Mail is monitored, read and censored. Visits are monitored. The payphone is monitored and conversations recorded.
The cell phone is the only way for prisoners to communicate without the overbearing presence of the corrections system. How can they do things that aren't allowed in prison without a communications channel that sidesteps the corrections system?
Simple. Who elected you to tell people what to do? So there is a rule and it is being ignored. So what? There are lots of rules that get ignored. Can you blame people for being offended and insulted when you take liberties that are not yours to take?
And as far as telling someone about some rule infraction, well, everyone loves a snitch. Sorry, ratting on people isn't going to get you any friends, anywhere.
I'd say it is better to join in the rulebreaking than try to get someone in trouble. It works in the inner city that way. It is clearly the way society is moving.
That might also get you involved in lots of lawsuits. Ever heard of this little rule against "cruel and unusual punishment?" This is something that is open to interpreation by courts. Because of this, it is great for lawsuits against anything that is even remotely contraversial.
Unless you want to spend all your time in court, you can't control a prison any more so than you can control a mob in the street. Or tenants in a public housing complex. Failure to abide by these non-rules results in court time, and the history is the prisons lose.
I'd say the government is committing the fraud by convincing people that some piece of paper has value beyond that of the paper and ink itself. People making their own money are perhaps assisting in this fraud, but it is a far lessor offense.
You see, the fraud is beginning to show today. Your money used to be worth X and today it is worth X/2 or maybe X/3. People are beginning to notice and elect politicians that promise them more and more. And how are they going to do that? By printing more worthless money!
Wouldn't surprise me if the WalMart starts refusing US Currency and takes only gold soon. While its value in US Currency is vastly inflated, it is actually materially worth something.
... superceed your rights to revenue. I guess that says it all.
Don't like it? Don't publish in digital form, or any form that can easily be converted to digital form. State-sanctioned revenue-zeroing is the fast way to eliminate revenue from "the Information Society". I don't know about you, but if is it available for free, I'm not paying.
Then we can rely on the Star Trek replicators to make sure we all eat.
The problem with charging for GPL (or other open-source license products) is that it changes the relationship between you, your competitors, your customer and their competitors.
Obviously, you would like to deal with your competitors and keep those dealings away from interfering with your relationship with your customers. But when you turn over the source (in a compilable, distributable form) to your customer what possible motivation do they have to avoid being your competitor as well? That it might sour the relationship with you? Probably not good enough.
Similarly, it makes your competitors their friends. In a true open-source environment your direct competitors are better for them than you are. No longer are they just the stick to hit you with over price. Now they can turn over all your work to them in exchange for something they want. Possibly something you don't have. Whereas before the customer-competitor relationship was all about quality and price now the customer has something the competitor wants more than money.
Your customer can also redistribute your product to their competition potentially becoming the hub of a cartel. Everyone in a given line of business needs to do the same stuff, right? If they are all using the same tools it may not matter if their competition is based on geography or other factors. Now you have created a competitor from your customer, one who may be more knowledgeable about their business than you are and better able to sell to and service others in the same line of business.
Betting that your customer and competitor relations will stay the same in an open source world is a mistake.
The reason there isn't a real Outlook competitor is primarily that it would be very, very hard to do. Lots of work for a minimal payback. There are Outlook look-alikes but none of them have the real capabilities of Outlook with Exchange.
And it isn't entirely because of an undocumented interface. The mechanism of the interface is well known - MAPI. If there was enough interest and enough value the nuts and bolts of the MAPI interaction between Exchange and Outlook would be mapped out. Then both parts, Outlook and Exchange could be individually replaced.
The problem is that it would be a huge project and one that would take a while. And there is no sizzle to it. When you were done you would have, well, Outlook. And it would get negative reviews from critics all the same. Could this lead to real improvement in handling email in large corporations? Sure. But Microsoft is doing 80% of the job well enough. And nobody is going to try to compete with them on their own turf.
There is a clear distinction in quality. Most of the open-source stuff out there is crap, certainly following the 80% rule - 80% of everything is crap. The problem is that programming is hard work. Well, actually quality programming is hard work and crap programming is quite a bit easier.
If you are producing custom and semi-custom software you are bucking a trend that started in the 1980's. Previously, all businesses would pay for custom-written software because the very idea of a commodity program that would fulfill their needs was foreign. And for the most part, other than very primitive things, it didn't exist. All of the functions of an ordinary business needed to be replicated in some custom fashion - accounting, inventory, bill of materials, customer information, everything.
This started to change in the 1980's with boxed solutions. The problem was that these were still primitive and hard to use. Either customization or lots of training were needed.
Today, for the most part, this isn't true. You can still find some businesses operating with custom-written solutions and some expensive software systems that require lots of training and customization. But it is clear this isn't the direction of the future. Software in general is getting easier to use and requiring less and less support. Training in some specialized fields is needed but it isn't necessary for the software. An example of this is you don't need training to use accounting software but you do need training to be an accountant.
Software that relies on a support model is counting on complexity and unfriendly user interfaces. This is going to go away and the sooner the better. Folks that write such things give the rest of programmers a bad reputation.
Advertising? Maybe if you have some mass-market thing that people will put up with things like that for. Maybe. I don't see it as a path into the future. Google, whose billions are build on pushing ads on people, is not a model that forward-looking people are going to want to emulate. I can't imagine the Google model being very long lived. Advertising, no matter how targeted, isn't something people find friendly or endearing. At best it is like product placement in some movies - it is there, but you don't really notice it. Once your nose is rubbed in it, it becomes distasteful and something to avoid.
Open source is certainly a race to zero, but quality is being left by the roadside. Everyone wants something for nothing, but nobody wants to work for nothing. And nobody works hard for very long for nothing. The mark of a hobbyist is a curve where things start out great and when the going gets tough the effort expended starts to drag. Until finally what started out as a inspired labor of love ends up being hated. Look at sourceforge - lots of stuff there, lots of stuff barely finished.
The one counterpoint to this is large organizations bankrolling professional developers and turning the source out. There are lots of motives for doing this, and some of them are very good. But I seriously doubt IBM is doing any of this for the betterment of mankind. No matter how altruistic the motives may be in the beginning, it comes down to either being a real operating business or it is a hobby. Or it fails. Most of what is seen today as good quality open source tools are being bankrolled by someone with their own reasons for doing so. And they are indeed making money from things that have nothing to do with it being open source. Red Hat may be an exception here in that their revenue is coming from support and it would appear to be support alone.
If I thought that people would one day stop paying for quality and take free crap, I think I'd just hang it up. For a large percentage of people Stallman's idea of "freedoms" is meaningless because they don't have the tools to take advantage of the freedom. Or the money to pay someone to take advantage of these freedoms on their behalf. So don't be fooled, it is all about the money. I do not see the balance shifting anytime soon - free crap or expensive quality. Is there expensive crap out there? Sure, but it isn't going to last. It never does.
Fine. Resolved that Linux or any UNIX varient is more secure than Windows.
OK, now can we please get applications that people in offices can use? How about if we just put all office automation on hold for a few years until that happens. Back to typewriters, everyone.
There is a little bit of a chicken-or-egg problem here. Nobody is making great software because there is no market for it. Market as in $$$. Yes, Gimp is an extremely valuable application, worth every penny I paid for it. Sadly, a lot of people can't move over to the "right" operating system until Adobe is convinced.
I do not believe there is any legal standing for the idea that the account holder is responsible, in any way, for the actions that take place on the connection.
It would seem to be the first step would be to establish that. Then you can sue the account holder all day long for whatever transpires on the connection and it is the account holder's responsibility to either accept responsibility or to parcel it out.
In other words, if your son is downloading music Dad is either going to serve up the kid or take the heat.
Nice idea. And, while we're at it, where is the corresponding improvement in programming? In the 1970's programmers were paid $30-50 an hour to code in Assembly language on IBM hardware. For a moment let's assume that your average Perl or Python programmer is 100x more productive than someone writing in 370 Assembler. Therefore, the cost for programming should be 100x less, right?
Unfortunately, we are pretty much past the 100 million sales mark for recorded music. So let's say they charge $0.10 per song and sell 1,000,000 copies at that price. This brings in $100,000 total. The physical media would have cost something, but now we say it costs nothing and that should make up the difference. Right?
Sorry, but not even close. Most of the money doesn't go for studio time - for a single song that might be as little as $10,000. Nope, where all the money goes is letting people know the song exists. Oh, so you want to eliminate music promotion as well? Let the Internet and word of mouth advertise it? Well, you aren't going to get your million sales then. Maybe more like 10,000. So now the band, songwriter, studio, and everyone else involved is working for $1000 per song.
I think most people would say they'd rather do whatever the heck they wanted rather than work for someone else at that rate of pay. And that pushes the whole thing out and it just doesn't ever happen at all. Unless you get some folks that just want to donate their time because of their contribution to "The Arts".
Sorry, recorded music is dead. It is free now and nobody is going to make money from it in the future. Not until we have some massive changes in the entitlement thinking that exists today. Your opinion of your worth is meaningless without some buy-in from the rest of society. No matter what you want to do, unless society values it there is no value. And right now recorded music has no value.
If your goal is to have a society of social misfits that would rather text each other than ever speak to another person again, you are on the right track.
Half of the companies I work with on a regular basis are staffed by people that simply do not know how to get along with others. Face it, you have to deal with the people you would rather not see again. If you can't learn that skill it is a shame and society at large has failed you. Don't make it worse.
Think about it... people believe you can't stop drugs because people are attracted to them and there is an almost infinite amount of money to be made. Well, same with phone and hospital records.
OK, how much would a sleazy tabloid (think National Enquirer) pay for Obama's phone records? What would they pay for a single phone number that was registered to someone that Mr. O should not be talking to? Be a hooker in Vegas or a low-level government employee in Saudi Arabia, such news would be incredibly valuable in the right hands. And nearly every single Verizon employee has access (although not legitimate) to this information.
Similar thinks happen in a hospital, but the occurrence is lower. With phone records you probably have something worth selling every month. So the real question is how long is it going to take before there is a real market for this kind of information? Can Verizon (or any carrier) fire every employee that accesses the information improperly? Maybe, but probably not.
I think we're just going to have to live with the new value of this information.
It would seem the obvious reason for implementing something with such dubious prospects is to firmly eliminate one of the nasty conspiracy theories/rumors that circles around the drain of the Internet. Chemtrails.
These are supposed to be something that results from introducing various chemicals to either the jet fuel or into the engines themselves to make for a more docile population. Or to stir things up and create race riots which can then be brutally put down. Or some other result which often the people believing in this can't articulate.
The idea is there is some observable difference between a "normal" contrail and one of these "chemtrails" which stay around longer or appear more dense.
Is it worth millions of dollars to stamp out this bit of nonsense? I'm not sure. If you do some searching you might find out the extent of this is larger than you would have ever believed. And maybe it might be worth millions to get rid of it.
It is known that good art actually generally benefits from the illegitimate channel, because people who would buy the physical product will buy it anyway to support the artist.
B.S. If I download something, I have it. I do not need to get it again. Why would I buy it if I'm not a guilt-ridden Catholic? (Yes, I was raised Catholic, but I got over it.)
The result of getting stuff for nothing is not that people buy more. They buy less and take more free stuff.
Partly the problem is that no matter how cheap the copy might be to produce, the marginal cost of the copies times their projected sales needs to cover the cost of production plus some profit.
Today the number of sales is pretty low and getting lower. There are no more "100 million copies sold" records. The available audience for sales is the people without high speed Internet access and a few Catholics that can't stand the guilt. The rest download for free.
With this arrangement prices will be going up, not down. As sales drop you can expect the $1,000 CD that 10 people buy.
Well, it would be pretty obvious if you think about it.
If you had the rights to publish pictures of cars for public display there would be nothing to prevent anyone with a gripe from doing so. Then we would have:
Pictures of apparently new cars in junkyards. Or being dropped into a car crusher.
Pictures of blood-soaked interiors of cars, obviously after a fatal accident.
Pictures of dead bodies with car logos embossed into them, from a collision.
Each and every one of these captioned "Would you buy a car like this?". Today, just try publishing one of those pictures and you will be sued. Partly because you don't have the rights to publish pictures of the cars or their logos. This is today keeping web sites, newspapers and magazines from publishing such pictures. Sure, pictures like this might be a little over the top, but think of the advertising value to Ford of having a collection of such pictures involving Toyotas. This is the logical extension of negative campaigning, just like our recent elections in the US.
Why shouldn't we have negative advertising? Well, I am sure we would if it was legal to do so. Today it is not. And trying to say the pictures currently published are negative or defaming isn't the point. The point is that once you let the rights slip there is no limit and no boundary. No morals, no common sense and certainly no decency.
Good luck with the negotiation on that. You do realize that nobody at the dealership would have the authority to negotiate such a contract and even if someone did sign it (with a flourish of "on behalf of the manufacturer") it would be immediately thrown out if it ever went to court.
Now let's assume that you did that and then published a series of extremely defaming pictures of cars rotting in junkyards, blood-filled car interiors (post-fatal-accident) and so on. Do you think the manufacturer would have thought they got a good deal from selling you such rights?
Think about this and you might have a clue why they aren't selling those rights.
The "mandatory" part disappeared in less than 96 hours after the election. Someone woke up. However, if you go back before the election you can see the word "mandatory" was there.
Now, it was pitched as partly in exchange for a $4000 grant for higher education but that didn't make it any less mandatory.
Say he is caught. Exactly what might be be charged with?
Stealing records? Can't be - they never left the original company.
Violating privacy? Not a crime in most jurisdictions.
And if they are in a country that really doesn't give a rat's ass about American companies and American laws, then he isn't getting prosecuted for anything, ever.
First off, I don't think you can sue the company unless you can prove they were somehow incompentent. Just having someone crack their security does not mean they were not taking reasonable precautions. And if they were taking what is considered to be (legally) reasonable precautions, then you aren't going to win suing them.
So there isn't going to be any class-action lawsuit. Hasn't happened yet, and unless you have proof of incompentence, there isn't going to be one.
As for catching the people doing this, if they are reasonably smart, they will not be caught. Ever. If they are pretty stupid, which is usually the case, they will spend a night in a bar telling everyone that next week they are going to be a millionaire. While sitting next to an off-duty cop.
We are losing our quality of life because of too many people. It has almost nothing to do with technology. Should most of the current technology stop, as promoted by many of the ecologlogical mindset the death toll would be very, very high indeed. We can't feed the people with the current farmer/city dweller mix we have today.
Solving problems like world hunger by throwing money at it is, if nothing else, a stupid American solution to a very complex problem. Until you understand that there is plenty of food to go around but people are prevented from getting it, you can't understand the problem at all. Money isn't going to solve the problem. A smaller population might, but so would moving people off-planet.
Shrinking the population would return us to a "sustaintable" planet, but a very unhappy one. For a real sustainable ecology that is able to recycle wastes by natural processes would require a maximum population of around 200 million, or around 1850 in historical terms. That means shrinking the population very quickly by around 5.8 billion people. Nothing has ever killed that many people. Ever. But if we want "sustainable" we better start thinking in terms of that many deaths. And every day you put off the decision there are tens of thousands more people.
Then we would have scenic beauty and wilderness. OK?
Slashdot Mirror
Mail is monitored, read and censored. Visits are monitored. The payphone is monitored and conversations recorded.
The cell phone is the only way for prisoners to communicate without the overbearing presence of the corrections system. How can they do things that aren't allowed in prison without a communications channel that sidesteps the corrections system?
Simple. Who elected you to tell people what to do? So there is a rule and it is being ignored. So what? There are lots of rules that get ignored. Can you blame people for being offended and insulted when you take liberties that are not yours to take?
And as far as telling someone about some rule infraction, well, everyone loves a snitch. Sorry, ratting on people isn't going to get you any friends, anywhere.
I'd say it is better to join in the rulebreaking than try to get someone in trouble. It works in the inner city that way. It is clearly the way society is moving.
That might also get you involved in lots of lawsuits. Ever heard of this little rule against "cruel and unusual punishment?" This is something that is open to interpreation by courts. Because of this, it is great for lawsuits against anything that is even remotely contraversial.
Unless you want to spend all your time in court, you can't control a prison any more so than you can control a mob in the street. Or tenants in a public housing complex. Failure to abide by these non-rules results in court time, and the history is the prisons lose.
I suspect there are laws against monitoring cell phone conversattions. Might be a good thing, you think?
Jamming the signals interfers with different regulations and no laws at all.
I'll bet that Darwin Reedy would share her creative works with anyone that would listen. Check her out.
I'd say the government is committing the fraud by convincing people that some piece of paper has value beyond that of the paper and ink itself. People making their own money are perhaps assisting in this fraud, but it is a far lessor offense.
You see, the fraud is beginning to show today. Your money used to be worth X and today it is worth X/2 or maybe X/3. People are beginning to notice and elect politicians that promise them more and more. And how are they going to do that? By printing more worthless money!
Wouldn't surprise me if the WalMart starts refusing US Currency and takes only gold soon. While its value in US Currency is vastly inflated, it is actually materially worth something.
... superceed your rights to revenue. I guess that says it all.
Don't like it? Don't publish in digital form, or any form that can easily be converted to digital form. State-sanctioned revenue-zeroing is the fast way to eliminate revenue from "the Information Society". I don't know about you, but if is it available for free, I'm not paying.
Then we can rely on the Star Trek replicators to make sure we all eat.
The problem with charging for GPL (or other open-source license products) is that it changes the relationship between you, your competitors, your customer and their competitors.
Obviously, you would like to deal with your competitors and keep those dealings away from interfering with your relationship with your customers. But when you turn over the source (in a compilable, distributable form) to your customer what possible motivation do they have to avoid being your competitor as well? That it might sour the relationship with you? Probably not good enough.
Similarly, it makes your competitors their friends. In a true open-source environment your direct competitors are better for them than you are. No longer are they just the stick to hit you with over price. Now they can turn over all your work to them in exchange for something they want. Possibly something you don't have. Whereas before the customer-competitor relationship was all about quality and price now the customer has something the competitor wants more than money.
Your customer can also redistribute your product to their competition potentially becoming the hub of a cartel. Everyone in a given line of business needs to do the same stuff, right? If they are all using the same tools it may not matter if their competition is based on geography or other factors. Now you have created a competitor from your customer, one who may be more knowledgeable about their business than you are and better able to sell to and service others in the same line of business.
Betting that your customer and competitor relations will stay the same in an open source world is a mistake.
The reason there isn't a real Outlook competitor is primarily that it would be very, very hard to do. Lots of work for a minimal payback. There are Outlook look-alikes but none of them have the real capabilities of Outlook with Exchange.
And it isn't entirely because of an undocumented interface. The mechanism of the interface is well known - MAPI. If there was enough interest and enough value the nuts and bolts of the MAPI interaction between Exchange and Outlook would be mapped out. Then both parts, Outlook and Exchange could be individually replaced.
The problem is that it would be a huge project and one that would take a while. And there is no sizzle to it. When you were done you would have, well, Outlook. And it would get negative reviews from critics all the same. Could this lead to real improvement in handling email in large corporations? Sure. But Microsoft is doing 80% of the job well enough. And nobody is going to try to compete with them on their own turf.
There is a clear distinction in quality. Most of the open-source stuff out there is crap, certainly following the 80% rule - 80% of everything is crap. The problem is that programming is hard work. Well, actually quality programming is hard work and crap programming is quite a bit easier.
If you are producing custom and semi-custom software you are bucking a trend that started in the 1980's. Previously, all businesses would pay for custom-written software because the very idea of a commodity program that would fulfill their needs was foreign. And for the most part, other than very primitive things, it didn't exist. All of the functions of an ordinary business needed to be replicated in some custom fashion - accounting, inventory, bill of materials, customer information, everything.
This started to change in the 1980's with boxed solutions. The problem was that these were still primitive and hard to use. Either customization or lots of training were needed.
Today, for the most part, this isn't true. You can still find some businesses operating with custom-written solutions and some expensive software systems that require lots of training and customization. But it is clear this isn't the direction of the future. Software in general is getting easier to use and requiring less and less support. Training in some specialized fields is needed but it isn't necessary for the software. An example of this is you don't need training to use accounting software but you do need training to be an accountant.
Software that relies on a support model is counting on complexity and unfriendly user interfaces. This is going to go away and the sooner the better. Folks that write such things give the rest of programmers a bad reputation.
Advertising? Maybe if you have some mass-market thing that people will put up with things like that for. Maybe. I don't see it as a path into the future. Google, whose billions are build on pushing ads on people, is not a model that forward-looking people are going to want to emulate. I can't imagine the Google model being very long lived. Advertising, no matter how targeted, isn't something people find friendly or endearing. At best it is like product placement in some movies - it is there, but you don't really notice it. Once your nose is rubbed in it, it becomes distasteful and something to avoid.
Open source is certainly a race to zero, but quality is being left by the roadside. Everyone wants something for nothing, but nobody wants to work for nothing. And nobody works hard for very long for nothing. The mark of a hobbyist is a curve where things start out great and when the going gets tough the effort expended starts to drag. Until finally what started out as a inspired labor of love ends up being hated. Look at sourceforge - lots of stuff there, lots of stuff barely finished.
The one counterpoint to this is large organizations bankrolling professional developers and turning the source out. There are lots of motives for doing this, and some of them are very good. But I seriously doubt IBM is doing any of this for the betterment of mankind. No matter how altruistic the motives may be in the beginning, it comes down to either being a real operating business or it is a hobby. Or it fails. Most of what is seen today as good quality open source tools are being bankrolled by someone with their own reasons for doing so. And they are indeed making money from things that have nothing to do with it being open source. Red Hat may be an exception here in that their revenue is coming from support and it would appear to be support alone.
If I thought that people would one day stop paying for quality and take free crap, I think I'd just hang it up. For a large percentage of people Stallman's idea of "freedoms" is meaningless because they don't have the tools to take advantage of the freedom. Or the money to pay someone to take advantage of these freedoms on their behalf. So don't be fooled, it is all about the money. I do not see the balance shifting anytime soon - free crap or expensive quality. Is there expensive crap out there? Sure, but it isn't going to last. It never does.
Fine. Resolved that Linux or any UNIX varient is more secure than Windows.
OK, now can we please get applications that people in offices can use? How about if we just put all office automation on hold for a few years until that happens. Back to typewriters, everyone.
There is a little bit of a chicken-or-egg problem here. Nobody is making great software because there is no market for it. Market as in $$$. Yes, Gimp is an extremely valuable application, worth every penny I paid for it. Sadly, a lot of people can't move over to the "right" operating system until Adobe is convinced.
I do not believe there is any legal standing for the idea that the account holder is responsible, in any way, for the actions that take place on the connection.
It would seem to be the first step would be to establish that. Then you can sue the account holder all day long for whatever transpires on the connection and it is the account holder's responsibility to either accept responsibility or to parcel it out.
In other words, if your son is downloading music Dad is either going to serve up the kid or take the heat.
Nice idea. And, while we're at it, where is the corresponding improvement in programming? In the 1970's programmers were paid $30-50 an hour to code in Assembly language on IBM hardware. For a moment let's assume that your average Perl or Python programmer is 100x more productive than someone writing in 370 Assembler. Therefore, the cost for programming should be 100x less, right?
Unfortunately, we are pretty much past the 100 million sales mark for recorded music. So let's say they charge $0.10 per song and sell 1,000,000 copies at that price. This brings in $100,000 total. The physical media would have cost something, but now we say it costs nothing and that should make up the difference. Right?
Sorry, but not even close. Most of the money doesn't go for studio time - for a single song that might be as little as $10,000. Nope, where all the money goes is letting people know the song exists. Oh, so you want to eliminate music promotion as well? Let the Internet and word of mouth advertise it? Well, you aren't going to get your million sales then. Maybe more like 10,000. So now the band, songwriter, studio, and everyone else involved is working for $1000 per song.
I think most people would say they'd rather do whatever the heck they wanted rather than work for someone else at that rate of pay. And that pushes the whole thing out and it just doesn't ever happen at all. Unless you get some folks that just want to donate their time because of their contribution to "The Arts".
Sorry, recorded music is dead. It is free now and nobody is going to make money from it in the future. Not until we have some massive changes in the entitlement thinking that exists today. Your opinion of your worth is meaningless without some buy-in from the rest of society. No matter what you want to do, unless society values it there is no value. And right now recorded music has no value.
If your goal is to have a society of social misfits that would rather text each other than ever speak to another person again, you are on the right track.
Half of the companies I work with on a regular basis are staffed by people that simply do not know how to get along with others. Face it, you have to deal with the people you would rather not see again. If you can't learn that skill it is a shame and society at large has failed you. Don't make it worse.
Think about it... people believe you can't stop drugs because people are attracted to them and there is an almost infinite amount of money to be made. Well, same with phone and hospital records.
OK, how much would a sleazy tabloid (think National Enquirer) pay for Obama's phone records? What would they pay for a single phone number that was registered to someone that Mr. O should not be talking to? Be a hooker in Vegas or a low-level government employee in Saudi Arabia, such news would be incredibly valuable in the right hands. And nearly every single Verizon employee has access (although not legitimate) to this information.
Similar thinks happen in a hospital, but the occurrence is lower. With phone records you probably have something worth selling every month. So the real question is how long is it going to take before there is a real market for this kind of information? Can Verizon (or any carrier) fire every employee that accesses the information improperly? Maybe, but probably not.
I think we're just going to have to live with the new value of this information.
Wouldn't it be more "green" to not build the airliner in the first place?
Wouldn't it use less fuel if it had never been built?
Wouldn't the climate be helped far more if airplanes were reserved for government and military use only?
It would seem the obvious reason for implementing something with such dubious prospects is to firmly eliminate one of the nasty conspiracy theories/rumors that circles around the drain of the Internet. Chemtrails.
These are supposed to be something that results from introducing various chemicals to either the jet fuel or into the engines themselves to make for a more docile population. Or to stir things up and create race riots which can then be brutally put down. Or some other result which often the people believing in this can't articulate.
The idea is there is some observable difference between a "normal" contrail and one of these "chemtrails" which stay around longer or appear more dense.
Is it worth millions of dollars to stamp out this bit of nonsense? I'm not sure. If you do some searching you might find out the extent of this is larger than you would have ever believed. And maybe it might be worth millions to get rid of it.
B.S. If I download something, I have it. I do not need to get it again. Why would I buy it if I'm not a guilt-ridden Catholic? (Yes, I was raised Catholic, but I got over it.)
The result of getting stuff for nothing is not that people buy more. They buy less and take more free stuff.
Partly the problem is that no matter how cheap the copy might be to produce, the marginal cost of the copies times their projected sales needs to cover the cost of production plus some profit.
Today the number of sales is pretty low and getting lower. There are no more "100 million copies sold" records. The available audience for sales is the people without high speed Internet access and a few Catholics that can't stand the guilt. The rest download for free.
With this arrangement prices will be going up, not down. As sales drop you can expect the $1,000 CD that 10 people buy.
Well, it would be pretty obvious if you think about it.
If you had the rights to publish pictures of cars for public display there would be nothing to prevent anyone with a gripe from doing so. Then we would have:
Each and every one of these captioned "Would you buy a car like this?". Today, just try publishing one of those pictures and you will be sued. Partly because you don't have the rights to publish pictures of the cars or their logos. This is today keeping web sites, newspapers and magazines from publishing such pictures. Sure, pictures like this might be a little over the top, but think of the advertising value to Ford of having a collection of such pictures involving Toyotas. This is the logical extension of negative campaigning, just like our recent elections in the US.
Why shouldn't we have negative advertising? Well, I am sure we would if it was legal to do so. Today it is not. And trying to say the pictures currently published are negative or defaming isn't the point. The point is that once you let the rights slip there is no limit and no boundary. No morals, no common sense and certainly no decency.
Good luck with the negotiation on that. You do realize that nobody at the dealership would have the authority to negotiate such a contract and even if someone did sign it (with a flourish of "on behalf of the manufacturer") it would be immediately thrown out if it ever went to court.
Now let's assume that you did that and then published a series of extremely defaming pictures of cars rotting in junkyards, blood-filled car interiors (post-fatal-accident) and so on. Do you think the manufacturer would have thought they got a good deal from selling you such rights?
Think about this and you might have a clue why they aren't selling those rights.
The "mandatory" part disappeared in less than 96 hours after the election. Someone woke up. However, if you go back before the election you can see the word "mandatory" was there.
Now, it was pitched as partly in exchange for a $4000 grant for higher education but that didn't make it any less mandatory.
Say he is caught. Exactly what might be be charged with?
Stealing records? Can't be - they never left the original company.
Violating privacy? Not a crime in most jurisdictions.
And if they are in a country that really doesn't give a rat's ass about American companies and American laws, then he isn't getting prosecuted for anything, ever.
First off, I don't think you can sue the company unless you can prove they were somehow incompentent. Just having someone crack their security does not mean they were not taking reasonable precautions. And if they were taking what is considered to be (legally) reasonable precautions, then you aren't going to win suing them.
So there isn't going to be any class-action lawsuit. Hasn't happened yet, and unless you have proof of incompentence, there isn't going to be one.
As for catching the people doing this, if they are reasonably smart, they will not be caught. Ever. If they are pretty stupid, which is usually the case, they will spend a night in a bar telling everyone that next week they are going to be a millionaire. While sitting next to an off-duty cop.
We are losing our quality of life because of too many people. It has almost nothing to do with technology. Should most of the current technology stop, as promoted by many of the ecologlogical mindset the death toll would be very, very high indeed. We can't feed the people with the current farmer/city dweller mix we have today.
Solving problems like world hunger by throwing money at it is, if nothing else, a stupid American solution to a very complex problem. Until you understand that there is plenty of food to go around but people are prevented from getting it, you can't understand the problem at all. Money isn't going to solve the problem. A smaller population might, but so would moving people off-planet.
Shrinking the population would return us to a "sustaintable" planet, but a very unhappy one. For a real sustainable ecology that is able to recycle wastes by natural processes would require a maximum population of around 200 million, or around 1850 in historical terms. That means shrinking the population very quickly by around 5.8 billion people. Nothing has ever killed that many people. Ever. But if we want "sustainable" we better start thinking in terms of that many deaths. And every day you put off the decision there are tens of thousands more people.
Then we would have scenic beauty and wilderness. OK?