If the original owner sells it and then files it as stolen isn't that enough to report him to the police? If you bought a phone and it gets blocked as stolen then the guy who sold it to you committed either insurance fraud or is selling stolen goods. Both are crimes.
When a car is caught by a speed trap and the owner of the car claims he wasn't driving it then he has to say who it was or receive the fine himself. Have that pass through the chain of connections and you'll track someone down. If they don't pay then disconnect them from all connections to the country. Allow each instance to tack a handling fee on if so desired.
Dial up the fines enough and people will abandon the phone network entirely if the companies insist on trying that. Then the phone company loses that avenue of money entirely. Allow the state to employ eminent domain to take ownership of the wires away from any telco that abandons phone service.
Extend the fines to those aggregators and phone companies, to be paid if they don't want to be disconnected from the US grid? Get the EU to pass the same legislation and that's a large chunk of the world prepared to cut your wires if you don't cough up. Doesn't matter whether it's a phone company, an individual or whatever else people may come up with, if it has dumped robocalls into a compliant network it has to pay. Any network that can show who passed the call to it can make that source be billed for its own fine too.
While scorched earth is a fairly simple game I think it's still a bit much for a three year old. At that age I was only messing around with a Pong clone. Give him 1-2 more years and then go up to something like R-Type.
Yeah and the whole liter of soda will turn out to be too much for him so he questions why he bought the second half.
I don't see "buy one, get one free" happening there unless restaurants are willing to cut into their bottomline. The 0.75l drinks were added to make people spend more money on more drink than they need, giving you a whole liter for the price of 0.5l means selling more soda for less money. The restaurant's goal isn't to spread obesity, it's to make money.
Considering the duration that's considered "temporary" for copyright law I'd say that anything that won't survive until the heat death of the universe could be considered temporary.
A star is also an extremely powerful energy source, if you need very high amounts of energy for something it may just be the only option to build solar panels very close to a star (barring some as of yet undiscovered energy production method there's no real way to compete with the energy output of a star simply because of how much fuel those things have, you'll have a hard time even finding enough matter that isn't already part of a star or former star). Colonizing a planet won't give nearly that much power.
That's even further off. If we manage to build completely automated, self-maintaining factories we need to figure out a way to make society work without people having jobs (just saying "go starve" will incite a rebellion). That's pretty much when we enter the post-scarcity era.
There's more to pollution than just CO2. A lot of industrial processes produce hazardous waste. In a badly regulated country you can just dump that in a public landfill or something, in a well regulated country you've gotta make sure you aren't spilling poison or acid on people. Many third world countries have problems with leaking oil pipelines, the leaking oil is destroying the environment and all it would take is to fix the damn pipes. Evidently the leaks aren't big enough to make the owners care so they just poison many miles of farmland.
I don't think China can keep its environmental stance up forever, they've probably got a lot of capacity for environment abuse before it really impacts the people they care about but when that point approaches I expect them to tighten regulations.
The US has significantly lower taxes than Germany too (especially VAT, buying non-food items at retail includes 19% VAT in Germany which already hikes the price up, we also pay about 50% of our income on taxes and the social system) yet the aforementioned car companies are doing their job just fine. Detroit's issue was one of selling the wrong goods or being badly optimized.
Besides, car companies manufacture much closer to the selling location than e.g. electronics industries. GM or VW cars sold in China are versions specifically designed for China and made in Chinese factories (I guess they're cheaper versions due to the much lower incomes in China). The R&D happens in the home country of the car maker but the production is usually near the target market. Doesn't just apply to poor countries either, VW has factories in the USA and GM has factories in Germany (the Opel brand). Probably for different demands and regulations or something.
Not just shipping. China's disrespect towards foreign IP isn't unknown to CEOs around the world. They know that by having stuff built in China they risk having their technology stolen by spies but because it's so much cheaper to build there it's worth the risk (what good is a technology if you can't compete because you're pricing yourself out of the market?). Without the massive cost advantage it's worth investing in having them built in countries where the government doesn't interfere that much with the economy (Libertarians will throw some stuff about no country being free of that in here but other countries don't use govt resources to steal technology from private enterprises and funnel it to their national ones) and your inventions aren't being used to create a competitor for you.
Also there's that Japanese island business, especially Japanese companies may be thinking about moving as much of their property out of China as possible just in case the govt decides to incite another round of anti-Japan protests (last time that led to factories being shut down because the Japanese owners feared that the rioting population would damage them).
When dealing with fictional technology there's far too much room for other possibilities anyway. E.g. in Schlock Mercenary the introduction of arbitrary FTL teleportation to a scenario where only warpgates existed previously resulted in the PDCL wiping out a whole fleet by teleporting warheads into the ships. Shortly afterwards people figure out how to jam teleportation within certain ranges. That setting also has gravity manipulation that's normally for artificial gravity but can also be used to apply force to enemy hulls at close range.
You could also just use a random number generator. It's not a matter of knowing how the other guy thinks, it's about actually being able to hit him. Counter drone technology takes the form of anti-aircraft weapons, not some sort of supercomputer.
That railgun would need some pretty awesome mounting to the hull to prevent it from just going out the other end of the ship when launching that much kinetic energy. And with that awesome mounting you'd need a really, REALLY massive ship to prevent the recoil acceleration from killing the crew. Also consider the range, at one lightsecond it would take your projectiles ten seconds to reach the target, if the target can change its trajectory fast enough to leave the projectile's path by then your railgun is useless. I think I'd take the risk and just launch a bunch of guided nuclear missiles at your massive railgun ship.
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If the original owner sells it and then files it as stolen isn't that enough to report him to the police? If you bought a phone and it gets blocked as stolen then the guy who sold it to you committed either insurance fraud or is selling stolen goods. Both are crimes.
Sounds like seek and destroy is the right approach then. Dead men make no robocalls. We can deal with the people who hired them later.
If Osama Bin Laden was worth the effort surely robocallers are too?
When a car is caught by a speed trap and the owner of the car claims he wasn't driving it then he has to say who it was or receive the fine himself. Have that pass through the chain of connections and you'll track someone down. If they don't pay then disconnect them from all connections to the country. Allow each instance to tack a handling fee on if so desired.
Now that you mention it, those robocalls do sound kinda drugged up...
Dial up the fines enough and people will abandon the phone network entirely if the companies insist on trying that. Then the phone company loses that avenue of money entirely. Allow the state to employ eminent domain to take ownership of the wires away from any telco that abandons phone service.
Extend the fines to those aggregators and phone companies, to be paid if they don't want to be disconnected from the US grid? Get the EU to pass the same legislation and that's a large chunk of the world prepared to cut your wires if you don't cough up. Doesn't matter whether it's a phone company, an individual or whatever else people may come up with, if it has dumped robocalls into a compliant network it has to pay. Any network that can show who passed the call to it can make that source be billed for its own fine too.
OR, a French general leads non-French troops.
The foreign legion still exists.
While scorched earth is a fairly simple game I think it's still a bit much for a three year old. At that age I was only messing around with a Pong clone. Give him 1-2 more years and then go up to something like R-Type.
Yeah and the whole liter of soda will turn out to be too much for him so he questions why he bought the second half.
I don't see "buy one, get one free" happening there unless restaurants are willing to cut into their bottomline. The 0.75l drinks were added to make people spend more money on more drink than they need, giving you a whole liter for the price of 0.5l means selling more soda for less money. The restaurant's goal isn't to spread obesity, it's to make money.
You're not supposed to put a tyre on the breaking wheel.
Just mandate that screens must be pretty reflective and you're saving bandwidth on that.
Considering the duration that's considered "temporary" for copyright law I'd say that anything that won't survive until the heat death of the universe could be considered temporary.
Yeah and the first time it happened the politicians were the only ones who thought it wasn't a big deal. Guess this is the reason why.
They're politicians, if you take them as an example for anything except being amoral scum you're doing it wrong.
And when you've got a dyson sphere do you really NEED to hide?
A star is also an extremely powerful energy source, if you need very high amounts of energy for something it may just be the only option to build solar panels very close to a star (barring some as of yet undiscovered energy production method there's no real way to compete with the energy output of a star simply because of how much fuel those things have, you'll have a hard time even finding enough matter that isn't already part of a star or former star). Colonizing a planet won't give nearly that much power.
That's even further off. If we manage to build completely automated, self-maintaining factories we need to figure out a way to make society work without people having jobs (just saying "go starve" will incite a rebellion). That's pretty much when we enter the post-scarcity era.
There's more to pollution than just CO2. A lot of industrial processes produce hazardous waste. In a badly regulated country you can just dump that in a public landfill or something, in a well regulated country you've gotta make sure you aren't spilling poison or acid on people. Many third world countries have problems with leaking oil pipelines, the leaking oil is destroying the environment and all it would take is to fix the damn pipes. Evidently the leaks aren't big enough to make the owners care so they just poison many miles of farmland.
I don't think China can keep its environmental stance up forever, they've probably got a lot of capacity for environment abuse before it really impacts the people they care about but when that point approaches I expect them to tighten regulations.
The US has significantly lower taxes than Germany too (especially VAT, buying non-food items at retail includes 19% VAT in Germany which already hikes the price up, we also pay about 50% of our income on taxes and the social system) yet the aforementioned car companies are doing their job just fine. Detroit's issue was one of selling the wrong goods or being badly optimized.
Besides, car companies manufacture much closer to the selling location than e.g. electronics industries. GM or VW cars sold in China are versions specifically designed for China and made in Chinese factories (I guess they're cheaper versions due to the much lower incomes in China). The R&D happens in the home country of the car maker but the production is usually near the target market. Doesn't just apply to poor countries either, VW has factories in the USA and GM has factories in Germany (the Opel brand). Probably for different demands and regulations or something.
Not just shipping. China's disrespect towards foreign IP isn't unknown to CEOs around the world. They know that by having stuff built in China they risk having their technology stolen by spies but because it's so much cheaper to build there it's worth the risk (what good is a technology if you can't compete because you're pricing yourself out of the market?). Without the massive cost advantage it's worth investing in having them built in countries where the government doesn't interfere that much with the economy (Libertarians will throw some stuff about no country being free of that in here but other countries don't use govt resources to steal technology from private enterprises and funnel it to their national ones) and your inventions aren't being used to create a competitor for you.
Also there's that Japanese island business, especially Japanese companies may be thinking about moving as much of their property out of China as possible just in case the govt decides to incite another round of anti-Japan protests (last time that led to factories being shut down because the Japanese owners feared that the rioting population would damage them).
When dealing with fictional technology there's far too much room for other possibilities anyway. E.g. in Schlock Mercenary the introduction of arbitrary FTL teleportation to a scenario where only warpgates existed previously resulted in the PDCL wiping out a whole fleet by teleporting warheads into the ships. Shortly afterwards people figure out how to jam teleportation within certain ranges. That setting also has gravity manipulation that's normally for artificial gravity but can also be used to apply force to enemy hulls at close range.
You could also just use a random number generator. It's not a matter of knowing how the other guy thinks, it's about actually being able to hit him. Counter drone technology takes the form of anti-aircraft weapons, not some sort of supercomputer.
That railgun would need some pretty awesome mounting to the hull to prevent it from just going out the other end of the ship when launching that much kinetic energy. And with that awesome mounting you'd need a really, REALLY massive ship to prevent the recoil acceleration from killing the crew. Also consider the range, at one lightsecond it would take your projectiles ten seconds to reach the target, if the target can change its trajectory fast enough to leave the projectile's path by then your railgun is useless. I think I'd take the risk and just launch a bunch of guided nuclear missiles at your massive railgun ship.
How much force can it realistically stop though? Can it even stop a handgun bullet, never mind modern kinetic energy penetrator shells?