Prostitution is illegal nearly everywhere because it is clearly recognized as a situation that most women do not find themselves in voluntarily. Even if someone does decide on their own to become a prostitute, they usually find themselves in an unexpectedly abusive situation - having to turn all their money over, etc.
It rapidly gets out of control with the pimp or madam having all the power and the worker none. It also leads to a lot of other things that are pretty bad.
Why is indentured servitude illegal today? Weren't there some nice masters? Wouldn't it be better to just focus on the "bad masters" and keep the practice so there wouldn't be as many homeless and destitute people today? Same argument.
The only "inexpensive" delivery is free. And the "industry" isn't ready to give in to that yet.
And why would digital deliver be any cheaper? Do you honestly believe that $19 of the $20 for the DVD in the store has to do with making the DVD and putting it in the store? The DVD costs about $0.40 at the quantity they are making them. The store is taking maybe 20% at the most. The rest is paying for the content and the production of the content. Sorry, but the only way you get inexpensive digital downloads is by stealing them, like AllOfMP3 did.
Of course I believe that it is free now and will be more free in the future. The generation that grows up downloading whatever they want are unlikely to be able to turn back the clock and say now that you have to pay. If it is digital, it is free. Today and forever more. Anyone expecting anything other than ad revenue is deluding themselves. And when the next browser comes out from Microsoft with built-in ad blocking that game is over as well.
There are no nuclear power plants because a few people have been able to block the technology and growth since the 1970s.
For example, "everyone" knows that a large number of people died because of Three Mile Island, right? Exactly how many died? 10,000? 1,000? Would you believe ZERO? No, I didn't think so.
So how many people died directly because of Chernobyl? Most people believe it was again thousands. It was 46, and they were all on the roof of the reactor building fighting the fire. A lot of people have thyroid problems and left untreated they could die from it, but they are being treated. There might be an increase in cancer, but so far it does not appear to be significant.
The exclusion zone around the Chernobyl site is currently less radioactive than some parts of Norway.
Ask any environmentalist about this and you will find that not only do they not care about the facts but they believe the facts just in the way of the truth. The truth, of course, is that nuclear power is bad. I wouldn't count on getting any new power plants any time soon.
Trains? Sorry, but the train era ended around 1970. After it was decided that trains were no longer profitable, they tore up the tracks and sold the land off.
Today, if you take the train, you will find that passenger service has to wait on sidings until the track (just one left) is cleared because freight is also using it and is more important. On the east coast there are some train lines left with some passenger service tracks, but that is the exception to the rest of the country.
Nobody is going to build any high speed rail lines except in a very few places where they can somehow buy back the right-of-way or just add a track to an existing freight corridor. A nationwide rail system was built before 1950 and allowed to deteriorate completely. It was sold off as scrap metal. I don't see anyone being able to rebuild it now.
Underground tunnels? Sure, but where would the labor come from? At OHSA prices we'd all be better off walking, even from New York to Chicago.
Pirates aren't customers. They will never be customers because for them it is all free.
I don't buy music. Nobody I know buys music. It is freely available on the Internet. None of these people are in any way "customers" for any RIAA member. They will never be because they will never buy anything that can be downloaded for free.
The numbers are growing, principally with the growth of broadband Internet access. Today the people buying CDs at WalMart probably do not have broadband Internet access at all - maybe dial-up, maybe nothing. When they have broadband access how long do you think it will be before a friend or neighbor shows them how to download music and movies? A week? Then they will cease being a customer and simply take what is available.
You are simply encountering the staff of the media company that grew up with the idea that it all should be free for the taking. If it is on the Internet, why should anyone pay for that?
Sure, you should be paid. But you aren't going to be. This is the culture we have formed. Sorry, but we all get to live with it.
You can expect more and more dealings with creative works to be handled the same way. If you grew up thinking music was free for the download, why would you pay for it? And why would you pay for photos, books, movies, software, etc? After all, it is all on the Internet free to download. Right?
I don't know where to begin, there are so many errors and misconceptions in the above.
The MP3 format was a trigger, but also CD-ROM drives that would "rip" a CD were another factor. In 1995 there were two. Two. All other drives where specifically programmed not to support extraction of audio information. This changed significantly around 1997 or so but before then "ripping" a CD simply wasn't possible for most people.
There is no copyright fee in the US - that's Canada you are thinking of. Unless you are buying "Music CD-R" discs which are required for the vanishingly small number of stereo-component CD recorders. There is a tariff on those discs, but few buy them because even fewer people have the hardware that requires them.
Oh, and the copyright warnings were on VHS tapes in the 1970's so this isn't exactly a new thing either.
Ha ha. OK, while your hyperbole is humorous you have to admit that distribution of music is going to be cut back. Sure, the people that "know" about it will still know and their friends will. But why are you going to go looking for "new music" that doesn't show up with some keyworded search that nobody ever tells you about?
I think more significantly the people that are need to make a living are going to have to rethink a career in recorded music. 15-20 years ago a good living could be made by being a backup musician for a studio. Today, I suspect the job still exists. 10 years from now it will not. Either you are a major talent or you are nothing. We will also have a lot of people that are publishing their material because they know the world would be a much poorer place without their (and specifically THEIR) music. Ego-driven publishing will result in plenty of music being out there - most of it being the sort you would expect from people that insist they are the best in the world.
I agree that the "war on drugs" isn't doing much to reduce the problem below current levels. But, it is my belief that after seeing plenty of people addicted to drugs in one form or another that removing what controls exist today on it would give many more people the justification to use drugs. There is a small group that really cares that they are illegal and without that, they would gladly use whatever was available.
So what do we do? Education? The problem is that we are fighting "escapism" in general. Educating people that getting away from the depressing aspects of their lives is somehow wrong or self-destructive doesn't work. Just let the druggies alone? The problem with that is without controls usage will expand significantly. High prices both deter use and create crimes to fund habits.
I don't know what the answer is. I do know that today in the US 20-30% of the population would agressively jump on the drug bandwagon if they knew it was safe and wasn't illegal. Maybe more. That isn't a solution, it is a disaster. I believe most people on the leading edges of the drug war are as frustrated as anyone else over the problem. Nobody has an idea what to do. Do we just write off a third of the population of the US?
So, do you selflishly hoard all of your virus-free purchases or do you share them for the betterment of mankind? I'm willing to let you buy the stuff as long as you share. If you aren't sharing, then most of the people I know will make sure that you no longer have a place to purchase your music because it ceases to be profitable to do so.
So, either way, the vendor loses and will give up. Eventually. Sorry, but it is like they say, adapt or die. And the adaptation means not trying to sell digital goods any longer.
Yes, but when it is perfectly clear that anything unprotected will be shared immediately with the Internet-using community on the planet there will be quite a bit of content that just isn't available.
It is already that way with music to a large extent. Not completely, but when the CD department at WalMart disappears it will be clear to everyone. Movies will take a little longer, but it is coming. If it is put in digital form, it will be stolen and "shared" with the entire planet.
Sorry, there can't be a profitable way to sell music online. It is impossible. We have cultured a generation of people to believe that if it can be copied, then it should be. Period.
I don't know anyone that actually pays for music. I can't imagine anyone that would do this, except if they simply didn't know how. iTunes? Sure. Not only is it not profitable, but the memory sizes of the devices assume you aren't going to actually pay to fill them - it would cost you $10,000 or more. Nobody is going to spend that. Nobody at all.
Face it, there cannot be any "music business" very soon. There will be old music and free music and that is about it. Expect a lot of it to sound like Darwin Reedy.
Investment isn't the whole problem. You have the protests that high tension lines cause cancer and a myrid of other ills. There is just as much "proof" that transmission lines cause sickness as there is that cell phones cause cancer. Or that global warming is caused by jet aircraft.
So, do you want to force people to accept transmission lines through their part of town? Because you believe the claims have no basis in fact? What if you are proved wrong 30 years from now? Are you or your local or state government willing to accept the liability for an untold number of deaths and illnesses?
Nope. Nobody is. So the lines don't get built or upgraded.
Until this problem is solved we're not going anywhere.
The problem with DC is that you can't use a simple transformer to reduce the voltage. Very high voltages are used for long distance transmission so the same amount of energy can be sent with a very low current. If it was DC you would need something far more complicated at each end to convert the voltage/current ratios.
Actually, I don't know of anything that you could use at the scale needed. You might be able to do something with a set of motor-generators or something like that. But it would not be trivial. Or small.
Finally, most of the losses aren't from inductance but simple resistance and conversion of electrical energy into heat in the wires. I don't see that getting any better using DC vs. AC.
Probably the biggest problem, aside from the investment required, is the public education that would be needed. Unless there is a significant change in state's rights and other aspects of law in the US, it would be impossible to do this simply as a federal mandate. You are going to have to get the states to buy into the plan and get the people behind it.
Unfortunately, there is a considerable following to the idea that power lines, especially those of high capacity, are dangerous to be near. They reputedly cause all sorts of mysterious health problems. This means that construction of any high capacity power line is going to run into community resistance whenever it crosses a populated area. Most people in state and local government are far more in touch with the feelings of the people they represent than those at the federal level - which is the way it is supposed to work. That means that the state and local governments are highly likely to resist any plans to build high capacity power lines in their area. Fiercely.
The result of this pretty much dooms any plans to build new power lines of any sort, smart or dumb. Environmental impact studies can be drawn out for years and years, all the while increasing the cost. Just plain "never near me" protests will dog any attempts even to upgrade existing infrastructure. And because most of the supposed problems have no rational basis you can't use science to disprove them. It is like disproving the invisible Easter Bunny.
I seriously doubt the ability of any large-scale engineering works in the US today. It isn't that we do not have the engineering skills, we do. We do not have the ability to muster the people behind such projects.
There is no such thing today as a bank of batteries that could hold 100MW. I suppose you could build up such a thing with lots and lots of ordinary lead-acid batteries, but there would be problems:
toxic gases
lead is a hazardous substance
acid !!!
You would need lots of batteries and some special permits. I can't imagine the size of the inverter you would need - it would be far larger than anything like that ever made. The losses would also be huge which is why nobody has done this.
A far more practical way to store that much energy is to do something like pumping water uphill which then powers a hydroelectric generating system. Again, nobody has done anything like that on a scale this large. So you are in unknown territory. With huge amounts of energy.
Oh, and by the way, it will never go anywhere near a populated area.
You misunderstand the motivations of pirates and thieves. If the technology can be produced fairly easily, there are people that will buy it. If it can be assembled by someone with a little instruction and some dexterity, so much the better.
I'll bet that there are plenty of people that would be willing to pay $50 for a lifetime transit "pass" that would let them ride free for years. Assuming the specifics were addressed and these "passes" needed to be updated, there are still plenty that would pay $50 a year to keep riding free. Same thing for tolls. If you could have Arnold Schwarzenegger's EZpass code do you not think there would be customers?
All the vendor of these things has to be is in a place that can thumb their nose at US law. Today that is easily Russia and most of Southeast Asia. Mexico, probably as well. There is money to be made with this, and I'm sure it will be made.
How many tolls and fares? Lots and lots. Will the various agencies decide they have to make major change? Maybe. The biggest problem is if there is any commercial exploitation of this the users will take in the wallet for high-priced, more difficult to use, systems with greater security.
Well, according to the FBI, this includes all forms of credit card fraud. This is mostly why "identity theft" is getting so much attention and seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
I have been subjected to credit card fraud many times, as have many people I have known. I have yet to meet anyone that has experenced any loss, even the supposed $50 that you might be liable for. Zero loss, get a new card and move on. Sometimes a minor hassle.
The sort of "identity theft" that most people associate with the term is where someone obtains credit under false pretenses. I don't know what the actual incidence of this is and because of the FBI combining it with credit card fraud, we will probably never know the true impact of this. What I want to know is how often this is really happening and has anyone, ever, been a victim of something beyond credit card fraud because of one of these disclosures.
I don't see any point to trying to make a bigger deal out of it if there have in fact been zero occurrences where this information has been used to someone's detriment.
The problem isn't that www.yourbank.com is compromised. Nor is it an immediate problem that www.somecrook.com is issued a certificate for www.yourbank.com.
The problem is far closer to www.yourbanking.com being (a) allowed to exist and (b) issued a certificate for www.yourbanking.com saying all is legitimate. Everyone should know that if the two are held up against each other that www.yourbanking.com is a scam. Today, GoDaddy, Register.com and others will happily register the domain for you. I don't see it as a huge leap for these folks to get certificates either.
The problem is that arrest information is "news" and aquittials/releases are not. Therefore, the arrest is made public and the fact you are released later never appears anywhere.
It might be reasonable if both got the same level of attention and publication. But the simple fact is that the arrest is interesting and the release is only important to the person that it happened to. Nobody else cares. This means that every arrest will be forever available on the Internet and never, ever any information about it being bogus, dismissed or whatever.
Your entire so-called criminal history is then public without any redeeming information.
There is a real problem with classifying what MediaSentry did as an "investigation". They are performing a service that involves tracking down IP addresses based on information gathered through connecting to various computers on the Internet.
An equivalent "investigation" occurs if you have a contractor examine logs for unwanted SSH traffic and reporting back the IP addresses, as well as the ISP to which they are connected. Is this something that requires licensing to do? If so, we better make sure that every single admin is licensed in this manner.
Of course, all of what MediaSentry does can be automated. Every last little bit of it. Who then, exactly, is performing this "investigation"? The author of the software or the person using it? This is an important question because obviously a defense of the person using it would be that they have no knowledge of what the program does - they are just a user.
I would say that searching public records is far more intrusive than this. Should a license be required to search on behalf of another? In some states today this is loosely interpreted as "Yes". As many public records are no on Google, might we see this expanded to needing a license to use Google on behalf of another? How about needing a license to use Google at all? After all, there is no telling what you might find on someone and publishing it could cause them significant harm, both legally and financially.
I believe it is fair to say that never before in history has there been either a fire that has burned in a steel frame building for hours without being put out, nor has there been a fire in a steel frame building which has been fed by tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene.
These two "never before in history" items make it pretty clear we are dealing with some pretty unusual things.
You might be able to draw some parallels with early 20th century fires in chemical plants where the building had a steel frame and brick construction. No, I don't know of any offhand. But that is about all that you could ever find with even close to the amount of flammable liquids involved in WTC1 and WTC2.
Tell that to the folks that are paid because if intellectual property.
The problem is, in reality, all "intellectual property" has maybe five years left to it. At that point the non-cooperation between nations will mean that if it isn't stolen and remarketed by someone in the West, it will be done from Asia. The pirates are there today with a goal of eliminating the revenue from digital media as well.
Creativity will NOT be rewarded in the future. Too bad, because we have so little of it anyway.
We all hear endlessly about the health effects of power lines, cell phones, and all other EM radiation. How come nobody has done a "study" on the health effects of these boxes so they have the same restrictions as power lines do today?
You want to put up a new power line? Mostly, unless it is an empty rural area with nothing but farms you can forget about it. An army of people will show up at public hearings to claim how much damage has been caused in their lives because of power lines and the supposed ill effects from them. Cell towers have it almost this bad.
I find it really humorous that Obama's energy plan calls for reworking the electric distribution grid. Sure, sounds good - but has anyone ventured out to a meeting where some local government is providing a forum for the power company's approval process? By the end of the meeting you can assume quite easily that there will be no power line coming anywhere near that community. The "documented" problems caused by power lines are such that nobody is going to allow a new distribution grid to be built.
(of course all the "documentation" is bullshit, but that doesn't seem to affect the process one bit.)
Slashdot Mirror
Prostitution is illegal nearly everywhere because it is clearly recognized as a situation that most women do not find themselves in voluntarily. Even if someone does decide on their own to become a prostitute, they usually find themselves in an unexpectedly abusive situation - having to turn all their money over, etc.
It rapidly gets out of control with the pimp or madam having all the power and the worker none. It also leads to a lot of other things that are pretty bad.
Why is indentured servitude illegal today? Weren't there some nice masters? Wouldn't it be better to just focus on the "bad masters" and keep the practice so there wouldn't be as many homeless and destitute people today? Same argument.
The only "inexpensive" delivery is free. And the "industry" isn't ready to give in to that yet.
And why would digital deliver be any cheaper? Do you honestly believe that $19 of the $20 for the DVD in the store has to do with making the DVD and putting it in the store? The DVD costs about $0.40 at the quantity they are making them. The store is taking maybe 20% at the most. The rest is paying for the content and the production of the content. Sorry, but the only way you get inexpensive digital downloads is by stealing them, like AllOfMP3 did.
Of course I believe that it is free now and will be more free in the future. The generation that grows up downloading whatever they want are unlikely to be able to turn back the clock and say now that you have to pay. If it is digital, it is free. Today and forever more. Anyone expecting anything other than ad revenue is deluding themselves. And when the next browser comes out from Microsoft with built-in ad blocking that game is over as well.
There are no nuclear power plants because a few people have been able to block the technology and growth since the 1970s.
For example, "everyone" knows that a large number of people died because of Three Mile Island, right? Exactly how many died? 10,000? 1,000? Would you believe ZERO? No, I didn't think so.
So how many people died directly because of Chernobyl? Most people believe it was again thousands. It was 46, and they were all on the roof of the reactor building fighting the fire. A lot of people have thyroid problems and left untreated they could die from it, but they are being treated. There might be an increase in cancer, but so far it does not appear to be significant.
The exclusion zone around the Chernobyl site is currently less radioactive than some parts of Norway.
Ask any environmentalist about this and you will find that not only do they not care about the facts but they believe the facts just in the way of the truth. The truth, of course, is that nuclear power is bad. I wouldn't count on getting any new power plants any time soon.
Trains? Sorry, but the train era ended around 1970. After it was decided that trains were no longer profitable, they tore up the tracks and sold the land off.
Today, if you take the train, you will find that passenger service has to wait on sidings until the track (just one left) is cleared because freight is also using it and is more important. On the east coast there are some train lines left with some passenger service tracks, but that is the exception to the rest of the country.
Nobody is going to build any high speed rail lines except in a very few places where they can somehow buy back the right-of-way or just add a track to an existing freight corridor. A nationwide rail system was built before 1950 and allowed to deteriorate completely. It was sold off as scrap metal. I don't see anyone being able to rebuild it now.
Underground tunnels? Sure, but where would the labor come from? At OHSA prices we'd all be better off walking, even from New York to Chicago.
Pirates aren't customers. They will never be customers because for them it is all free.
I don't buy music. Nobody I know buys music. It is freely available on the Internet. None of these people are in any way "customers" for any RIAA member. They will never be because they will never buy anything that can be downloaded for free.
The numbers are growing, principally with the growth of broadband Internet access. Today the people buying CDs at WalMart probably do not have broadband Internet access at all - maybe dial-up, maybe nothing. When they have broadband access how long do you think it will be before a friend or neighbor shows them how to download music and movies? A week? Then they will cease being a customer and simply take what is available.
Sorry, but the RIAA isn't suing their customers.
You are simply encountering the staff of the media company that grew up with the idea that it all should be free for the taking. If it is on the Internet, why should anyone pay for that?
Sure, you should be paid. But you aren't going to be. This is the culture we have formed. Sorry, but we all get to live with it.
You can expect more and more dealings with creative works to be handled the same way. If you grew up thinking music was free for the download, why would you pay for it? And why would you pay for photos, books, movies, software, etc? After all, it is all on the Internet free to download. Right?
I don't know where to begin, there are so many errors and misconceptions in the above.
The MP3 format was a trigger, but also CD-ROM drives that would "rip" a CD were another factor. In 1995 there were two. Two. All other drives where specifically programmed not to support extraction of audio information. This changed significantly around 1997 or so but before then "ripping" a CD simply wasn't possible for most people.
There is no copyright fee in the US - that's Canada you are thinking of. Unless you are buying "Music CD-R" discs which are required for the vanishingly small number of stereo-component CD recorders. There is a tariff on those discs, but few buy them because even fewer people have the hardware that requires them.
Oh, and the copyright warnings were on VHS tapes in the 1970's so this isn't exactly a new thing either.
Ha ha. OK, while your hyperbole is humorous you have to admit that distribution of music is going to be cut back. Sure, the people that "know" about it will still know and their friends will. But why are you going to go looking for "new music" that doesn't show up with some keyworded search that nobody ever tells you about?
I think more significantly the people that are need to make a living are going to have to rethink a career in recorded music. 15-20 years ago a good living could be made by being a backup musician for a studio. Today, I suspect the job still exists. 10 years from now it will not. Either you are a major talent or you are nothing. We will also have a lot of people that are publishing their material because they know the world would be a much poorer place without their (and specifically THEIR) music. Ego-driven publishing will result in plenty of music being out there - most of it being the sort you would expect from people that insist they are the best in the world.
I agree that the "war on drugs" isn't doing much to reduce the problem below current levels. But, it is my belief that after seeing plenty of people addicted to drugs in one form or another that removing what controls exist today on it would give many more people the justification to use drugs. There is a small group that really cares that they are illegal and without that, they would gladly use whatever was available.
So what do we do? Education? The problem is that we are fighting "escapism" in general. Educating people that getting away from the depressing aspects of their lives is somehow wrong or self-destructive doesn't work. Just let the druggies alone? The problem with that is without controls usage will expand significantly. High prices both deter use and create crimes to fund habits.
I don't know what the answer is. I do know that today in the US 20-30% of the population would agressively jump on the drug bandwagon if they knew it was safe and wasn't illegal. Maybe more. That isn't a solution, it is a disaster. I believe most people on the leading edges of the drug war are as frustrated as anyone else over the problem. Nobody has an idea what to do. Do we just write off a third of the population of the US?
So, do you selflishly hoard all of your virus-free purchases or do you share them for the betterment of mankind? I'm willing to let you buy the stuff as long as you share. If you aren't sharing, then most of the people I know will make sure that you no longer have a place to purchase your music because it ceases to be profitable to do so.
So, either way, the vendor loses and will give up. Eventually. Sorry, but it is like they say, adapt or die. And the adaptation means not trying to sell digital goods any longer.
Yes, but when it is perfectly clear that anything unprotected will be shared immediately with the Internet-using community on the planet there will be quite a bit of content that just isn't available.
It is already that way with music to a large extent. Not completely, but when the CD department at WalMart disappears it will be clear to everyone. Movies will take a little longer, but it is coming. If it is put in digital form, it will be stolen and "shared" with the entire planet.
Sorry, there can't be a profitable way to sell music online. It is impossible. We have cultured a generation of people to believe that if it can be copied, then it should be. Period.
I don't know anyone that actually pays for music. I can't imagine anyone that would do this, except if they simply didn't know how. iTunes? Sure. Not only is it not profitable, but the memory sizes of the devices assume you aren't going to actually pay to fill them - it would cost you $10,000 or more. Nobody is going to spend that. Nobody at all.
Face it, there cannot be any "music business" very soon. There will be old music and free music and that is about it. Expect a lot of it to sound like Darwin Reedy.
Investment isn't the whole problem. You have the protests that high tension lines cause cancer and a myrid of other ills. There is just as much "proof" that transmission lines cause sickness as there is that cell phones cause cancer. Or that global warming is caused by jet aircraft.
So, do you want to force people to accept transmission lines through their part of town? Because you believe the claims have no basis in fact? What if you are proved wrong 30 years from now? Are you or your local or state government willing to accept the liability for an untold number of deaths and illnesses?
Nope. Nobody is. So the lines don't get built or upgraded.
Until this problem is solved we're not going anywhere.
The problem with DC is that you can't use a simple transformer to reduce the voltage. Very high voltages are used for long distance transmission so the same amount of energy can be sent with a very low current. If it was DC you would need something far more complicated at each end to convert the voltage/current ratios.
Actually, I don't know of anything that you could use at the scale needed. You might be able to do something with a set of motor-generators or something like that. But it would not be trivial. Or small.
Finally, most of the losses aren't from inductance but simple resistance and conversion of electrical energy into heat in the wires. I don't see that getting any better using DC vs. AC.
Probably the biggest problem, aside from the investment required, is the public education that would be needed. Unless there is a significant change in state's rights and other aspects of law in the US, it would be impossible to do this simply as a federal mandate. You are going to have to get the states to buy into the plan and get the people behind it.
Unfortunately, there is a considerable following to the idea that power lines, especially those of high capacity, are dangerous to be near. They reputedly cause all sorts of mysterious health problems. This means that construction of any high capacity power line is going to run into community resistance whenever it crosses a populated area. Most people in state and local government are far more in touch with the feelings of the people they represent than those at the federal level - which is the way it is supposed to work. That means that the state and local governments are highly likely to resist any plans to build high capacity power lines in their area. Fiercely.
The result of this pretty much dooms any plans to build new power lines of any sort, smart or dumb. Environmental impact studies can be drawn out for years and years, all the while increasing the cost. Just plain "never near me" protests will dog any attempts even to upgrade existing infrastructure. And because most of the supposed problems have no rational basis you can't use science to disprove them. It is like disproving the invisible Easter Bunny.
I seriously doubt the ability of any large-scale engineering works in the US today. It isn't that we do not have the engineering skills, we do. We do not have the ability to muster the people behind such projects.
There is no such thing today as a bank of batteries that could hold 100MW. I suppose you could build up such a thing with lots and lots of ordinary lead-acid batteries, but there would be problems:
You would need lots of batteries and some special permits. I can't imagine the size of the inverter you would need - it would be far larger than anything like that ever made. The losses would also be huge which is why nobody has done this.
A far more practical way to store that much energy is to do something like pumping water uphill which then powers a hydroelectric generating system. Again, nobody has done anything like that on a scale this large. So you are in unknown territory. With huge amounts of energy.
Oh, and by the way, it will never go anywhere near a populated area.
You misunderstand the motivations of pirates and thieves. If the technology can be produced fairly easily, there are people that will buy it. If it can be assembled by someone with a little instruction and some dexterity, so much the better.
I'll bet that there are plenty of people that would be willing to pay $50 for a lifetime transit "pass" that would let them ride free for years. Assuming the specifics were addressed and these "passes" needed to be updated, there are still plenty that would pay $50 a year to keep riding free. Same thing for tolls. If you could have Arnold Schwarzenegger's EZpass code do you not think there would be customers?
All the vendor of these things has to be is in a place that can thumb their nose at US law. Today that is easily Russia and most of Southeast Asia. Mexico, probably as well. There is money to be made with this, and I'm sure it will be made.
How many tolls and fares? Lots and lots. Will the various agencies decide they have to make major change? Maybe. The biggest problem is if there is any commercial exploitation of this the users will take in the wallet for high-priced, more difficult to use, systems with greater security.
Well, according to the FBI, this includes all forms of credit card fraud. This is mostly why "identity theft" is getting so much attention and seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
I have been subjected to credit card fraud many times, as have many people I have known. I have yet to meet anyone that has experenced any loss, even the supposed $50 that you might be liable for. Zero loss, get a new card and move on. Sometimes a minor hassle.
The sort of "identity theft" that most people associate with the term is where someone obtains credit under false pretenses. I don't know what the actual incidence of this is and because of the FBI combining it with credit card fraud, we will probably never know the true impact of this. What I want to know is how often this is really happening and has anyone, ever, been a victim of something beyond credit card fraud because of one of these disclosures.
I don't see any point to trying to make a bigger deal out of it if there have in fact been zero occurrences where this information has been used to someone's detriment.
The problem isn't that www.yourbank.com is compromised. Nor is it an immediate problem that www.somecrook.com is issued a certificate for www.yourbank.com.
The problem is far closer to www.yourbanking.com being (a) allowed to exist and (b) issued a certificate for www.yourbanking.com saying all is legitimate. Everyone should know that if the two are held up against each other that www.yourbanking.com is a scam. Today, GoDaddy, Register.com and others will happily register the domain for you. I don't see it as a huge leap for these folks to get certificates either.
The problem is that arrest information is "news" and aquittials/releases are not. Therefore, the arrest is made public and the fact you are released later never appears anywhere.
It might be reasonable if both got the same level of attention and publication. But the simple fact is that the arrest is interesting and the release is only important to the person that it happened to. Nobody else cares. This means that every arrest will be forever available on the Internet and never, ever any information about it being bogus, dismissed or whatever.
Your entire so-called criminal history is then public without any redeeming information.
There is a real problem with classifying what MediaSentry did as an "investigation". They are performing a service that involves tracking down IP addresses based on information gathered through connecting to various computers on the Internet.
An equivalent "investigation" occurs if you have a contractor examine logs for unwanted SSH traffic and reporting back the IP addresses, as well as the ISP to which they are connected. Is this something that requires licensing to do? If so, we better make sure that every single admin is licensed in this manner.
Of course, all of what MediaSentry does can be automated. Every last little bit of it. Who then, exactly, is performing this "investigation"? The author of the software or the person using it? This is an important question because obviously a defense of the person using it would be that they have no knowledge of what the program does - they are just a user.
I would say that searching public records is far more intrusive than this. Should a license be required to search on behalf of another? In some states today this is loosely interpreted as "Yes". As many public records are no on Google, might we see this expanded to needing a license to use Google on behalf of another? How about needing a license to use Google at all? After all, there is no telling what you might find on someone and publishing it could cause them significant harm, both legally and financially.
I would offer that to many people on Slashdot the difference between advertising and something designed to steal from you is indisguishable from zero.
I believe it is fair to say that never before in history has there been either a fire that has burned in a steel frame building for hours without being put out, nor has there been a fire in a steel frame building which has been fed by tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene.
These two "never before in history" items make it pretty clear we are dealing with some pretty unusual things.
You might be able to draw some parallels with early 20th century fires in chemical plants where the building had a steel frame and brick construction. No, I don't know of any offhand. But that is about all that you could ever find with even close to the amount of flammable liquids involved in WTC1 and WTC2.
Tell that to the folks that are paid because if intellectual property.
The problem is, in reality, all "intellectual property" has maybe five years left to it. At that point the non-cooperation between nations will mean that if it isn't stolen and remarketed by someone in the West, it will be done from Asia. The pirates are there today with a goal of eliminating the revenue from digital media as well.
Creativity will NOT be rewarded in the future. Too bad, because we have so little of it anyway.
We all hear endlessly about the health effects of power lines, cell phones, and all other EM radiation. How come nobody has done a "study" on the health effects of these boxes so they have the same restrictions as power lines do today?
You want to put up a new power line? Mostly, unless it is an empty rural area with nothing but farms you can forget about it. An army of people will show up at public hearings to claim how much damage has been caused in their lives because of power lines and the supposed ill effects from them. Cell towers have it almost this bad.
I find it really humorous that Obama's energy plan calls for reworking the electric distribution grid. Sure, sounds good - but has anyone ventured out to a meeting where some local government is providing a forum for the power company's approval process? By the end of the meeting you can assume quite easily that there will be no power line coming anywhere near that community. The "documented" problems caused by power lines are such that nobody is going to allow a new distribution grid to be built.
(of course all the "documentation" is bullshit, but that doesn't seem to affect the process one bit.)