You are correct. All taxation causes net society poverty.
Hm, for the record I neither stated nor implied that deduction in my post. I respect your opinions but must personally disagree with the absolutes you assert. I think a balanced approach to taxation can be useful for society and does provide certain benefits that are not easily achieved through a purely free market system. That said there are certainly many cases where this is not true, or the taxes are levied or spent inappropriately.
"this would lead to more piracy. "
no it wouldn't. There is no evidence at all.
Actually I'd argue that basic economics would support that statement. By adding an additional tax you will increase the cost of the good (I highly doubt digital music stores will cover the tax and not pass it on to the buyer). Which shifts the demand curve because the price has now increased. Some people were willing to pay $X per download, but now at $X + $Tax they will decide it's not worth it and will move on to some other source of getting their music for $X or cheaper. For some that other source will be piracy.
There's plenty of examples throughout history and currently of new taxes creating grey and black markets for goods.
"Besides the obvious fact that it would be very hard to police (esp. the pr0n)..."
no, not really.
I agree it won't be hard to police official outlets, but good luck trying to tax ALL music downloads without implementing more of, and more-intrusive, net filters than we currently have in place. And that's another argument for a resulting increase in piracy. People who sell/share music outside of official venues, or who find ways to fool filters, will not be subject to the downloaded music tax, so they have a price advantage. And what about steganography? Encryption? All difficult to police for tax with the networks and laws we have now.
Hehehe, yes, I understand it's way more involved than simply Pvt Jimmy being the one to press the button. And I think your detailed list of what actually goes into a strike assessment drives the point home. Even troop-level firing can be a multi-step process of evaluation and confirmation. That people think this can all be automated so that no human is involved in that process are severely underestimating the process and overestimating the state of the technology. Thank you for the clarification!
And I can make a "car" in my garage by gluing pipe axles with wagon wheels to a box. Does that mean it'll be used in the Indy 500? We're talking about military grade robotic systems. I can tell from your webcam comments that you have no clue how to do video recognition. There is a huge difference between shooting for the centroid of a moving object and detecting, targeting, tracking, recognizing, verifying it's not a friendly, and then shooting it. But by all means, go build your box shooting robot and let me know how many you sell to DHS.
Landmines are autoMATED not autoNOMOUS. In the context of this discussion we're talking about weapons platforms that have some advanced level of intelligence combined with sensors that allow them to make targeting and firing decisions. But all the people who think they are so clever by pointing out landmines have missed the point entirely. You're completely offtopic since the article is talking about automated, mostly robotic, weapons systems. Anyone can be "clever" and offtopic. Next time bring something to the discussion.
I've been watching this story slowly spread around the net today since I develop for some of the systems referred to. The whole thing is a bunch of hand-waving 'OMG teh robotz will kills us all!' page rank generating crap. First, very few robotic systems in the whole world right now are even weaponized, yet we're supposed to believe automated killing is "just around the corner". Second, no military anywhere has deployed fully automated (no human on trigger/joystick) weaponized systems ever, yet we're to expect legions of them very soon. Third, "terrorists" will supposedly get their hands on these systems and reverse engineer them to their advantage - do I even need to explain how improbable this is? Military and private research funded to the tune of billions haven't even been able to develop these systems yet, but we're supposed to believe some terrorist organizations with almost no funding and little access to high-level engineers will be able to understand and rework these same nonexistent systems. Is it impossible? No. I don't doubt that given enough time eventually some extremist group will have a CS PhD/MS level member who could figure something out. That still doesn't negate the fact that no groups have even captured and reverse-engineered current robotic systems, which are much less advanced than this alleged future autonomous platform would be. And finally, if one of the major world governments developed and deployed fully autonomous armed robots, does anyone really think there wouldn't be a remote shutdown/disable sequence or other back door? It's fun to discuss possible dystopian Terminator style futures, but it annoys me to no end when some researcher or professor says we're all imminently doomed and the net runs away with the idea. We're still very far from fully automated systems with weapons. Even US tanks, which have highly advanced target acquisition and recognition systems, aren't fired except by a human operator. You'll see fully automated targeting and firing in manned vehicles long before you see it in unmanned platforms IMHO.
And to stem off people who point out that many UAVs fly totally unmanned, with weapons, and with no joystick control - there are multiple ground operators constantly monitoring and updating mission parameters for each of these UAVs, also all firing sequences are still human in the loop.
That reminds me of a couple years back, when in one year Yahoo three times killed off their own breast-cancer support-group mailing list. Talking about breasts is porn, y'know, and we can't let impressionable children read about them.
And that reminds me of waaaay back when AOL first started censoring chat room names based on a blacklist of words. For two days the "Breast Cancer Survivors Group" was the "Hooters Cancer Survivors Group" before it was fixed. Cancer is not funny, but 'hooters cancer' sure sounds funny.
Here's a tip: I play in a band. We're not too bad at what we do. We put smiles on faces every show and most of the time we cover our up front costs. We never cover our "hours" put in, and we don't care, because it's Art, and we all have day jobs anyway. And guess what? There's no greedy corporation troughing from *our* Art.
NonCow doesn't care if he doesn't make the scene/
He's got a daytime job, he's doin' all right/
He can play the honky tonk just like anything/
Savin' it up for Friday night.
I don't know where you got the number $500000 per month from - the prosecutor claims that they have made in total 1200000 SEK, or $200000. The Pirate Bay themselves claim that they are running it as a hobby project and the advertising just covers the hardware and bandwidth costs.
Whoops, looks like I added an extra '0' by mistake, I meant 50 (fifty) K per month. Googling around I see numbers between 40K and 70K being quoted in various sources, a few older articles state the MPAA has estimated TPB's monthly ad revenue at $60K. Of course, this is before bandwidth costs, but either way, I'm sure they've made more than $200K total since the site started. I'm sure in the next week or two we'll get better data on these numbers as the trial moves forward.
Doesn't TPB rake in something like $500K per month in advertising revenues? It might even be more than that but last I knew that number was unbelievably high. Losing the HW is probably the more expensive problem if they are found guilty, but even so, I'm sure they've got everything backed up in a half dozen other countries by now.
A lot of the posts on this news seem to focus on what could have been done instead of just blanking the site, but do we have any evidence that the wipe was the only thing that occurred? If the person/people who did this really wanted to hurt the RIAA then this would be a good way to get some trojans onto RIAA computers. To be really sneaky they might have even done some research on which IP blocks are most likely assigned to RIAA and member networks and only infect computers coming from those blocks, thus sparing most innocent visitors. Then you've got a direct line into RIAA operations and much more valuable data than whatever is on their web servers. Not that I'm advocating this, merely postulating that there could be more at work than a simple website wipe.
I think we get enough of New York Country Lawyer's imbecilic legal theories as is
I think we'll all be waiting for you to post the court transcripts where these theories were presented during cases. Oh wait, there's a difference between forum posts seeking to encourage discussion and actual legal theories. Are you also implying that the RIAA has never stretched the truth or used irrelevant info to try and make their case sound stronger? Because that too is a load of crap.
You seem to be putting a lot of faith in these agencies to work within the explicit dictates of law, but we've already seen many instances where this is not the case. I wish it were easy enough to simply state, as you did, that it is illegal for the NSA to do an end-run around the law by asking the British Intelligence to investigate for them and let the issue be settled. Unfortunately, reality proves otherwise. It is similarly illegal for the NSA to ask AT&T to wiretap all internet communications going through their data centers, and yet that is precisely what's happening. It is similarly illegal for the FBI to ask for wiretaps or other private customer information from companies under "urgent" circumstances using National Security Letters and then never provide any paperwork. It would also be illegal to place US-to-foreign wiretaps without a FISA warrant, even retroactively, and yet that has happened.
Look, there's has been recently AND with previous administrations (and no doubt future ones) an awful lot of events that either seem or ARE blatantly illegal and yet are excused via some minor legal loophole or technical wording. The fact is if it CAN be done, it WILL be done. Just saying "oh, it's illegal" is not a magical way to prevent the abuse. Most likely when, not if, the abuse occurs it will be covered up, then if exposed it will be explained away for national security interests, and eventually some low to mid-level operative will be fired and everyone above him in the chain who knowingly made the decision to break the law/policy will be off the hook completely.
And besides, the NSA doesn't even have to make an official (and thus illegal) request for info it couldn't legally gather itself, if that data is already being collected by the Brits then a wink-nod request for all the data on a given investigation would net them the bits they're really after. The article itself points out that many of the fingerprint data in the British databases isn't even for convicted felons, merely people who were arrested, regardless of what charges were later pressed or proven. I'm sure the US has similar "left-over" bits of data that end up being a privacy nightmare. As an example imagine some otherwise law-abiding Brit who was picked up on suspicion of something or other, say assault in a bar brawl, was fingerprinted and added to the DB but later released with no charges. Now he flies to the US on holiday, his prints at customs are run against our new spiffy shared "criminal" DB and voila he is denied access to the US because there was a hit in the system. Nevermind that he was never found guilty of anything, or that it was totally unrelated to a national security threat. And don't tell me it's not plausible, for pete's sake the TSA stops _toddlers_ from boarding planes for matching a name on the watch lists, common sense means nothing in the face of security policy.
Point is, intelligence gathering laws are ALREADY abused, and the legality of the abuses is usually untested in court at best, and covered up with executive privilege when finally brought to court, at worst. If there is room for abuse then we must specifically word the law to prevent it with clear designations of what is and is not allowed and what repercussions there will be for violation.
It's not illegal for the US to spy on British citizens, and vice versa. This is a potential conduit for getting around pesky little details like domestic wiretapping laws.
IFF [sic] they keep to their mandate of tracking only international criminal suspects, then this is a good thing and merely links DBs that already exist. It's the potential expansion of sharing all data for any reason that may be cause for worry.
but it seems to me the same sort who whine and moan about more security at airports are the same who would whine and moan about the government not doing more to protect us when a terrorist hijacking happens.
Any evidence at all to support this assertion other than the fact that it conveniently lets you shrug off any and all TSA complaints?
I'm sick of hearing people say things like this, because it's a false assertion and regardless it proves nothing. Guess what, both complaints can be valid. If a new security measure doesn't actually provide any more security, but instead causes delays, confusion, inconvenience then it has failed to improve the situation and thus yes, we CAN complain that useless security is being implemented AND the government didn't do enough to prevent an incident. By focusing resources on useless crap like this and other restrictions the security forces are wasting time and money and potentially missing out on other, more realistic threats.
One of the biggest problem with all these little regulations is that they are highly subjectively enforced, and this one will be no different. You leave from one airport with your extra cellphone battery no problem, but returning from another airport security will confiscate it. Now screeners are going to be spending their time scrutinizing every portable device and battery, shoes, tubes of toothpaste, cologne bottles, half finished bottles of soda, etc. With all the time and effort spent looking at USELESS CRAP when is there time for actual security? If someone wanted to bring down a plane in a one-shot, make-it-crash attempt then they'd be able to do it. There's plenty of ways that aren't impacted by all these ridiculous carry on restrictions as others have already pointed out.
Incorrect, in cases such as these rather than fining the country in question, one form of restitution is to allow the winning country (Antigua) to "take payment" in the form of ignoring copyrights of the losing country (US) up to a certain value. This is a broad summary of this practice, you'll have to look up details on your own time.;)
At the end of the day if it's not illegal and you do report him the worst that happens is the police knock on his door, he lets them poke about and they say sorry for bothering you.
If you really think that's the worst thing that can happen to an innocent person reported for a possible crime - especially potential terrorist activities - then your ignorance is alarming. Try go reading some articles about what happens to innocent people accused of heinous crimes, see how "worst case" some of those situations turned out. Just for fun, try pricing a trial lawyer, you still have to pay that bill when you're found innocent. Oh, and you can't sue the state for that cost in most cases.
I'm not going to pass any judgment on the main point of this article and the actions taken in this specific case, but honestly, you can't truly believe that if you're innocent there could never be any negative consequences for someone reporting you for a crime.
All popular music is worthless. If anyone with a clean shirt and a decent haircut has heard of a band, then they're over-processed sellout pop shit for teenagers. It's a scientifically proven fact that the worth of a band is inversely proportional to the number of records they've sold.
They tried to make the little embedded video link to the REEM-B site exciting and give "glimpses" of the new robot but it was a big yawn mostly. Maybe they could hire a real advertising firm to do it right and show more of their product and less of everyone else's?
I saw absolutely nothing new or exciting in that video, in fact all of the development shots at the end make it look *less* maneuverable than an Asimo. One version of the Asimo, btw, is capable of actual running, wherein both feet are momentarily off the ground, rather impressive. From the limited preview this looks like just another minor incremental advance in the current generation of bipedal bots.
And are we supposed to be impressed by 3 years of research? Three years is NOTHING in robotics development. Try perfecting a single motor controller or algorithm for three years. Doing a whole biped (from scratch?) in 3 years tells me that while they are very dedicated people, some corners were likely cut.
I'll be impressed when they actually show us something.
Given that one can get a nib customized to your personal writing style, the elegant and more civilized fountain pen would be the better representative of firefox than a mere ball point.
Luke: What's that? Obi Wan: It's your father's fountain pen, a more civilized writing utensil, for a more civilized time.
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There's plenty of examples throughout history and currently of new taxes creating grey and black markets for goods.
I agree it won't be hard to police official outlets, but good luck trying to tax ALL music downloads without implementing more of, and more-intrusive, net filters than we currently have in place. And that's another argument for a resulting increase in piracy. People who sell/share music outside of official venues, or who find ways to fool filters, will not be subject to the downloaded music tax, so they have a price advantage. And what about steganography? Encryption? All difficult to police for tax with the networks and laws we have now.
Hehehe, yes, I understand it's way more involved than simply Pvt Jimmy being the one to press the button. And I think your detailed list of what actually goes into a strike assessment drives the point home. Even troop-level firing can be a multi-step process of evaluation and confirmation. That people think this can all be automated so that no human is involved in that process are severely underestimating the process and overestimating the state of the technology. Thank you for the clarification!
And I can make a "car" in my garage by gluing pipe axles with wagon wheels to a box. Does that mean it'll be used in the Indy 500? We're talking about military grade robotic systems. I can tell from your webcam comments that you have no clue how to do video recognition. There is a huge difference between shooting for the centroid of a moving object and detecting, targeting, tracking, recognizing, verifying it's not a friendly, and then shooting it. But by all means, go build your box shooting robot and let me know how many you sell to DHS.
Landmines are autoMATED not autoNOMOUS. In the context of this discussion we're talking about weapons platforms that have some advanced level of intelligence combined with sensors that allow them to make targeting and firing decisions. But all the people who think they are so clever by pointing out landmines have missed the point entirely. You're completely offtopic since the article is talking about automated, mostly robotic, weapons systems. Anyone can be "clever" and offtopic. Next time bring something to the discussion.
I've been watching this story slowly spread around the net today since I develop for some of the systems referred to. The whole thing is a bunch of hand-waving 'OMG teh robotz will kills us all!' page rank generating crap.
First, very few robotic systems in the whole world right now are even weaponized, yet we're supposed to believe automated killing is "just around the corner". Second, no military anywhere has deployed fully automated (no human on trigger/joystick) weaponized systems ever, yet we're to expect legions of them very soon. Third, "terrorists" will supposedly get their hands on these systems and reverse engineer them to their advantage - do I even need to explain how improbable this is? Military and private research funded to the tune of billions haven't even been able to develop these systems yet, but we're supposed to believe some terrorist organizations with almost no funding and little access to high-level engineers will be able to understand and rework these same nonexistent systems. Is it impossible? No. I don't doubt that given enough time eventually some extremist group will have a CS PhD/MS level member who could figure something out. That still doesn't negate the fact that no groups have even captured and reverse-engineered current robotic systems, which are much less advanced than this alleged future autonomous platform would be. And finally, if one of the major world governments developed and deployed fully autonomous armed robots, does anyone really think there wouldn't be a remote shutdown/disable sequence or other back door?
It's fun to discuss possible dystopian Terminator style futures, but it annoys me to no end when some researcher or professor says we're all imminently doomed and the net runs away with the idea. We're still very far from fully automated systems with weapons. Even US tanks, which have highly advanced target acquisition and recognition systems, aren't fired except by a human operator. You'll see fully automated targeting and firing in manned vehicles long before you see it in unmanned platforms IMHO.
And to stem off people who point out that many UAVs fly totally unmanned, with weapons, and with no joystick control - there are multiple ground operators constantly monitoring and updating mission parameters for each of these UAVs, also all firing sequences are still human in the loop.
He's got a daytime job, he's doin' all right/
He can play the honky tonk just like anything/
Savin' it up for Friday night.
Whoops, looks like I added an extra '0' by mistake, I meant 50 (fifty) K per month. Googling around I see numbers between 40K and 70K being quoted in various sources, a few older articles state the MPAA has estimated TPB's monthly ad revenue at $60K. Of course, this is before bandwidth costs, but either way, I'm sure they've made more than $200K total since the site started. I'm sure in the next week or two we'll get better data on these numbers as the trial moves forward.
Doesn't TPB rake in something like $500K per month in advertising revenues? It might even be more than that but last I knew that number was unbelievably high. Losing the HW is probably the more expensive problem if they are found guilty, but even so, I'm sure they've got everything backed up in a half dozen other countries by now.
Heat rises, duh.
;)
A lot of the posts on this news seem to focus on what could have been done instead of just blanking the site, but do we have any evidence that the wipe was the only thing that occurred? If the person/people who did this really wanted to hurt the RIAA then this would be a good way to get some trojans onto RIAA computers. To be really sneaky they might have even done some research on which IP blocks are most likely assigned to RIAA and member networks and only infect computers coming from those blocks, thus sparing most innocent visitors. Then you've got a direct line into RIAA operations and much more valuable data than whatever is on their web servers. Not that I'm advocating this, merely postulating that there could be more at work than a simple website wipe.
I mean that silly skull can't be older than 6,000 years, obviously not worth much. ;)
Excellent answer based on packet analysis. Mod parent up!
You seem to be putting a lot of faith in these agencies to work within the explicit dictates of law, but we've already seen many instances where this is not the case. I wish it were easy enough to simply state, as you did, that it is illegal for the NSA to do an end-run around the law by asking the British Intelligence to investigate for them and let the issue be settled. Unfortunately, reality proves otherwise. It is similarly illegal for the NSA to ask AT&T to wiretap all internet communications going through their data centers, and yet that is precisely what's happening. It is similarly illegal for the FBI to ask for wiretaps or other private customer information from companies under "urgent" circumstances using National Security Letters and then never provide any paperwork. It would also be illegal to place US-to-foreign wiretaps without a FISA warrant, even retroactively, and yet that has happened.
Look, there's has been recently AND with previous administrations (and no doubt future ones) an awful lot of events that either seem or ARE blatantly illegal and yet are excused via some minor legal loophole or technical wording. The fact is if it CAN be done, it WILL be done. Just saying "oh, it's illegal" is not a magical way to prevent the abuse. Most likely when, not if, the abuse occurs it will be covered up, then if exposed it will be explained away for national security interests, and eventually some low to mid-level operative will be fired and everyone above him in the chain who knowingly made the decision to break the law/policy will be off the hook completely.
And besides, the NSA doesn't even have to make an official (and thus illegal) request for info it couldn't legally gather itself, if that data is already being collected by the Brits then a wink-nod request for all the data on a given investigation would net them the bits they're really after. The article itself points out that many of the fingerprint data in the British databases isn't even for convicted felons, merely people who were arrested, regardless of what charges were later pressed or proven. I'm sure the US has similar "left-over" bits of data that end up being a privacy nightmare. As an example imagine some otherwise law-abiding Brit who was picked up on suspicion of something or other, say assault in a bar brawl, was fingerprinted and added to the DB but later released with no charges. Now he flies to the US on holiday, his prints at customs are run against our new spiffy shared "criminal" DB and voila he is denied access to the US because there was a hit in the system. Nevermind that he was never found guilty of anything, or that it was totally unrelated to a national security threat. And don't tell me it's not plausible, for pete's sake the TSA stops _toddlers_ from boarding planes for matching a name on the watch lists, common sense means nothing in the face of security policy.
Point is, intelligence gathering laws are ALREADY abused, and the legality of the abuses is usually untested in court at best, and covered up with executive privilege when finally brought to court, at worst. If there is room for abuse then we must specifically word the law to prevent it with clear designations of what is and is not allowed and what repercussions there will be for violation.
It's not illegal for the US to spy on British citizens, and vice versa. This is a potential conduit for getting around pesky little details like domestic wiretapping laws.
IFF [sic] they keep to their mandate of tracking only international criminal suspects, then this is a good thing and merely links DBs that already exist. It's the potential expansion of sharing all data for any reason that may be cause for worry.
I'm sick of hearing people say things like this, because it's a false assertion and regardless it proves nothing. Guess what, both complaints can be valid. If a new security measure doesn't actually provide any more security, but instead causes delays, confusion, inconvenience then it has failed to improve the situation and thus yes, we CAN complain that useless security is being implemented AND the government didn't do enough to prevent an incident. By focusing resources on useless crap like this and other restrictions the security forces are wasting time and money and potentially missing out on other, more realistic threats.
One of the biggest problem with all these little regulations is that they are highly subjectively enforced, and this one will be no different. You leave from one airport with your extra cellphone battery no problem, but returning from another airport security will confiscate it. Now screeners are going to be spending their time scrutinizing every portable device and battery, shoes, tubes of toothpaste, cologne bottles, half finished bottles of soda, etc. With all the time and effort spent looking at USELESS CRAP when is there time for actual security? If someone wanted to bring down a plane in a one-shot, make-it-crash attempt then they'd be able to do it. There's plenty of ways that aren't impacted by all these ridiculous carry on restrictions as others have already pointed out.
I'm a Beowulf cluster of DVD writers, you insensitive clod!
Incorrect, in cases such as these rather than fining the country in question, one form of restitution is to allow the winning country (Antigua) to "take payment" in the form of ignoring copyrights of the losing country (US) up to a certain value. This is a broad summary of this practice, you'll have to look up details on your own time. ;)
I'm not going to pass any judgment on the main point of this article and the actions taken in this specific case, but honestly, you can't truly believe that if you're innocent there could never be any negative consequences for someone reporting you for a crime.
Indie Rock Pete, is that you?
They tried to make the little embedded video link to the REEM-B site exciting and give "glimpses" of the new robot but it was a big yawn mostly. Maybe they could hire a real advertising firm to do it right and show more of their product and less of everyone else's?
I saw absolutely nothing new or exciting in that video, in fact all of the development shots at the end make it look *less* maneuverable than an Asimo. One version of the Asimo, btw, is capable of actual running, wherein both feet are momentarily off the ground, rather impressive. From the limited preview this looks like just another minor incremental advance in the current generation of bipedal bots.
And are we supposed to be impressed by 3 years of research? Three years is NOTHING in robotics development. Try perfecting a single motor controller or algorithm for three years. Doing a whole biped (from scratch?) in 3 years tells me that while they are very dedicated people, some corners were likely cut.
I'll be impressed when they actually show us something.
Obi Wan: It's your father's fountain pen, a more civilized writing utensil, for a more civilized time.
I recall hearing about this at least two years ago, why is it suddenly /. front page news? There's got to be something else to post.