Murder is one of those things that no matter how many public service advertisements come on television, people seem to just keep getting killed. Law enforcement is powerless to stop it. Tens of thousands of people are murdered each year on the average.
Should laws against murder be considered bad because the enforcement isn't having much of an effect?
Two problems with that multipartisian committee. First off, who are you going to get? There is a real shortage of competent volunteerism in the US. So you are going to get elderly retired people with nothing else to do, and not very many of them. So manpower is going to be a problem.
Secondly, the US elections are trending to be below human accuracy limits. Do you believe that human counting can get better than say 0.5%? I doubt it. That means every time there is a recount you are going to get different results. So what do you do? Two out of thee counts? Statistically, with human counting and margins like 0.3% and less you are going to get a random result. Not good.
Also there is the time factor. If you had unlimited manpower (which you don't) you might be able to get through it in an evening. Problem is, there is a hard deadline of when the TV News decides they are going to announce. You can't stop them, freedom of the press and all that. So they are going to announce someone as the winner based on exit polls and any other information they can come up with. Tea leaves. Rabbit entrails. Tarot cards. Whatever. How do you deal with the fallout from that when they announce the wrong guy?
No, there really isn't a federal voting supervisor. The only federal office that is not elected by people in a single state is the President, and that election is in fact made by the Electoral College. The individual states elect Electors for the Electoral College and that is as far as it goes.
The problem with any sort of paper ballot is the time required to count them. The news organizations have put the burden on the state election commissions to ensure that results are delivered before midnight the day of the election. If the state fails in this mission, the TV news folks will just announce a winner anyway based on exit polls and the like. If they are wrong, so much the better because there will be exciting riots for everyone to watch the next day on TV.
OK, in the US we would have roughly 15,000 different pieces of paper because of municipal, county, state and federal elections all happening on the same day. Not enough for you? How about the requirement that they be counted within about 4 hours?
How long does it take the UK to tally the results of an election? Is the count carried live on the BBC? No? Well, election results are carried live in the US. And they don't get their advertising rates if nobody watches. So they have to announce a winner - it is a requirement of the TV News folks to keep people interested. Pretty much the deadline is midnight, before people go to bed.
Harken back to 2000 when CBS announced Gore as the winner just before midnight. Sure, by 2:00AM or so they rescinded that and said it looked like Bush was the winner. But the fact is that people went to bed "knowing" that Gore won. When they woke up the next morning Bush had "stolen" the election because the results were different. Now it wasn't all CBS's fault, but they do get some of the blame. Wanna see what happens this year if Obama is declared the winner by CBS and after actually counting the votes McCain turns out to be the winner two days later?
Do you really believe that George W. Bush really gives a rats ass about what the public opinion is on what he believes is the right course of action? One of the significant differences between Bush and Clinton is that Clinton would take a poll to decide what to have for breakfast whereas Bush apparently pays absolutely no attention to such polls at all.
For better or worse, George Bush believes he (and some advisors) know the right course. It may be the wrong course in many people's opinion, but in a representative democracy that doesn't really matter. Since the 2001 the US government has not been run by opinion polls whereas 1993-2000 it clearly was.
You may not like the course that George W. Bush is leading things in. But I see no evidence whatsoever that any sort of public opinion serves as a guide to this administration.
There is a little problem with the idea of "risk management". One that most people do not understand.
Nobody in any sort of public capacity wants to be the guy that has to stand in front of a group of parents and say he is real sorry about their children, but at least they didn't suffer. Much. It is a career-ending speech, and everybody knows it. You can change the parameters of it is little bit and be talking about wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers instead of children but the effect is the same.
And it doesn't really matter if you were the one making the decisions. Making the speech is what does you in. Where exactly is Rudy Giuliani today? He made a nice speech on 9/11 or thereabouts, but he couldn't really DO anything.
OK, with that firmly in mind, just about every politician knows that they do not want to be in that position. They need to do whatever it takes, however much public money is required to be spent, to ensure that they do not ever have to be in a position of making that speech. There is no sense of "risk management" about it. The risk is unacceptable at face value, at least to the politician. Folks can talk about the "risk" of terrorism all they want, but as a general class Americans will not put up with any level of casualities from something they perceive as being unnecessary and not an "act of God".
You can point out that in 2001 there were 10 times as many traffic fatalities as those that were killed in New York City. It doesn't matter. The same level of "blame" is not attached to traffic fatalities.
Let's see... passports have a OCR-readable number on them designed for insertion into a scanner. These are used whenever you enter the country.
I'd say they have been tracking people entering and leaving the country for, well, 20 or 30 years now. Possibly since they have been using passports.
I would say that tracking people entering and leaving a country is nothing new, and that just about every country is doing the same thing. Did you know, for example, that to visit Australia from the US they require a pre-approved visa that you must pay for? And unlike the US, overstaying your visa is a serious matter. Cross the border (illegally) into Mexico from the US and you are met by the Mexican Army with guns pointed at you.
Sorry, the US probably needs more tracking of who is coming in and who is leaving rather than less.
A much saner approach would simply to require ISPs to include in their terms of service and service contract a statement that says in signing up for service the account holder is responsible for all actions taken through use of the account.
I think you will likely find language like that already present in some, but not all service agreements today. It hasn't been enforced heavily, but it would eliminate a lot of silliness that exists today. You sign up for the account, you are responsible. Period.
Yes, this means that if you have an open WiFi service for your neighbors you take the heat for their downloading child porn, sending threatening letters to the President and so on. Unfortunately, from a law enforcement perspective there are few alternatives other than a camera that takes pictures every time the keyboard is used. And that isn't even a 100% solution, no matter how invasive it might seem.
The problem today is that for the most part, unless you brag, your exploits on the Internet cannot be tracked back to you. Sure, they have an IP address. But there is no connection between an IP address and a person. There isn't even a solid connection between an IP address and a computer. This means the Internet is a law-free zone today for people clever enough to contain their glee at describing their exploits in their personal crime blog.
Just like in the Wild West days, commerce eventually forced the elimination of widespread crime without law enforcement. Commerce and crime are pretty much polar opposites and if you are going to have one you cannot have the other - at least not in large quantities. The fact that I can steal your money, make purchases in your name, "borrow" anything digital that I want and never be held accountable is a problem. One solution is to simply enforce that the account holder is responsible for traffic on their account - certainly until proven otherwise.
There are plenty of examples of this type of accountability today.
Yes, the music companies aren't paying Pandora to play. I strongly suspect there are no ratings or audience statistics that would indicate to the copyright owners exactly what they might be getting by licensing Pandora to play their material. No advertising rate information that would indicate how valuable businesses consider Pandora to be in terms of listener attention.
What this all comes down to is it seems worthless to have the music played by Pandora. If they still want to, for no reason apparent to the copyright owners, they get to pay a lot for the privilege.
I think I'd argue that most people do not believe they can be successful. Therefore the obvious choice is for someone to give them what they can never achieve themselves. The Obamatarians want their piece of the pie and they are convinced that either the game is rigged or they simply weren't given the opportunity to be successful. Therefore, they need the leg up from the government to get theirs.
The folks that reject this message believe they can make it on their own. Or have already.
I'm talking about belief here, not reality. Lots of people in an $8 an hour job believe that one day the are going to be successful and wealthy. Within their own definition of wealth, they probably have a chance at that in the US. The folks making $70,000 and go home every day thinking that if only their boss was fair they would have a chance at his lifestyle are doomed to be unhappy no matter how much the government gives them - it will never be enough.
The one thing that Obama and his ilk can do is bring down everyone to the same level. It is much easier than elevating the unfortunate, it is quicker and can be absolutely controlled by the government. Trying to make everyone "successful" is doomed to failure and can't be guaranteed by the government in any way. That is the scenario that I find really worrisome - equality. Enforced by government programs.
I want public campaign financing. As much money as it takes to get elected today. This means that for mayor you get $500,000 to a million. A senator gets probably 5 million and for president it takes more like 200 million.
Anything you can pay out to friends and relatives is great, because they can support you in the off years.
I'd like to be a permanent campaigner for something like state senator. A few million every two years with most of it actually spent on campaign buttons and lawn signs. The rest to highly paid consultants (wife, brother, etc.) that are critical to the success of the campaign. I don't see any need to actually win. Just to get supported by public campaign financing.
Well, a large part of the problem that you don't seem to recognize is that a lot of really socially-minded people thought it would be a good idea for less fortunate people to be able to own a piece of the "American Dream". Sounds good, doesn't it? Why should the benefits of owning a home, with the associated tax benefits, be restricted to fat cats? How about including the "little guy" in to this club?
Excellent thinking, and because it sounds good it was extremely popular. One minor detail escaped the implementation of this plan however. How are these less-fortunate people supposed to pay for their newly acquired home? Obviously, because real estate values were increasing, we can just put this off until a later time.
It's a later time now. I don't think you can put this all on some kind of lack of regulation. It was a clear mandate to include people in home purchasing and it actually worked for a couple of years.
There was a time when the overt data colection would get you executed as a spy,
Where have you been hiding? China imprisons such people even when they are clearly not working for anyone outside China. Many Middle East countries will certainly execute people that are reading the newspapers a little too closely.
When was the last time that an American was imprisoned or executed? It has been a while, at least back to the 1980s or so.
What you clearly do not understand is let's say the ROM with the driver added only $0.10 to the cost of the device. Fine. The company that is making 100,000 consumer devices has a decision - CD at $0 additional cost or embedded storage at $10,000.
See, the marginal cost per unit needs to be pushed down as far as possible when you are making consumer hardware. Every nickle that is added is $50,000 if you are making a million units. That is a whole additional engineer in the US or EU and it is 10 people in China. Increasing engineering time is a single occurrence, adding cost to the device adds up very quickly.
This is why consumer electronics is generally very hard to work with and unbelieveably difficult to program sometimes. Sure, they could make it easier with a few more parts. But the costs go up astronomically.
Sorry, in today's world there are two sorts of companies: those with IP and a product and those with a product.
The first sort exist in the US and Europe. The second sort are in China, Singapore, Indonesia, etc. Taiwan and Japan are sort of a mix.
Once you let the IP out, the second sort of company can easily eliminate the first sort from the market. They can make the product cheaper, faster and more efficiently and they have zero R & D costs. Sure, you can use all sorts of things like patents and copyrights to try to lock down the IP. Unfortunately, none of those apply in a Singapore courtroom. And US Customs really, really doesn't care. They will not block importation of materials based on patents, licensing or anything else like that.
The problem is that unless the sensor is some kind of one-of-a-kind item unique to the company, what their entire product consists of is a sensor, a microprocessor and the code to interpret the readings from the sensor properly.
Once the source code gets out into the world - and of course it will be leaked somewhere on the Internet - they no longer have anything at all. No product. Why? Because their product can then be replicated for 1/10th the price in China. I'd say that protecting the source code is their only option.
It is entirely possible that they could have an expert review the source code in their office and ensure that no copy of it leaves their possession. They could have their own developers assist in this review. Unfortunately, it sounds like that course might disclose their proprietary source code consist of nothing more than reading a sensor and displaying the results. Good sensors often produce really nice results that require little interpretation. Of course, half the battle is figuring that out.
Again, once it gets out the company might as well just close down. They aren't going to be making any more sales after the Chinese manufacturing starts.
Keep in mind that iTunes is not profitable. Apple needs it to supply content for the billions of iPods. It turns out that iTunes isn't losing lots of money, but it is way below what any commercial entity would be able to tolerate.
If there were no iPods, iTunes would disappear overnight.
You are missing the one really expensive point of the "music business". Promotion. It is the promotional dollars that really add up and this is the only real service that the labels provide to the artists.
Without promotion, there is no music played on radio. Why not? Because the radio stations that play music exist because of the promotional dollars the music labels are spreading around directly or indirectly. They advertise the music, the music gets played by the radio station and the radio stations carry other advertising. No promotion equals no advertising.
There are lots and lots of other related businesses that will cease to exist when the promotional dollars end. They are certainly ending - I cannot imagine that music promotion can continue after WalMart stops selling CDs - and that market ends when broadband Internet reaches around 80% in the US.
Apple does not make money from music. They barely cover their costs of the iTunes operation. iTunes exists not to make money but to provide content for the billions of iPods out there. If there were no more iPods, iTunes would be shut down the very next day.
Amazon does apparently make some money from music. I don't know how their operation works but it is rather astonishing.
Nobody I know will ever pay a dime for music. Never. It is free now and anybody that tries to sell you music is ripping you off or taking advantage of your ignorance. Period. There is no "recorded music business" any longer. There cannot be - you can't make a profit on a free product. About all you can do is try to make people feel guilty (works!) or try to convince them to buy other stuff while taking their free music.
There is no business model that can make this work. There never will be.
I am not familiar with the law in Michigan. I am somewhat familiar with what was attempted in Texas. I believe they have similar roots and similar objectives.
The idea is to eliminate the "shadetree forensic examiner" from the marketplace. These folks represent themselves as being qualified but often do more damage than useful work. Read up on Bando v. Gates for an example of an unqualified forensic examiner.
The problem is most people are missing the point. States do not differentate between actions taken as part of an investigation or not. States do not differentate between evidence being collected for court vs. information for private use. If you are going to regulate examiners, then by God they are going to regulate examiners. What defines an examiner? Well, the Texas proposal would have regulated anyone doing "examination" work.
Yes, indeed, using Google would have fallen into their definition in some cases. This is not a matter of fine-tuning the law. This is utter silliness. The objective - elimination of unqualified people touching computers - is a good one. I'd really like to have a law like that to keep most of the people that come to me for help from ever touching a computer again. But it is not a realistic objective and not one that is compatible with the current state of the art.
Bemoan the use of "unlicensed investigators" all you want, but be aware that the bloggers license is next if this really were to succeed. I suspect it will not. The law may remain but it will not be enforced. Ever.
The process is far more important than the software. I don't care what the software is if the machines are secured properly. If the machines are not secured properly the software can be replaced, exchanged, modified or even the hardware can be tampered with.
Most of the difficulties being described are process problems, not problems with the software. If each machine had four armed National Guardsmen around it instead of some tamper seal we could be assured there would be little opportunity for tampering.
In the US we have a collection of folks called "TV News". They rely on delivery of titilating information to collect ratings upon which their advertising revenue is based. Without this, they have no function and many many people will be out on the street looking for work.
A significant source of information is elections. Everyone in the US wants to know who won because the elections (local, state and national) are referred to as a "horserace" and everyone wants to know the results of the "race". Races have winners, after all and the results are known immediately. This is the conditioning of the US voter and has been that was for well over 100 years.
So the TV News reports on election results. These results have to be timely and interesting. Titilating would be better, but that only happens in the run-up to the election. On election night it is all about the winner. There has to be a winner and it has to be announced before people go to bed. Otherwise, the TV News would be no more relevent than the newspaper where they can read about the winner the next morning. So in order to get the advertising revenue, there must be a winner announced before everyone goes to bed. The deadline there is pretty much midnight on the East Coast.
This means the West Coast has 2 or 3 hours to report the results of their election. Since most of the population is in the Eastern and Central time zones, they have five or six hours for their results which often works out even with more primitive voting machines. It has served well since the first TV News reporting of election results in 1960.
What happens if the West Coast doesn't report in time? The TV News folks are well aware of the time issue and use exit polling and surveys to fill in the gaps so there can be results no matter how long it really takes. This means they are reporting on a guess rather than an established fact. This led to the CBS News reporting of Gore as the winner in 2000 around midnight. Within a couple of hours they had corrected it, but many people went to bed knowing "their horse" (Gore) had won the "race". Obviously, they were stunned when they found out that the election had been stolen from their man. It could be nothing else because CBS News announced the winner before they went to bed.
If the US were to move to a system like other countries where real results were announced a couple of weeks after the election you would find the TV News still reporting results the night of the election. It would be based on exit polls and surveys. Sometimes it would be correct and sometimes the election would be "stolen" because the other candidate would have won. It would be this way because without the announcement of the winner the TV News has no relevance and would have no ad revenue.
You better get used to the idea that the US needs something where real results are available immediately. My guess is that there would be riots in the streets this year if the evening of the election Obama was announced as the winner and then a week later, after counting the votes for real, McCain was announced as the actual winner. Do you think that would be fun? I seriously doubt the the state government (esp. the police forces) think it would be.
So how can we make it work? And work quick enough so the TV News has reality to report rather than just some made up fantasy?
I want to own the company that gets the consulting contract supplying lots and lots of third-world labor for that transcription. Imagine getting $50 an hour for 200 people transcribing stuff for QC & verification. Most of it would have to be automated because humans transcribe at a 1:1 ratio and you would need more like 1000:1 or more.
This would be one of the most lucrative contracts ever awarded. It would create a huge corporate infrastructure and make the owners billions. It would be bigger than Google overnight.
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Murder is one of those things that no matter how many public service advertisements come on television, people seem to just keep getting killed. Law enforcement is powerless to stop it. Tens of thousands of people are murdered each year on the average.
Should laws against murder be considered bad because the enforcement isn't having much of an effect?
Two problems with that multipartisian committee. First off, who are you going to get? There is a real shortage of competent volunteerism in the US. So you are going to get elderly retired people with nothing else to do, and not very many of them. So manpower is going to be a problem.
Secondly, the US elections are trending to be below human accuracy limits. Do you believe that human counting can get better than say 0.5%? I doubt it. That means every time there is a recount you are going to get different results. So what do you do? Two out of thee counts? Statistically, with human counting and margins like 0.3% and less you are going to get a random result. Not good.
Also there is the time factor. If you had unlimited manpower (which you don't) you might be able to get through it in an evening. Problem is, there is a hard deadline of when the TV News decides they are going to announce. You can't stop them, freedom of the press and all that. So they are going to announce someone as the winner based on exit polls and any other information they can come up with. Tea leaves. Rabbit entrails. Tarot cards. Whatever. How do you deal with the fallout from that when they announce the wrong guy?
No, there really isn't a federal voting supervisor. The only federal office that is not elected by people in a single state is the President, and that election is in fact made by the Electoral College. The individual states elect Electors for the Electoral College and that is as far as it goes.
The problem with any sort of paper ballot is the time required to count them. The news organizations have put the burden on the state election commissions to ensure that results are delivered before midnight the day of the election. If the state fails in this mission, the TV news folks will just announce a winner anyway based on exit polls and the like. If they are wrong, so much the better because there will be exciting riots for everyone to watch the next day on TV.
OK, in the US we would have roughly 15,000 different pieces of paper because of municipal, county, state and federal elections all happening on the same day. Not enough for you? How about the requirement that they be counted within about 4 hours?
How long does it take the UK to tally the results of an election? Is the count carried live on the BBC? No? Well, election results are carried live in the US. And they don't get their advertising rates if nobody watches. So they have to announce a winner - it is a requirement of the TV News folks to keep people interested. Pretty much the deadline is midnight, before people go to bed.
Harken back to 2000 when CBS announced Gore as the winner just before midnight. Sure, by 2:00AM or so they rescinded that and said it looked like Bush was the winner. But the fact is that people went to bed "knowing" that Gore won. When they woke up the next morning Bush had "stolen" the election because the results were different. Now it wasn't all CBS's fault, but they do get some of the blame. Wanna see what happens this year if Obama is declared the winner by CBS and after actually counting the votes McCain turns out to be the winner two days later?
I don't think I want to be in the US for that.
Do you really believe that George W. Bush really gives a rats ass about what the public opinion is on what he believes is the right course of action? One of the significant differences between Bush and Clinton is that Clinton would take a poll to decide what to have for breakfast whereas Bush apparently pays absolutely no attention to such polls at all.
For better or worse, George Bush believes he (and some advisors) know the right course. It may be the wrong course in many people's opinion, but in a representative democracy that doesn't really matter. Since the 2001 the US government has not been run by opinion polls whereas 1993-2000 it clearly was.
You may not like the course that George W. Bush is leading things in. But I see no evidence whatsoever that any sort of public opinion serves as a guide to this administration.
There is a little problem with the idea of "risk management". One that most people do not understand.
Nobody in any sort of public capacity wants to be the guy that has to stand in front of a group of parents and say he is real sorry about their children, but at least they didn't suffer. Much. It is a career-ending speech, and everybody knows it. You can change the parameters of it is little bit and be talking about wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers instead of children but the effect is the same.
And it doesn't really matter if you were the one making the decisions. Making the speech is what does you in. Where exactly is Rudy Giuliani today? He made a nice speech on 9/11 or thereabouts, but he couldn't really DO anything.
OK, with that firmly in mind, just about every politician knows that they do not want to be in that position. They need to do whatever it takes, however much public money is required to be spent, to ensure that they do not ever have to be in a position of making that speech. There is no sense of "risk management" about it. The risk is unacceptable at face value, at least to the politician. Folks can talk about the "risk" of terrorism all they want, but as a general class Americans will not put up with any level of casualities from something they perceive as being unnecessary and not an "act of God".
You can point out that in 2001 there were 10 times as many traffic fatalities as those that were killed in New York City. It doesn't matter. The same level of "blame" is not attached to traffic fatalities.
Let's see... passports have a OCR-readable number on them designed for insertion into a scanner. These are used whenever you enter the country.
I'd say they have been tracking people entering and leaving the country for, well, 20 or 30 years now. Possibly since they have been using passports.
I would say that tracking people entering and leaving a country is nothing new, and that just about every country is doing the same thing. Did you know, for example, that to visit Australia from the US they require a pre-approved visa that you must pay for? And unlike the US, overstaying your visa is a serious matter. Cross the border (illegally) into Mexico from the US and you are met by the Mexican Army with guns pointed at you.
Sorry, the US probably needs more tracking of who is coming in and who is leaving rather than less.
A much saner approach would simply to require ISPs to include in their terms of service and service contract a statement that says in signing up for service the account holder is responsible for all actions taken through use of the account.
I think you will likely find language like that already present in some, but not all service agreements today. It hasn't been enforced heavily, but it would eliminate a lot of silliness that exists today. You sign up for the account, you are responsible. Period.
Yes, this means that if you have an open WiFi service for your neighbors you take the heat for their downloading child porn, sending threatening letters to the President and so on. Unfortunately, from a law enforcement perspective there are few alternatives other than a camera that takes pictures every time the keyboard is used. And that isn't even a 100% solution, no matter how invasive it might seem.
The problem today is that for the most part, unless you brag, your exploits on the Internet cannot be tracked back to you. Sure, they have an IP address. But there is no connection between an IP address and a person. There isn't even a solid connection between an IP address and a computer. This means the Internet is a law-free zone today for people clever enough to contain their glee at describing their exploits in their personal crime blog.
Just like in the Wild West days, commerce eventually forced the elimination of widespread crime without law enforcement. Commerce and crime are pretty much polar opposites and if you are going to have one you cannot have the other - at least not in large quantities. The fact that I can steal your money, make purchases in your name, "borrow" anything digital that I want and never be held accountable is a problem. One solution is to simply enforce that the account holder is responsible for traffic on their account - certainly until proven otherwise.
There are plenty of examples of this type of accountability today.
Yes, the music companies aren't paying Pandora to play. I strongly suspect there are no ratings or audience statistics that would indicate to the copyright owners exactly what they might be getting by licensing Pandora to play their material. No advertising rate information that would indicate how valuable businesses consider Pandora to be in terms of listener attention.
What this all comes down to is it seems worthless to have the music played by Pandora. If they still want to, for no reason apparent to the copyright owners, they get to pay a lot for the privilege.
I think I'd argue that most people do not believe they can be successful. Therefore the obvious choice is for someone to give them what they can never achieve themselves. The Obamatarians want their piece of the pie and they are convinced that either the game is rigged or they simply weren't given the opportunity to be successful. Therefore, they need the leg up from the government to get theirs.
The folks that reject this message believe they can make it on their own. Or have already.
I'm talking about belief here, not reality. Lots of people in an $8 an hour job believe that one day the are going to be successful and wealthy. Within their own definition of wealth, they probably have a chance at that in the US. The folks making $70,000 and go home every day thinking that if only their boss was fair they would have a chance at his lifestyle are doomed to be unhappy no matter how much the government gives them - it will never be enough.
The one thing that Obama and his ilk can do is bring down everyone to the same level. It is much easier than elevating the unfortunate, it is quicker and can be absolutely controlled by the government. Trying to make everyone "successful" is doomed to failure and can't be guaranteed by the government in any way. That is the scenario that I find really worrisome - equality. Enforced by government programs.
I want public campaign financing. As much money as it takes to get elected today. This means that for mayor you get $500,000 to a million. A senator gets probably 5 million and for president it takes more like 200 million.
Anything you can pay out to friends and relatives is great, because they can support you in the off years.
I'd like to be a permanent campaigner for something like state senator. A few million every two years with most of it actually spent on campaign buttons and lawn signs. The rest to highly paid consultants (wife, brother, etc.) that are critical to the success of the campaign. I don't see any need to actually win. Just to get supported by public campaign financing.
Well, a large part of the problem that you don't seem to recognize is that a lot of really socially-minded people thought it would be a good idea for less fortunate people to be able to own a piece of the "American Dream". Sounds good, doesn't it? Why should the benefits of owning a home, with the associated tax benefits, be restricted to fat cats? How about including the "little guy" in to this club?
Excellent thinking, and because it sounds good it was extremely popular. One minor detail escaped the implementation of this plan however. How are these less-fortunate people supposed to pay for their newly acquired home? Obviously, because real estate values were increasing, we can just put this off until a later time.
It's a later time now. I don't think you can put this all on some kind of lack of regulation. It was a clear mandate to include people in home purchasing and it actually worked for a couple of years.
Where have you been hiding? China imprisons such people even when they are clearly not working for anyone outside China. Many Middle East countries will certainly execute people that are reading the newspapers a little too closely.
When was the last time that an American was imprisoned or executed? It has been a while, at least back to the 1980s or so.
What you clearly do not understand is let's say the ROM with the driver added only $0.10 to the cost of the device. Fine. The company that is making 100,000 consumer devices has a decision - CD at $0 additional cost or embedded storage at $10,000.
See, the marginal cost per unit needs to be pushed down as far as possible when you are making consumer hardware. Every nickle that is added is $50,000 if you are making a million units. That is a whole additional engineer in the US or EU and it is 10 people in China. Increasing engineering time is a single occurrence, adding cost to the device adds up very quickly.
This is why consumer electronics is generally very hard to work with and unbelieveably difficult to program sometimes. Sure, they could make it easier with a few more parts. But the costs go up astronomically.
Sorry, in today's world there are two sorts of companies: those with IP and a product and those with a product.
The first sort exist in the US and Europe. The second sort are in China, Singapore, Indonesia, etc. Taiwan and Japan are sort of a mix.
Once you let the IP out, the second sort of company can easily eliminate the first sort from the market. They can make the product cheaper, faster and more efficiently and they have zero R & D costs. Sure, you can use all sorts of things like patents and copyrights to try to lock down the IP. Unfortunately, none of those apply in a Singapore courtroom. And US Customs really, really doesn't care. They will not block importation of materials based on patents, licensing or anything else like that.
The problem is that unless the sensor is some kind of one-of-a-kind item unique to the company, what their entire product consists of is a sensor, a microprocessor and the code to interpret the readings from the sensor properly.
Once the source code gets out into the world - and of course it will be leaked somewhere on the Internet - they no longer have anything at all. No product. Why? Because their product can then be replicated for 1/10th the price in China. I'd say that protecting the source code is their only option.
It is entirely possible that they could have an expert review the source code in their office and ensure that no copy of it leaves their possession. They could have their own developers assist in this review. Unfortunately, it sounds like that course might disclose their proprietary source code consist of nothing more than reading a sensor and displaying the results. Good sensors often produce really nice results that require little interpretation. Of course, half the battle is figuring that out.
Again, once it gets out the company might as well just close down. They aren't going to be making any more sales after the Chinese manufacturing starts.
That would be a violation of the CCA rules. Only CCA-authorized entities can produce CSS protected discs.
Sorry, but most online "newspapers" just republish other web content. There may not even be a human involved.
Ask yourself, how long could Slashdot go with an automated submission editor? Without it being noticed?
Keep in mind that iTunes is not profitable. Apple needs it to supply content for the billions of iPods. It turns out that iTunes isn't losing lots of money, but it is way below what any commercial entity would be able to tolerate.
If there were no iPods, iTunes would disappear overnight.
You are missing the one really expensive point of the "music business". Promotion. It is the promotional dollars that really add up and this is the only real service that the labels provide to the artists.
Without promotion, there is no music played on radio. Why not? Because the radio stations that play music exist because of the promotional dollars the music labels are spreading around directly or indirectly. They advertise the music, the music gets played by the radio station and the radio stations carry other advertising. No promotion equals no advertising.
There are lots and lots of other related businesses that will cease to exist when the promotional dollars end. They are certainly ending - I cannot imagine that music promotion can continue after WalMart stops selling CDs - and that market ends when broadband Internet reaches around 80% in the US.
When will you people get it? Probably never.
Apple does not make money from music. They barely cover their costs of the iTunes operation. iTunes exists not to make money but to provide content for the billions of iPods out there. If there were no more iPods, iTunes would be shut down the very next day.
Amazon does apparently make some money from music. I don't know how their operation works but it is rather astonishing.
Nobody I know will ever pay a dime for music. Never. It is free now and anybody that tries to sell you music is ripping you off or taking advantage of your ignorance. Period. There is no "recorded music business" any longer. There cannot be - you can't make a profit on a free product. About all you can do is try to make people feel guilty (works!) or try to convince them to buy other stuff while taking their free music.
There is no business model that can make this work. There never will be.
I am not familiar with the law in Michigan. I am somewhat familiar with what was attempted in Texas. I believe they have similar roots and similar objectives.
The idea is to eliminate the "shadetree forensic examiner" from the marketplace. These folks represent themselves as being qualified but often do more damage than useful work. Read up on Bando v. Gates for an example of an unqualified forensic examiner.
The problem is most people are missing the point. States do not differentate between actions taken as part of an investigation or not. States do not differentate between evidence being collected for court vs. information for private use. If you are going to regulate examiners, then by God they are going to regulate examiners. What defines an examiner? Well, the Texas proposal would have regulated anyone doing "examination" work.
Yes, indeed, using Google would have fallen into their definition in some cases. This is not a matter of fine-tuning the law. This is utter silliness. The objective - elimination of unqualified people touching computers - is a good one. I'd really like to have a law like that to keep most of the people that come to me for help from ever touching a computer again. But it is not a realistic objective and not one that is compatible with the current state of the art.
Bemoan the use of "unlicensed investigators" all you want, but be aware that the bloggers license is next if this really were to succeed. I suspect it will not. The law may remain but it will not be enforced. Ever.
The process is far more important than the software. I don't care what the software is if the machines are secured properly. If the machines are not secured properly the software can be replaced, exchanged, modified or even the hardware can be tampered with.
Most of the difficulties being described are process problems, not problems with the software. If each machine had four armed National Guardsmen around it instead of some tamper seal we could be assured there would be little opportunity for tampering.
In the US we have a collection of folks called "TV News". They rely on delivery of titilating information to collect ratings upon which their advertising revenue is based. Without this, they have no function and many many people will be out on the street looking for work.
A significant source of information is elections. Everyone in the US wants to know who won because the elections (local, state and national) are referred to as a "horserace" and everyone wants to know the results of the "race". Races have winners, after all and the results are known immediately. This is the conditioning of the US voter and has been that was for well over 100 years.
So the TV News reports on election results. These results have to be timely and interesting. Titilating would be better, but that only happens in the run-up to the election. On election night it is all about the winner. There has to be a winner and it has to be announced before people go to bed. Otherwise, the TV News would be no more relevent than the newspaper where they can read about the winner the next morning. So in order to get the advertising revenue, there must be a winner announced before everyone goes to bed. The deadline there is pretty much midnight on the East Coast.
This means the West Coast has 2 or 3 hours to report the results of their election. Since most of the population is in the Eastern and Central time zones, they have five or six hours for their results which often works out even with more primitive voting machines. It has served well since the first TV News reporting of election results in 1960.
What happens if the West Coast doesn't report in time? The TV News folks are well aware of the time issue and use exit polling and surveys to fill in the gaps so there can be results no matter how long it really takes. This means they are reporting on a guess rather than an established fact. This led to the CBS News reporting of Gore as the winner in 2000 around midnight. Within a couple of hours they had corrected it, but many people went to bed knowing "their horse" (Gore) had won the "race". Obviously, they were stunned when they found out that the election had been stolen from their man. It could be nothing else because CBS News announced the winner before they went to bed.
If the US were to move to a system like other countries where real results were announced a couple of weeks after the election you would find the TV News still reporting results the night of the election. It would be based on exit polls and surveys. Sometimes it would be correct and sometimes the election would be "stolen" because the other candidate would have won. It would be this way because without the announcement of the winner the TV News has no relevance and would have no ad revenue.
You better get used to the idea that the US needs something where real results are available immediately. My guess is that there would be riots in the streets this year if the evening of the election Obama was announced as the winner and then a week later, after counting the votes for real, McCain was announced as the actual winner. Do you think that would be fun? I seriously doubt the the state government (esp. the police forces) think it would be.
So how can we make it work? And work quick enough so the TV News has reality to report rather than just some made up fantasy?
I want to own the company that gets the consulting contract supplying lots and lots of third-world labor for that transcription. Imagine getting $50 an hour for 200 people transcribing stuff for QC & verification. Most of it would have to be automated because humans transcribe at a 1:1 ratio and you would need more like 1000:1 or more.
This would be one of the most lucrative contracts ever awarded. It would create a huge corporate infrastructure and make the owners billions. It would be bigger than Google overnight.