I'd much rather that each segment of the flight be handled by a pilot with vast experience in the patch of sky the plane is heading through at the moment. I'd prefer that the guy who lands the plane at Lindbergh Field has spent 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for the last 10 years landing 4 planes an hour at Lindbergh Field. You can't have that if the same pilot landing the plane is the same guy that took off and cruised in it all the way from its source. But if all the pilots are all flying the planes in a big building somewhere in Oklahoma, then planes can be handed off between teams of specialists just like happens with air traffic control.
It's also pretty nice that if the pilot keels over in the middle of his shift that he can be replaced by the next pilot in line rather than a stewardess.
Besides, you get far, far better and more rational decision making from people when their lives actually aren't on the line.
The concept of the "suicide bomber" makes this less than 100%,
Sure. I am willing, by my logic in the original post, to concede suicide bombings. I will note that suicide bombers are by their nature a consumable resource. Imposing the luggage restriction merely means that you will only personally get to ever blow up one plane (at least, directly).
Firearms can be achieved with plastics now which would not come up in a metal detector
Nobody has yet developed plastic ammunition. When they do, then perhaps the topic can be revisited. Note that rubber bullets don't count, since they're housed in shotgun shells, which have substantial metal components.
This already happens, where are you going with it?
Nowhere, other than to simply include it in the list of things that are necessary for airport/aircraft security.
And as I mentioned in the other comment, UAVs are not automatically piloted, they are simply remotely piloted. The improvements in positive control I mentioned have to do with insuring that the control channel to and from the pilot is secure and continuous, and if interrupted (despite the foregoing), that the craft will perform some reasonable emergency procedure as an alternative.
There are fairly substantial safety benefits to remote piloting that aren't based in security - pilots can work in shifts that are completely decoupled from the actual flights. For instance, you could have a pilot whose job all day long is to land planes at Lindbergh Field - one of the more difficult civilian airport approaches in the US. Long flights could be broken up into shorter shifts, allowing the pilots to remain fresh.
The presence of free goods will always displace higher cost goods
Note that I did put emphasis on the word "direct" in the sentence you quoted. You are correct that there are indirect damages, but they are nothing like the direct damages suffered when a physical good is shoplifted, which was the ENTIRE POINT of my comment.
Movie producers don't sell movies, they rent seats in the theater and sell DVDs.
If you make doing that unprofitable, by making the content freely available, then nobody will make the content.
Seriously. Avatar cost more than 400 MILLION dollars to make.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is a way that that much money could be gathered up to make the movie if it were just going to be made freely available when they were done making it?
The security theater that has been implemented since 2001 has raised the cost (in dollars, time and convenience) of air travel enough to divert enough travelers to the nations highways that I posit that we as a nation have suffered more death and injury than had we reacted to the Sep 11 attacks by literally doing nothing at all.
We kill more people on the roads annually than more than 15 such attacks would have done.
Meanwhile, UBL's grand master plan stopped working even before the last airplane was grounded that day - the passengers found out that the rules (give hijackers what they want and you get out alive) had changed and the last plane did not make its target. And because everybody knows the new rules of engagement, that plan will never work again - regardless of any changes (or lack thereof) in government policy.
There are exactly 3 things necessary for airport security:
1. Make sure that no luggage gets on the plane without its associated passenger (you can't blow up the plane without going along for the ride).
2. Metal detectors to keep guns out. The alternative is allowing anybody to carry, thus insuring the entire plane will wind up swiss cheese if any funny business starts. That's a less than positive outcome, IMHO.
3. Lock and bar the cockpit doors for the flight's duration.
And for extra credit
4. Research applying the military's UAV technology to the air transport system. If enough improvements can be made in assuring positive aircraft control, there's no reason the flight deck as we know it needs to exist on the plane at all.
We in the modern west have a problem, and I, for one, do not see an easy solution.
It used to be that making copies of creative works was a physical task that was the domain of professionals. As such, enforcing copyrights was relatively easy.
As soon as copyrightable creative works were representable in digital form, and computers became capable of copying them trivially, that changed utterly.
Copyrights exist so that creators of creative works can be given an incentive to create. Their creations, on the whole, enrich society. That's the basic copyright bargain: You write good books and we, as a society, will insure that you can make a living doing it. Of course, another part of the bargain is that your monopoly is for a limited time - that it will eventually fall into the public domain. Congress, in its wisdom, has been eroding that on a regular basis, but that's a whole different discussion.
In an era where digital representations of copyrightable works can be freely copied (DRM doesn't count - breaking the DRM is largely equivalent to scanning in and OCRing a book - something you have to do once, but then the work is disencumbered), however, the idea of being able to police the copying so that authors of creative works can be fairly compensated becomes impossible.
Notice that I said fairly compensated. That means that consumers of creative works (readers of books, listeners of music, watchers of movies and TV shows) pay commensurate with their consumption, and authors get paid commensurate with the relative rates of consumption.
DRM is an attempt to retain control over content copying. Alas (for the ??AA), it is the exact equivalent of an ostrich attempting to control predation by burying its head in the sand.
The Copyright system no longer functions properly because conditions in the world have changed irrevocably. I don't have an answer as to how to fix it. Nobody does, because if they did, things would be different.
Shoplifting and copyright infringement are not comparable. If you shoplift a pair of pants, the store cannot sell them to someone else. The store takes a hard loss of the cost they paid to acquire the pants. Making a copy of a music file, by contrast, does not cause any direct damage to someone selling copies of that file, since they still have the undiminished ability to continue selling copies. That is, if you download a copy of Gin and Juice from bittorrent, the "inventory" in the iTunes music store of that track does not magically decrement.
In fact, the PCPI Applicard did the same basic job, but did it with a far superior architecture, and far superior product specifications. Pretty much typical of the average Microsoft product.
I actually overclocked my Applicard. I upgraded it to a 10 MHz Z-80H part, upgraded the RAM to faster parts and replaced the crystal and oscillator chip. The result was a system that ran Turbo Pascal programs faster than the Compaq PCs in the school computer lab at the time.
The really nice part about the Applicard was that the host system was still running. It buffered keystrokes and print jobs and stuff in the background. It also assured you that you could abort/reset the Z-80 if it ever ran amok. The Softcard, by contrast, raised the INH line, freezing the 6502 while the Z-80 was running.
Meanwhile, the best a Softcard could do was 2 MHz because they tied it to the 6502 system timing.
I posit that it doesn't take nearly as much heat to keep the lenses frost/snow free as the old incandescent bulbs were generating. The LEDs may be consuming 10-15 watts, but they're outputting that energy as visible light, not waste heat. I suspect a 5 watt resistor dissipating 5 watts of pure heat would raise the temperature much more than the circuitry alone.
Well, besides, you're not going to even lose that much energy efficiency with the heating coils - you only turn those on when it's cold out. So that's half the year right there where they won't be on.
but you also want it off when the lens is unobscured but cold.
I would actually leave it on under those circumstances as a preventative measure. Plus, just having it work off temperature is going to make the fix a lot cheaper.
Um, you can't look for evidence of Taco being retarded here. Rather, in this instance, he's more clever than you. He's made a pun on "green" meaning energy efficient as opposed to literal color. The inefficient lights had a side effect of melting snow/frost build-up. That side effect was not considered when they were replaced with efficient ones. Thus the reason we grown-ups are here talking about it instead of, at least in your case, contemplating gay oral sex.
Because the context was that someone couldn't tell the difference between a green arrow and a green ball. Both would be in the same position, and could conceivably look the same when frosted over (enough).
The California high-speed rail situation is different. There's no problem using existing ROW through the central valley, nor between southern LA and San Diego. The big problem will be creating an entirely grade separated system through Los Angeles and between Merced and San Francisco. The freeways that you might use as you suggest don't have wide enough medians, nor are they straight and flat enough to be of use.
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I'd much rather that each segment of the flight be handled by a pilot with vast experience in the patch of sky the plane is heading through at the moment. I'd prefer that the guy who lands the plane at Lindbergh Field has spent 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for the last 10 years landing 4 planes an hour at Lindbergh Field. You can't have that if the same pilot landing the plane is the same guy that took off and cruised in it all the way from its source. But if all the pilots are all flying the planes in a big building somewhere in Oklahoma, then planes can be handed off between teams of specialists just like happens with air traffic control.
It's also pretty nice that if the pilot keels over in the middle of his shift that he can be replaced by the next pilot in line rather than a stewardess.
Besides, you get far, far better and more rational decision making from people when their lives actually aren't on the line.
I hit 'submit' too early.
The concept of the "suicide bomber" makes this less than 100%,
Sure. I am willing, by my logic in the original post, to concede suicide bombings. I will note that suicide bombers are by their nature a consumable resource. Imposing the luggage restriction merely means that you will only personally get to ever blow up one plane (at least, directly).
Firearms can be achieved with plastics now which would not come up in a metal detector
Nobody has yet developed plastic ammunition. When they do, then perhaps the topic can be revisited. Note that rubber bullets don't count, since they're housed in shotgun shells, which have substantial metal components.
This already happens, where are you going with it?
Nowhere, other than to simply include it in the list of things that are necessary for airport/aircraft security.
And as I mentioned in the other comment, UAVs are not automatically piloted, they are simply remotely piloted. The improvements in positive control I mentioned have to do with insuring that the control channel to and from the pilot is secure and continuous, and if interrupted (despite the foregoing), that the craft will perform some reasonable emergency procedure as an alternative.
There are fairly substantial safety benefits to remote piloting that aren't based in security - pilots can work in shifts that are completely decoupled from the actual flights. For instance, you could have a pilot whose job all day long is to land planes at Lindbergh Field - one of the more difficult civilian airport approaches in the US. Long flights could be broken up into shorter shifts, allowing the pilots to remain fresh.
Unrealistic, I think, as the human factor will not be eliminated.
I didn't say the planes would not be piloted by humans. UAVs today have human pilots. They simply are not pilotting the craft from inside it.
I did put emphasis on the word "direct" in my earlier comment for a reason.
The presence of free goods will always displace higher cost goods
Note that I did put emphasis on the word "direct" in the sentence you quoted. You are correct that there are indirect damages, but they are nothing like the direct damages suffered when a physical good is shoplifted, which was the ENTIRE POINT of my comment.
Movie producers don't sell movies, they rent seats in the theater and sell DVDs.
If you make doing that unprofitable, by making the content freely available, then nobody will make the content.
Seriously. Avatar cost more than 400 MILLION dollars to make.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is a way that that much money could be gathered up to make the movie if it were just going to be made freely available when they were done making it?
It qualifies him because predicting attack vectors is a common skill-set in both arenas, among other things.
I take it a step further.
The security theater that has been implemented since 2001 has raised the cost (in dollars, time and convenience) of air travel enough to divert enough travelers to the nations highways that I posit that we as a nation have suffered more death and injury than had we reacted to the Sep 11 attacks by literally doing nothing at all.
We kill more people on the roads annually than more than 15 such attacks would have done.
Meanwhile, UBL's grand master plan stopped working even before the last airplane was grounded that day - the passengers found out that the rules (give hijackers what they want and you get out alive) had changed and the last plane did not make its target. And because everybody knows the new rules of engagement, that plan will never work again - regardless of any changes (or lack thereof) in government policy.
There are exactly 3 things necessary for airport security:
1. Make sure that no luggage gets on the plane without its associated passenger (you can't blow up the plane without going along for the ride).
2. Metal detectors to keep guns out. The alternative is allowing anybody to carry, thus insuring the entire plane will wind up swiss cheese if any funny business starts. That's a less than positive outcome, IMHO.
3. Lock and bar the cockpit doors for the flight's duration.
And for extra credit
4. Research applying the military's UAV technology to the air transport system. If enough improvements can be made in assuring positive aircraft control, there's no reason the flight deck as we know it needs to exist on the plane at all.
We in the modern west have a problem, and I, for one, do not see an easy solution.
It used to be that making copies of creative works was a physical task that was the domain of professionals. As such, enforcing copyrights was relatively easy.
As soon as copyrightable creative works were representable in digital form, and computers became capable of copying them trivially, that changed utterly.
Copyrights exist so that creators of creative works can be given an incentive to create. Their creations, on the whole, enrich society. That's the basic copyright bargain: You write good books and we, as a society, will insure that you can make a living doing it. Of course, another part of the bargain is that your monopoly is for a limited time - that it will eventually fall into the public domain. Congress, in its wisdom, has been eroding that on a regular basis, but that's a whole different discussion.
In an era where digital representations of copyrightable works can be freely copied (DRM doesn't count - breaking the DRM is largely equivalent to scanning in and OCRing a book - something you have to do once, but then the work is disencumbered), however, the idea of being able to police the copying so that authors of creative works can be fairly compensated becomes impossible.
Notice that I said fairly compensated. That means that consumers of creative works (readers of books, listeners of music, watchers of movies and TV shows) pay commensurate with their consumption, and authors get paid commensurate with the relative rates of consumption.
DRM is an attempt to retain control over content copying. Alas (for the ??AA), it is the exact equivalent of an ostrich attempting to control predation by burying its head in the sand.
The Copyright system no longer functions properly because conditions in the world have changed irrevocably. I don't have an answer as to how to fix it. Nobody does, because if they did, things would be different.
While I can get behind what you're saying, the facts you infer do not apply here - the defendant in TFA was supplying the songs, not downloading them.
Take your straw-man elsewhere, please.
Shoplifting and copyright infringement are not comparable. If you shoplift a pair of pants, the store cannot sell them to someone else. The store takes a hard loss of the cost they paid to acquire the pants. Making a copy of a music file, by contrast, does not cause any direct damage to someone selling copies of that file, since they still have the undiminished ability to continue selling copies. That is, if you download a copy of Gin and Juice from bittorrent, the "inventory" in the iTunes music store of that track does not magically decrement.
Point of order: He was not sentenced to anything, since this was not a criminal trial.
the CP/M software was sold by Microsoft
Huh? Resold, perhaps, but CP/M was a product of Digital Research.
In fact, the PCPI Applicard did the same basic job, but did it with a far superior architecture, and far superior product specifications. Pretty much typical of the average Microsoft product.
I actually overclocked my Applicard. I upgraded it to a 10 MHz Z-80H part, upgraded the RAM to faster parts and replaced the crystal and oscillator chip. The result was a system that ran Turbo Pascal programs faster than the Compaq PCs in the school computer lab at the time.
The really nice part about the Applicard was that the host system was still running. It buffered keystrokes and print jobs and stuff in the background. It also assured you that you could abort/reset the Z-80 if it ever ran amok. The Softcard, by contrast, raised the INH line, freezing the 6502 while the Z-80 was running.
Meanwhile, the best a Softcard could do was 2 MHz because they tied it to the 6502 system timing.
I posit that it doesn't take nearly as much heat to keep the lenses frost/snow free as the old incandescent bulbs were generating. The LEDs may be consuming 10-15 watts, but they're outputting that energy as visible light, not waste heat. I suspect a 5 watt resistor dissipating 5 watts of pure heat would raise the temperature much more than the circuitry alone.
Who ever did?
It's easier than that - just add a 32 degree F thermistor and a 5 watt resistor in series.
Frost accumulates on the lights too.
Well, besides, you're not going to even lose that much energy efficiency with the heating coils - you only turn those on when it's cold out. So that's half the year right there where they won't be on.
but you also want it off when the lens is unobscured but cold.
I would actually leave it on under those circumstances as a preventative measure. Plus, just having it work off temperature is going to make the fix a lot cheaper.
The latter. Specifically, you've not considered frost build-up on the lens.
Um, you can't look for evidence of Taco being retarded here. Rather, in this instance, he's more clever than you. He's made a pun on "green" meaning energy efficient as opposed to literal color. The inefficient lights had a side effect of melting snow/frost build-up. That side effect was not considered when they were replaced with efficient ones. Thus the reason we grown-ups are here talking about it instead of, at least in your case, contemplating gay oral sex.
Because the context was that someone couldn't tell the difference between a green arrow and a green ball. Both would be in the same position, and could conceivably look the same when frosted over (enough).
Come on, a thermister set for 32 degrees F and a 5 watt resistor would probably do the trick. How much could that really cost extra?
The California high-speed rail situation is different. There's no problem using existing ROW through the central valley, nor between southern LA and San Diego. The big problem will be creating an entirely grade separated system through Los Angeles and between Merced and San Francisco. The freeways that you might use as you suggest don't have wide enough medians, nor are they straight and flat enough to be of use.