It's definately not going to be a waste of money if we build it. Most people would gladly spend their gas money on the train and the company that builds the train would make billions.
The problem is, governments can't build anything cheaply. Something which should only cost a few billion to build will probably cost 100 billion, just like the big dig, due to corruption in the system.
One way to make construction cheap is to use illegal immigrant labor, while it's not popular on the east coast, on the west coast where they are planning this, if they use illegal immigrant labor, they could probably build this at a oost of a few billion dollars.
I say we should do it. We spend more money on the Iraq war than we spend on fixing our economy here at home, and better transportation always improves the economy.
It's not good to allow a small group of people to stifle the development of a technology. This is just like with Microsoft, it holds software development back entirely. Look at what IE did to the web when it had monopoly status.
Finally Firefox has challenged it. And now we have an entirely new web 2.0 and 3.0 etc.
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads." Artists don't make music to profit from record sales. Record companies profit from record sales.
Artists profit from ticket sales. If you combine a search engine for music with a ticket subscription service system, artists will get rich, the search engine will get rich, and everyone wins. Mp3.com has the right idea, thats why they put mp3.com out of business.
And Baidu is offering what seems to be free advertising. I hope Google copies this idea, because there is a fortune to be made by offering us the ability to search Google for music and buy concert tickets in a few clicks.
It's not that nobody is willing to pay for recorded music, it's that the product that American record companies tend to offer is crap. 5 minute tracks, usually they aren't all that good, I'll be glad when the current music industry falls so we can focus on the art again.
Music is not a product, it's art. A true masterpiece is priceless and will be paid for. An artist should get paid when CDs are being sold, however when music is shared thats advertising.
People aren't going to buy your albums or go to your concerts if they don't know who you are!
...It has nothing to do with what a person is thinking....
The conscience is also part of thinking. It is your will that decides which thoughts get acted upon. People that do evil silence their conscience and deliberately decide to put these evil thoughts into action. People who do act out their evil thoughts, tell the voice of their conscience to shut up. If that is done often enough, the voice does just that, or at least is reduced to a whisper that is easy to ignore. That point is, most of us have a conscience. Rapists don't have a conscience, they don't feel any empathy towards their victim, and that's why they go through with it. To criminalize the thoughts instead of the deeds will lead to putting a lot of people in prison who were never capable of committing the deeds in the first place, and it will do nothing to stop the sick individuals who enjoy raping/torturing.
It's just like how some kids love to torture animals, that kid may grow up to be an adult who likes to rape people, but it's not like every kid who every killed any animal in the context of hunting, or by accident, is the type who will torture a cat or dog for the pleasure of it. It takes a certain rare kind of individual to be like that.
I don't think you can learn much about a persons thinking based on what pictures they have on their computer. And you certainly can't jump from the level of non-violet viewer of pictures to labeling them on the level of child molestor or rapist. I think there are different levels of pedophiles here, the non-violent types who don't abuse kids but who have creepy thoughts, and the actual abusers.
If you support torture, you are no different than the pedophile who tortures children.
Torture is torture. However, I do agree that pedophiles should be locked away in prison. The question should be whether or not being exposed to certain images makes someone a pedophile.
I personally think it takes a bit more than that, but thats just my opinion. If you believe people should be locked up for thinking as a pedophile, why not just institute a sexual preference test and determine who they are once and for all so you can leave the rest of us alone?
A pedophile will fail that test, the rest of us sane people will pass.
Sacrifice your freedom of thought so that we can live in a world without virtual snuff films and computer generated child pornography. Keep your sick thoughts to yourself so that other people can express their sick thoughts in public.
If you can pass any law you want as long as it has to do with fighting pedophilia, why draw a line at all? You can declare war on pedophilia and test everyone with brain scans, DNA testing, and sexual preference testing, and require every citizen to pass this test or go straight to prison as a pedophile.
Basically we show you a series of sick images and if your brain shows that you are turned on by any of these images you get life in prison or get chipped. Problem solved.
Here is a list of reasons why we need at least a billion pedophiles.
A. It allows us to infinitely increase the budgets and power of law enforcement agencies. Now the FBI and local police have a reason to work together, now there is a reason for the unmanned drones to be scanning the skies and a reason for every phone and internet connection to be tapped. Terrorism doesn't work because it's just not believable that there could be a billion terrorists, but a billion pedophiles works just fine.
B. It allows for the institution of both thought crimes and pre-crimes, which can lead to massive government DNA and brain scanning to see exactly who has the genes and brain of a criminal. No need for trials anymore, simply arrest all who fail their yearly medical exam, drug testing, or sexual preference testing.
C. If there must be a billion pedophiles, how hard would it be to get someone put on the pedophile suspect list? Probably about as easy as it was to get people put on the terrorist watch list. Last I heard it's almost a million people. And they can use something similar to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_TIPS to build a list. Consider what the world would be like if a billion people were put on this watch list? And what if it just happens to be the billion people you dislike or actively hate?
D. By having a billion pedophiles, we'd have every excuse we need to launch a war on pedophillia, spend hundreds of billions monitoring the internet usage of billions all around the world.
We can use this money to encourage informants to entrap people by offering rewards based on conviction rate.
We can use this money to go after people who download mp3s and movies, and warez pirates. Limewire and other popular programs can be flooded with kiddie porn as a way to keep people from using it.
Foreign goverments that hate us will have the ability to write botnet and viruses and hide gigs of kiddie porn on millions of harddrives of selected people they dislike, and then tip off the very informants who track pedophiles down for a living simply by giving the informants a list of IP addresses along with the list of files.
Individuals who want to censor the internet will be able to do so, using the illegal hyperlink model as a way to censor other websites. And allowing for the legal creation of global thought crimes and thought viruses. Hate sites will be censored. If you say anything hateful you will be punished.
There are plenty of other reasons for why we need at least a billion pedophiles, but this post is just a way to get you to think in this direction.
Or perhaps billions who have to be labeled pedophile.
All we will need is some evidence that you had a sick thought, if you write some suspicious text, if you download a suspicious image, if you look at a 16 year old in the wrong way, perhaps there should be laws to address all of these possibilities so that anyone can be labeled a pedophile.
If you think like a pedophile, you are a pedophile. So why do we even bother trying to pretend that pedophiles are human?
How about we treat all who think like pedophiles as thought terrorists and give them the death penalty? And we can develop our brain scanning and genetic technology so we can remove the genes from all fetuses once and for all erasing the existence of them.
But I have a feeling that wont happen because the government needs the fear of pedophiles as a way to do surveillance on the rest of us. If we were to give all pedophiles the death penalty right now, we wouldn't have a wide enough net cast to catch the millions or billions of pedophiles that could be on the internet.
So in 5 years thats when the inquisition will begin and if you don't think all pedophiles should be given the death penalty, maybe you're a pedophile supporter, and maybe you're just one of them.
Say some crazy programmer writes an ASCII child porn generator. Should the programmer and the people who go to the websites which displayed it be arrested and given prison time for seeing the ASCII images?
Same in Washington State USA... Age of consent for most situations is 16 - however taking pictures of or having indecent conversations with a person under 18 could well land you in jail. How do you define an indecent conversation? That's the kinda law that is so fuzzy and vague that it's practically undefinable. It's easy to figure out whats indecent when it's someone under 15, but over 15, what is indecent?
Personally I would make the law that if they are found in conjunction with photographic indecent images then they should be bundled in with Level 1 images (the least severe) and if you find nothing but graphic images they should be ignored but maybe the cops should keep a regular eye on the person who has them. So you support increasing the punishment for someone convicted of child pornography offenses because they possess artistic images which depict no real children. And you want the police to monitor people who possess drawn or computer-generated fake images. You advocate increasing penalties and surveillance based on assumptions of what a persons thinks or desires, even though their direct actions may not have any connection to abuse of children in real life.
I wonder if you'd also support the police keeping an eye on people who read literature which has child-sex themes? Perhaps monitoring those who check out "Lolita" at the library?
I'd say you picked a fitting career for yourself. Congratulations. See, maybe we've run out of Muslim terrorists as an excuse to build up the surveillance state, so now we need a new boogyman, the Pedophile terrorist. And by casting as wide of a net as possible, anyone with a computer is now a potential pedophile and so now we should monitor every computer in cyberspace.
And of course, anyone can be labeled a pedophile easily if set up properly, you know, the feds give them the illegal pictures and then arrest them for possession, or a virus downloads it onto millions of computers in some botnet as part of some cyber war tactic.
I can see some hackers in China or Russia writing viruses to make the governments waste resources arresting people for this. I can also see the real terrorists trying to make this situation worse because all it's going to do is cause the government to turn on it's own people.
I am also in the digital forensics industry and it is a scary thought when you try to work out how this will be enforced. How accurate do the drawings have to be? (eg, would a stick man with a label "14 year old naked girl" be banned?)
Do existing images still count as legal? (classical art?)
It does seem like a slippery slope despite their best intentions.
It was a similar situation when the age at which someone could appear in pornographic images changed. An example is that Sam Fox appeared topless in the Sun newspaper aged 17 (which at the time was legal) but the change in the law made posession of that newspaper paedophilia. You say despite their best intentions, but how do we know their intentions aren't to create precisely the slippery slope you fear? It's the same government that started a war with Iraq despite their best intentions to avoid it.
I've had evil thoughts all my life, and I've not done any evil deeds.
The argument that evil thoughts leads to evil deeds is like saying that being born leads to sin. It's the original sin argument, and it's stupid.
People do evil behavior because they don't have a conscience. It has nothing to do with what a person is thinking. Most people who have a conscience think about doing evil stuff just as much as anyone else, only we have a voice in our head telling us it's wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's definately not going to be a waste of money if we build it. Most people would gladly spend their gas money on the train and the company that builds the train would make billions.
The problem is, governments can't build anything cheaply. Something which should only cost a few billion to build will probably cost 100 billion, just like the big dig, due to corruption in the system.
One way to make construction cheap is to use illegal immigrant labor, while it's not popular on the east coast, on the west coast where they are planning this, if they use illegal immigrant labor, they could probably build this at a oost of a few billion dollars.
I say we should do it. We spend more money on the Iraq war than we spend on fixing our economy here at home, and better transportation always improves the economy.
Call it what it is, it's the copyright cartel.
Now, I respect the fact that they have the rights, however, I don't agree with how they do business and I'd do things differently.
It's not good to allow a small group of people to stifle the development of a technology. This is just like with Microsoft, it holds software development back entirely. Look at what IE did to the web when it had monopoly status.
Finally Firefox has challenged it. And now we have an entirely new web 2.0 and 3.0 etc.
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads." Artists don't make music to profit from record sales. Record companies profit from record sales.
Artists profit from ticket sales. If you combine a search engine for music with a ticket subscription service system, artists will get rich, the search engine will get rich, and everyone wins. Mp3.com has the right idea, thats why they put mp3.com out of business.
And Baidu is offering what seems to be free advertising. I hope Google copies this idea, because there is a fortune to be made by offering us the ability to search Google for music and buy concert tickets in a few clicks.
It's not that nobody is willing to pay for recorded music, it's that the product that American record companies tend to offer is crap. 5 minute tracks, usually they aren't all that good, I'll be glad when the current music industry falls so we can focus on the art again.
Music is not a product, it's art. A true masterpiece is priceless and will be paid for. An artist should get paid when CDs are being sold, however when music is shared thats advertising.
People aren't going to buy your albums or go to your concerts if they don't know who you are!
By linking it to Baidu, now they can advertise their music to a larger audience. I don't see why any sane musician would be against this.
It's consistent with the current agenda and it would work.
Give them a brain scan and force them to view sick images. If they fall into the pedophile category, offer to either chip them or put them in prison.
...It has nothing to do with what a person is thinking....The conscience is also part of thinking. It is your will that decides which thoughts get acted upon. People that do evil silence their conscience and deliberately decide to put these evil thoughts into action. People who do act out their evil thoughts, tell the voice of their conscience to shut up. If that is done often enough, the voice does just that, or at least is reduced to a whisper that is easy to ignore. That point is, most of us have a conscience. Rapists don't have a conscience, they don't feel any empathy towards their victim, and that's why they go through with it. To criminalize the thoughts instead of the deeds will lead to putting a lot of people in prison who were never capable of committing the deeds in the first place, and it will do nothing to stop the sick individuals who enjoy raping/torturing.
It's just like how some kids love to torture animals, that kid may grow up to be an adult who likes to rape people, but it's not like every kid who every killed any animal in the context of hunting, or by accident, is the type who will torture a cat or dog for the pleasure of it. It takes a certain rare kind of individual to be like that.
I don't think you can learn much about a persons thinking based on what pictures they have on their computer. And you certainly can't jump from the level of non-violet viewer of pictures to labeling them on the level of child molestor or rapist. I think there are different levels of pedophiles here, the non-violent types who don't abuse kids but who have creepy thoughts, and the actual abusers.
Answer: Yes? No?
If you support torture, you are no different than the pedophile who tortures children.
Torture is torture. However, I do agree that pedophiles should be locked away in prison. The question should be whether or not being exposed to certain images makes someone a pedophile.
I personally think it takes a bit more than that, but thats just my opinion. If you believe people should be locked up for thinking as a pedophile, why not just institute a sexual preference test and determine who they are once and for all so you can leave the rest of us alone?
A pedophile will fail that test, the rest of us sane people will pass.
Sacrifice your freedom of thought so that we can live in a world without virtual snuff films and computer generated child pornography. Keep your sick thoughts to yourself so that other people can express their sick thoughts in public.
Every adult male or female must pass this test or receive their choice of a life sentence in prison for pedophilia, or be chipped.
You must pass a brain scan/sexual preference test to determine whether or not you are a pedophile.
You are shown a series of sick images and if your brain shows that you are turned on by any of these images you get life in prison or get chipped.
Problem solved.
If you can pass any law you want as long as it has to do with fighting pedophilia, why draw a line at all? You can declare war on pedophilia and test everyone with brain scans, DNA testing, and sexual preference testing, and require every citizen to pass this test or go straight to prison as a pedophile.
Basically we show you a series of sick images and if your brain shows that you are turned on by any of these images you get life in prison or get chipped. Problem solved.
Here is a list of reasons why we need at least a billion pedophiles.
A. It allows us to infinitely increase the budgets and power of law enforcement agencies. Now the FBI and local police have a reason to work together, now there is a reason for the unmanned drones to be scanning the skies and a reason for every phone and internet connection to be tapped. Terrorism doesn't work because it's just not believable that there could be a billion terrorists, but a billion pedophiles works just fine.
B. It allows for the institution of both thought crimes and pre-crimes, which can lead to massive government DNA and brain scanning to see exactly who has the genes and brain of a criminal. No need for trials anymore, simply arrest all who fail their yearly medical exam, drug testing, or sexual preference testing.
C. If there must be a billion pedophiles, how hard would it be to get someone put on the pedophile suspect list? Probably about as easy as it was to get people put on the terrorist watch list. Last I heard it's almost a million people. And they can use something similar to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_TIPS to build a list. Consider what the world would be like if a billion people were put on this watch list? And what if it just happens to be the billion people you dislike or actively hate?
D. By having a billion pedophiles, we'd have every excuse we need to launch a war on pedophillia, spend hundreds of billions monitoring the internet usage of billions all around the world.
We can use this money to encourage informants to entrap people by offering rewards based on conviction rate.
We can use this money to go after people who download mp3s and movies, and warez pirates. Limewire and other popular programs can be flooded with kiddie porn as a way to keep people from using it.
Foreign goverments that hate us will have the ability to write botnet and viruses and hide gigs of kiddie porn on millions of harddrives of selected people they dislike, and then tip off the very informants who track pedophiles down for a living simply by giving the informants a list of IP addresses along with the list of files.
Individuals who want to censor the internet will be able to do so, using the illegal hyperlink model as a way to censor other websites. And allowing for the legal creation of global thought crimes and thought viruses. Hate sites will be censored. If you say anything hateful you will be punished.
There are plenty of other reasons for why we need at least a billion pedophiles, but this post is just a way to get you to think in this direction.
Or perhaps billions who have to be labeled pedophile.
All we will need is some evidence that you had a sick thought, if you write some suspicious text, if you download a suspicious image, if you look at a 16 year old in the wrong way, perhaps there should be laws to address all of these possibilities so that anyone can be labeled a pedophile.
You have suspicious thinking.
The difference is, pedophiles are not considered human. This is why we can arrest people for thinking as a pedophile.
A. Pre-crime is now a reality.
B. Thought crimes are now a reality.
If you think like a pedophile, you are a pedophile.
So why do we even bother trying to pretend that pedophiles are human?
How about we treat all who think like pedophiles as thought terrorists and give them the death penalty? And we can develop our brain scanning and genetic technology so we can remove the genes from all fetuses once and for all erasing the existence of them.
But I have a feeling that wont happen because the government needs the fear of pedophiles as a way to do surveillance on the rest of us. If we were to give all pedophiles the death penalty right now, we wouldn't have a wide enough net cast to catch the millions or billions of pedophiles that could be on the internet.
So in 5 years thats when the inquisition will begin and if you don't think all pedophiles should be given the death penalty, maybe you're a pedophile supporter, and maybe you're just one of them.
Say some crazy programmer writes an ASCII child porn generator. Should the programmer and the people who go to the websites which displayed it be arrested and given prison time for seeing the ASCII images?
I wonder if you'd also support the police keeping an eye on people who read literature which has child-sex themes? Perhaps monitoring those who check out "Lolita" at the library?
I'd say you picked a fitting career for yourself. Congratulations. See, maybe we've run out of Muslim terrorists as an excuse to build up the surveillance state, so now we need a new boogyman, the Pedophile terrorist. And by casting as wide of a net as possible, anyone with a computer is now a potential pedophile and so now we should monitor every computer in cyberspace.
And of course, anyone can be labeled a pedophile easily if set up properly, you know, the feds give them the illegal pictures and then arrest them for possession, or a virus downloads it onto millions of computers in some botnet as part of some cyber war tactic.
I can see some hackers in China or Russia writing viruses to make the governments waste resources arresting people for this. I can also see the real terrorists trying to make this situation worse because all it's going to do is cause the government to turn on it's own people.
How accurate do the drawings have to be? (eg, would a stick man with a label "14 year old naked girl" be banned?)
Do existing images still count as legal? (classical art?)
It does seem like a slippery slope despite their best intentions.
It was a similar situation when the age at which someone could appear in pornographic images changed. An example is that Sam Fox appeared topless in the Sun newspaper aged 17 (which at the time was legal) but the change in the law made posession of that newspaper paedophilia. You say despite their best intentions, but how do we know their intentions aren't to create precisely the slippery slope you fear? It's the same government that started a war with Iraq despite their best intentions to avoid it.
I've had evil thoughts all my life, and I've not done any evil deeds.
The argument that evil thoughts leads to evil deeds is like saying that being born leads to sin. It's the original sin argument, and it's stupid.
People do evil behavior because they don't have a conscience. It has nothing to do with what a person is thinking. Most people who have a conscience think about doing evil stuff just as much as anyone else, only we have a voice in our head telling us it's wrong.