Respond to consumer demand.
They used to bitch that they couldn't use newer technology because of the consumer's expense in upgrade path (LP->8 track->cassette->cd->?). Now that consumers have spent (insert illegally downloaded mp3 of Carl Sagan) BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars buying the equipment for the next format and the government with other private industry has spent further BILLIONS AND BILLIONS to build the distribution infrastructure, they refuse to step up to the plate with a viable business model.
SCREW 'EM.
It amazes me even more when a completely unrelated event happens largely due to the laws of physics and systems working as designed to prevent a major catastrophe that people blame the internet. I would much prefer a blackout to a power surge rolling back at three hundred thousand kilometers per second piping straight back into a nuclear reactor.
Save for the massive increase in demand for electricity due to the parallel increase in datacenters and personal computers plugging into the grid, there is no evidence whatsoever that the internet played a role in this or any other power outage.
Regardless, disconnecting from the internet will not prevent anyone from flying a Cessna through high tension lines, which all other things being equal in the current body of evidence, would have caused the exact same event.
Last I was forced to code hundreds of entity beans and EJBs, I thanked every god ever worshipped for code generation. There simply is NO reason to hand code this highly structured, standardized, uninspiring dreck. After designing everything in SQL (or Rational, ER studio etc.) why the fuck would anyone want to hand code the same crap again in Java unless absolutely necessary? Given the choice between that and shipping my job off to India, I'd rather learn Hindi.
1. A place for: bakery.
2. A collection or class: finery.
3. A state or condition: slavery.
4. Act; practice: bribery.
5. Characteristics or qualities of: snobbery.
It would then be proper to say this thread is the height of stupidery.
That sounds remarkably like a "document control" regime, which has been quite common in businesses and government agencies with strict confidentiality policies for ages.
Perhaps all these implied conspiracies are just responses to customer demand. It may or may not be an effective scheme, but M$ can hardly be faulted for attempting to provide what the corporate and government markets have been demanding since before M$ existed.
I am the furthest thing from a Microsoft apologist, I loathe that company and its products, but this whole argument is hyperbolic, based on slippery-slope logic and utterly paranoid. Ok, the paranoia is understandable, but the rest is a joke.
In fact, Microsoft used that exact exception scenario to legitimize interoperation of MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger.
There is a rather enormous difference in your analogy. Generally, the contents of the MS Office files in question are wholly the property of the users who create them. The contents of an encrypted DVD are very much not.
It would be extraordinarily difficult for Microsoft to make a case that "fair use" of your own resume document did not include interoperability with other products as YOU own the contents, not Microsoft.
This sounds very much like the "sky is falling" shrieking that went on when people discovered the copyright statements in ISP terms and conditions, which when interpreted with no apparent knowledge of law, made it sound like ISPs were taking ownership of personal websites when in fact it was simply the necessary license the users would have to give in order for the service distribute their property.
The law remains unambiguous and M$ itself has used that lack of abiguity for the exact purpose in question.
I'm glad to see your college education was successful enough for you to still be completely oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of university tuition financing is through private finace -- student loans are almost always merely guaranteed by the government but not a single dime of your-hard-earned-tax-dollars are spent. The fact that it is subsidized in very limited circumstances (extreme financial need or extreme academic achievement) is quickly mooted by the fact that most college graduates pay taxes the rest of their lives as their parents and children no doubt will..
Of course. To deliberately draft something so altruistic in the 18th century would be dramatically un-American. Of course, back then, you pretty much had to be a wealthy white guy to do anything of consequence in the U.S. Damned shame about emancipation, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement and the United Nations broadening the scope just a tad. Piiiiity:P
The problem in analogy was with the original comment making absurd comments about American strengths compared to perceived "African" weaknesses. I was making essentially the same point you are.
However, to say that there is no cooperative self interest in Africa is naive. The Southern African Development Community exists for precisely that reason, hence the motto "toward a common future." I suppose the problem in making references to anything African from the point of view of the USA is that most Americans are unaware that organizations as complex as SADC exist, much less to the point that they could name the member states, ergo, all becomes "Africa." People will continue to make ridiculous assumptions about Africa until they bother to educate themselves.
Incidentally, the federal government DOES sit by while California sucks the Colorado river dry, so I don't quite see your point.
This law was used to bring Swiss banks to pay over a billion dollars in damages to holocaust victims. I would hardly call that "unsuccessful."
Human Rights Watch has a rather extensive background on the law and recent cases.
Not so ironically in the context of this thread, the law was originally written to allow the prosecution of foreign pirates for actions outside the United States.
"Technocracy has no political ante cedents. It derives nothing from any of the historic political theorists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or Karl Marx."
...yet when reading "An analysis of Technocracy" on Technocracy.ca, there is a rather large side-bar consisting of a lengthy quote of Karl Marx. Not surprising as the basis of the argument is central planning, which works so well.
'Organization and management of a country's industrial resources by technical experts for the good of the whole community' is more or less the state of the industrial status quo now. It seems like everything is run by morons, but in fact, the whole point of classic Adam Smith capitalist specialization can essentially be boiled down to the same statement and is more or less how things have already progressed.
As for the pompous "we have no political antecedants" statement trumpeted by this group... well, that hardly needs elaboration, but, COME ON!
No relation to Marx?
"development a process of progressive social instability; that this process will continue until the instability reaches the limit of social tolerance..." Funny, I seem to recall a global workers revolution based on the same idea somewhere in Das Kapital.
"...there is in development a process of progressive social instability; that this process will continue until the instability reaches the limit of social tolerance, and that there then will have to be installed on this Continent a social mechanism competent to meet the needs of its people." Hmmm... sounds VERY Marx here...
Even explicitly disavowing preconceived concepts like Ricardian Comparative Advantage, good god, that's like saying "we reject Isaac Newton."
If "TECHNOCRACY is science in the social field" how can you say there are "no political antecedents?" For christ's sake, the whole history of economics and political science is that of SOCIAL SCIENCE.
I am sure the poor people in Africa might have something to say about the wise stewardship of European invaders.
As for corrupt governments, well... we've done fairly well with that. Nonexistant coastlines? America's coastline is vastly smaller than Africa's. Poor soil? Save for the Sahara, which is not dissimilar to the better part of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and a great deal of Texas... well, let's just say that rainforests, which make up about a quarter of Africa, don't generally thrive on "poor soil."
Hmmm... have you ever been to Africa?
I like taxes. Taxes pay for roads and nice well-uniformed people to scrape up the entrails of the homeless when they get run over by my Hummer while I talk on my cell phone drinking a Frappachino. Taxes also provide infinitessimally small amounts of money to those people in the hopes they'll just stay out of my way. They also pay for those same nice uniformed people to arrest my butt for reckless disregard for human life and throw me into a cold, dark prison cell for the rest of my life should I decide other people's lives are worthless enough to mow them down. Should you avoid prison, but your capitalist schemes don't work out and you end up homeless, I'd prefer you not be allowed to opt out of social security or medicare as we'll all end up paying to either keep you alive or scrape your decaying entrails off the street.
I like taxes.
There's one rather enormous problem with the idea, which is not unattractive only to the displaced worker, but also to the capitalist.
Taking the example of "hey! let's sell the backs of dollars to big companies for advertising!"
Well, money is simply a store of value, which can ALWAYS be reduced down to labor -- even if it represents a diamond or a big drum of oil found in nature, you still have to find the damned diamond or oil, extract it and haul the thing to the buyer. The scarcity of the resource in question increases the labor and thus the value. Pretty simple concept.
So, Coke exerts all sorts of effort (robotic, human and otherwise) to produce a couple billion bottles of brown water. They then take money (see above) and purchase the back of the paper used as money, which also takes, well, "money" to make in the first place, but that's getting circular (like the article's argument). That money, which cost magical invisible money to manufacture and was then partially rented by Coke with money, is then given to idle consumers who then give it back to Coke to purchase the bottles of Coke advertised on the back.
WHERE THE HELL IS THE 'VALUE' OF THE MONEY GENERATED?!?!
The main crux of this is that someone, somewhere will have to be educated in something not idle, but not necessarily pleasant and attractive (like engineering or medicine). If you are simply paid to sit on your duff, what is the incentive to spend a decade becoming an engineer to build better robots, or an astronaut or whatever? Hey, we'll pay you more. Voila, something of value has been created and within twenty seconds you have the exact same economic system we have now.
How earth shaking.
Damn, and all this time people have been harping about how "NO! Software shouldn't be patented" "NO! Business methods shouldn't be patented!" "Software is like MUSIC!"
That said, John Cage should patent 4:33 so he can sue whenever anyone attempts to "reverse-engineer" the process of doing absolutely nothing.
Getting to the point, the DMCA specifically states: "Congress recognized that there may be legitimate reasons for engaging in circumvention. In addition to the rulemaking noted above, Congress specifically provided for a number of exceptions to the prohibition on circumvention and circumvention devices.
Reverse Engineering Exception. Section 1201(f) allows software developers to circumvent technological protection measures of a lawfully obtained computer program in order to identify the elements necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs. A person may reverse engineer the lawfully acquired program only where the elements necessary to achieve interoperability are not readily available and reverse engineering is otherwise permitted under the copyright law. Furthermore, a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent and make available to others the information or means for the purpose of achieving interoperability."
The act gives Federal jusidiction over "any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." The ATCA can be used via proxy by non-US entities as long as they can establish some reasonable connection to a US entity, such as relatives (in the case of people) or parents/subsidiaries (in the case of companies). Since copyright is covered in numerous treaties, particularly the Berne Convention, it is open season.
Wrong, go take economics 101 again.
Full employment, without central planning and price controls, generally leads to hyperinflation due to basic supply and demand. This is regulated largely through interest rates. Notice how LOW they are now? Think there might be a reason? Well, labor is paid for through capital (read:money) and interest rates reflect the cost of money. High unemployment? Lower interest rates (increase demand). Inflation? Raise interest rates (remove demand). A simplification, but a relatively accurate one.
When was the last time the United States had ZERO unemployment, which is defined as those "actively seeking full-time employment" NOT simply "those not working?" Answer: NEVER. So, yes, it is possible to just not have a job -- a scenario exacerbated by the fact that OVERqualified candidates are often eliminated. PhD's bitch about this ALL the time, especially since India has more of 'em than anyone and they work CHEEEAAP.
Knock the rosy-cheeked economic sophism in favor of a slightly more complex reality.
I've studied economics here, in post-communist transitional economies and in Africa. I understand economics all to well.
The main problem with your attack on those who question the "free-market" and your opposition to applying duties or sanctions trade barriers is that the primary factors behind movement of production are of a regulatory nature, whether in labor laws, civil rights, health and safety, taxation or otherwise. By not being held to the same regulatory regime, foreign companies have an unfair advantage as local companies have no choice but to comply with more adverse conditions. This applies in inter-state commerce as well (ask anyone in Arizona or Nevada who has a job previously held in California). In order to suggest that free-market forces are in play, these regulatory barriers would need to be either normalized or removed. The current relationship encourages other countries to loosen their regulatory regimes, creating a global race to the bottom in terms of human rights as countries fight to increase their competitiveness.
There are two options to resolve this: all our trading partners can adjust their regulatory regimes to equal ours or we can loosen ours to the level of, say, Bangladesh. Any other relationship is NOT a global free-market at anything but a trans-national and state level. Local commerce and local labor do not operate at that level and in fact are barred from migration in the vast majority of cases, so they can hardly be seen as having the remotest opportunity to participate (ever try go anywhere overseas for more than two weeks, let alone seek employment? If not, good luck). I just relocated myself for economic reasons and it cost me over US$30,000 to do so. Making a transnational move to, say, any Commonwealth nation, would require an additional $30,000 (Canada) to $70,000 (Australia, New Zealand or South Africa) just to get in the legal door. Most people would probably say that a 'vastly overpaid' $60k/year computer programmer with $100k in student loans probably couldn't be expected to execute that.
The social darwinist argument seems to assume that something has not changed since Adam Smith. In fact, the regulatory nature of global trade has dramatically changed in only the last decade with the transition from GATT to the WTO and the creation of NAFTA. This is a HUGE development and has absolutely nothing to do with individual responsibility and everything to do with capital in search of Dickensian production environments. That is not necessarily a global good as it imperils a developed local labor force not in order to raise the standard of living for laborers in less developed countries ('development' as in OECD terms), but rather to send them to Maquilladora sweatshops while our local capital holders rake in profits as our remaining labor force consumes cheaper goods imported from locations abroad whose conditions would be illegal here.
There is an incentive to raise global standards to ours or higher as otherwise the race to the bottom will continue until the loss of buyers (read: unemployed americans, germans, english etc. who can't afford to purchase anything anymore) outpaces the drop in production costs... that is, assuming a more attractive consumer market does not usurp America in the eyes of global capital. China, perhaps.
This is not a simple topic. Playing it up as a personal responsibility is abusive and quite suicidal from any point of view other than one in possession of enough capital to survive on global arbitrage, which certainly is not a large portion of any population, American or otherwise.
Part of market research technology is using existing research, which on the subject of 'examplary punishment' is quite voluminous. Go to any of the assorted death penalty opposition organizations or your local university social sciences department and you will no doubt find more research studies showing that niether imprisonment nor death serve as deterrents for much of anything in terms of quantifiable effects.
By example, it is truly common knowledge that the United States has the highest prison population in the entire world, currently over two million (see Human Rights Watch). Here in the District of Columbia, we have an incarceration rate of over 1600 per 100,000, which is nearly TRIPLE that of Russia, yet DC still has almost double the national crime rate (see FBI Uniform Crime Reports). Mother Jones has a wonderful spread on incarceration rates, which if you combine with the FBI UCRs, you can approximate the success of exemplary justice.
Much like an earlier post about traffic cops implied, unless or even if the punishment is imminent and certain (i.e. the cop is standing directly in front of you, gun in hand), people will break laws from the trivial to the severe for innumerable reasons. If there is a political motivation, imprisonment and in some cases even death may be acceptable consequences and hence not deterrents at all. In the case of virus writers, capture is not a huge a risk, proof of guilt is difficult to establish, so what the hell.
Vendors used to make our lives miserable by requiring us to bolt on stupid dongle thingamajigs to supposed "spare" ports on every "licensed" machine. Great, until you had four or five such packages and one free port. If that was reasonable, anything short of random drug testing and DNA samples in a license could be considered a blessing. Thank god there are other ways to validate licenses.
So your IP address is sent out with identifiers for software on your machine. What's next, bitching over browser detection on web pages as an infringement of privacy rights since the action of opening a web page does precisely the same thing?
If I sell a package to ACME Billionaires [INC|AG|SaP] and just trust them with no auditability to follow a license, I'm not in good shape to prove a damned thing. With all the auto-updating software that is out there, which does exactly the same thing (see: Symantec LiveUpdate et.al.) this is hardly earth-shaking. Maybe if this was more wide-spread, companies would stop bitching about piracy as an excuse for hiked up prices, which may explain why the anti-virus software that used to cost fifty-bucks now goes for ten likely owing to this practice.
Not to rub on a fine point but a Yen is about a penny. US$400B would require about Y47 TRILLION on today's market. The point the article is attempting to make: that Japan is making an equivalent investment as the USA did with Apollo. That implies percent of GDP. 1960's Japan cannot remotely be compared to 1960's USA in terms of economic capacity, so more than exchange rate must be used.
How about adjusting that 1969 exchange rate in terms of real GDP? Hell, in 1965 the US economy was about $3T, making the $19B budget for Apollo about.6% of GDP. That same portion in 2003 terms would be about $70B. Apollo lasted 9 years averaging about $2.2B per year, or, in 2003 terms, roughly $7B per year, or about Y826B per year. This program at Y50B per year over 30 years would be about Y1.5T total. If compacted down from 30 to 9 years, like Apollo, this would still only be Y450B -- about half. The $12.7B this project will cost in 2003 dollars would be about $3.5B in 1969, or ~.1% of GDP in either year -- one-sixth the investment in Apollo in terms of percent of GDP and still just over half in terms of total dollars unadjusted for over 30 years of inflation. Still f'ing huge, but nowhere near Apollo.
Slashdot Mirror
Respond to consumer demand. They used to bitch that they couldn't use newer technology because of the consumer's expense in upgrade path (LP->8 track->cassette->cd->?). Now that consumers have spent (insert illegally downloaded mp3 of Carl Sagan) BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars buying the equipment for the next format and the government with other private industry has spent further BILLIONS AND BILLIONS to build the distribution infrastructure, they refuse to step up to the plate with a viable business model. SCREW 'EM.
It amazes me even more when a completely unrelated event happens largely due to the laws of physics and systems working as designed to prevent a major catastrophe that people blame the internet. I would much prefer a blackout to a power surge rolling back at three hundred thousand kilometers per second piping straight back into a nuclear reactor.
Save for the massive increase in demand for electricity due to the parallel increase in datacenters and personal computers plugging into the grid, there is no evidence whatsoever that the internet played a role in this or any other power outage.
Regardless, disconnecting from the internet will not prevent anyone from flying a Cessna through high tension lines, which all other things being equal in the current body of evidence, would have caused the exact same event.
Last I was forced to code hundreds of entity beans and EJBs, I thanked every god ever worshipped for code generation. There simply is NO reason to hand code this highly structured, standardized, uninspiring dreck. After designing everything in SQL (or Rational, ER studio etc.) why the fuck would anyone want to hand code the same crap again in Java unless absolutely necessary? Given the choice between that and shipping my job off to India, I'd rather learn Hindi.
-ery or -ry
suff.
1. A place for: bakery.
2. A collection or class: finery.
3. A state or condition: slavery.
4. Act; practice: bribery.
5. Characteristics or qualities of: snobbery.
It would then be proper to say this thread is the height of stupidery.
Democracy and Western Civilization.
Both truly excellent ideas that have yet to appear.
...or that person could send it in PDF to be read by a nearly ubiquitous, cross-platform, free application.
That sounds remarkably like a "document control" regime, which has been quite common in businesses and government agencies with strict confidentiality policies for ages. Perhaps all these implied conspiracies are just responses to customer demand. It may or may not be an effective scheme, but M$ can hardly be faulted for attempting to provide what the corporate and government markets have been demanding since before M$ existed. I am the furthest thing from a Microsoft apologist, I loathe that company and its products, but this whole argument is hyperbolic, based on slippery-slope logic and utterly paranoid. Ok, the paranoia is understandable, but the rest is a joke.
There is a rather enormous difference in your analogy. Generally, the contents of the MS Office files in question are wholly the property of the users who create them. The contents of an encrypted DVD are very much not.
It would be extraordinarily difficult for Microsoft to make a case that "fair use" of your own resume document did not include interoperability with other products as YOU own the contents, not Microsoft.
This sounds very much like the "sky is falling" shrieking that went on when people discovered the copyright statements in ISP terms and conditions, which when interpreted with no apparent knowledge of law, made it sound like ISPs were taking ownership of personal websites when in fact it was simply the necessary license the users would have to give in order for the service distribute their property.
The law remains unambiguous and M$ itself has used that lack of abiguity for the exact purpose in question.
The DMCA clearly and unambiguously allows reverse-engineering and circumvention to achieve interoperability.
d f
Don't just assume and feed absurd conspiracy theories. READ THE LAW.
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.p
Maybe SCO should take their case to London where doing less nothing than someone else's nothing is worth $157,000.
Wow.
I'm glad to see your college education was successful enough for you to still be completely oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of university tuition financing is through private finace -- student loans are almost always merely guaranteed by the government but not a single dime of your-hard-earned-tax-dollars are spent. The fact that it is subsidized in very limited circumstances (extreme financial need or extreme academic achievement) is quickly mooted by the fact that most college graduates pay taxes the rest of their lives as their parents and children no doubt will..
Of course. To deliberately draft something so altruistic in the 18th century would be dramatically un-American. Of course, back then, you pretty much had to be a wealthy white guy to do anything of consequence in the U.S. Damned shame about emancipation, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement and the United Nations broadening the scope just a tad. Piiiiity :P
The problem in analogy was with the original comment making absurd comments about American strengths compared to perceived "African" weaknesses. I was making essentially the same point you are.
However, to say that there is no cooperative self interest in Africa is naive. The Southern African Development Community exists for precisely that reason, hence the motto "toward a common future." I suppose the problem in making references to anything African from the point of view of the USA is that most Americans are unaware that organizations as complex as SADC exist, much less to the point that they could name the member states, ergo, all becomes "Africa." People will continue to make ridiculous assumptions about Africa until they bother to educate themselves.
Incidentally, the federal government DOES sit by while California sucks the Colorado river dry, so I don't quite see your point.
This law was used to bring Swiss banks to pay over a billion dollars in damages to holocaust victims. I would hardly call that "unsuccessful." Human Rights Watch has a rather extensive background on the law and recent cases. Not so ironically in the context of this thread, the law was originally written to allow the prosecution of foreign pirates for actions outside the United States.
'Organization and management of a country's industrial resources by technical experts for the good of the whole community' is more or less the state of the industrial status quo now. It seems like everything is run by morons, but in fact, the whole point of classic Adam Smith capitalist specialization can essentially be boiled down to the same statement and is more or less how things have already progressed.
As for the pompous "we have no political antecedants" statement trumpeted by this group... well, that hardly needs elaboration, but, COME ON!
No relation to Marx?
"development a process of progressive social instability; that this process will continue until the instability reaches the limit of social tolerance..." Funny, I seem to recall a global workers revolution based on the same idea somewhere in Das Kapital.
"...there is in development a process of progressive social instability; that this process will continue until the instability reaches the limit of social tolerance, and that there then will have to be installed on this Continent a social mechanism competent to meet the needs of its people." Hmmm... sounds VERY Marx here...
Even explicitly disavowing preconceived concepts like Ricardian Comparative Advantage, good god, that's like saying "we reject Isaac Newton."
If "TECHNOCRACY is science in the social field" how can you say there are "no political antecedents?" For christ's sake, the whole history of economics and political science is that of SOCIAL SCIENCE.
DUH. Give me a break.
I am sure the poor people in Africa might have something to say about the wise stewardship of European invaders. As for corrupt governments, well... we've done fairly well with that. Nonexistant coastlines? America's coastline is vastly smaller than Africa's. Poor soil? Save for the Sahara, which is not dissimilar to the better part of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and a great deal of Texas... well, let's just say that rainforests, which make up about a quarter of Africa, don't generally thrive on "poor soil." Hmmm... have you ever been to Africa?
I like taxes. Taxes pay for roads and nice well-uniformed people to scrape up the entrails of the homeless when they get run over by my Hummer while I talk on my cell phone drinking a Frappachino. Taxes also provide infinitessimally small amounts of money to those people in the hopes they'll just stay out of my way. They also pay for those same nice uniformed people to arrest my butt for reckless disregard for human life and throw me into a cold, dark prison cell for the rest of my life should I decide other people's lives are worthless enough to mow them down. Should you avoid prison, but your capitalist schemes don't work out and you end up homeless, I'd prefer you not be allowed to opt out of social security or medicare as we'll all end up paying to either keep you alive or scrape your decaying entrails off the street. I like taxes.
Taking the example of "hey! let's sell the backs of dollars to big companies for advertising!"
Well, money is simply a store of value, which can ALWAYS be reduced down to labor -- even if it represents a diamond or a big drum of oil found in nature, you still have to find the damned diamond or oil, extract it and haul the thing to the buyer. The scarcity of the resource in question increases the labor and thus the value. Pretty simple concept.
So, Coke exerts all sorts of effort (robotic, human and otherwise) to produce a couple billion bottles of brown water. They then take money (see above) and purchase the back of the paper used as money, which also takes, well, "money" to make in the first place, but that's getting circular (like the article's argument). That money, which cost magical invisible money to manufacture and was then partially rented by Coke with money, is then given to idle consumers who then give it back to Coke to purchase the bottles of Coke advertised on the back.
WHERE THE HELL IS THE 'VALUE' OF THE MONEY GENERATED?!?!
The main crux of this is that someone, somewhere will have to be educated in something not idle, but not necessarily pleasant and attractive (like engineering or medicine). If you are simply paid to sit on your duff, what is the incentive to spend a decade becoming an engineer to build better robots, or an astronaut or whatever? Hey, we'll pay you more. Voila, something of value has been created and within twenty seconds you have the exact same economic system we have now. How earth shaking.
Damn, and all this time people have been harping about how "NO! Software shouldn't be patented" "NO! Business methods shouldn't be patented!" "Software is like MUSIC!"
That said, John Cage should patent 4:33 so he can sue whenever anyone attempts to "reverse-engineer" the process of doing absolutely nothing.
Getting to the point, the DMCA specifically states:
"Congress recognized that there may be legitimate reasons for engaging in circumvention. In addition to the rulemaking noted above, Congress specifically provided for a number of exceptions to the prohibition on circumvention and circumvention devices.
Reverse Engineering Exception. Section 1201(f) allows software developers to circumvent technological protection measures of a lawfully obtained computer program in order to identify the elements necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs. A person may reverse engineer the lawfully acquired program only where the elements necessary to achieve interoperability are not readily available and reverse engineering is otherwise permitted under the copyright law. Furthermore, a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent and make available to others the information or means for the purpose of achieving interoperability."
Laws are public and freely available. Read them.
The Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 allows it.
The act gives Federal jusidiction over "any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." The ATCA can be used via proxy by non-US entities as long as they can establish some reasonable connection to a US entity, such as relatives (in the case of people) or parents/subsidiaries (in the case of companies). Since copyright is covered in numerous treaties, particularly the Berne Convention, it is open season.
Wrong, go take economics 101 again. Full employment, without central planning and price controls, generally leads to hyperinflation due to basic supply and demand. This is regulated largely through interest rates. Notice how LOW they are now? Think there might be a reason? Well, labor is paid for through capital (read:money) and interest rates reflect the cost of money. High unemployment? Lower interest rates (increase demand). Inflation? Raise interest rates (remove demand). A simplification, but a relatively accurate one. When was the last time the United States had ZERO unemployment, which is defined as those "actively seeking full-time employment" NOT simply "those not working?" Answer: NEVER. So, yes, it is possible to just not have a job -- a scenario exacerbated by the fact that OVERqualified candidates are often eliminated. PhD's bitch about this ALL the time, especially since India has more of 'em than anyone and they work CHEEEAAP. Knock the rosy-cheeked economic sophism in favor of a slightly more complex reality.
I've studied economics here, in post-communist transitional economies and in Africa. I understand economics all to well.
The main problem with your attack on those who question the "free-market" and your opposition to applying duties or sanctions trade barriers is that the primary factors behind movement of production are of a regulatory nature, whether in labor laws, civil rights, health and safety, taxation or otherwise. By not being held to the same regulatory regime, foreign companies have an unfair advantage as local companies have no choice but to comply with more adverse conditions. This applies in inter-state commerce as well (ask anyone in Arizona or Nevada who has a job previously held in California). In order to suggest that free-market forces are in play, these regulatory barriers would need to be either normalized or removed. The current relationship encourages other countries to loosen their regulatory regimes, creating a global race to the bottom in terms of human rights as countries fight to increase their competitiveness.
There are two options to resolve this: all our trading partners can adjust their regulatory regimes to equal ours or we can loosen ours to the level of, say, Bangladesh. Any other relationship is NOT a global free-market at anything but a trans-national and state level. Local commerce and local labor do not operate at that level and in fact are barred from migration in the vast majority of cases, so they can hardly be seen as having the remotest opportunity to participate (ever try go anywhere overseas for more than two weeks, let alone seek employment? If not, good luck). I just relocated myself for economic reasons and it cost me over US$30,000 to do so. Making a transnational move to, say, any Commonwealth nation, would require an additional $30,000 (Canada) to $70,000 (Australia, New Zealand or South Africa) just to get in the legal door. Most people would probably say that a 'vastly overpaid' $60k/year computer programmer with $100k in student loans probably couldn't be expected to execute that.
The social darwinist argument seems to assume that something has not changed since Adam Smith. In fact, the regulatory nature of global trade has dramatically changed in only the last decade with the transition from GATT to the WTO and the creation of NAFTA. This is a HUGE development and has absolutely nothing to do with individual responsibility and everything to do with capital in search of Dickensian production environments. That is not necessarily a global good as it imperils a developed local labor force not in order to raise the standard of living for laborers in less developed countries ('development' as in OECD terms), but rather to send them to Maquilladora sweatshops while our local capital holders rake in profits as our remaining labor force consumes cheaper goods imported from locations abroad whose conditions would be illegal here.
There is an incentive to raise global standards to ours or higher as otherwise the race to the bottom will continue until the loss of buyers (read: unemployed americans, germans, english etc. who can't afford to purchase anything anymore) outpaces the drop in production costs... that is, assuming a more attractive consumer market does not usurp America in the eyes of global capital. China, perhaps.
This is not a simple topic. Playing it up as a personal responsibility is abusive and quite suicidal from any point of view other than one in possession of enough capital to survive on global arbitrage, which certainly is not a large portion of any population, American or otherwise.
Part of market research technology is using existing research, which on the subject of 'examplary punishment' is quite voluminous. Go to any of the assorted death penalty opposition organizations or your local university social sciences department and you will no doubt find more research studies showing that niether imprisonment nor death serve as deterrents for much of anything in terms of quantifiable effects.
By example, it is truly common knowledge that the United States has the highest prison population in the entire world, currently over two million (see Human Rights Watch). Here in the District of Columbia, we have an incarceration rate of over 1600 per 100,000, which is nearly TRIPLE that of Russia, yet DC still has almost double the national crime rate (see FBI Uniform Crime Reports). Mother Jones has a wonderful spread on incarceration rates, which if you combine with the FBI UCRs, you can approximate the success of exemplary justice.
Much like an earlier post about traffic cops implied, unless or even if the punishment is imminent and certain (i.e. the cop is standing directly in front of you, gun in hand), people will break laws from the trivial to the severe for innumerable reasons. If there is a political motivation, imprisonment and in some cases even death may be acceptable consequences and hence not deterrents at all. In the case of virus writers, capture is not a huge a risk, proof of guilt is difficult to establish, so what the hell.
Vendors used to make our lives miserable by requiring us to bolt on stupid dongle thingamajigs to supposed "spare" ports on every "licensed" machine. Great, until you had four or five such packages and one free port. If that was reasonable, anything short of random drug testing and DNA samples in a license could be considered a blessing. Thank god there are other ways to validate licenses. So your IP address is sent out with identifiers for software on your machine. What's next, bitching over browser detection on web pages as an infringement of privacy rights since the action of opening a web page does precisely the same thing? If I sell a package to ACME Billionaires [INC|AG|SaP] and just trust them with no auditability to follow a license, I'm not in good shape to prove a damned thing. With all the auto-updating software that is out there, which does exactly the same thing (see: Symantec LiveUpdate et.al.) this is hardly earth-shaking. Maybe if this was more wide-spread, companies would stop bitching about piracy as an excuse for hiked up prices, which may explain why the anti-virus software that used to cost fifty-bucks now goes for ten likely owing to this practice.
Not to rub on a fine point but a Yen is about a penny. US$400B would require about Y47 TRILLION on today's market. The point the article is attempting to make: that Japan is making an equivalent investment as the USA did with Apollo. That implies percent of GDP. 1960's Japan cannot remotely be compared to 1960's USA in terms of economic capacity, so more than exchange rate must be used. How about adjusting that 1969 exchange rate in terms of real GDP? Hell, in 1965 the US economy was about $3T, making the $19B budget for Apollo about .6% of GDP. That same portion in 2003 terms would be about $70B. Apollo lasted 9 years averaging about $2.2B per year, or, in 2003 terms, roughly $7B per year, or about Y826B per year. This program at Y50B per year over 30 years would be about Y1.5T total. If compacted down from 30 to 9 years, like Apollo, this would still only be Y450B -- about half. The $12.7B this project will cost in 2003 dollars would be about $3.5B in 1969, or ~.1% of GDP in either year -- one-sixth the investment in Apollo in terms of percent of GDP and still just over half in terms of total dollars unadjusted for over 30 years of inflation. Still f'ing huge, but nowhere near Apollo.