As far as the question "is marijuana addictive" is concerned, the answer is clearly that it is. There are a lot of types of addiction, and if you have ever seen the results of significant marijuana use, you see addiction.
Now, what most people think of as "addiction" is the sort of withdrawal that occurs with heroin or alcohol. Obviously, marijuana is not physically addictive in that manner. It has different physical effects and the method of addiction is different.
In my experience, addiction to marijuana is a whole lot closer to addiction to porn, sex, or gambling. It makes the user do things that are self-destructive towards the end of getting more marijuana. If you haven't been around goal-oriented self-destructive people, you don't know what you are missing. Whatever it is that is driving them, that is their only goal and all other considerations are put aside. Little things like marriage, school, money, children, job, whatever.
Finally, I have not seen marijuana addiction except with high regular use - I suspect occaisional use doesn't reach whatever threshold there is. So it isn't very addictive in the sense that other drugs are either. I guess an argument could be made that anything which offers the user some psychological reward is addictive in this manner. While that may be the case, I still don't think you can say that marijuana is not addictive.
Two problems have come up with paper ballots in the US.
The first is the logistics of getting them designed, approved (by multiple committees) and distributed. This takes a long time and has caused some real problems.
The second is the time required to count them. How long after your elections are the results announced? Well, in the US the TV News shows the results the evening of the elections. They are under tremendous financial pressure to be "relevent" and annouce the results before people go to bed. This means the last vote pretty much has to be counted in California by 9 PM. Failure to do this allows the TV News to announce results based purely on exit polls and other statistical measures. Which encourages the idea "Why vote? It doesn't matter anyway!"
If the US could somehow tolerate the idea of no results for a week, we could do anything we wanted to count votes. We could ship all the ballots to somewhere in Nebraska and have people there count them three times. Unfortunately, we are going to have either real results or made up results by midnight Eastern Time the evening of the election. No matter what, a winner will be announced.
CBS announced Al Gore as the winner in 2000. They retracted that after everyone went to bed on the east coast. Can you imagine the fun if Obama is announced the winner this year and 24 hours later it comes out that McCain is the "real" winner?
Instead, imagine a 4x8 panel covered with buttons. Small buttons with different colors. Each button is one candidate. Some buttons have to be pressed together with two, three or even four other buttons in order to record a vote.
If each button and its caption occupied a 2"x2" space, a 4x8 panel (48x96) could have 1152 buttons on it. This would work for most precints in the US but a few might need two panels.
Yup, there are that many items people are voting on and that many alternatives.
Apply to ISPs also. Problem is today that most ISPs actively shield users on their system which engage in malicious activity.
The answer is always they will not cooperate without a court order. Of course, if the police ask nicely they cooperate without a court order. But after a system is broken into unless there is at least $25,000 in provable damages you aren't going to get anyone in law enforcement interested. And that is just the beginning.
So if someone is downloading child porn, the police are right there on that. If they break into your system and cause hours of downtime nothing happens. This can be considered to be tacit encouragement. Helping the folks learn about computers. Roughly the same way that gangbangers learn about automatic weapons.
No one expects to be randomly checked inside their own borders and to be harassed by federal agents.
Wrong. Almost every other country on the planet has serious enforcement of immigration laws, most of which are far, far more restrictive than those in the US. Are you thinking that the entire country is a safe zone that once someone gets across the border or overstays their visa they are free to do whatever they please?
Someone from a Phoenix radio station drove down to Mexico not too long ago and crossed the border at some unattended area. Illegally. They drove into some small town not far over the border. Within 30 minutes they were surrounded by miltary vehicles - the Mexican Army was there defending their border. Is the US not entitled to defend its border similarly?
Sorry, but out of all the people I know there are maybe two that will ever pay for music again. It is all available for free, thanks to the helpful pirates with P2P applications.
Movies are almost there now. It takes a long time to download one, but with faster download speeds this will be fixed in the future. So no more paying for movies!!!
The only fair price for digital media is zero, according to most of the people I know. They will pay if they have to, but given any loophole to avoid it they will put their money on beer, pizza and condoms.
So you are rewarding the people that are preventing you from returning, reselling or whatever? Why are you buying still? Isn't the whole point to take stuff away from the people that are "denying your rights"?
Now a true pirate would be proud of not ever paying because it destroys the revenue model for digital goods. Sounds like you are a guilt-ridden wanker.
If everyone was working from the same set of cultural and intellectual ground rules, he might have a point. But that is far, far from the case.
We have North Korea where the leader really doesn't give a rat's ass about the civilian population of the country. Their leader could foreseeably order a nuclear attack on Japan or South Korea and as long as he, personally, was assured of living in comfort it probably wouldn't matter that in the retaliation 99% of the civilian population and military would be wiped out.
Same goes for the leaders of Iran, when they get their first bomb. It is highly likely their cultural imperitive to destroy Israel will be quite a bit stronger than the disincentive from any retaliation. And today it is highly debatable that if Iran wiped out Israel if there would be any retaliation whatsoever. The UN might issue some strongly worded repremands, but we all know there is no teeth behind that.
The basic idea behind nuclear disarmament is that both sides can agree that use of nuclear weapons is just to horrible to consider. The fear during the Cold War was if the Soviets really saw things that way but we had enough in common with them to believe they did. We have virtually nothing in common with Iran's leadership or that of any terrorist group that might grab a weapon. We cannot assume a common cultural basis for an assumption they value the lives of their civilian population as strongly as people in the West do. As a matter of fact, we have clear evidence they do not value civilian populations strongly, from the locations where weapons are based for attacks and attacks on purely civilian targets.
Unfortunately, so far the answer is that the privacy of these people must be protected at all costs. They are purchasing goods and services in large quantities and this revenue stream must not be interrupted. So their ISP has no motivation whatsoever to cooperate with law enforcement. And the amount of money the spammers are putting into their local economy ensures that the governments of many nations has no interest in changing laws to make what they are doing illegal.
And, isn't what they are doing just so terribly clever and showing off the technical skills of emerging nations? Why would their government want to interfere?
Well, now that her address is posted, she better think about moving. Who did it? Nobody will ever admit to it and even if someone did, there is this little thing called the 1st Amendment. Publishing someone's address so they can be harrassed is not illegal.
As to finding the people using her phone number for Caller ID, good luck. You need to understand that you aren't receiving those phone calls. So there is nothing to trace. You aren't going to get anyone to track down the phone records of someone that calls because of the Caller ID - that would be a violation of their privacy.
I'd say you either trust in the good nature of all of the people on the Internet or plan on helping your nice old lady friend move. Now that she is linked with telemarketing and her address is published you can assume someone, somewhere with a militant attitude towards telemarketers will follow up on this address. Sure, after they burn her house down she might be able to have them arrested for arson.
You are thinking it is still 1950. Relying on people's good nature will get you a rude surprise today. It isn't 1950 and Mrs. Cleaver doesn't live up the street. Indeed, most people aren't feeling remorse.
In the town where I live they put up lights along a bicycle path. The path is relatively isolated from other homes so at night there is nobody around. Some people figured this out and removed all of (3 or for miles worth) the electrical wire for the lights. Probably got several hundred dollars for it at the recycling center. The city is going to rewire the lights, giving some other enterprising person another windfall because the lights simply cannot be protected.
As to how much the average person could steal, stores are facing that every day. Your average retailer is looking at 2% to 5% in shrinkage, every day. You wonder why more and more stores are checking people as they leave? It is because it is proven over and over that it is no longer a small minority that steal. It is everybody. Societal norms have completely broken down.
A security system in a store that simply moves the thieves next door is accomplishing the objective of the shopkeeper. Absolutely, and at minimal cost. Catching shoplifters is not the objective, it is the prevention of theft.
A basic problem we are now faced with in the US is that 50 years ago societal pressure was enough to ensure that most people obeyed the law, were nice to other people and we generally had a civil society. These pressures are breaking down, in some ways because of unassimilated immigration and changing attitudes. Also because of increased population. So what defined perfectly adequate security in a civil society doesn't work at all today.
Take the example of the restaurant. 50 years ago most people would not conceive of going to a restaurant, eating and not paying. The few that tried it were often stopped by other patrons. Today? Better have something stronger in place. The other patrons aren't going to be any help.
Security where everyone is a potential threat is a completely different game than the way the US has been playing since the 1700s.
Where exactly do they do this? Some far-off place that has no voters?
See, a majority of the problem in the US today is there isn't much of anywhere to put large, imposing physical plants. Nobody wants them and environmentalists want them absolutely nowhere at all. So, we are running plants that were built before the "environmental movement" took hold and trying to keep up with demand with very small "peaker plants" that just run when there is a bump in usage.
It is not efficient. And it is a losing game, because either we are going to have to reduce usage or we are going to have to build lots of new, bigger plants. I know of no plans to build anything large in the near future. It would take 10+ years just to get through the licensing and permit process to build a new generating plant, no matter what the fuel was. It isn't happening.
Build the plant somewhere else and pipe in the power? Nope, can't be done. Electrical power lines are hazardous. "Everyone" knows that power lines cause everything from cancer to autism. And the existing grid is 30-50 years old today and can't handle much more load anyway.
The only existing solution that is compatible with the population today is to reduce consumption.
In Abraham Lincoln's time this wasn't a problem. Moving back to that level of industrialization and population will eliminate this situation. It will also eliminate global warming/climate change, most forms of pollution and most resource consumption issues.
It is a little difficult to build a DVD player using 1850's technology, but heck Mr. Lincoln didn't have anywhere near the carbon footprint of someone living today either. True sustainability means living within the natural limits of the planet and not consuming resources at a faster pace than natural replenishment. You want sustainable? Then this is the only available route.
I believe the original plot which triggered the whole liquids ban was involving hydrogen peroxide. Not the drug-store variety, but the 100% pure stuff that is very, very reactive. It was used as one component of the Komet fuel, a German WWII rocketplane fighter. That happened to have a lot of losses because fuel fires and explosions.
No, I have no idea what sort of container it would take to bring hydrazine and peroxide onto an airplane. But far from being imaginary, bringing containers of those two liquids onto an airplane would certainly result in loss of the airplane if they were combined. I'm not positive about the hydrazine, and there may be a number of other liquids which would have the same reaction with peroxide.
Did you really think the TSA just made this shit up?
The problem with the "extremists" is that they have local and national leaders behind them in their efforts to hold onto "the old ways". These folks are convinced their way is right and the only way. Their religious materials say "kill the infidels" and they believe it.
Seen the riots triggered by the Danish cartoons? This is the sort of response that can be whipped up on demand. No, we haven't had that sort of riot in the US or UK yet, but it is only a matter of time. If you were to get 1% of the population of the city of London or Chicago to converge in the city center you would have a very formidable mob indeed.
It is a mindset that most Westerners cannot conceive of. And by discounting it, we feed it every day.
It was my understanding that from its inception, the charter of the NSA was to monitor all cross-border communications to and from the US. Period.
In the 1960's it was generally assumed that the NSA was listening in on all transatlantic phone calls. I don't see how anything has changed. When did the charter change? More to the point, when did they stop monitoring overseas communications?
Hint: I don't think they ever did stop.
What precisely do you think all that hardware at Ft. Meade is for? I would expect them to be monitoring all communications, especially those with countries that have significant numbers of people that seem to want to stir up trouble.
How about an age we can all agree on? 10? 7? Child porn involving children under 4 years of age is up. Way, way up. A lot of what gets discovered these days is 2 and 3 year old children being penetrated in various ways.
Sure, you can deliver 3Mb/sec wirelessly. But can you deliver 30,000Mb/sec?
See, the problem is that what I (and a good portion of the tech-using community) would like is to be able to access this bandwidth on demand, anywhere. Do you believe there would be 10,000 users in a wingle WiMax coverage area? If so, they are going to need 30,000Mb/sec to keep everyone working at this speed.
Microcells work for cell phones, but the rules are different.
Governments have one goal, to increase their power and control. That sometimes comes in the form of providing services to citizens. Usually it comes in the form of increased power and control directly.
The function of any life form is to grow until an external limit is reached. With governments there is but one predator, war. The only other limit might be 100% of the wealth of the citizens. Other than that, look out. Government, like mold or rabbits, will expand to fill all available space.
Face it, no matter how secure a system is, if it is usable by humans it can be breached. Easily.
There is anywhere from a 100 to 1000 hackers/crackers/slimeballs out there that are ready and willing to take on each and every system. Ones that claim to be "secure" are just a bigger target. There is no such thing as a completely "secure" system that is usable and accessible by ordinary humans. True security would require controlled physical access, multiple authenticating factors, and so on. None of this is going to happen for an accessible system usable by "ordinary humans".
About all that is realistic is to minimize the damages. Face the fact that if you are a target you are going to lose. Try not to lose too much.
Prosecution of the break-in? Forget it. It's the Internet. It is International. If it looks like it is coming from China, it could be real or it could be a proxy. There are no effective International laws that will assist in any sort of prosecution. There is no supra-national police force that will break down the door of the cracker and haul them away. Nothing is going to happen. Unless the guy is a complete idiot that brags about it.
I'd like it if the fact that Ford Motor Company sold cars for $1500 required them to sell cars for $1500 today.
Or, I should be able to buy something at any price I set rather than the price some greedy accountant set. This would immediately value your labor at whatever price someone other than you would set.
Any of this going to happen? Maybe. I suspect the really bad parts of #2 might come to pass in the US soon.
The point is there is no "business model" that will come after the labels and RIAA. You can't sell free stuff. If it is available for free and 100% of the people know it and can get it for free then there is nothing left to sell.
I don't know anyone that will buy music again. It is available for free and that is how people get it. Trying to build a new business that will get money for music is pointless. iTuens is offering convenience and a brand to people, but even still is making basically zero money. But it keeps iPod users fed and will exist for that purpose as long as possible. I suppose you might be able to sell a service something like that, but I doubt it. In a small number of years the people that equate piracy with theft and aren't willing to steal will be gone. At that point, free is the only game in town.
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As far as the question "is marijuana addictive" is concerned, the answer is clearly that it is. There are a lot of types of addiction, and if you have ever seen the results of significant marijuana use, you see addiction.
Now, what most people think of as "addiction" is the sort of withdrawal that occurs with heroin or alcohol. Obviously, marijuana is not physically addictive in that manner. It has different physical effects and the method of addiction is different.
In my experience, addiction to marijuana is a whole lot closer to addiction to porn, sex, or gambling. It makes the user do things that are self-destructive towards the end of getting more marijuana. If you haven't been around goal-oriented self-destructive people, you don't know what you are missing. Whatever it is that is driving them, that is their only goal and all other considerations are put aside. Little things like marriage, school, money, children, job, whatever.
Finally, I have not seen marijuana addiction except with high regular use - I suspect occaisional use doesn't reach whatever threshold there is. So it isn't very addictive in the sense that other drugs are either. I guess an argument could be made that anything which offers the user some psychological reward is addictive in this manner. While that may be the case, I still don't think you can say that marijuana is not addictive.
Two problems have come up with paper ballots in the US.
The first is the logistics of getting them designed, approved (by multiple committees) and distributed. This takes a long time and has caused some real problems.
The second is the time required to count them. How long after your elections are the results announced? Well, in the US the TV News shows the results the evening of the elections. They are under tremendous financial pressure to be "relevent" and annouce the results before people go to bed. This means the last vote pretty much has to be counted in California by 9 PM. Failure to do this allows the TV News to announce results based purely on exit polls and other statistical measures. Which encourages the idea "Why vote? It doesn't matter anyway!"
If the US could somehow tolerate the idea of no results for a week, we could do anything we wanted to count votes. We could ship all the ballots to somewhere in Nebraska and have people there count them three times. Unfortunately, we are going to have either real results or made up results by midnight Eastern Time the evening of the election. No matter what, a winner will be announced.
CBS announced Al Gore as the winner in 2000. They retracted that after everyone went to bed on the east coast. Can you imagine the fun if Obama is announced the winner this year and 24 hours later it comes out that McCain is the "real" winner?
Might work in some places, but nowhere in the US.
Instead, imagine a 4x8 panel covered with buttons. Small buttons with different colors. Each button is one candidate. Some buttons have to be pressed together with two, three or even four other buttons in order to record a vote.
If each button and its caption occupied a 2"x2" space, a 4x8 panel (48x96) could have 1152 buttons on it. This would work for most precints in the US but a few might need two panels.
Yup, there are that many items people are voting on and that many alternatives.
Apply to ISPs also. Problem is today that most ISPs actively shield users on their system which engage in malicious activity.
The answer is always they will not cooperate without a court order. Of course, if the police ask nicely they cooperate without a court order. But after a system is broken into unless there is at least $25,000 in provable damages you aren't going to get anyone in law enforcement interested. And that is just the beginning.
So if someone is downloading child porn, the police are right there on that. If they break into your system and cause hours of downtime nothing happens. This can be considered to be tacit encouragement. Helping the folks learn about computers. Roughly the same way that gangbangers learn about automatic weapons.
Wrong. Almost every other country on the planet has serious enforcement of immigration laws, most of which are far, far more restrictive than those in the US. Are you thinking that the entire country is a safe zone that once someone gets across the border or overstays their visa they are free to do whatever they please?
Someone from a Phoenix radio station drove down to Mexico not too long ago and crossed the border at some unattended area. Illegally. They drove into some small town not far over the border. Within 30 minutes they were surrounded by miltary vehicles - the Mexican Army was there defending their border. Is the US not entitled to defend its border similarly?
Sorry, but out of all the people I know there are maybe two that will ever pay for music again. It is all available for free, thanks to the helpful pirates with P2P applications.
Movies are almost there now. It takes a long time to download one, but with faster download speeds this will be fixed in the future. So no more paying for movies!!!
The only fair price for digital media is zero, according to most of the people I know. They will pay if they have to, but given any loophole to avoid it they will put their money on beer, pizza and condoms.
So you are rewarding the people that are preventing you from returning, reselling or whatever? Why are you buying still? Isn't the whole point to take stuff away from the people that are "denying your rights"?
Now a true pirate would be proud of not ever paying because it destroys the revenue model for digital goods. Sounds like you are a guilt-ridden wanker.
If everyone was working from the same set of cultural and intellectual ground rules, he might have a point. But that is far, far from the case.
We have North Korea where the leader really doesn't give a rat's ass about the civilian population of the country. Their leader could foreseeably order a nuclear attack on Japan or South Korea and as long as he, personally, was assured of living in comfort it probably wouldn't matter that in the retaliation 99% of the civilian population and military would be wiped out.
Same goes for the leaders of Iran, when they get their first bomb. It is highly likely their cultural imperitive to destroy Israel will be quite a bit stronger than the disincentive from any retaliation. And today it is highly debatable that if Iran wiped out Israel if there would be any retaliation whatsoever. The UN might issue some strongly worded repremands, but we all know there is no teeth behind that.
The basic idea behind nuclear disarmament is that both sides can agree that use of nuclear weapons is just to horrible to consider. The fear during the Cold War was if the Soviets really saw things that way but we had enough in common with them to believe they did. We have virtually nothing in common with Iran's leadership or that of any terrorist group that might grab a weapon. We cannot assume a common cultural basis for an assumption they value the lives of their civilian population as strongly as people in the West do. As a matter of fact, we have clear evidence they do not value civilian populations strongly, from the locations where weapons are based for attacks and attacks on purely civilian targets.
Unfortunately, so far the answer is that the privacy of these people must be protected at all costs. They are purchasing goods and services in large quantities and this revenue stream must not be interrupted. So their ISP has no motivation whatsoever to cooperate with law enforcement. And the amount of money the spammers are putting into their local economy ensures that the governments of many nations has no interest in changing laws to make what they are doing illegal.
And, isn't what they are doing just so terribly clever and showing off the technical skills of emerging nations? Why would their government want to interfere?
Well, now that her address is posted, she better think about moving. Who did it? Nobody will ever admit to it and even if someone did, there is this little thing called the 1st Amendment. Publishing someone's address so they can be harrassed is not illegal.
As to finding the people using her phone number for Caller ID, good luck. You need to understand that you aren't receiving those phone calls. So there is nothing to trace. You aren't going to get anyone to track down the phone records of someone that calls because of the Caller ID - that would be a violation of their privacy.
I'd say you either trust in the good nature of all of the people on the Internet or plan on helping your nice old lady friend move. Now that she is linked with telemarketing and her address is published you can assume someone, somewhere with a militant attitude towards telemarketers will follow up on this address. Sure, after they burn her house down she might be able to have them arrested for arson.
You are thinking it is still 1950. Relying on people's good nature will get you a rude surprise today. It isn't 1950 and Mrs. Cleaver doesn't live up the street. Indeed, most people aren't feeling remorse.
In the town where I live they put up lights along a bicycle path. The path is relatively isolated from other homes so at night there is nobody around. Some people figured this out and removed all of (3 or for miles worth) the electrical wire for the lights. Probably got several hundred dollars for it at the recycling center. The city is going to rewire the lights, giving some other enterprising person another windfall because the lights simply cannot be protected.
As to how much the average person could steal, stores are facing that every day. Your average retailer is looking at 2% to 5% in shrinkage, every day. You wonder why more and more stores are checking people as they leave? It is because it is proven over and over that it is no longer a small minority that steal. It is everybody. Societal norms have completely broken down.
A security system in a store that simply moves the thieves next door is accomplishing the objective of the shopkeeper. Absolutely, and at minimal cost. Catching shoplifters is not the objective, it is the prevention of theft.
A basic problem we are now faced with in the US is that 50 years ago societal pressure was enough to ensure that most people obeyed the law, were nice to other people and we generally had a civil society. These pressures are breaking down, in some ways because of unassimilated immigration and changing attitudes. Also because of increased population. So what defined perfectly adequate security in a civil society doesn't work at all today.
Take the example of the restaurant. 50 years ago most people would not conceive of going to a restaurant, eating and not paying. The few that tried it were often stopped by other patrons. Today? Better have something stronger in place. The other patrons aren't going to be any help.
Security where everyone is a potential threat is a completely different game than the way the US has been playing since the 1700s.
Where exactly do they do this? Some far-off place that has no voters?
See, a majority of the problem in the US today is there isn't much of anywhere to put large, imposing physical plants. Nobody wants them and environmentalists want them absolutely nowhere at all. So, we are running plants that were built before the "environmental movement" took hold and trying to keep up with demand with very small "peaker plants" that just run when there is a bump in usage.
It is not efficient. And it is a losing game, because either we are going to have to reduce usage or we are going to have to build lots of new, bigger plants. I know of no plans to build anything large in the near future. It would take 10+ years just to get through the licensing and permit process to build a new generating plant, no matter what the fuel was. It isn't happening.
Build the plant somewhere else and pipe in the power? Nope, can't be done. Electrical power lines are hazardous. "Everyone" knows that power lines cause everything from cancer to autism. And the existing grid is 30-50 years old today and can't handle much more load anyway.
The only existing solution that is compatible with the population today is to reduce consumption.
In Abraham Lincoln's time this wasn't a problem. Moving back to that level of industrialization and population will eliminate this situation. It will also eliminate global warming/climate change, most forms of pollution and most resource consumption issues.
It is a little difficult to build a DVD player using 1850's technology, but heck Mr. Lincoln didn't have anywhere near the carbon footprint of someone living today either. True sustainability means living within the natural limits of the planet and not consuming resources at a faster pace than natural replenishment. You want sustainable? Then this is the only available route.
I believe the original plot which triggered the whole liquids ban was involving hydrogen peroxide. Not the drug-store variety, but the 100% pure stuff that is very, very reactive. It was used as one component of the Komet fuel, a German WWII rocketplane fighter. That happened to have a lot of losses because fuel fires and explosions.
No, I have no idea what sort of container it would take to bring hydrazine and peroxide onto an airplane. But far from being imaginary, bringing containers of those two liquids onto an airplane would certainly result in loss of the airplane if they were combined. I'm not positive about the hydrazine, and there may be a number of other liquids which would have the same reaction with peroxide.
Did you really think the TSA just made this shit up?
When these "bullshit religions" respond with riots and killing the folks that offend them, perhaps you would like to reconsider.
I know of no Western government that is prepared to deal with Islam other than by acceding to its demands.
The problem with the "extremists" is that they have local and national leaders behind them in their efforts to hold onto "the old ways". These folks are convinced their way is right and the only way. Their religious materials say "kill the infidels" and they believe it.
Seen the riots triggered by the Danish cartoons? This is the sort of response that can be whipped up on demand. No, we haven't had that sort of riot in the US or UK yet, but it is only a matter of time. If you were to get 1% of the population of the city of London or Chicago to converge in the city center you would have a very formidable mob indeed.
It is a mindset that most Westerners cannot conceive of. And by discounting it, we feed it every day.
It was my understanding that from its inception, the charter of the NSA was to monitor all cross-border communications to and from the US. Period.
In the 1960's it was generally assumed that the NSA was listening in on all transatlantic phone calls. I don't see how anything has changed. When did the charter change? More to the point, when did they stop monitoring overseas communications?
Hint: I don't think they ever did stop.
What precisely do you think all that hardware at Ft. Meade is for? I would expect them to be monitoring all communications, especially those with countries that have significant numbers of people that seem to want to stir up trouble.
How about an age we can all agree on? 10? 7? Child porn involving children under 4 years of age is up. Way, way up. A lot of what gets discovered these days is 2 and 3 year old children being penetrated in various ways.
Sure, you can deliver 3Mb/sec wirelessly. But can you deliver 30,000Mb/sec?
See, the problem is that what I (and a good portion of the tech-using community) would like is to be able to access this bandwidth on demand, anywhere. Do you believe there would be 10,000 users in a wingle WiMax coverage area? If so, they are going to need 30,000Mb/sec to keep everyone working at this speed.
Microcells work for cell phones, but the rules are different.
Governments have one goal, to increase their power and control. That sometimes comes in the form of providing services to citizens. Usually it comes in the form of increased power and control directly.
The function of any life form is to grow until an external limit is reached. With governments there is but one predator, war. The only other limit might be 100% of the wealth of the citizens. Other than that, look out. Government, like mold or rabbits, will expand to fill all available space.
Yes, but the federal law would likely read something along the lines of:
Would that make anyone happy?
Face it, no matter how secure a system is, if it is usable by humans it can be breached. Easily.
There is anywhere from a 100 to 1000 hackers/crackers/slimeballs out there that are ready and willing to take on each and every system. Ones that claim to be "secure" are just a bigger target. There is no such thing as a completely "secure" system that is usable and accessible by ordinary humans. True security would require controlled physical access, multiple authenticating factors, and so on. None of this is going to happen for an accessible system usable by "ordinary humans".
About all that is realistic is to minimize the damages. Face the fact that if you are a target you are going to lose. Try not to lose too much.
Prosecution of the break-in? Forget it. It's the Internet. It is International. If it looks like it is coming from China, it could be real or it could be a proxy. There are no effective International laws that will assist in any sort of prosecution. There is no supra-national police force that will break down the door of the cracker and haul them away. Nothing is going to happen. Unless the guy is a complete idiot that brags about it.
I'd like it if the fact that Ford Motor Company sold cars for $1500 required them to sell cars for $1500 today.
Or, I should be able to buy something at any price I set rather than the price some greedy accountant set. This would immediately value your labor at whatever price someone other than you would set.
Any of this going to happen? Maybe. I suspect the really bad parts of #2 might come to pass in the US soon.
The point is there is no "business model" that will come after the labels and RIAA. You can't sell free stuff. If it is available for free and 100% of the people know it and can get it for free then there is nothing left to sell.
I don't know anyone that will buy music again. It is available for free and that is how people get it. Trying to build a new business that will get money for music is pointless. iTuens is offering convenience and a brand to people, but even still is making basically zero money. But it keeps iPod users fed and will exist for that purpose as long as possible. I suppose you might be able to sell a service something like that, but I doubt it. In a small number of years the people that equate piracy with theft and aren't willing to steal will be gone. At that point, free is the only game in town.