When it is an "open" platform, applications can do whatever in the heck is possible. If the application requires Internet access to be useful, people would complain that the application did not work when data roaming was disabled. So the application authors take it upon themselves to insure that their application functions properly at all times.
Now, is this the right way to do it? Possibly not, but it is a choice that application authors can make for themselves.
Such devices are entirely too complicated to require each individual user run through a list of authorizations for each application. Blackberry has this and it would be a nightmare if it was really exposed to individual users. Normally, this is something the administrator does through authorizing the phone on the company BES system.
Utterly a unique Microsoft problem. Apple has changed CPU architectures twice and each time there was limited compatibility with emulation. The latest changed byte order and I can only imagine what that did for historical files for most applications.
But Microsoft gets dinged on "I can't run my 15-year-old Windows 3.11 applications!"
The problem is that Ted Kaczynski could be found by tracing down his movements and actions. There is no correspondence to the Internet.
If you don't brag and use reasonable caution it is possible to connect actions with a high probability to a computer. It is not certain and it never can be. It does not connect with a person at all, and cannot ever. Unless the person is stupid, you can't use any tracing information available on the Internet to connect to a person. Period.
What this means is that any crime on the Internet is possible and the perpetrator can never be brought to justice. Unless they reveal themselves in other ways. Unlike other crimes, criminals do not leave DNA, they do not leave fibers, hairs, or any other physical evidence. There is at best some circumstantial evidence that points to a computer - maybe. If the person uses a proxy or other tools even that is not possible.
So that pretty much leaves the idea of investigation out in the cold. There is nothing to investigate. Nobody to catch. Ever wonder why nobody ever gets prosecuted for distributing viruses or creating botnets unless they are bragging about it? RIchard Smith, the author of the I Love You worm got prosecuted because he pretty much signed his name. When was the last botnet herder convicted of anything? It will never happen.
The "music business" isn't a viable business any longer. Period. There is no "adapt". You can't adapt to a situation where the sale of your product is undercut by distributors passing it out for free. So any idea of selling recorded music has got to go.
What could possibly compensate artists? Patronage is a bad idea that was stamped out with the death of feudalism. Doing it for ego-reasons - because the artist feels it has to be done - doesn't feed the children or pay the rent. Any sort of tax is going to run into massive fraud and evasion. Trying to give the music away and sell T-shirts or hope for huge concert sales only helps a very few artists. Most artists and performers are going to be playing bars and clubs for pocket change and drinks. And that is the way it is going to be, because music is now free.
Any semblance of value in recorded music has pretty much been destroyed. Partly by record companies deciding what to market based on what was selling last year. Partly by really awful bands commanding the same prices as top performers. Partly by piracy exerting really strong negative pricing pressure. Might as well face up to it, you can't compete with free and win.
The problem is, your statements are written out. They are "in print". People have known for a hundred years or more that only things "in print" are true and not to pay attention to anything else.
Therefore, lots of folks believe only what is written on the Internet. I guess if you stated these things in a YouTube video it would have less credibility.
Further, most people will believe any negative comment about a business or product. And the state of businesses must be really awful because you see so few positive comments. Obviously, all businesses are terrible which just lends further credibility to any negative comments. Completely self-reinforcing.
Thie plantiff needs to learn this and realize the only solution is to shut down and move.
That is usually what it is called when you are doing something that affects a business in a negative manner. Slander and libel are problematic because even though we are all "journalists" now, the publishing of an opinion probably doesn't carry that much weight.
The question is more likely can you have an unmoderated forum of nothing but negative comments about businesses without ever incurring legal liability? For most of the history of the world, the answer has been no, you can't. Today, with the Internet the operator of the forum may be hard to find, too hard for an assembly of people with torches and buckets of tar to locate and deliver punishment.
I'd think that the operator of the forum can either shield participants and take all the heat or serve up the participants and hope nobody actually sues them. In today's world, betting you will not be sued is a very risky bet.
Right. There are a couple of differences with your selling it. First off, it isn't being claimed as new. Next, the customer gets (maybe) what is left on a factory warranty and maybe not even that since they aren't the registered owner.
Compare this to a supposed individual selling for 10% over cost claiming it is new and comes with a factory warranty. Big suprise for the buyer may be that the factory will not honor such graymarket warranties.
It is that last point about lost tokens that is the real deterrent to wide implementation in the US. Some huge number of police calls are because of lost car keys, so you can imagine what the result would be.
In Arizona it appears anyone can get a replacement driver's license mailed out by requesting it over the phone. This pretty much means that you can get your friend's driver's license mailed out to them and all you have to do then is intercept that piece of mail.
I thought now all persons in the US (legally or illegally) were now eligible for Social Security benefits. There was some recent decision about this specifically addressing undocumented workers. After all, they are paying in so shouldn't they get all the benefits? At least that was the thinking that led to this.
So it is OK to advertise child-porn web sites using cartoon figures in the US now. Great, I am sure lots of people will pay for child porn web sites and now we have the ideal advertising vehicle that is perfectly legal.
Right?
Or do you think this might be what they had in mind all along?
This problem is that most people of average intelligence and not wealthy are ready and willing to be taken in by almost any sales approach. Trying to outlaw "deceptive marketing" to these people would mean you couldn't sell them a newspaper subscription.
There are some organizations that go out of their way to mislead people, but most people are very willing to be misled all by themselves and even encourage it. So is it worth trying to explain to someone that if all they want is the Sunday paper that it is actually cheaper to get the whole week's papers because that is how it is sold? Is it really deceptive to give the person what they think they want, regardless that it costs more? Lots of folks would say selling someone what they want when it is more expensive than some alternative is indeed "deceptive". With this in mind, I'd say you would have to get rid of all sales, marketing and advertising to avoid "deceiving" most people of average intelligence.
The point is to remove revenue from digital goods. This will succeed at some point, mostly because we are training up an entire generation with the idea that "stuff on the Internet is free." They are going to utilize the Internet and the tools given to them to find free stuff and take advantage of it.
The "pay" sites, like Amazon, are going to suffer because of it. There isn't any two ways about it.
Sure, every now and then you get some guilt-ridden person saying that piracy just makes them want to spend more money. That may in fact be the way it works for some people. Unfortunately for content creators it is not the way it works for people with limited funds and limited time. If I watch a movie for free I may never watch it again, ever. The idea of running down to the store to buy it now that I have seen it is completely foreign to me and most of the rest of humanity. There are limits to how this applies to music but for most of the iPod generation the idea is "having" and even having a crappy MP3 is indeed "having". Buying a CD to rip it into an equally crappy MP3 is a lot of work - and I "have" it already, right?
I firmly believe that most of the hardcore pirates really believe they can "win". Once the majority of people have high-speed Internet and know how to use it they will have "free" stuff available. If they take advantage of it - as the pirates presume is the case - then there is no more revenue for digital goods. They are all free, forever. This is the goal, the Star Trek world where money no longer has any meaning and everything is free. It is difficult to put into effect at the grocery store, but it is perfectly possible at the music or movie store.
For the most part, electric cars divide the physical space in the car between four things: passengers, storage, motor(s) and batteries. Batteries come last because they can be crammed in anywhere there is a bit of space left. Everywhere. Lots of batteries.
This pretty much means that you either break down the batteries into individual units or each car type has a unique set up shapes that go into it, just to fit into the space(s) for that type of car. I think you would end up with a lot of variety of packaging together the battery units for each car. Even with lead-acid batteries you end up with three here and four there and five more under that part over there.
Sure, I'd like to see a car that ran on D cells. Let's see, a D cell is about 1.6A/hr and you probably need more like 400 amps for 4-5 hours at around 48 volts. From this you would require 1600A/hrs at 48 volts or 32,000 D cells. There is your standard battery electric car! That Radio Shack battery card is going to really come in handy.
One problem is that a D cell weighs almost a pound, so that is a 16 ton car now.
Wouldn't it make sense to (a) see if this affects you in the slightest bit and (b) see if it is actually implemented?
It certainly sounds like the ISPs are doing this under protest in a manner designed to bring the Internet to a halt on 24 Dec. I'd guess that on the 26th things might be a little different.
Of course, nobody is going to stop you spending money needlessly. That is how the consumer culture works.
Of course the only people with standing are the oppressed women that suffer under Sharia.
And it would be oh so incorrect and unfair for anyone to actually imply that this was going on outside of the cultural locus where it applies. It would be like trying to get a slavemaster arrested for beating a slave... except maybe it is exactly like that.
Sorry, but when a political appointee isn't seen as following the lead of the appointer, especially when the office is officially held "at the pleasure" of the appointer, they get canned.
Happens in Chicago all the time. This was news because somebody assumed (correctly so) that most people don't understand how that kind of political appointee works.
Watch a whole new crop of US Attorneys are brought in with the new administration. What possible reason could there be for canning the lot of them? Other than perhaps they are political appointees and serve at the pleasure of the president. So Mr. Obama gets to put in a whole new set of Democrats.
Now, if these positions were not political appointments but instead Civil Service, then is would be different. The whole concept of Civil Service was to eliminate this kind of political appointment. Of course then we have a unelected and unresponsive bureaucracy. Just like most of the rest of the government is today.
Like Lessig said in his book, of the three kinds of P2P, only one can possibly harm the artist, and the other three actually help. P2P is no more a threat to the entertainment industries than the VCR and cassette were.
Indeed P2P is a great threat to all creators that use a digital medium. It is simple - I and everyone else on the Internet has a choice now. We can consume for free, or we can consume and pay. It is a simple and obvious choice.
I can choose to pay for what I download. I can use many different "stores" to make purchases. But at the same time, perhaps with even greater breadth of products to choose from, I can just take for free. Most of the people I know that are Internet-savvy are taking without paying. There doesn't seem to be any clear consequence to them why they would choose to pay.
There is no "download for free and pay later" option. How many times does the average person read a book or watch a movie? Once? Twice? OK, so now you have read it or seen it. Why would you ever, ever in your entire lifetime pay for the opportunity to do so again.
So I would say P2P is clearly harmful to content creators. If content is available in digital form, it is available today on the Internet for free. Sure, there may be greater familiarity with some content creators and it might mean that I would seek out there other works in the future. But if it is available for free, why would I ever pay for it?
Now this looks like a perfect world, as long as you aren't hoping for revenue from digital content. I do not see this going back to a "pay" model anytime soon, if ever.
Part of the problem is stigma. Let's say there was a high-profile child pornography ring in the city where the university is. Under the concept of "everyone deserves representation", shouldn't the law school assemble an army of lawyers to help out in the defense of the accused?
No, they wouldn't because the local (and maybe national) press would utterly crucify the school, the professors and the students.
Now, the RIAA is interesting because the battle is clearly over the University's rights to shield their students, no matter what the students do. In a lot of ways, the University may be right that they can shield the students and are not required to expend any resources on the behalf of the RIAA attempting to track down the students. It might even be that all the students were doing is covered by fair use. However, it is highly likely that the student's activities are in fact infringing on copyrights and shielding them isn't a great policy.
The one problem is that no matter how "wrong" the students may be, forcing the University to do anything at all in support of a lawsuit against the students would seem to be an unpopular move.
And besides, everyone that knows how is downloading stuff today. Free has won the day and paying for digital stuff is unlikely to ever come back into favor.
Solar? We are talking about around 100 100W lamps. 10KW or thereabout. Have you looked at the size solar panel you need for 10KW? And that would provide maybe 6 hours of light at best.
No, you can't replace these lamps with the kind of solar lamps you see at the hardware store for people's homes. These are a couple of LEDs - maybe 100ma total draw. Well, I guess you could but then you would be right back in the dark. While light pollution is an important aspect of astronomy, lighted parks mean people can use them after 6 PM or so.
I guess it would make some sense to just tell people to go back to a couple of candles a week and to stay in their homes after dark. It would certainly save lots of energy and fit in with the whole "reduce" lifestyle choices that some people believe we have to make. But I don't see a lot of popular support for that yet.
Maybe when our new president actually shuts some coal power plants down there will be more people thinking this way.
Property rights? How dare anyone assert property rights over materials just sitting out in the open air waiting for someone to recycle.
Besides, a lot of this is installed by governments and government agencies, so they can't really own it - it belongs to the people. Some folks just want to exercise their rights over their property. The right of recycle.
If this stuff was really all that important it would be defended. It isn't and law enforcement can't seem to do much about it. That means we are just going to have to live with this.
In Chandler, AZ park lights have had the wire removed for miles. The problem is that it cannot be stopped by law enforcement, which means it pretty much cannot be stopped at all.
Someone sees some wire, they take the wire and get cash. Nobody wants to infringe upon the rights of the scrap dealers, so accepting of wire from just about anyone is going to continue. We now have people that in order to buy their next HD TV are ripping out the wires to street lights, homes, and anywhere else that wire can be obtained.
It is an easy way to get cash with very limited risks.
Slashdot Mirror
When it is an "open" platform, applications can do whatever in the heck is possible. If the application requires Internet access to be useful, people would complain that the application did not work when data roaming was disabled. So the application authors take it upon themselves to insure that their application functions properly at all times.
Now, is this the right way to do it? Possibly not, but it is a choice that application authors can make for themselves.
Such devices are entirely too complicated to require each individual user run through a list of authorizations for each application. Blackberry has this and it would be a nightmare if it was really exposed to individual users. Normally, this is something the administrator does through authorizing the phone on the company BES system.
Utterly a unique Microsoft problem. Apple has changed CPU architectures twice and each time there was limited compatibility with emulation. The latest changed byte order and I can only imagine what that did for historical files for most applications.
But Microsoft gets dinged on "I can't run my 15-year-old Windows 3.11 applications!"
The problem is that Ted Kaczynski could be found by tracing down his movements and actions. There is no correspondence to the Internet.
If you don't brag and use reasonable caution it is possible to connect actions with a high probability to a computer. It is not certain and it never can be. It does not connect with a person at all, and cannot ever. Unless the person is stupid, you can't use any tracing information available on the Internet to connect to a person. Period.
What this means is that any crime on the Internet is possible and the perpetrator can never be brought to justice. Unless they reveal themselves in other ways. Unlike other crimes, criminals do not leave DNA, they do not leave fibers, hairs, or any other physical evidence. There is at best some circumstantial evidence that points to a computer - maybe. If the person uses a proxy or other tools even that is not possible.
So that pretty much leaves the idea of investigation out in the cold. There is nothing to investigate. Nobody to catch. Ever wonder why nobody ever gets prosecuted for distributing viruses or creating botnets unless they are bragging about it? RIchard Smith, the author of the I Love You worm got prosecuted because he pretty much signed his name. When was the last botnet herder convicted of anything? It will never happen.
The "music business" isn't a viable business any longer. Period. There is no "adapt". You can't adapt to a situation where the sale of your product is undercut by distributors passing it out for free. So any idea of selling recorded music has got to go.
What could possibly compensate artists? Patronage is a bad idea that was stamped out with the death of feudalism. Doing it for ego-reasons - because the artist feels it has to be done - doesn't feed the children or pay the rent. Any sort of tax is going to run into massive fraud and evasion. Trying to give the music away and sell T-shirts or hope for huge concert sales only helps a very few artists. Most artists and performers are going to be playing bars and clubs for pocket change and drinks. And that is the way it is going to be, because music is now free.
Any semblance of value in recorded music has pretty much been destroyed. Partly by record companies deciding what to market based on what was selling last year. Partly by really awful bands commanding the same prices as top performers. Partly by piracy exerting really strong negative pricing pressure. Might as well face up to it, you can't compete with free and win.
That seems to be the open source message, right?
After all, once it is in digital form, why pay?
The problem is, your statements are written out. They are "in print". People have known for a hundred years or more that only things "in print" are true and not to pay attention to anything else.
Therefore, lots of folks believe only what is written on the Internet. I guess if you stated these things in a YouTube video it would have less credibility.
Further, most people will believe any negative comment about a business or product. And the state of businesses must be really awful because you see so few positive comments. Obviously, all businesses are terrible which just lends further credibility to any negative comments. Completely self-reinforcing.
Thie plantiff needs to learn this and realize the only solution is to shut down and move.
Do you not believe accusing a food service establishment of being unsanitary is not defamtory? What sort of places to you eat at, anyway?
Or are you trying to say that it is only defamatory if untrue?
That is usually what it is called when you are doing something that affects a business in a negative manner. Slander and libel are problematic because even though we are all "journalists" now, the publishing of an opinion probably doesn't carry that much weight.
The question is more likely can you have an unmoderated forum of nothing but negative comments about businesses without ever incurring legal liability? For most of the history of the world, the answer has been no, you can't. Today, with the Internet the operator of the forum may be hard to find, too hard for an assembly of people with torches and buckets of tar to locate and deliver punishment.
I'd think that the operator of the forum can either shield participants and take all the heat or serve up the participants and hope nobody actually sues them. In today's world, betting you will not be sued is a very risky bet.
Right. There are a couple of differences with your selling it. First off, it isn't being claimed as new. Next, the customer gets (maybe) what is left on a factory warranty and maybe not even that since they aren't the registered owner.
Compare this to a supposed individual selling for 10% over cost claiming it is new and comes with a factory warranty. Big suprise for the buyer may be that the factory will not honor such graymarket warranties.
It is that last point about lost tokens that is the real deterrent to wide implementation in the US. Some huge number of police calls are because of lost car keys, so you can imagine what the result would be.
In Arizona it appears anyone can get a replacement driver's license mailed out by requesting it over the phone. This pretty much means that you can get your friend's driver's license mailed out to them and all you have to do then is intercept that piece of mail.
I thought now all persons in the US (legally or illegally) were now eligible for Social Security benefits. There was some recent decision about this specifically addressing undocumented workers. After all, they are paying in so shouldn't they get all the benefits? At least that was the thinking that led to this.
So it is OK to advertise child-porn web sites using cartoon figures in the US now. Great, I am sure lots of people will pay for child porn web sites and now we have the ideal advertising vehicle that is perfectly legal.
Right?
Or do you think this might be what they had in mind all along?
Because none of what you are describing involves "copying", one of the key items in the laws surrounding the concept of "copyright".
This problem is that most people of average intelligence and not wealthy are ready and willing to be taken in by almost any sales approach. Trying to outlaw "deceptive marketing" to these people would mean you couldn't sell them a newspaper subscription.
There are some organizations that go out of their way to mislead people, but most people are very willing to be misled all by themselves and even encourage it. So is it worth trying to explain to someone that if all they want is the Sunday paper that it is actually cheaper to get the whole week's papers because that is how it is sold? Is it really deceptive to give the person what they think they want, regardless that it costs more? Lots of folks would say selling someone what they want when it is more expensive than some alternative is indeed "deceptive". With this in mind, I'd say you would have to get rid of all sales, marketing and advertising to avoid "deceiving" most people of average intelligence.
The point is to remove revenue from digital goods. This will succeed at some point, mostly because we are training up an entire generation with the idea that "stuff on the Internet is free." They are going to utilize the Internet and the tools given to them to find free stuff and take advantage of it.
The "pay" sites, like Amazon, are going to suffer because of it. There isn't any two ways about it.
Sure, every now and then you get some guilt-ridden person saying that piracy just makes them want to spend more money. That may in fact be the way it works for some people. Unfortunately for content creators it is not the way it works for people with limited funds and limited time. If I watch a movie for free I may never watch it again, ever. The idea of running down to the store to buy it now that I have seen it is completely foreign to me and most of the rest of humanity. There are limits to how this applies to music but for most of the iPod generation the idea is "having" and even having a crappy MP3 is indeed "having". Buying a CD to rip it into an equally crappy MP3 is a lot of work - and I "have" it already, right?
I firmly believe that most of the hardcore pirates really believe they can "win". Once the majority of people have high-speed Internet and know how to use it they will have "free" stuff available. If they take advantage of it - as the pirates presume is the case - then there is no more revenue for digital goods. They are all free, forever. This is the goal, the Star Trek world where money no longer has any meaning and everything is free. It is difficult to put into effect at the grocery store, but it is perfectly possible at the music or movie store.
Why would anyone other than a complete idiot choose "buy" when "take free" is offered?
Are you suggesting we support idiocy? Should idiots get a tax break for being stupid?
For the most part, electric cars divide the physical space in the car between four things: passengers, storage, motor(s) and batteries. Batteries come last because they can be crammed in anywhere there is a bit of space left. Everywhere. Lots of batteries.
This pretty much means that you either break down the batteries into individual units or each car type has a unique set up shapes that go into it, just to fit into the space(s) for that type of car. I think you would end up with a lot of variety of packaging together the battery units for each car. Even with lead-acid batteries you end up with three here and four there and five more under that part over there.
Sure, I'd like to see a car that ran on D cells. Let's see, a D cell is about 1.6A/hr and you probably need more like 400 amps for 4-5 hours at around 48 volts. From this you would require 1600A/hrs at 48 volts or 32,000 D cells. There is your standard battery electric car! That Radio Shack battery card is going to really come in handy.
One problem is that a D cell weighs almost a pound, so that is a 16 ton car now.
Wouldn't it make sense to (a) see if this affects you in the slightest bit and (b) see if it is actually implemented?
It certainly sounds like the ISPs are doing this under protest in a manner designed to bring the Internet to a halt on 24 Dec. I'd guess that on the 26th things might be a little different.
Of course, nobody is going to stop you spending money needlessly. That is how the consumer culture works.
Of course the only people with standing are the oppressed women that suffer under Sharia.
And it would be oh so incorrect and unfair for anyone to actually imply that this was going on outside of the cultural locus where it applies. It would be like trying to get a slavemaster arrested for beating a slave... except maybe it is exactly like that.
Sorry, but when a political appointee isn't seen as following the lead of the appointer, especially when the office is officially held "at the pleasure" of the appointer, they get canned.
Happens in Chicago all the time. This was news because somebody assumed (correctly so) that most people don't understand how that kind of political appointee works.
Watch a whole new crop of US Attorneys are brought in with the new administration. What possible reason could there be for canning the lot of them? Other than perhaps they are political appointees and serve at the pleasure of the president. So Mr. Obama gets to put in a whole new set of Democrats.
Now, if these positions were not political appointments but instead Civil Service, then is would be different. The whole concept of Civil Service was to eliminate this kind of political appointment. Of course then we have a unelected and unresponsive bureaucracy. Just like most of the rest of the government is today.
Indeed P2P is a great threat to all creators that use a digital medium. It is simple - I and everyone else on the Internet has a choice now. We can consume for free, or we can consume and pay. It is a simple and obvious choice.
I can choose to pay for what I download. I can use many different "stores" to make purchases. But at the same time, perhaps with even greater breadth of products to choose from, I can just take for free. Most of the people I know that are Internet-savvy are taking without paying. There doesn't seem to be any clear consequence to them why they would choose to pay.
There is no "download for free and pay later" option. How many times does the average person read a book or watch a movie? Once? Twice? OK, so now you have read it or seen it. Why would you ever, ever in your entire lifetime pay for the opportunity to do so again.
So I would say P2P is clearly harmful to content creators. If content is available in digital form, it is available today on the Internet for free. Sure, there may be greater familiarity with some content creators and it might mean that I would seek out there other works in the future. But if it is available for free, why would I ever pay for it?
Now this looks like a perfect world, as long as you aren't hoping for revenue from digital content. I do not see this going back to a "pay" model anytime soon, if ever.
Part of the problem is stigma. Let's say there was a high-profile child pornography ring in the city where the university is. Under the concept of "everyone deserves representation", shouldn't the law school assemble an army of lawyers to help out in the defense of the accused?
No, they wouldn't because the local (and maybe national) press would utterly crucify the school, the professors and the students.
Now, the RIAA is interesting because the battle is clearly over the University's rights to shield their students, no matter what the students do. In a lot of ways, the University may be right that they can shield the students and are not required to expend any resources on the behalf of the RIAA attempting to track down the students. It might even be that all the students were doing is covered by fair use. However, it is highly likely that the student's activities are in fact infringing on copyrights and shielding them isn't a great policy.
The one problem is that no matter how "wrong" the students may be, forcing the University to do anything at all in support of a lawsuit against the students would seem to be an unpopular move.
And besides, everyone that knows how is downloading stuff today. Free has won the day and paying for digital stuff is unlikely to ever come back into favor.
Solar? We are talking about around 100 100W lamps. 10KW or thereabout. Have you looked at the size solar panel you need for 10KW? And that would provide maybe 6 hours of light at best.
No, you can't replace these lamps with the kind of solar lamps you see at the hardware store for people's homes. These are a couple of LEDs - maybe 100ma total draw. Well, I guess you could but then you would be right back in the dark. While light pollution is an important aspect of astronomy, lighted parks mean people can use them after 6 PM or so.
I guess it would make some sense to just tell people to go back to a couple of candles a week and to stay in their homes after dark. It would certainly save lots of energy and fit in with the whole "reduce" lifestyle choices that some people believe we have to make. But I don't see a lot of popular support for that yet.
Maybe when our new president actually shuts some coal power plants down there will be more people thinking this way.
Property rights? How dare anyone assert property rights over materials just sitting out in the open air waiting for someone to recycle.
Besides, a lot of this is installed by governments and government agencies, so they can't really own it - it belongs to the people. Some folks just want to exercise their rights over their property. The right of recycle.
If this stuff was really all that important it would be defended. It isn't and law enforcement can't seem to do much about it. That means we are just going to have to live with this.
In Chandler, AZ park lights have had the wire removed for miles. The problem is that it cannot be stopped by law enforcement, which means it pretty much cannot be stopped at all.
Someone sees some wire, they take the wire and get cash. Nobody wants to infringe upon the rights of the scrap dealers, so accepting of wire from just about anyone is going to continue. We now have people that in order to buy their next HD TV are ripping out the wires to street lights, homes, and anywhere else that wire can be obtained.
It is an easy way to get cash with very limited risks.