First off, is the transition team a government entity? Does it in reality have any association with the US Government at all? I suspect it does not. Therefore, all the yammering about the videos being in the public domain may not apply at all. The videos may be created by an independent contractor paid for as part of the non-governmental transition. The transition team is not paid by taxpayer funds, you know...
If these videos are in fact public domain, then I can create my own version of them. For humor, parody or any other purpose whatsoever. I can use this source material and inter-edit it with anything else I would like to and publish the results. Is this a good idea? Let's have a contest for the most outrageous, over-the-top video composed of at least 20% Obama public-domain video and see what we get, shall we?
Parents have not exercised proper control over their children. Obvious on the face of it.
Government has recognized this lacking and is preparing to step up to the plate, at least in some minimal aspect.
This removes the need for any "parenting" in that specific area. Of course, since "parenting" is an obsolete concept that seems to have gone out of favor with June Cleaver we can expect further government action.
It is an obvious step. The government can't legislate "parenting" so they are going to (ineffectively) step into that role. The people have spoken, by not doing any parenting themselves. I believe we can expect similar action in the US sometime soon. The nanny state expands to fill all voids.
You don't push custom features upstream.. upstream won't even accept them unless they are something everyone would want.
Depends on the definition of "everyone". It also depends on how products are written and maintained. I agree, with 80% of the developers out there stuff is coded so inflexibly that new stuff can't be implemented in a customer-reasonable timeframe.
Obviously, the key is to not get caught in that trap. Because adding requested features is really the lifeblood of commercial software.
There will not be an ongoing market for custom software. Nearly every business school or other place where people talk about real business has been harping on the incredible screwing over businesses have gotten over the years from programmers, software companies, and consultants. This is what led to most of the packaged software revolution of the 1980s.
Before that, it was all custom. Nobody sold anything that was a package that didn't need some customization. In 10-15 years nothing will be custom and everyone will just be picking stuff (free or not) off the shelf and using it. Why? Because every knowledgable person will have told everyone starting a business that to do otherwise is just asking to be screwed.
Sorry, the "custom software" game is just about done.
Do you believe that your average flyer today has the courage and determination to go up against a determined person wanting to damage or bring down the aircraft? Today's mollycoddled, welfare-fed, government supported flyer is likely to sit there and say anything is OK with them as long as they aren't late meeting Aunt Katie.
Even on flight 93 there were only one or two "leaders" that inspired a few of the passengers to action. Even when everyone on the plane knew that only certain death awaited them.
In the current East vs. West struggle, the difference is "they" are far more willing to devalue lives than "we" are.
No Western religion says you can achieve benefits from giving up your live in service to some higher being. Islam clearly and often says you get benefits from giving up your life in service of Allah. This is a key and important difference.
No, it isn't possible to be perfectly and completely safe. However, it is entirely possible to keep people that believe in a better afterlife from bringing unwilling people with them. The most effective way is simply isolation. They don't seem to want to interact with us for purposes other than subugation and we really don't need them either. After all, 12th Century countries just don't need much in the way of consumer goods or anything else we produce. Our food isn't even farmed according to their dietary laws.
Enabling auto-update implies the user trusts Microsoft to (a) update Windows properly and (b) not steal their bank account and credit card information with each update.
I would say most Windows users do not believe in (a). Some think they know better what updates to install than Microsoft suggests.
A significant number of users do not believe in (b). They have heard so much trash talk about Microsoft that they believe it is a criminal enterprise being operated by the Mafia.
I would say there is no hope for anything good coming from this set of beliefs.
We are seeing that abusing freedom has consequences. Unfortunately, not so directly upon the people doing the abusing.
Why are some cold remedies restricted? Because people make incredibly damaging drugs from them. Credit cards? Well, you get what you asked for - use it, abuse it and pay for it the rest of your life. At least they are more damaging to the abusers than non-abusers.
Yes, we should certainly empty the prisons. Take home a prisoner today! As long as we can agree there will be no prisoners in whatever place I am living, I am all for the idea. You see, we had this idea of emptying the mental hospitals in he 1970s and the result was the homeless population went up like 20x in the first year after the closings. I suspect emptying the prisons would work just as well.
Ever think why so many people are finding their way into the justice system? Is it just power-mad corrupt police? Or do you think that there actually are a bunch of people that think they can get away with just about anything?
Neither is likely to happen. The problem is 80-90% of the users are not using anywhere near the bandwidth they have available or what they have been "sold". The big (imaginary) numbers being tossed around are a marketing tool. It is like having a car with a speedometer calibrated to 180 when the car might get up to 120 going downhill with a tailwind.
To update the infrastructure is a non-starter. Why can't they just get more bandwidth? In most cases it is partly because there isn't any more at the head end. Period. Getting two OC48s going to the same router connected to an OC48 does not get you "more bandwidth". That is clearly going to be the situation in a lot of cable head ends. I suspect DSL is likely worse.
Stop overselling? Sure, that has worked well with car speedometers. Until overall usage starts to justify building fatter backbones for the Internet in the US, we are unlikely to see any real improvements. And the cost of doing this will be significant. So, are we going to get reality from the sales and marketing departments? No, because it is all about market share and people want their car with a 180MPH speedometer or a 50Mb/sec Internet connection that can really only deliver 2Mb/sec.
They can't sell them for another reason - disposal of the batteries. If they sell them the manufacturer cannot guarantee to the states that the batteries will be disposed of "properly." Failure to do so results in a toxic waste mess for the EPA to clean up, nationwide.
Of course, this is assuming we still can't get around the idea that everything, including farts, are hazardous waste.
GM tried to produce an all-electric car with 1990's technology. Their reward was the car was denied permission to be sold because of toxic waste considerations. Is there any assurance that similar actions will not befall future electric cars?
Today, lead is considered a hazardous substance that requires warning stickers and signs in places where it may be encountered. What about lithium in large quantities, such as in 1,000 (or more) battery cells in a car? What about the potential for a short circuit causing a fire which releases hazardous gases?
Without any assurances - and there really can't be today - mass production of electric vehicles is an extremely risky venture. The EV1 could not be sold in California because it was impossible to control movement of the cars after sale. The state pretty much declared the car to be a rolling toxic waste dump. Why is it impossible for other, future electric vehicles to be declared the same? The answer right now is that it is not impossible. So producing electric cars on a massive scale is still pretty risky. You might have a lot of unsalable cars when you are done.
Well, my understanding for the limited release of the EV1 was really simple - the car was a rolling toxic waste dump. It was illegal to do anything with the car except bury it in a protected landfill.
Do you think you want millions of toxic waste dumps rolling around on the road? Sure, gasoline is dangerous but we finally got the lead out. How many children's lives would be ruined by lead-acid batteries in electric cars? How many children would require permanent residental care because of being unable to care for themselves?
Sure, electric cars might be a nice idea. You need to figure out a way to make sure that more lives are not sacrificed because of a bad battery decision. Like the EV1 was.
I think you misunderstand. Intelligence - at least meaningful intelligence - can be represented by a few things. One of them is clearly exercising control over the environment or habitat. You mention roads. Well, yes, that is an example of such control. But control extends to shelter, exclusion of things that are harmful (pests, vermin, disease, etc.) as well as many other things. Use of tools is a clear sign of intelligence because that shows control over environment.
Radio transmissions are a secondary effect of this control - first you have to have a significant level of environmental control in order to build and power the radio transmitter.
Most signs of control are going to be recognizable from orbit and maybe somewhat further off. I suspect that it would be extremely difficult to judge a lifeform as intelligent if this control was not evident to an average person today.
Probably the biggest problem that has been theorized is encountering a civilization where this control exists but is done through an unknown mechanism that we can't recognize. Something like controlling the genetic makeup of plants such that they autotomously build shelters. This would be difficult to recognize from a distance and may not be clear even in person.
What if a plant could be bred that would form a microwave dish and transform heat and light into microwave energy emitted from the dish?
We can have long conversations about dolphins, whales and chimpanzees. Unfortunately (for them) dolphins and whales apparently do not influence or control their environment in any way. Even in ways the could, such as herding of food. Chimps have been seen using tools in the wild, but not often enough or with clear purpose to really judge them as intelligent.
The basic reason that companies do not want to release pricing on B2B sales not just that they charge different prices to different customers. If you are an idiot and shopping for a large server you might look at web sites for pricing and choose solely based on price. You would be demonstrating to everyone that you are an idiot, but some companies do indeed employ idiots.
So you discover that the server with 1024 processors and 12 terabytes of RAM from an unknown company in Taiwan that is a reseller for a company in China has the lowest price. Quality isn't going to enter your mind - you are going to present your boss with an unbeatable deal based on price. And your expertise in selecting systems that will work. Of course your boss will love you for your low-price choice. For maybe a month.
So how do you compare large scale server systems from IBM, Dell, HP and others? Well, maybe the most important attribute isn't price. Perhaps price is so utterly unimportant for a mission-critical system that it is just a distraction. So disclosing price doesn't help anyone in reality - it helps anal bean counters and idiots that buy stuff based on price rather than features, quality and support.
And anyone that confuses GSA pricing with the prices that are quoted to non-government entities is in for a surprise. No, you don't get GSA pricing unless you are government. Sometimes you get better, sometimes worse prices. Sometimes government folks buy open market instead of GSA because they can get better deals than GSA based on things GSA doesn't take into account, like quantity discounting.
Huh? GSA pricing is public information. GSA prices are only available to state & federal government entities.
For everyone else, HP gets to set "other" prices and these certainly are trade secret. And protected by NDA, I am sure. Clearly they are going to sue and find the leaker. This information is protected for a reason.
The overselling is very understandable when to most users it matters not if their HTML email spam is downloaded from a 1Mb or 20Mb connection. And a 250GB per month cap is meaningless to the users that use only 1GB a month.
Now when you have 1% of the users actually using 20Mb and angry about the 250GB cap, can you understand why the cable company isn't very receptive? Of course, should this reach 5% their system will be unusable. But it has been impossible to justify massive expansion throughout the network when the user community is split like this.
Finally, the biggest problem for most ISPs in the US is still marketshare and penetration. In some affluent areas it is approaching 100%, but throughout most of the country it is far, far less than that. Maybe 10%. Should this change, they might actually be motivated to invest in the kind of massive rebuilding you would like to see. Until then, expect little to happen to benefit 1% of the customer base.
Most of the time the deed or purchase agreement has an HOA clause in it. It is set up that way when the community is established. Just about everyone in the Phoenix area has an HOA and there is no opting out of it. It is sanctioned by state law.
Re:I.e., the community should own the infrastructu
on
Houses With Tails
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· Score: 1
You need to read up on the telephone system someday. We had "community telephone companies" in the 1960's. As the rest of the Bell system modernized with electronic switching, these guys still had mechanical crossbar switches.
Innovation? Nah, there wasn't enough money in a small telephone company to do it. Lots of these places had less than 1,000 customers and one switch.
This has been tried in the past and it didn't work very well. I guess you could say it worked well enough to get some people phone service, but nobody was very happy about it.
Re:Already Done With WiFi
on
Houses With Tails
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Absolutely, it is just because the greedy monopoly wants to maximize their profits.
And liability has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. Sure. Because everyone knows that you aren't responsible for anything that happens with YOUR connection. You can't connect an IP address to an individual so whatever happens on the Internet stays on the Internet. Right.
So your neighbor, sharing your Internet connection, decides to use LimeWire to share their 10,000 song collection. Which finally comes to the notice of someone who asks the ISP who this IP address belongs to. Well, it turns out that YOU are the account holder at YOUR address.
No, it would be impossible for anyone to actually be harrassed legally because of this. Everyone knows these days that the account holder has no responsibility whatsoever. After all your wireless router has an SSID of FreeLeechn just to emphasize the point.
Magnify the above by 10,000 and you will begin to understand why ISPs do not allow sharing. Is the legal system behind the times? Sure. But just exactly who would you hold responsible when all the tracks come back to your front door? Trust me, the answer that society is looking for is not "nobody."
When you can download for free? How are they getting any sales at all?
The pirates whose goal is the elimination of revenue from digital goods are clearly not doing a good enough job. The rest of the folks, just leeches mostly, are getting theirs but evidently some people just don't know.
As with all computer issues, it is just a matter of education.
Yes, people have done this before. But mostly people have done it in an environment of trade-secret vs. patented code. If there are patents involved you need to decide how litigious the company is. If they are apt to throw lots of money at lawyers, you might have a problem.
I would offer that it takes more than some programmers to set up a company. You need a management team that you can get along with. If you start with a bunch of programmers and nobody else, you will almost certainly fail. Having some folks that can garner investors and operate the business can make the whole thing work and you will certainly wipe out your current employer. The key is that the programming talent shouldn't need to worry about a lot of operational issues.
Iraq became a police action needing law enforcement, not military force, from the moment President Bush stood on the carrier deck saying "Mission Accomplished". From that moment forward using military troops in Iraq became the wrong approach. You don't use the Army as a police force. Any information derived from soldiers misused as policemen is irrelevent.
The only ethics needed or desired on the battlefield is to win the day. Period. Doing anything else is a formula for disaster. As can be shown in Vietnam. We didn't use the maximum force to full effect, we danced around and tried to do everything but defeat the enemy. The result - South Vietnam was overrun and lots of people died.
Once you leave the scenario of the battlefield, you can talk about ethics. You also stop needing soldiers and start needing diplomats and policemen. Consuing the two doesn't work and provably so.
Do you think you want to confront someone that either (a) just stole your laptop or (b) paid for a stolen laptop? I would suggest that you should expect to be confronted with deadly force should you try to separate them from their acquisition. Lack of preparedness on your part may cause your next of kin to receive a financial windfall - your life insurance.
Law enforcement? Sorry, they aren't going to care. You should have insurance against such trivial losses. If you don't you are making a mistake in assuming that anyone is out to really punish criminals.
What this means is that an IP cannot be connected to a person. It is obvious that this is widely applicable.
Within a year this should be clear that anything, and I mean ANYTHING, goes on the Internet. You cannot be convicted of anything by leaving an IP address in a log somewhere. You can, of course, be convicted if you put your (real) name, address and such in the same posting as the death threat against your childhood nemesis.
You wouldn't believe how many incredibly dumb people will do just about that. Or brag openly about how they are "getting away with murder".
I'd say this is clear justification for appeals based on illegal searches without probable cause for anyone that has been convicted of anything where the original seizure of their computer was based on an IP address.
Ha. Blackberry is one heck of a secure device. Most FBI agents carry them, issued by the FBI. Do you think there is any possibility of a leak there? They are tied into the FBI secure email system.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, is the transition team a government entity? Does it in reality have any association with the US Government at all? I suspect it does not. Therefore, all the yammering about the videos being in the public domain may not apply at all. The videos may be created by an independent contractor paid for as part of the non-governmental transition. The transition team is not paid by taxpayer funds, you know...
If these videos are in fact public domain, then I can create my own version of them. For humor, parody or any other purpose whatsoever. I can use this source material and inter-edit it with anything else I would like to and publish the results. Is this a good idea? Let's have a contest for the most outrageous, over-the-top video composed of at least 20% Obama public-domain video and see what we get, shall we?
Parents have not exercised proper control over their children. Obvious on the face of it.
Government has recognized this lacking and is preparing to step up to the plate, at least in some minimal aspect.
This removes the need for any "parenting" in that specific area. Of course, since "parenting" is an obsolete concept that seems to have gone out of favor with June Cleaver we can expect further government action.
It is an obvious step. The government can't legislate "parenting" so they are going to (ineffectively) step into that role. The people have spoken, by not doing any parenting themselves. I believe we can expect similar action in the US sometime soon. The nanny state expands to fill all voids.
Depends on the definition of "everyone". It also depends on how products are written and maintained. I agree, with 80% of the developers out there stuff is coded so inflexibly that new stuff can't be implemented in a customer-reasonable timeframe.
Obviously, the key is to not get caught in that trap. Because adding requested features is really the lifeblood of commercial software.
There will not be an ongoing market for custom software. Nearly every business school or other place where people talk about real business has been harping on the incredible screwing over businesses have gotten over the years from programmers, software companies, and consultants. This is what led to most of the packaged software revolution of the 1980s.
Before that, it was all custom. Nobody sold anything that was a package that didn't need some customization. In 10-15 years nothing will be custom and everyone will just be picking stuff (free or not) off the shelf and using it. Why? Because every knowledgable person will have told everyone starting a business that to do otherwise is just asking to be screwed.
Sorry, the "custom software" game is just about done.
Do you believe that your average flyer today has the courage and determination to go up against a determined person wanting to damage or bring down the aircraft? Today's mollycoddled, welfare-fed, government supported flyer is likely to sit there and say anything is OK with them as long as they aren't late meeting Aunt Katie.
Even on flight 93 there were only one or two "leaders" that inspired a few of the passengers to action. Even when everyone on the plane knew that only certain death awaited them.
In the current East vs. West struggle, the difference is "they" are far more willing to devalue lives than "we" are.
No Western religion says you can achieve benefits from giving up your live in service to some higher being. Islam clearly and often says you get benefits from giving up your life in service of Allah. This is a key and important difference.
No, it isn't possible to be perfectly and completely safe. However, it is entirely possible to keep people that believe in a better afterlife from bringing unwilling people with them. The most effective way is simply isolation. They don't seem to want to interact with us for purposes other than subugation and we really don't need them either. After all, 12th Century countries just don't need much in the way of consumer goods or anything else we produce. Our food isn't even farmed according to their dietary laws.
Enabling auto-update implies the user trusts Microsoft to (a) update Windows properly and (b) not steal their bank account and credit card information with each update.
I would say most Windows users do not believe in (a). Some think they know better what updates to install than Microsoft suggests.
A significant number of users do not believe in (b). They have heard so much trash talk about Microsoft that they believe it is a criminal enterprise being operated by the Mafia.
I would say there is no hope for anything good coming from this set of beliefs.
We are seeing that abusing freedom has consequences. Unfortunately, not so directly upon the people doing the abusing.
Why are some cold remedies restricted? Because people make incredibly damaging drugs from them. Credit cards? Well, you get what you asked for - use it, abuse it and pay for it the rest of your life. At least they are more damaging to the abusers than non-abusers.
Yes, we should certainly empty the prisons. Take home a prisoner today! As long as we can agree there will be no prisoners in whatever place I am living, I am all for the idea. You see, we had this idea of emptying the mental hospitals in he 1970s and the result was the homeless population went up like 20x in the first year after the closings. I suspect emptying the prisons would work just as well.
Ever think why so many people are finding their way into the justice system? Is it just power-mad corrupt police? Or do you think that there actually are a bunch of people that think they can get away with just about anything?
Neither is likely to happen. The problem is 80-90% of the users are not using anywhere near the bandwidth they have available or what they have been "sold". The big (imaginary) numbers being tossed around are a marketing tool. It is like having a car with a speedometer calibrated to 180 when the car might get up to 120 going downhill with a tailwind.
To update the infrastructure is a non-starter. Why can't they just get more bandwidth? In most cases it is partly because there isn't any more at the head end. Period. Getting two OC48s going to the same router connected to an OC48 does not get you "more bandwidth". That is clearly going to be the situation in a lot of cable head ends. I suspect DSL is likely worse.
Stop overselling? Sure, that has worked well with car speedometers. Until overall usage starts to justify building fatter backbones for the Internet in the US, we are unlikely to see any real improvements. And the cost of doing this will be significant. So, are we going to get reality from the sales and marketing departments? No, because it is all about market share and people want their car with a 180MPH speedometer or a 50Mb/sec Internet connection that can really only deliver 2Mb/sec.
They can't sell them for another reason - disposal of the batteries. If they sell them the manufacturer cannot guarantee to the states that the batteries will be disposed of "properly." Failure to do so results in a toxic waste mess for the EPA to clean up, nationwide.
Of course, this is assuming we still can't get around the idea that everything, including farts, are hazardous waste.
GM tried to produce an all-electric car with 1990's technology. Their reward was the car was denied permission to be sold because of toxic waste considerations. Is there any assurance that similar actions will not befall future electric cars?
Today, lead is considered a hazardous substance that requires warning stickers and signs in places where it may be encountered. What about lithium in large quantities, such as in 1,000 (or more) battery cells in a car? What about the potential for a short circuit causing a fire which releases hazardous gases?
Without any assurances - and there really can't be today - mass production of electric vehicles is an extremely risky venture. The EV1 could not be sold in California because it was impossible to control movement of the cars after sale. The state pretty much declared the car to be a rolling toxic waste dump. Why is it impossible for other, future electric vehicles to be declared the same? The answer right now is that it is not impossible. So producing electric cars on a massive scale is still pretty risky. You might have a lot of unsalable cars when you are done.
Well, my understanding for the limited release of the EV1 was really simple - the car was a rolling toxic waste dump. It was illegal to do anything with the car except bury it in a protected landfill.
Do you think you want millions of toxic waste dumps rolling around on the road? Sure, gasoline is dangerous but we finally got the lead out. How many children's lives would be ruined by lead-acid batteries in electric cars? How many children would require permanent residental care because of being unable to care for themselves?
Sure, electric cars might be a nice idea. You need to figure out a way to make sure that more lives are not sacrificed because of a bad battery decision. Like the EV1 was.
I think you misunderstand. Intelligence - at least meaningful intelligence - can be represented by a few things. One of them is clearly exercising control over the environment or habitat. You mention roads. Well, yes, that is an example of such control. But control extends to shelter, exclusion of things that are harmful (pests, vermin, disease, etc.) as well as many other things. Use of tools is a clear sign of intelligence because that shows control over environment.
Radio transmissions are a secondary effect of this control - first you have to have a significant level of environmental control in order to build and power the radio transmitter.
Most signs of control are going to be recognizable from orbit and maybe somewhat further off. I suspect that it would be extremely difficult to judge a lifeform as intelligent if this control was not evident to an average person today.
Probably the biggest problem that has been theorized is encountering a civilization where this control exists but is done through an unknown mechanism that we can't recognize. Something like controlling the genetic makeup of plants such that they autotomously build shelters. This would be difficult to recognize from a distance and may not be clear even in person.
What if a plant could be bred that would form a microwave dish and transform heat and light into microwave energy emitted from the dish?
We can have long conversations about dolphins, whales and chimpanzees. Unfortunately (for them) dolphins and whales apparently do not influence or control their environment in any way. Even in ways the could, such as herding of food. Chimps have been seen using tools in the wild, but not often enough or with clear purpose to really judge them as intelligent.
I can't believe the comments here.
The basic reason that companies do not want to release pricing on B2B sales not just that they charge different prices to different customers. If you are an idiot and shopping for a large server you might look at web sites for pricing and choose solely based on price. You would be demonstrating to everyone that you are an idiot, but some companies do indeed employ idiots.
So you discover that the server with 1024 processors and 12 terabytes of RAM from an unknown company in Taiwan that is a reseller for a company in China has the lowest price. Quality isn't going to enter your mind - you are going to present your boss with an unbeatable deal based on price. And your expertise in selecting systems that will work. Of course your boss will love you for your low-price choice. For maybe a month.
So how do you compare large scale server systems from IBM, Dell, HP and others? Well, maybe the most important attribute isn't price. Perhaps price is so utterly unimportant for a mission-critical system that it is just a distraction. So disclosing price doesn't help anyone in reality - it helps anal bean counters and idiots that buy stuff based on price rather than features, quality and support.
And anyone that confuses GSA pricing with the prices that are quoted to non-government entities is in for a surprise. No, you don't get GSA pricing unless you are government. Sometimes you get better, sometimes worse prices. Sometimes government folks buy open market instead of GSA because they can get better deals than GSA based on things GSA doesn't take into account, like quantity discounting.
Huh? GSA pricing is public information. GSA prices are only available to state & federal government entities.
For everyone else, HP gets to set "other" prices and these certainly are trade secret. And protected by NDA, I am sure. Clearly they are going to sue and find the leaker. This information is protected for a reason.
The overselling is very understandable when to most users it matters not if their HTML email spam is downloaded from a 1Mb or 20Mb connection. And a 250GB per month cap is meaningless to the users that use only 1GB a month.
Now when you have 1% of the users actually using 20Mb and angry about the 250GB cap, can you understand why the cable company isn't very receptive? Of course, should this reach 5% their system will be unusable. But it has been impossible to justify massive expansion throughout the network when the user community is split like this.
Finally, the biggest problem for most ISPs in the US is still marketshare and penetration. In some affluent areas it is approaching 100%, but throughout most of the country it is far, far less than that. Maybe 10%. Should this change, they might actually be motivated to invest in the kind of massive rebuilding you would like to see. Until then, expect little to happen to benefit 1% of the customer base.
Most of the time the deed or purchase agreement has an HOA clause in it. It is set up that way when the community is established. Just about everyone in the Phoenix area has an HOA and there is no opting out of it. It is sanctioned by state law.
You need to read up on the telephone system someday. We had "community telephone companies" in the 1960's. As the rest of the Bell system modernized with electronic switching, these guys still had mechanical crossbar switches.
Innovation? Nah, there wasn't enough money in a small telephone company to do it. Lots of these places had less than 1,000 customers and one switch.
This has been tried in the past and it didn't work very well. I guess you could say it worked well enough to get some people phone service, but nobody was very happy about it.
Absolutely, it is just because the greedy monopoly wants to maximize their profits.
And liability has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. Sure. Because everyone knows that you aren't responsible for anything that happens with YOUR connection. You can't connect an IP address to an individual so whatever happens on the Internet stays on the Internet. Right.
So your neighbor, sharing your Internet connection, decides to use LimeWire to share their 10,000 song collection. Which finally comes to the notice of someone who asks the ISP who this IP address belongs to. Well, it turns out that YOU are the account holder at YOUR address.
No, it would be impossible for anyone to actually be harrassed legally because of this. Everyone knows these days that the account holder has no responsibility whatsoever. After all your wireless router has an SSID of FreeLeechn just to emphasize the point.
Magnify the above by 10,000 and you will begin to understand why ISPs do not allow sharing. Is the legal system behind the times? Sure. But just exactly who would you hold responsible when all the tracks come back to your front door? Trust me, the answer that society is looking for is not "nobody."
When you can download for free? How are they getting any sales at all?
The pirates whose goal is the elimination of revenue from digital goods are clearly not doing a good enough job. The rest of the folks, just leeches mostly, are getting theirs but evidently some people just don't know.
As with all computer issues, it is just a matter of education.
Yes, people have done this before. But mostly people have done it in an environment of trade-secret vs. patented code. If there are patents involved you need to decide how litigious the company is. If they are apt to throw lots of money at lawyers, you might have a problem.
I would offer that it takes more than some programmers to set up a company. You need a management team that you can get along with. If you start with a bunch of programmers and nobody else, you will almost certainly fail. Having some folks that can garner investors and operate the business can make the whole thing work and you will certainly wipe out your current employer. The key is that the programming talent shouldn't need to worry about a lot of operational issues.
Yes, I own a software company.
Iraq became a police action needing law enforcement, not military force, from the moment President Bush stood on the carrier deck saying "Mission Accomplished". From that moment forward using military troops in Iraq became the wrong approach. You don't use the Army as a police force. Any information derived from soldiers misused as policemen is irrelevent.
The only ethics needed or desired on the battlefield is to win the day. Period. Doing anything else is a formula for disaster. As can be shown in Vietnam. We didn't use the maximum force to full effect, we danced around and tried to do everything but defeat the enemy. The result - South Vietnam was overrun and lots of people died.
Once you leave the scenario of the battlefield, you can talk about ethics. You also stop needing soldiers and start needing diplomats and policemen. Consuing the two doesn't work and provably so.
Do you think you want to confront someone that either (a) just stole your laptop or (b) paid for a stolen laptop? I would suggest that you should expect to be confronted with deadly force should you try to separate them from their acquisition. Lack of preparedness on your part may cause your next of kin to receive a financial windfall - your life insurance.
Law enforcement? Sorry, they aren't going to care. You should have insurance against such trivial losses. If you don't you are making a mistake in assuming that anyone is out to really punish criminals.
What this means is that an IP cannot be connected to a person. It is obvious that this is widely applicable.
Within a year this should be clear that anything, and I mean ANYTHING, goes on the Internet. You cannot be convicted of anything by leaving an IP address in a log somewhere. You can, of course, be convicted if you put your (real) name, address and such in the same posting as the death threat against your childhood nemesis.
You wouldn't believe how many incredibly dumb people will do just about that. Or brag openly about how they are "getting away with murder".
I'd say this is clear justification for appeals based on illegal searches without probable cause for anyone that has been convicted of anything where the original seizure of their computer was based on an IP address.
Ha. Blackberry is one heck of a secure device. Most FBI agents carry them, issued by the FBI. Do you think there is any possibility of a leak there? They are tied into the FBI secure email system.