on a web page. In fact, it's EXACTLY the same thing, only with a different protocol.
Muslim kids beating up non-muslim kids isn't any different than black kids fighting hispanic kids.
Muslims bitching about people celebrating christmas isn't any different than Jews bitching about Christians celebrating Christmas. Or Atheists. Or Christians bitching about Atheists NOT wanting prayer in schools.
When any of those people start stapping bombs to their chests, or leaving bombs on trains, then you might have something.
But in the meantime, 'moderate' muslims arn't any more batty than American home-grown 'moderate' bible bangers.
Apparently you've never been to a no-Computer store before. It wouldn't be a very good no-Computer store if it had computers there now, would it?
And Gateway's no-Computer stores succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, selling record numbers of no-Computers!
It's rare that a company can conceive and execute a new strategy like this so successfully. In fact, the Gateway no-Computer stores were SO successful, they even increased the no-Computer sales on the web sales side!
By buying Gateway, Acer is hoping to extend Gateway's no-Computer sales model to also sell no-Servers, along with no-Monitors and no-Projectors.
Why should you expect anyone to want to live a life less than what you're willing to live?
Because I chose to develop more valuable skills and they did not?
Some jobs require specialized training/experience, and you get paid more for them. Some jobs are less pleasant, and you get paid more for them. And some jobs require you to be above-average-intelligent, and you get paid more for them.
And some jobs require no training, are fairly pleasant, and any idiot can do them. And for those you earn the minimum wage. Why would we expect anything else? If you don't like the minimum wage, make some DECISIONS and get a different job.
Why would anyone expect to live a life as good as someone else when they're not willing/able to do the same things that other person is?
Christians aren't going to start murdering innocents if you make fun of them in a comic.
Muslims won't start murdering people because of a comic. They've been murdering people because a few muslims with a lot of money resent western influence in their business/political affairs, and a few Muslims with no money, jobs, hope, or anything else are willing to buy into their propaganda and blow themselves up.
In most US states, each corporation is only required to maintain a registered agent address on file with the state, so anyone who needs to contact your organization can do so. The registered agent can be anyone, so for example, you might have your lawyer be your registered agent, and anyone who wants to know who owns the company has to go through him.
We've currently got the same system with domain names - your registrar can act as your registered agent, serving as a barrier between the public and you. If someone has a legitimate need to contact you, they can do so through your registrar. If not, they can't. I don't see any reason to change this.
Thus, if, under the WTO treaty, offshore gambling should be legal, then it was legal.
But the WTO treaty doesn't say offshore gambling should be legal. It says only that countries who erect trade barriers in violation of WTO rules can forfeit other international trade protections (like copyright protections).
At issue is not whether the gambling is legal or not - it's not - but whether the fact that it's not legal is a violation of free trade standards, and as a result of that violation, whether Antigua should get to copy all the stuff it wants.
The laws that make online gambling illegal have SPECIFIC exemptions for the SPECIFIC kinds of gambling you mention. Absent those SPECIFIC exemptions, online gambling has always been illegal (according to the US government, anyway).
What Antigua is arguing is that since the US has carved out exceptions that allow some kinds of online gambling, that disqualifies the US from making the argument that they are entitled to ban online gambling on the same basis that Muslim countries are entitled to ban alcohol imports, because the Muslim countries have a blanket legal and cultural objection to alcohol, but no such blanket legal or cultural objection to gambling exists in the US.
The problem for the US is how to collect the taxes. The US can't tax no-resident corporations. One way might be to have US residents report their gambling activities in their annual tax filings and pay the tax, but look at how well that approach works for states that demand "use" taxes for inter-state puchases.
What huh? The US can most certainly tax non-resident corporations.
The US would tax BOTH gambling profits by the gamblers *AND* the companies doing the gambling, and both are pretty easy.
First, you amend the law to allow online gambling, but only allow banks to transfer money to licensed companies. Since the companies are licensed, you know who they are, can collect your taxes, and if they don't pay, you revoke the license and put them out of business.
As far as the gamblers, collecting taxes there is especially easy - your bank already reports how much you make to the IRS; deposits from gambling companies aren't any harder to track than any other deposit. (The reason use taxes are hard to collect is there's no record anywhere that a resident buys something out of state and brings it into the state - and even if there was, the second a state tries to collect there will be a nice lawsuit and the law will be overturned as an illegal tariff on interstate commerce anyway.)
There is a secondary problem -- what about those people that the US has thrown in jail for running offshore Internet gambling operations. What happens to them if the US decides that Internet gambling is legal? Could they sue on the basis that Internet gambling is currently legal because of the US's treaty obligations (the WTO treaties) and thus their convictions were wrong?
The WTO ruling is orthogonal to whether online gambling in the US is illegal or not. The WTO isn't saying that gambling in the US is legal. The WTO is saying that allowing casino-style gambling by US companies while prohibiting online-gambling by foreign companies is not legal and the US must make online gambling legal or face WTO-imposed consequences (specifically, Antigua gets to copy stuff.) So no, there would be no basis to sue, because even if the US changes the law to make online gambling legal in the future, it wasn't legal at the time the people thrown in jail were arrested and prosecuted.
Music piracy INCREASES economic productivity because piracy is ULTRA efficient at copying and distributing songs. When consumers get the same (or more) stuff while LESS resources are required (labor and materials), that's an economic gain.
Now, it IS also true that piracy causes economic losses for record companies. But, economic losses for record companies are not necessarily bad for the economy, any more than economic losses for carjackers put in prison are bad for the economy.
To use another example, when the US instituted the Do Not Call list, it caused a lot of losses for companies whose business was paying people to call people who didn't want to be called. And it caused a lot of jobs in that industry to be 'lost'. Was this bad for the economy? NO! All the money that used to get spent interrupting people's dinner just got spent on something else, creating more jobs elsewhere.
So when someone pirates a song instead of paying for it, yes, the record company has a loss, but the economy does not - that money instead gets spent on something else, like a trip to the movies. That's an economic GAIN - the consumer gets to listen to music AND they get to go to the movies, whereas before, when they were paying for extremely inefficient record company distribution, they only got to listen to the music.
Online gambling has been banned in the US for years by the same laws that made it illegal to wager over the phone. So there were never any domestic online gambling companies, because the US would just arrest the people running them for violating existing law.
But, the US couldn't get at people who ran online gambling companies outside the country, and while the US could have technically prosecuted individual gamblers for gambling online, that would hardly be practical. So instead, the US recently made it illegal for US banks and credit card companies to process payments to online gambling companies, effectively preventing US citizens from gambling online since it's now much harder to get your money to the gambling site.
The trick here is that the law only applies to certain kinds of online gambling, specifically, the kind of online gambling common in casinos, as it was mainly the casinos pushing for this legislation (under the guise of 'gambling is evil!'). So, the US had a situation in which certain domestic companies could engage in gambling as a trade, but certain international companies could not - and that's the basis of the WTO dispute.
The US actually has a very similar construct with regard to free trade amongst the 50 US states - it isn't legal for any state to have laws which favor domestic commerce over commerce from parties in other states. For example, in a recent ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that banned companies from directly shipping alcoholic beverages to customers from out of state while allowing domestic producers to do so. Supreme Court said you had to either ban all mail-order alcohol sales or none.
And that's what the WTO is saying. The US is free to ban gambling, so long as they ban ALL gambling, not just gambling done by companies outside the country. And the US would be free to tax gambling, so long as it taxes ALL gambling. So the problem isn't that the US isn't getting a piece - they could allow gambling and tax it and get a piece. The problem is that because of the existing ban on online wagering that pit US casinos against non-US online gaming sites, the US companies were losing business to the non-US companies, so the US banned gambling at the non-US companies, which is exactly the kind of practice the free trade pacts and the WTO are supposed to prevent.
The groups of 1,000 have to be selected randomly across the voting population
Actually, no, they don't. The best way to have them selected is by the candidates - 2nd place candidate gets to pick 75% of the ballot blocks to be recounted and the 1st place candidate gets to pick 25%.
Random selection is not as good as giving the party with the strongest motivation to find any incorrect ballots the power to do so.
The problem is not the system. The problem is you have zero understanding of how it works.
You visually verify that the votes recorded are accurate, separate your 1/2 of the paper ballot as a "receipt" and drop the remainder of the paper ballot in the box for counting at a later date.
There's your first problem. YOU DO NOT KEEP A RECEIPT! You NEVER give the voter the ability to keep a record of how they voted. If you don't understand why this is, you should just give up now because you're missing BASIC rules about keeping an election fair.
You put a ballot with both the human-readable and computer coded votes in the ballot box.
1. If Candidate_A is not chosen, print Candidate_B on human part, record vote on barcode as Candidate_A 2. If Candidate_A IS chosen, print Candidate_A on human part, record vote on barcode as Candidate_A.
It would be painfully obvious that this had happened with trivial ballot inspection because you would have a bunch of ballots that said Candidate A on the human part and Candidate B on the computer part. And when you looked at any random sample of ballots and counted them by hand, the counts would be off, and this failure would be detected.
Sorry, but it works fine, you just don't understand how it works.
But that probably has nothing to do with sewage privacy and everything to do with not having the President of the United States stuck with his pants down for 15 minutes in a bathroom using foreign-sourced toilet paper. Secret Service probably doesn't want the President in a confined bathroom for an extended period of time and given the choice between inspecting all the toilet paper and bringing their own, they might as well bring their own.
Indeed, you can do all sorts of nifty things to increase the security of the elections when you introduce electronic machines and can track the movement of groups of ballots.
Expanding on your idea, you can tag each ballot that's printed with a number, then randomly send the numbers to different poling places, then as ballots come back, key in the polling place the box of ballots came from, then scan the ballots, and then the machine can flag any ballot that comes in with a ballot number that doesn't match the list of ballot numbers sent to that location.
Further, you can then also scan in all the ballots that got voided or were never given out, and you'll know if a big pile of your ballots went missing. Or if those don't scan with the right codes, you'll know someone switched ballots around on you.
But, I was just trying to illustrate a simple process where each vote can be recorded and verified. There are obviously more steps needed to insure you don't get extra votes, or lose votes, in the transit between voting and counting.
I hope you can read Barcode or whatever gets printed as machine-readable on the ballot? How else would you know what the machine printed on it, never mind what the human-readable part says.
Why would you hope that? It doesn't matter.
Think of it this way. What if we recorded your vote in English and German (assuming for a moment that an average American can read the english vote record and not the german vote record), and then we had Germans count the German vote record.
So we run our election, give the ballots to the Germans in groups of 1000, and the Germans give us a count of votes for each group.
Now we want to check that the count the Germans gave us is accurate. So what do we do? We pick a few of those groups of 1,000 and we count the English records on those ballots and make sure they match the count the Germans gave us. Setting aside the issue of whether what's written on the ballots in German matches what is written in English, this audit is the only way to make sure the Germans aren't lying when they give us the final count. And looking at the issue of the German votes matching the English votes, while each voter can't check this, it would be pretty obvious to someone who knows English and German that the ballots were wrong with casual observation.
Now, lets say that instead of having Germans count German vote records, we just had Americans count the votes? Then what would we do to make sure the vote count was accurate? The same thing: We'd give the votes to the counters in groups of 1,000, then pick a couple groups and recount them to make sure they match.
In this analogy, the bar code (or whatever) is the vote record in German, and the Germans are the vote counting machines. It doesn't matter that the voter can't verify that the German written on their ballot is accurate, because the voter can't verify that the Germans themselves are accurate either, just like the voter can't verify that the vote counting machines are accurate. The only way to verify that is to do an audit and make sure that the totals of hand-counted English voting records match the totals of machine-counted machine-coded voting records.
So, it doesn't matter if every voter can verify that the machine-readable record matches their human-readable record, as long as both are on the ballot. A quick check by someone who can read the human and machine readable portions of the ballots will make it obvious if they don't match, and separate from that, you have to do other checking to verify that the counting machines are accurate anyway, and that check will also detect any ballots where the machine records don't match the human-readable records as well.
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I don't think people are giving the judge enough credit. The ruling doesn't say that every single thing that was put in RAM needs to be produced or recorded. The ruling was over a request that FUTURE connections be logged. The company tried to argue that they shouldn't be compelled to log connections because the connection information was only normally in RAM and not written to disk. The judge called that bullshit, and the judge was right - just because you don't write something to disk doesn't mean it's unreasonable to write it to disk.
Now, if the judge ordered the production of items that HAD BEEN in RAM, or ordered that EVERYTHING in RAM was logged, then you'd be right to complain, but that isn't what the judge said. A small set of data was asked for, and 'it's only in RAM' was correctly not accepted as an excuse to not be able to follow the order.
The lack of open land in urban areas is preventing urban areas from diversifying into agriculture! News at 11!
If your business depends on internet access, then locate it where there is inexpensive internet access, just like if your business depends on open land, you locate it where there is inexpensive open land.
If a farmer can't run a farm in downtown Chicago because there isn't any affordable land, the problem is not the lack of affordable land, the problem is the farmer is stupid. And if a web developer can't be a web developer in BFE NH, the problem is not that there isn't inexpensive broadband in BFE NH, the problem is that the web developer is, also, dumb.
The inability of rural areas to host high-tech business is NOT A PROBLEM! They're RURAL AREAS, the whole POINT of a RURAL AREA is that it supports RURAL BUSINESSES, like agriculture. If you want to run an URBAN business, MOVE TO AN URBAN AREA!
Trying to run broadband internet all over the country doesn't make any more sense than building multi-million dollar 4-lane highway bridges to remote islands in Alaska.
I should have made an exception for POTS - it's to my benefit that the telephone network is ubiquitous, even in rural areas, as the functionality of my phone decreases when I can't call people who live in rural areas.
But there is no such network affect for broadband service, electricity, cable, or water.
I don't think we should subsidize any of those services either.
If you live in a rural area, then you should pay the costs of living there, not anyone else. And that should go for everything.
There is no direct benefit to me to subsidize where you choose to live. If there's a compelling reason for you to be out there, pay for it.
Or, put another way, if you can live in a city where providing you with essential services is cheap, and you can live in the country where it's not, the only person who should pay for it if you choose to live in the country is YOU. Same goes for business - if it is more cost effective for you to be in a rural area than in the city (like you're farming), then pay the additional costs for services and charge more for your product. If not, set up your business in the city.
This whole article is about a guy who wants access to the internet, but can't get it in his rural location. Too bad - if his profession requires internet access, then he should move to where there is internet access.
Next we'll have an article about how the Open Land Crisis in urban areas is inhibiting development of farms in inner cities.
Company builds out network to most profitable areas first. News at 11.
Duh!
There is no reason that cable shouldn't be REQUIRED to service these areas if they want a monopoly
Uh, yeah there is. I don't want to pay twice as much for cable to support economically inefficient low-density cable service to people who live in BFE. You've entirely missed the reason the cable company gets a monopoly (setting aside whether it works or not): We should all theoretically get lower rates when you only have to build out one network instead of two or three.
The fact of the matter is, cable service isn't provided in rural areas because there isn't a market for it. And one or two people who want broadband AND a horse ranch is not a market. People in rural areas would simply generally not want to pay what it costs to provide cable service to rural areas. That's all there is to it.
If broadband service is important to you, live somewhere where there is broadband service.
They can't just lay the line and be done with it - they have to lay AND MAINTAIN that line, and they have to lay AND MAINTAIN that line on ONE SUBSCRIBER'S worth of revenue.
The problem is that the phone company has the ability to charge $450/month for laying the T1 line, but once the cable company lays the line, it's obligated to charge him the same price it charges all the other customers, which doesn't make financial sense for the cable company.
It's not that the cable company doesn't want to provide him service - I'm sure the cable company would have been happy to lay the line for free if they could charge him $450/month - it's that the laws governing the rates cable companies charge prevent the cable company from providing service in a manner that makes financial sense for them to do so.
Look, if you provide the facilities for someone to copy copywritten material, you should be liable. There is no other way for copyright to work.
The 'leaving your back door open' analogy is not a good one. A better analogy is buying a book, scanning it, and posting it on a web page. In fact, it's EXACTLY the same thing, only with a different protocol.
That's a different category.
Muslim kids beating up non-muslim kids isn't any different than black kids fighting hispanic kids.
Muslims bitching about people celebrating christmas isn't any different than Jews bitching about Christians celebrating Christmas. Or Atheists. Or Christians bitching about Atheists NOT wanting prayer in schools.
When any of those people start stapping bombs to their chests, or leaving bombs on trains, then you might have something.
But in the meantime, 'moderate' muslims arn't any more batty than American home-grown 'moderate' bible bangers.
Apparently you've never been to a no-Computer store before. It wouldn't be a very good no-Computer store if it had computers there now, would it?
And Gateway's no-Computer stores succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, selling record numbers of no-Computers!
It's rare that a company can conceive and execute a new strategy like this so successfully. In fact, the Gateway no-Computer stores were SO successful, they even increased the no-Computer sales on the web sales side!
By buying Gateway, Acer is hoping to extend Gateway's no-Computer sales model to also sell no-Servers, along with no-Monitors and no-Projectors.
Maybe when voter turnout gets to be less than 20% they will start to notice.
Oh, they'll notice alright. They'll just campaign to only the 20% of people who vote.
Why should you expect anyone to want to live a life less than what you're willing to live?
Because I chose to develop more valuable skills and they did not?
Some jobs require specialized training/experience, and you get paid more for them. Some jobs are less pleasant, and you get paid more for them. And some jobs require you to be above-average-intelligent, and you get paid more for them.
And some jobs require no training, are fairly pleasant, and any idiot can do them. And for those you earn the minimum wage. Why would we expect anything else? If you don't like the minimum wage, make some DECISIONS and get a different job.
Why would anyone expect to live a life as good as someone else when they're not willing/able to do the same things that other person is?
Christians aren't going to start murdering innocents if you make fun of them in a comic.
Muslims won't start murdering people because of a comic. They've been murdering people because a few muslims with a lot of money resent western influence in their business/political affairs, and a few Muslims with no money, jobs, hope, or anything else are willing to buy into their propaganda and blow themselves up.
In most US states, each corporation is only required to maintain a registered agent address on file with the state, so anyone who needs to contact your organization can do so. The registered agent can be anyone, so for example, you might have your lawyer be your registered agent, and anyone who wants to know who owns the company has to go through him.
We've currently got the same system with domain names - your registrar can act as your registered agent, serving as a barrier between the public and you. If someone has a legitimate need to contact you, they can do so through your registrar. If not, they can't. I don't see any reason to change this.
Thus, if, under the WTO treaty, offshore gambling should be legal, then it was legal.
But the WTO treaty doesn't say offshore gambling should be legal. It says only that countries who erect trade barriers in violation of WTO rules can forfeit other international trade protections (like copyright protections).
At issue is not whether the gambling is legal or not - it's not - but whether the fact that it's not legal is a violation of free trade standards, and as a result of that violation, whether Antigua should get to copy all the stuff it wants.
The online gambling ban effort was started by Jack Abramoff. Jack received a fairly large amount of lobbying fees from Indian tribes. With casinos.
I was referring to casino-style online gambling.
The laws that make online gambling illegal have SPECIFIC exemptions for the SPECIFIC kinds of gambling you mention. Absent those SPECIFIC exemptions, online gambling has always been illegal (according to the US government, anyway).
What Antigua is arguing is that since the US has carved out exceptions that allow some kinds of online gambling, that disqualifies the US from making the argument that they are entitled to ban online gambling on the same basis that Muslim countries are entitled to ban alcohol imports, because the Muslim countries have a blanket legal and cultural objection to alcohol, but no such blanket legal or cultural objection to gambling exists in the US.
The problem for the US is how to collect the taxes. The US can't tax no-resident corporations. One way might be to have US residents report their gambling activities in their annual tax filings and pay the tax, but look at how well that approach works for states that demand "use" taxes for inter-state puchases.
What huh? The US can most certainly tax non-resident corporations.
The US would tax BOTH gambling profits by the gamblers *AND* the companies doing the gambling, and both are pretty easy.
First, you amend the law to allow online gambling, but only allow banks to transfer money to licensed companies. Since the companies are licensed, you know who they are, can collect your taxes, and if they don't pay, you revoke the license and put them out of business.
As far as the gamblers, collecting taxes there is especially easy - your bank already reports how much you make to the IRS; deposits from gambling companies aren't any harder to track than any other deposit. (The reason use taxes are hard to collect is there's no record anywhere that a resident buys something out of state and brings it into the state - and even if there was, the second a state tries to collect there will be a nice lawsuit and the law will be overturned as an illegal tariff on interstate commerce anyway.)
There is a secondary problem -- what about those people that the US has thrown in jail for running offshore Internet gambling operations. What happens to them if the US decides that Internet gambling is legal? Could they sue on the basis that Internet gambling is currently legal because of the US's treaty obligations (the WTO treaties) and thus their convictions were wrong?
The WTO ruling is orthogonal to whether online gambling in the US is illegal or not. The WTO isn't saying that gambling in the US is legal. The WTO is saying that allowing casino-style gambling by US companies while prohibiting online-gambling by foreign companies is not legal and the US must make online gambling legal or face WTO-imposed consequences (specifically, Antigua gets to copy stuff.) So no, there would be no basis to sue, because even if the US changes the law to make online gambling legal in the future, it wasn't legal at the time the people thrown in jail were arrested and prosecuted.
Music piracy INCREASES economic productivity because piracy is ULTRA efficient at copying and distributing songs. When consumers get the same (or more) stuff while LESS resources are required (labor and materials), that's an economic gain.
Now, it IS also true that piracy causes economic losses for record companies. But, economic losses for record companies are not necessarily bad for the economy, any more than economic losses for carjackers put in prison are bad for the economy.
To use another example, when the US instituted the Do Not Call list, it caused a lot of losses for companies whose business was paying people to call people who didn't want to be called. And it caused a lot of jobs in that industry to be 'lost'. Was this bad for the economy? NO! All the money that used to get spent interrupting people's dinner just got spent on something else, creating more jobs elsewhere.
So when someone pirates a song instead of paying for it, yes, the record company has a loss, but the economy does not - that money instead gets spent on something else, like a trip to the movies. That's an economic GAIN - the consumer gets to listen to music AND they get to go to the movies, whereas before, when they were paying for extremely inefficient record company distribution, they only got to listen to the music.
It's not that simple.
Online gambling has been banned in the US for years by the same laws that made it illegal to wager over the phone. So there were never any domestic online gambling companies, because the US would just arrest the people running them for violating existing law.
But, the US couldn't get at people who ran online gambling companies outside the country, and while the US could have technically prosecuted individual gamblers for gambling online, that would hardly be practical. So instead, the US recently made it illegal for US banks and credit card companies to process payments to online gambling companies, effectively preventing US citizens from gambling online since it's now much harder to get your money to the gambling site.
The trick here is that the law only applies to certain kinds of online gambling, specifically, the kind of online gambling common in casinos, as it was mainly the casinos pushing for this legislation (under the guise of 'gambling is evil!'). So, the US had a situation in which certain domestic companies could engage in gambling as a trade, but certain international companies could not - and that's the basis of the WTO dispute.
The US actually has a very similar construct with regard to free trade amongst the 50 US states - it isn't legal for any state to have laws which favor domestic commerce over commerce from parties in other states. For example, in a recent ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that banned companies from directly shipping alcoholic beverages to customers from out of state while allowing domestic producers to do so. Supreme Court said you had to either ban all mail-order alcohol sales or none.
And that's what the WTO is saying. The US is free to ban gambling, so long as they ban ALL gambling, not just gambling done by companies outside the country. And the US would be free to tax gambling, so long as it taxes ALL gambling. So the problem isn't that the US isn't getting a piece - they could allow gambling and tax it and get a piece. The problem is that because of the existing ban on online wagering that pit US casinos against non-US online gaming sites, the US companies were losing business to the non-US companies, so the US banned gambling at the non-US companies, which is exactly the kind of practice the free trade pacts and the WTO are supposed to prevent.
The groups of 1,000 have to be selected randomly across the voting population
Actually, no, they don't. The best way to have them selected is by the candidates - 2nd place candidate gets to pick 75% of the ballot blocks to be recounted and the 1st place candidate gets to pick 25%.
Random selection is not as good as giving the party with the strongest motivation to find any incorrect ballots the power to do so.
The problem is not the system. The problem is you have zero understanding of how it works.
You visually verify that the votes recorded are accurate, separate your 1/2 of the paper ballot as a "receipt" and drop the remainder of the paper ballot in the box for counting at a later date.
There's your first problem. YOU DO NOT KEEP A RECEIPT! You NEVER give the voter the ability to keep a record of how they voted. If you don't understand why this is, you should just give up now because you're missing BASIC rules about keeping an election fair.
You put a ballot with both the human-readable and computer coded votes in the ballot box.
1. If Candidate_A is not chosen, print Candidate_B on human part, record vote on barcode as Candidate_A
2. If Candidate_A IS chosen, print Candidate_A on human part, record vote on barcode as Candidate_A.
It would be painfully obvious that this had happened with trivial ballot inspection because you would have a bunch of ballots that said Candidate A on the human part and Candidate B on the computer part. And when you looked at any random sample of ballots and counted them by hand, the counts would be off, and this failure would be detected.
Sorry, but it works fine, you just don't understand how it works.
But that probably has nothing to do with sewage privacy and everything to do with not having the President of the United States stuck with his pants down for 15 minutes in a bathroom using foreign-sourced toilet paper. Secret Service probably doesn't want the President in a confined bathroom for an extended period of time and given the choice between inspecting all the toilet paper and bringing their own, they might as well bring their own.
Indeed, you can do all sorts of nifty things to increase the security of the elections when you introduce electronic machines and can track the movement of groups of ballots.
Expanding on your idea, you can tag each ballot that's printed with a number, then randomly send the numbers to different poling places, then as ballots come back, key in the polling place the box of ballots came from, then scan the ballots, and then the machine can flag any ballot that comes in with a ballot number that doesn't match the list of ballot numbers sent to that location.
Further, you can then also scan in all the ballots that got voided or were never given out, and you'll know if a big pile of your ballots went missing. Or if those don't scan with the right codes, you'll know someone switched ballots around on you.
But, I was just trying to illustrate a simple process where each vote can be recorded and verified. There are obviously more steps needed to insure you don't get extra votes, or lose votes, in the transit between voting and counting.
I hope you can read Barcode or whatever gets printed as machine-readable on the ballot? How else would you know what the machine printed on it, never mind what the human-readable part says.
Why would you hope that? It doesn't matter.
Think of it this way. What if we recorded your vote in English and German (assuming for a moment that an average American can read the english vote record and not the german vote record), and then we had Germans count the German vote record.
So we run our election, give the ballots to the Germans in groups of 1000, and the Germans give us a count of votes for each group.
Now we want to check that the count the Germans gave us is accurate. So what do we do? We pick a few of those groups of 1,000 and we count the English records on those ballots and make sure they match the count the Germans gave us. Setting aside the issue of whether what's written on the ballots in German matches what is written in English, this audit is the only way to make sure the Germans aren't lying when they give us the final count. And looking at the issue of the German votes matching the English votes, while each voter can't check this, it would be pretty obvious to someone who knows English and German that the ballots were wrong with casual observation.
Now, lets say that instead of having Germans count German vote records, we just had Americans count the votes? Then what would we do to make sure the vote count was accurate? The same thing: We'd give the votes to the counters in groups of 1,000, then pick a couple groups and recount them to make sure they match.
In this analogy, the bar code (or whatever) is the vote record in German, and the Germans are the vote counting machines. It doesn't matter that the voter can't verify that the German written on their ballot is accurate, because the voter can't verify that the Germans themselves are accurate either, just like the voter can't verify that the vote counting machines are accurate. The only way to verify that is to do an audit and make sure that the totals of hand-counted English voting records match the totals of machine-counted machine-coded voting records.
So, it doesn't matter if every voter can verify that the machine-readable record matches their human-readable record, as long as both are on the ballot. A quick check by someone who can read the human and machine readable portions of the ballots will make it obvious if they don't match, and separate from that, you have to do other checking to verify that the counting machines are accurate anyway, and that check will also detect any ballots where the machine records don't match the human-readable records as well.