"Borrow against your home.
Borrow from friends and family.
Have a working spouse.
Borrow from your credit cards."
Obtain money from a potentially major customer
This one is often overlooked. If a company has a problem they need solving and is willing to fund some of your development effort to solve it, this is a golden opportunity. Depending upon what problem you are solving, the company may not be interested either in owning any of the IP you create or supporting the product if/when it takes off.
This is how the company I'm with now started and their sales are $500MUSD per year. It all started from a $500K investment from a major industry leader, who remains the company's biggest and most valued customer.
The author seems to be implying that people will change their habits, either by choice or by legislation, based upon an obligation to the artist or recording label. With something so abstract, the cited economic principles don't necessarily apply here -- the good can be replicated at almost zero cost, unlike stealing something else such as a lemon from your local grocer for example.
In the case of stealing from the grocer, morality is somewhat different because the lemon pool you are drawing from is finite and depletes the supply. But copying a bunch of data to your 120G hard drive that is only utilised to 20% has no perceived cost and does not deplete any one else's resource.
The issue is more complicated than what is stated, and the equalisation schemes suggested do not take away from the fact that downloading a piece of data has almost no variable cost. Do economics work when 0 is in the denominator?
Online elections have been tried before in Canada -- the last one I heard about was for the election of the New Democratic Party held over a year ago, run by election.com.
During this election the system was hacked and was down for a few hours, highlighting the fact that anarchists and hackers see elections as a focal point to concentrate their efforts; luckily for election.com, the NDP, and pro-online vote advocates, they had a backup plan of some sort that seemed to thwart further hack attempts (I don't know what they did though).
Online elections will not lead to massive fraud, no more than has happened with paper ballots in most countries already. The software set up by some of the online election companies is robust and undoubtedly have redundancies built in that can thwart potential hacks. Of course nothing if foolproof but there is no sense throwing up one's hands before trying.
Maybe someone can explain to me why an online election would be any different to, say, online banking systems, for example? An online bank has a lot at stake as well, and is open to hack attempts 247, not just for 12 hours in 4 years.
It also probably WILL mean a larger voter turnout, as people with internet access (quite a large percentage of registered voters, in Canada anyways) will find it easier to vote, as they have when filing their taxes online (another government system that hasn't been seriously hacked in the few years it has been active).
Get used to on-line elections -- their "paper" trails are as good as we have already, and they attest to how robust software can be made to fend off serious and concentrated hack attempts.
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Borrow from friends and family.
Have a working spouse.
Borrow from your credit cards."
Obtain money from a potentially major customer
This one is often overlooked. If a company has a problem they need solving and is willing to fund some of your development effort to solve it, this is a golden opportunity. Depending upon what problem you are solving, the company may not be interested either in owning any of the IP you create or supporting the product if/when it takes off.
This is how the company I'm with now started and their sales are $500MUSD per year. It all started from a $500K investment from a major industry leader, who remains the company's biggest and most valued customer.
The author seems to be implying that people will change their habits, either by choice or by legislation, based upon an obligation to the artist or recording label. With something so abstract, the cited economic principles don't necessarily apply here -- the good can be replicated at almost zero cost, unlike stealing something else such as a lemon from your local grocer for example.
In the case of stealing from the grocer, morality is somewhat different because the lemon pool you are drawing from is finite and depletes the supply. But copying a bunch of data to your 120G hard drive that is only utilised to 20% has no perceived cost and does not deplete any one else's resource.
The issue is more complicated than what is stated, and the equalisation schemes suggested do not take away from the fact that downloading a piece of data has almost no variable cost. Do economics work when 0 is in the denominator?
Online elections have been tried before in Canada -- the last one I heard about was for the election of the New Democratic Party held over a year ago, run by election.com.
During this election the system was hacked and was down for a few hours, highlighting the fact that anarchists and hackers see elections as a focal point to concentrate their efforts; luckily for election.com, the NDP, and pro-online vote advocates, they had a backup plan of some sort that seemed to thwart further hack attempts (I don't know what they did though).
Online elections will not lead to massive fraud, no more than has happened with paper ballots in most countries already. The software set up by some of the online election companies is robust and undoubtedly have redundancies built in that can thwart potential hacks. Of course nothing if foolproof but there is no sense throwing up one's hands before trying.
Maybe someone can explain to me why an online election would be any different to, say, online banking systems, for example? An online bank has a lot at stake as well, and is open to hack attempts 247, not just for 12 hours in 4 years.
It also probably WILL mean a larger voter turnout, as people with internet access (quite a large percentage of registered voters, in Canada anyways) will find it easier to vote, as they have when filing their taxes online (another government system that hasn't been seriously hacked in the few years it has been active).
Get used to on-line elections -- their "paper" trails are as good as we have already, and they attest to how robust software can be made to fend off serious and concentrated hack attempts.