"What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash?"
Brilliant! If we set aside the fact that a lot of the current money is already 100% digital and not physical... it's easier to generate digital cash than to mint or to print it. The FED would be able to inflate the amount of money even more than they do already. Say welcome to hyperinflation.
If only there, there were another interconnected network... hmm.
Some of us are still running UUCP nodes over POTS phone lines just for the heck of it. Others are running various darknets on top of the main IP network (Freenet, RetroShare, and many, many others). There are also UUCP-based or even IP-based packet radio out there if you have a HAM license...
In other news, were I a pharma company, I would immediately stop selling anything in India...
While I understand the reasoning behind their logic, I'd still say to them: Go ahead. Do you really think that India's reverse-engineers aren't able to get the original drug overseas?
That's the dilemma of the drug companies: they're damned if they stay, they're damned if they don't. And considering all the pain they're inflicting on dying or extremely sick people by withholding their drugs through prices that don't reflect the local purchasing power by a long stretch, they damn well deserve being damned. Maybe it's time they've got a taste of their own overly expensive medicine?
I expect drug makers to react by slapping some kind of DRM on their future inventions in a way similar to the infamous Monsanto Suicidal Seeds (a.k.a. GURTs, terminator seeds). Expect the DRM to be deeply hidden in the manufacturing process, and designed in such a subtle way as to cause middle-term casualties or at least strong pain in patients who, being poor, dare to use an affordable copy of that drug that was made by a competing company unaware of the specifics of the production process.
Actually, the standard answer of "neither confirm nor deny" is the output of a some super-secret encryption algorithm they developed... If only we could decrypt it, we would obtain the desired answer to all questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
This is used to deter people from starting violent riots in the middle of peaceful protests by targeting specific people who are visibly and audibly inciting the crowd to start breaking things.
This is only true as long as you trust the police/military to act in the name of the People... and to actually be the Good Guys(tm). But how long will this remain true, until they start acting on behalf of the corporations and other special interests that are increasingly running the show? How long until such a weapon turns into a tool of oppression in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian regime?
I have family living in one of those countries (Morocco), and all of them saw it coming, and constantly said so, long before Ben Ali fled Tunisia. The problem with the "Arabellion" was that it came too early, in the midst of a huge wave of Islamism that has been sweeping the region since at least the 1990ies and that is still virulent and highly contagious today. Before this, there were already democratization tendencies in place and going along nicely, albeit slowly. But now, the modernists have lost before they even had a chance, and the western governments now militarily supporting Islamist forces and regimes (see Libya, and now Syria as well) is yet another stab in the back of secular-minded people of those countries. It's a real tragedy what's going on, and it's based on a deeply flawed understanding of the region's people's mentality and reality. It's also based on blindly trusting the Saudis (fundamentalist wahhabis), Qataris (spreading wahhabism like wildfire through the arabic channel of Al Jazeera) and the Turks (they too turned islamists under Erdogan) on how to deal with the Middle East and North Africa. If at all, those three are the worst possible advisers at the moment, yet western governments listen to them.
As to Anonymous, that's child's play. It's not their hacking that's going to change the real world (as much as I would have hoped it would)... especially not this particular world.
Demand and supply are interdependent. If you increase supply, demand grows accordingly, and if you cut supply or make it more expensive, demand goes down too. Not immediately of course, but after a transitional period where the system re-balances itself. The less power, the more pressure there will be on converting to more energy efficiency.
Obviously, the RIAA don't own any copyrights... at least not copyright related to music. It's their members who do. But who said that the RIAA, or maybe one of their many affiliates don't own copyright to *ahemm* those photos? Not implying anything here, just naively asking.
Having used all kinds of HDDs in the last 15+ years by the tens of thousands in a big data center facility, all I can say is that Hitachi had the absolutely worst track record of failed drives. But a large margin at that! I won't touch them with a 10 ft. pole, and if WD acquires them, that would be a tragedy, unless there's a reliable way to avoid the Hitachi models.
I live in Finland and I can't understand what is going on in all those countries where they start charging more while giving less.
That comes with network congestion... or more precisely with congestion of the RF spectrum: more and more users are competing for a larger and larger chunk of what amounts to a finite resource. Maybe Finland's RF spectrum isn't congested yet as that of other countries?
If people keep coming up with these "solutions" to enable piracy, then maybe it's best to attack the problem from another angle: focus on the bug in pirates' moral programming that makes them believe that piracy is okay.
There ain't nothing wrong with NOT obeying arbitrary rules that go against the human nature of sharing knowledge. If there's a bug somewhere, it was the ban on copying that originated in clerical Europe's Middle Ages and spread like wildfire across the globe with European (esp. British and French) colonialism. If there's a self-inflicted bug we need to eradicate, it's this ban.
Actually, it tells a lot about one's way of thinking whether he/she considers aliens as potential friends or as potential enemies. Prior sci-fi used to be mostly of the former optimistic kind (think Star Trek e.g.) with the hostile alien being the exception, or at least the minority. Newer sci-fi belongs to the latter pessimistic kind and is a lot darker and quite depressing. What turned a formerly mostly utopian-minded readership into a mostly dystopian-minded one tells a lot about the state of the country they're living in, IMHO.
Sending missiles into space to shoot stuff is EXPENSIVE
Remember that MAFIAA has the backing of governments, and governments have access to what basically amounts to unlimited funding. Not so SAT-HAM fans. If the community loses a couple of expensive satellites in a military confrontation, that's pretty much the end of the experiment.
More so if the targets are small, and there are lots of them.
LEOs are less expensive to take down too, since it requires less fuel to power the missiles.
In a totally "free market", AT&T and other carriers would simply squat a bigger part of the RF spectrum without caring for regulations. So the limitation isn't brought by the free market, it's brought by government regulations. Of course, those regulations are inevitable in the case of the RF spectrum, since without them, everyone would be stomping on everyone elses radio feet, so to say, and the medium would be not only saturated, it would be nearly unusable.
Playing classical music that is no longer protected by copyright and performed for the purpose of free redistribution/public performance keeps the IP lawyers away.
Yes. But sadly, the performance (i.e. recording) of the classical music is usually still copyrighted...
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant! If we set aside the fact that a lot of the current money is already 100% digital and not physical... it's easier to generate digital cash than to mint or to print it. The FED would be able to inflate the amount of money even more than they do already. Say welcome to hyperinflation.
Not available in your country: Google didn't roll out gOvernment yet.
That's the EURion DRM kicking in.
We are the USA, resistance is futile, you will be naturalized.
Some of us are still running UUCP nodes over POTS phone lines just for the heck of it. Others are running various darknets on top of the main IP network (Freenet, RetroShare, and many, many others). There are also UUCP-based or even IP-based packet radio out there if you have a HAM license...
While I understand the reasoning behind their logic, I'd still say to them: Go ahead. Do you really think that India's reverse-engineers aren't able to get the original drug overseas?
That's the dilemma of the drug companies: they're damned if they stay, they're damned if they don't. And considering all the pain they're inflicting on dying or extremely sick people by withholding their drugs through prices that don't reflect the local purchasing power by a long stretch, they damn well deserve being damned. Maybe it's time they've got a taste of their own overly expensive medicine?
I expect drug makers to react by slapping some kind of DRM on their future inventions in a way similar to the infamous Monsanto Suicidal Seeds (a.k.a. GURTs, terminator seeds). Expect the DRM to be deeply hidden in the manufacturing process, and designed in such a subtle way as to cause middle-term casualties or at least strong pain in patients who, being poor, dare to use an affordable copy of that drug that was made by a competing company unaware of the specifics of the production process.
Actually, the standard answer of "neither confirm nor deny" is the output of a some super-secret encryption algorithm they developed... If only we could decrypt it, we would obtain the desired answer to all questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Wasn't it exactly what happened in Belgium?
... when released, will it run on Linux? Or will it be open-sourced?
This is only true as long as you trust the police/military to act in the name of the People... and to actually be the Good Guys(tm). But how long will this remain true, until they start acting on behalf of the corporations and other special interests that are increasingly running the show? How long until such a weapon turns into a tool of oppression in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian regime?
I have family living in one of those countries (Morocco), and all of them saw it coming, and constantly said so, long before Ben Ali fled Tunisia. The problem with the "Arabellion" was that it came too early, in the midst of a huge wave of Islamism that has been sweeping the region since at least the 1990ies and that is still virulent and highly contagious today. Before this, there were already democratization tendencies in place and going along nicely, albeit slowly. But now, the modernists have lost before they even had a chance, and the western governments now militarily supporting Islamist forces and regimes (see Libya, and now Syria as well) is yet another stab in the back of secular-minded people of those countries. It's a real tragedy what's going on, and it's based on a deeply flawed understanding of the region's people's mentality and reality. It's also based on blindly trusting the Saudis (fundamentalist wahhabis), Qataris (spreading wahhabism like wildfire through the arabic channel of Al Jazeera) and the Turks (they too turned islamists under Erdogan) on how to deal with the Middle East and North Africa. If at all, those three are the worst possible advisers at the moment, yet western governments listen to them.
As to Anonymous, that's child's play. It's not their hacking that's going to change the real world (as much as I would have hoped it would)... especially not this particular world.
Demand and supply are interdependent. If you increase supply, demand grows accordingly, and if you cut supply or make it more expensive, demand goes down too. Not immediately of course, but after a transitional period where the system re-balances itself. The less power, the more pressure there will be on converting to more energy efficiency.
Right. Except that cucumbers weren't to blame for the e-coli, it was fenugreek that was contaminated. At least that's the official version.
Obviously, the RIAA don't own any copyrights... at least not copyright related to music. It's their members who do. But who said that the RIAA, or maybe one of their many affiliates don't own copyright to *ahemm* those photos? Not implying anything here, just naively asking.
That chilling thing about this is that you have been modded funny instead of insightful.
Having used all kinds of HDDs in the last 15+ years by the tens of thousands in a big data center facility, all I can say is that Hitachi had the absolutely worst track record of failed drives. But a large margin at that! I won't touch them with a 10 ft. pole, and if WD acquires them, that would be a tragedy, unless there's a reliable way to avoid the Hitachi models.
That comes with network congestion... or more precisely with congestion of the RF spectrum: more and more users are competing for a larger and larger chunk of what amounts to a finite resource. Maybe Finland's RF spectrum isn't congested yet as that of other countries?
There ain't nothing wrong with NOT obeying arbitrary rules that go against the human nature of sharing knowledge. If there's a bug somewhere, it was the ban on copying that originated in clerical Europe's Middle Ages and spread like wildfire across the globe with European (esp. British and French) colonialism. If there's a self-inflicted bug we need to eradicate, it's this ban.
You hopefully realize that most Arabs are also Caucasians. But this aside, you're right: Persians are NOT Arabs.
Actually, it tells a lot about one's way of thinking whether he/she considers aliens as potential friends or as potential enemies. Prior sci-fi used to be mostly of the former optimistic kind (think Star Trek e.g.) with the hostile alien being the exception, or at least the minority. Newer sci-fi belongs to the latter pessimistic kind and is a lot darker and quite depressing. What turned a formerly mostly utopian-minded readership into a mostly dystopian-minded one tells a lot about the state of the country they're living in, IMHO.
Were they only BREIN-less, moving to the Netherlands would be a no-brainer.
Remember that MAFIAA has the backing of governments, and governments have access to what basically amounts to unlimited funding. Not so SAT-HAM fans. If the community loses a couple of expensive satellites in a military confrontation, that's pretty much the end of the experiment.
LEOs are less expensive to take down too, since it requires less fuel to power the missiles.
In a totally "free market", AT&T and other carriers would simply squat a bigger part of the RF spectrum without caring for regulations. So the limitation isn't brought by the free market, it's brought by government regulations. Of course, those regulations are inevitable in the case of the RF spectrum, since without them, everyone would be stomping on everyone elses radio feet, so to say, and the medium would be not only saturated, it would be nearly unusable.
Yes. But sadly, the performance (i.e. recording) of the classical music is usually still copyrighted...