Any browser that has a link to download something and does not allow the user to download it could be considered to be "secure". But unfortunately I do not know of any browser that is secure in that sense. When the user clicks on the link "Get hot sex now!!!", downloads and runs the "get hot sex now" installer they pretty much leave themselves wide open to whatever.
Security would be disallowing that action. I do not see any security on the horizon.
Yes, those mean Canadians not helping the poor, oppressed and disadvantaged Mexicans. Here in the US we welcome those poor, oppressed and disadvantaged folks with open arms. As you can tell from the way laws are enforced.
Of course, we are all in danger of becoming equally poor, oppressed and disadvantaged by allowing anyone and everyone to come here.
The problem is the unparented children that grow up. Would it be nice if "unparenting" was a criminal offence punishable by life in prison? Sure. But that doesn't help all the people that have to live with the "unparented child". I guess we could just put them on an island and hope for the best.
See, let's start with little Johnny that watches lots of porn. Hard-core stuff. Ends up getting out of high school thinking that (a) wimmen like surprises, like rape, and (b) wimmen don't like him. Yes, (b) is a logical corallary to (a) but we won't go there. How did little Johnny get so twisted? Simple: nobody ever paid any attention to him and let him go off and figure stuff out for himself, like relating to other people. In today's world this is pretty easy to imagine.
Whose problem is it exactly when little Johnny acts out his hard-core rape fantasies? His parents? His teachers? Nope. It is your problem and mine because we have to live in the society that little Johnny is living in.
Is little Johnny fit for society? Who exactly is going to take care of little Johnny if he doesn't fit in society and can't be left alone with anything female? Couldn't we just give him back to his parents? Sadly, we can't lock him up until he accumulates enough rapes with witnesses to actually get a conviction. And just locking him up for a while isn't going to "fix" him - we have to deal with little Johnny for life and thousands more like him. How did it get this way? Because as a society we were content to assume his parents were responsible adults and could foresee what would happen if they were not effective parents. We all assumed that "the village" would help raise Johhny right even if his parents were incapable. What we got was a disaster and a human hardly worth the name.
What is the answer? I don't know. But for parents using a TV or computer as a babysitter and ignoring the kid results in damage. Damage to the kid and damage to society. We are currently dealing with that damage today, mostly in the inner cities but believe me, it isn't confined there by any means. Would COPA be a solution? Not really, but it couldn't hurt in this sort of case. Where would we go for a real solution? I think we need to think about some points:
Licenses and education required for breeding.
Real penalties for not getting help when you can't parent your offspring properly. Providing parenting help and education, even when there is a kid in the picture already, is vastly cheaper than dealing with the results later.
End absent-parent child support - no amount of money paid to the mother makes up for lack of a responsible two-parent family. If you can't be bothered with birth control you get to live with the results of your inattentiveness.
Holding parents responsible for the actions of their children, really. This means that when the 10-year-old kills a neighbor child the parents and the child are responsible. Today often as not the child gets some slap on the wrist punishment because of their age and the parents get nothing. How could you be an effective parent and not know your kid is seriously screwed up when a 10-year-old kills someone?
Undoubtably this means more "community resources" and "social workers" to help failing parents. But we are either going to spend the money on the front end or the back end. Right now you can check the prisons for the results of dealing with the problem on the back end.
Face it, today in the US a good deal of our troubles are parents that dump their children on "the system" and hope for the best because they haven't a clue. Or haven't the motivation. How exactly do we fix this problem? It isn't by hoping parents will do a better job. We have been hoping they would since the 1960s or even before that and it hasn't happened.
Sure, charging stations are needed for rechargable cars. Only, there are a few little problems. The biggest one is that we aren't building power plants any longer. We are running on coal-fired plants from the 1950s and hydroelectric plants from the 1930s. Nobody is going to build a new high-efficency coal-fired power plant today. Where, exactly would they put it? How long would it take to get through the environmental impact studies? What community group would come out and say they need it, vs. all the groups saying it will kill children and ruin the landscape?
Nuclear? Sure, maybe a couple of plants might get fast-tracked in the next few years. But the electric boom is pretty much over.
Plan on more brown-outs. Supply exceeding demand? I don't think so, not in any future that I can foresee. Will there be more wind and solar generation? Absolutely. Will it keep up with growth in demand from cities? Today, right now, we could use a few hundred megawatts additional for every city in the US. It isn't going to happen.
Yes, they are going to build a huge wind farm in Texas. Only problem is, the transmission lines aren't up to carrying any massive increases, so a huge part of the project will be to increase transmission capacity. And this is happening in a small part of Texas. What about the rest of the states?
Reduce, reuse and recycle. Mostly, for electricity it is reduce. California and Florida both have home controls to turn off your electric consumption during peak demand periods. It is coming to other states as well. There simply isn't enough electricity to go around today in the US. We are not building power plants. We are not increasing transmission capacity.
Do you really think there is enough power to charge up hundreds of cars in a city of any size today?
Yes, but... most people today equate "hero" with "got something for nothing". The thieves and parasites manage to "get something for nothing" and as long as it doesn't appear to have a direct cost to them, people are willing to say "good job!"
Obviously with public transit the trains are going to run whether or not there are any riders. Therefore, an extra rider costs nothing. Therefore there is nothing lost by having a free rider so it isn't "theft" but simply uncompensated use of a service. Much like copyright infringement is.
Sorry, but after you spend 20 years or so teaching children all through school that it is their absolute right to download whatever they can find on the Internet for free - regardless of where it came from - you are going to have people defending this sort of behavior. It is a natural consequence.
How does the above argument relate with persons that believe taking a child of one race and allowing adoption by parents of a different race equals "racial genocide", mostly when the child is of some supposedly disadvantaged race?
Sadly, we're a long, long way from treating members of the human population as all equals and ignoring race. Members of various races cling to their unique cultures as part of their "racial heritage" and try to pretend that denying them this is some kind of oppression. All the while where their culture reinforces lots of things that are easily shown to be isolating, offensive to others and generally continuing separation of members of this group. Think about the things that the US African-American population do to themselves all in the name of maintaining their "culture". A culture that seems to be steeped in slave traditions. Is this helping?
What you are describing is inefficiency, something the Internet tends to combat rather severely.
In an efficient system, the people that pirate the game (or other material) then pass it on to others. There are zero sales. Music is slowing approaching that point. When WalMart finally gives up selling CDs you will know it has pretty much reached that point - no more recorded music sales. I believe it has reached that in China already. The difference is that the US and Western Europe have many more people that can afford to shop at WalMart and the like but are not extremely computer literate.
The whole point of piracy is to zero out the sales. The truely dedicated folks out there are making purchases with stolen credit cards and then posting whatever they bought so nobody else has to steal to get the goods. I don't think there are a lot of truely dedicated pirates like that out there, but there are plenty that will spend $100 (time, computer hardware, etc.) to avoid paying $10 for music, movies, software, etc.
I think it is primarily bandwidth-limited. If (when?) the US has 10x the bandwidth available you will see a huge jump in pirate quality and distribution. Normal distribution channels will not be able to keep up. There is also a knowledge limitation. Today you have to know something about how to download and what software to use. In 20 years everyone that went to school will know this and the folks that do not will have died.
Take a hint from the car manufacturers. Today, high-end cars are using LED tail lights. They are also used on trucks. The main advantage is they do not burn out.
However, for most people in the world a burned-out tail light bulb is a minor safety issue and a minor expense. Replacing the bulb takes 10 minutes and maybe the owner's manual if you are truely clueless about how to do it. Also, many people own a car for 5+ years without ever having to replace a single bulb.
Compare this to the cost of a minor traffic accident where a tail light is cracked. No, you cannot replace the lens or any individual part, just the whole assembly. Instead of $100-$200 for an incandescent bulb assembly expect to pay $1500-$2000 for the LED tail light.
Sure, over the life of many vehicles it is a minor issue that bulbs will never burn out. But over the same number of vehicles it is far, far more likely that a lamp assembly will have to be replaced. The result is a far more expensive part to replace.
With trucks there is a certain amount of sense to be made with claiming that the bulbs do not have to be replaced. Replacing a bulb on a truck or semi-trailer can be a real hassle requiring a ladder and tools. However, again the likelyhood the bulb would ever need to be replaced vs. the lens being damaged is about the same as for cars. Basically, it is a complete rip-off.
Expect to see wired-in LED systems in household lamps where the fixture must be replaced because the bulbs cannot be. Expect to see the fixtures sold to builders with non-replacable bulbs will cost the builder only slightly more when bought in huge quantities but the homeowner will be faced with $1000 lamp fixtures should they ever need or desire to replace them.
I do have to ask though -- I have social worker friends, and they are telling me that sex between 12-year olds is increasingly common.
Increasingly common? From what? Since 1850? Or since 1980? How about the fact that 12-year-olds have been having sex since the beginning of time. Sometimes, in earlier generations the parents have maintained a watchful eye over their offspring such that the opportunities for such adventures were few and far between. But since the advent of the working mother and latchkey kids...
Come on now, what do you think they are doing after school? Not all of them are having sex to be sure. But some are. And it has certainly gotten a lot more acceptable.
The result of banning guns means that it would be illegal to have a gun, right? That means that criminals would be sure that only fellow criminals would have guns. Since there are just about the same number of guns in the US today as their are people do you really believe any sort of "ban" would have any effect on people that breaking the law was irrelevent?
The trap that the US has gotten themselves in is with relatively "open" borders and trade, guns, drugs, people and just about anything else has streamed into the country. Other countries have effective border controls. If I try to import guns into Germany I will fail and likely be arrested. Importing of guns, legal and illegal, happens every day in the US.
Further, if I try to cross the border into Mexico I will be arrested and detained. Possibly imprisoned. On the other hand, thousands of people cross the border into the US every day and stopping them has become a "race" issue. No police or military even attempts to stop them. Many cities declare themselves to be a sanctuary for people that have crossed the border illegally.
Do you really think a gun ban would do anything except ensure that only criminals have guns?
Today, I can get a gun and a license to carry it. If a criminal tries to rob me, my business or another business that I am a customer at, why, he could get shot! This is about the only effective deterrent there is today with the crime situation the way it is. Remove the possibility that ordinary citizens can be carrying guns and this potential deterrent is removed completely. Is it an effective deterrent? I doubt it. But I assure you that a criminal that trys to rob a legal gun-carrying citizen is likely to be his last act on Earth. There are no future crimes.
First off, how does someone "track" the actions of a child-porn downloader? By IP address, you say? Well, ask NewYorkCountryLawyer about how much value there is to an IP address and how much proof there is that an IP address equals a person. So I doubt very much if you can do any meaningful "tracking".
Next would be the publishers. Did you know that it is possible to have a web site that hosts child porn? A web site that is absolutely protected against anyone finding out who the actual "owner" might be. A web site that protects the anonyminity of the "publisher" completely. Its very simple. It might be hard to do in the credit-card happy US but outside of the US it is perfectly legal to use cash. And to do so anonymously. And post any objectionable content you want. Would you want it any other way?
So you say that such illegal material should be prohibited. What about torrent trackers for copyright movies? How about links to bomb-making instructions? Abortion doctors home addresses? How about instructions for making sarin or VX gas? Where exactly do you draw the line for "objectionable" materials? And where do you require people to give up their anonymity?
Sorry, this is the Internet we're talking about. If you aren't incredibly stupid, it is almost impossible to track a "downloader" and connect up the actions that take place on an ISP account with an actual individual. Fortunately, most criminals are really incredibly stupid. So they brag about their exploits and what they have done - almost always to the wrong people. Which then gets them convicted, sued and whatnot.
How are you going to stop child porn really? You aren't going to stop it by making it illegal - there is way, way too much money in it. You aren't going to be able to track it down on the Internet because of the basic protections that web hosting providers and registrars are more than happy to provide to their customers. You aren't going to track downloaders because you will find grandmothers, 9 year old girls and dead people getting hauled into court - such are the perils of believing an IP address means anything at all.
Yes, child porn is a problem that involves at least 50% of all computer forensic technicians today and probably 30-50% of all law enforcement and prosecuters today. But no, I seriously doubt you are going to stop it any time soon. Millions of dollars change hands on a weekly basis because of child porn. Might as well just license it and tax it like drugs.
Open source software is just as unmodifiable to 99% of the population. The source is unreadable to them. It is all a matter of trust and confidence.
To a certain limited elite class open source software is readable and modifiable. If you believe you are part of this elite class, then it makes sense to make a strong differentiation between closed and open software.
To everyone outside of this limited elite class, it makes almost no difference at all.
No, stealing is when the original owner is prevented from ever getting another dime from the sale of their product, whatever it is.
Today, music is free. If anyone is able to sell music in a store, it is because of fraud and ignorance. The original has been stolen and WalMart, Sam Goode and all others no longer have the ability to charge for it. Therefore, it has been stolen.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that nobody is deprived of it any longer.
The same thing will happen with movies fairly soon. It is just a bandwidth problem. Why would anyone pay when it is free? Fraud (the store getting you to think you have to pay) and ignorance (not knowing it is available for free.)
There are a number of problems with this. In the UK the libel laws are quite different and the whole "absence of malice" defense that will get you a pass in the US does not apply. Therefore, the mother probably does have a case in the UK and will win.
The newspaper probably did not get authorization to republish the pictures from the web site. They were not reporting on what was on the web site but stealing the content that was published there. This is certainly a copyright problem and the prior publication of the material "on the Internet" means nothing. They took the material without authorization and used it to the detrement of the girl, her parents, etc. This should be a warning to anyone that just takes material and republishes it.
As far as fact-checking is concerned, obviously there was none and no editorial oversight. For a blog to steal the photos and commentary from a site is one thing - for a newspaper to do so should result in the reporter and editor both getting fired for not doing their job. If they had written a story about how this appeared on the web and how interesting it was without reusing the same materials that might have been a little different. Pointless, but different.
The fact that something was put on the Internet does not give everyone on the planet the right to republish it and use it for their own purposes and/or gain. There is such a thing as copyright. It would be nice if people would understand that. Clearly we are creating a generation that has utterly no understanding of that at all. If I can see it, it is mine is the new thinking.
I guess this is the result. Post it on the Internet and someone will steal it.
The problem in the US today is that in 2000 CBS announced Al Gore as the winner based on the results they had. This was taken to be official by a number of people. Gosh, it turned out they were wrong and in a couple of hours they retracted their claim. People that went to bed "knowing" Gore won woke up the next morning "knowing" that the election had been rigged and stolen. Everything that went on after that point was meaningless hand-waving to those people.
In 2008 if we have a close election it is a tossup as to who will announce the winner first - the election officials or the TV news media. The TV news folks pretty much have a requirement to announce a winner before midnight Pacific time. Otherwise millions of people will just turn off their TV sets and go to bed. The whole reason for staying up late and watching the commercials is to be one of the first to hear about the newly elected president. Should they not announce a winner it will cost them millions of dollars in 2012.
Therefore, no matter what, if we want official election results they have to be FAST. Counting paper ballots is not fast enough. Failure to have official results in a timely manner will absolutely result in the news media reporting a winner based on whatever results they have and their own speculations. Should there be a winner announced at 11:59 PM Pacific time and this result is retracted later there could indeed be a revolution in the US. Again people will know for a certainty that the election was rigged and stolen. The unelected bureaucracy can't have a revolution, so there will be FAST official results.
Sure, CO2 from generating electricty might be a problem. But no matter how you slice it, using energy contributes to climate change in various ways.
If you believe that humans are causing the climate to change, the answer is fewer humans. Lots fewer. You can argue that before 1850 humans (all 50 million or so of them) had negligible effects on the climate. After that, well there has been an effect. Continued growth of human population is going to be having a greater and greater effect. There is no getting away from it.
Your understanding may be somewhat flawed. The conventional thinking of what constitutes a "dirty bomb" is an explosive device with some amount of radioactive material that is a very, very fine particulate.
Now, if you just take some chunks of uranium and pile them on some dynamite you are quite correct - about the only danger is getting hit with something.
On the other hand, if you had some radioactive material as fine as dust and blew it into the air with an explosive this would pretty much mean the end of that area as a usable part of the Earth's surface for at least the half-life of the material, whatever it was. Anybody breathing it in would likely be dead. Set off this explosive in the middle of London or Manhattan and you would have a disaster and likely hundreds of thousands dead.
Yup, and that is why the US is a republic. While it might be nice to ask everyone to text in their vote on every decision the government made, it wouldn't really be practical.
You get the leadership you vote in. And you better hope the leader wants to do something besides take a poll every morning to see what to have for breakfast.
You seem to have forgotten Tibet. And a lot of threatening moves towards Taiwan.
While it is true that China has not made direct threats against other nations lately, they are viewed as a potential threat. They are also in an economic position that could lead them to attempt to expand their power in other directions.
China directly, and various US concerns indirectly, have also caused the death of a significant number of pets and illnesses of people. Lots and lots of people feel China as a whole has not done nearly enough to prevent this from happening in the future. This certainly could have a lot more impact very close to home for a lot of US citizens, far more than some petty tyrant in Germany in the 1930s, for example.
I would say that if the next industrial mishap causes the deaths of 100s of children in the US there would be a lot of people that would question the idea that the people of China aren't interested in fighting. And believe me, we are just as likely now to see something like this as we were a few years ago. Nothing has changed.
Unfortunately, what the leaders of the Western world are looking at is moving all material production to low-labor-cost countries and building their entire economies based on IP. So what you are advocating is reversing this entire trend. Not sure if this is gonna fly...
In some ways, the best thing that could happen would be a declared hot war with China and Islamic countries. With a naval blockade preventing any trade with them. This would cut the oil imports off and the free flow of goods from China, Singapore, Thailand, etc. The end result would be that the West would have to rebuild factories and we would all have to face paying more for manufactured goods.
Should this happen your vision of IP freedom might come to pass. Without that, I don't see it.
As long as the FBI is mandating that credit card fraud is "identity theft" there will never be any sort of accurate numbers as to real, honest-to-goodness identity theft. Today, every time someone uses your credit card number on an online site and the charge is really submitted, this is considered "identity theft".
The truth is that use of SSNs and fraudulently applying for loans and such is incredibly rare. It is so rare as to almost not be a problem - except the folks at Life Lock and others do not want you to find this out. They want to get their money from you for protecting you from something that almost never happens.
Almost everyone I know has been a "victim" of credit card fraud. Only problem was, they weren't really the victim. The merchant was. I've never heard of anyone actually losing anything because of credit card fraud. Now, if you use a debit card instead of a credit card you are asking for trouble because you will lose with those. No, I don't know anyone that has lost money - probably because they had more sense than to use a debit card for purchases.
You see, if nobody wanted the product that the RIAA and MPAA are producing, then they would just go away.
The problem is that there is demand for the product, and plenty of it. However, people have figured out that they no longer have to pay to obtain this product. It can be "shared" for free and purchased at greatly discounted prices from various semi-criminal enterprises. So why pay full price? Why would anyone pay full price when either paying a vastly discounted price or just grabbing for free is a possibility?
Sure, what we would all like is for everything to be free. It isn't going to happen anytime soon. What is far more likely is that we will see music distribution taken over by low-rent folks like allofmp3.com - get anything you want for a discounted price. Sort of like the pawn shop that sells stuff a really low, low prices and never seems to run out. The difference is that through the magic of the Internet the police can't seem to check out the sources for allofmp3.com like they can the pawn shop.
In the longer term I see it all being free. Why would anyone work to keep low-rent distribution in business when it doesn't benefit them? Altruism? Maybe, but that only goes so far in buying groceries.
Patronage worked fine for Beethoven and Mozart. Only problem was, there were many, many others creating and playing music at the same time. Nobody ever heard about them, nor did they prosper doing it. Sure, we are going to have our fair share of garage bands and part-time street musicians. But nobody is ever going to earn a living at that every again. And why should they?
First off, I doubt very much if France has anything like a "first sale" doctrine. So trying to argue something based on that is pointless in a French court.
The real problem is the grey market. Should you be able to buy a printer, computer, camera or handbag from a reseller that isn't authorized by the manufacturer? In many cases the stuff you are buying seems to have fallen off the back of a truck on its way to an "authorized" reseller which accounts for the deep discount you are getting on the grey market. Other times it is through less clearly criminal channels but are still unauthorized. The primary problem is one of trying to maintain a price point for products and the only way to do that today is through an authorized reseller program.
So going around it often gets the buyer the same product without a warranty the manufacturer will stand behind. It also creates a race-to-the-bottom situation where it can easily get out of hand with authorized resellers no longer able to sell the product because the price point has eroded. With Apple computers and many cameras this turns into a real problem because through the grey market there is no customer service. A first-time buyer attracted by the price ends up with an unusable product and a bad experience.
The obvious benefit for the buyer that doesn't want or need any customer service or warranty is a lower price. Unfortunately for the manufacturer the authorized resellers don't have a sustainable business at the lower price. Usually this is because of low volume. There doesn't seem to be a good solution that allows the selling at lower prices as well as the authorized resellers that can provide customer service.
The "Internet solution" seems to be screw the customer service, just give me lower prices! And clearly that is where we are heading where the lower price via some price-collecting tool is the only thing tool available to consumers. They can compare lower prices and see they are getting screwed by quality resellers, thus driving them out of business. This leaves the fly-by-night operators like the New York electronics merchants to sell everything at the lowest possible prices - no matter how often they try to cheat their customers. You see, a low price doesn't necessarily always win out. But today on the Internet all you have are low prices and zero customer service.
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Any browser that has a link to download something and does not allow the user to download it could be considered to be "secure". But unfortunately I do not know of any browser that is secure in that sense. When the user clicks on the link "Get hot sex now!!!", downloads and runs the "get hot sex now" installer they pretty much leave themselves wide open to whatever.
Security would be disallowing that action. I do not see any security on the horizon.
Yes, those mean Canadians not helping the poor, oppressed and disadvantaged Mexicans. Here in the US we welcome those poor, oppressed and disadvantaged folks with open arms. As you can tell from the way laws are enforced.
Of course, we are all in danger of becoming equally poor, oppressed and disadvantaged by allowing anyone and everyone to come here.
See, let's start with little Johnny that watches lots of porn. Hard-core stuff. Ends up getting out of high school thinking that (a) wimmen like surprises, like rape, and (b) wimmen don't like him. Yes, (b) is a logical corallary to (a) but we won't go there. How did little Johnny get so twisted? Simple: nobody ever paid any attention to him and let him go off and figure stuff out for himself, like relating to other people. In today's world this is pretty easy to imagine.
Whose problem is it exactly when little Johnny acts out his hard-core rape fantasies? His parents? His teachers? Nope. It is your problem and mine because we have to live in the society that little Johnny is living in.
Is little Johnny fit for society? Who exactly is going to take care of little Johnny if he doesn't fit in society and can't be left alone with anything female? Couldn't we just give him back to his parents? Sadly, we can't lock him up until he accumulates enough rapes with witnesses to actually get a conviction. And just locking him up for a while isn't going to "fix" him - we have to deal with little Johnny for life and thousands more like him. How did it get this way? Because as a society we were content to assume his parents were responsible adults and could foresee what would happen if they were not effective parents. We all assumed that "the village" would help raise Johhny right even if his parents were incapable. What we got was a disaster and a human hardly worth the name.
What is the answer? I don't know. But for parents using a TV or computer as a babysitter and ignoring the kid results in damage. Damage to the kid and damage to society. We are currently dealing with that damage today, mostly in the inner cities but believe me, it isn't confined there by any means. Would COPA be a solution? Not really, but it couldn't hurt in this sort of case. Where would we go for a real solution? I think we need to think about some points:
Face it, today in the US a good deal of our troubles are parents that dump their children on "the system" and hope for the best because they haven't a clue. Or haven't the motivation. How exactly do we fix this problem? It isn't by hoping parents will do a better job. We have been hoping they would since the 1960s or even before that and it hasn't happened.
Sure, charging stations are needed for rechargable cars. Only, there are a few little problems. The biggest one is that we aren't building power plants any longer. We are running on coal-fired plants from the 1950s and hydroelectric plants from the 1930s. Nobody is going to build a new high-efficency coal-fired power plant today. Where, exactly would they put it? How long would it take to get through the environmental impact studies? What community group would come out and say they need it, vs. all the groups saying it will kill children and ruin the landscape?
Nuclear? Sure, maybe a couple of plants might get fast-tracked in the next few years. But the electric boom is pretty much over.
Plan on more brown-outs. Supply exceeding demand? I don't think so, not in any future that I can foresee. Will there be more wind and solar generation? Absolutely. Will it keep up with growth in demand from cities? Today, right now, we could use a few hundred megawatts additional for every city in the US. It isn't going to happen.
Yes, they are going to build a huge wind farm in Texas. Only problem is, the transmission lines aren't up to carrying any massive increases, so a huge part of the project will be to increase transmission capacity. And this is happening in a small part of Texas. What about the rest of the states?
Reduce, reuse and recycle. Mostly, for electricity it is reduce. California and Florida both have home controls to turn off your electric consumption during peak demand periods. It is coming to other states as well. There simply isn't enough electricity to go around today in the US. We are not building power plants. We are not increasing transmission capacity.
Do you really think there is enough power to charge up hundreds of cars in a city of any size today?
Yes, but ... most people today equate "hero" with "got something for nothing". The thieves and parasites manage to "get something for nothing" and as long as it doesn't appear to have a direct cost to them, people are willing to say "good job!"
Obviously with public transit the trains are going to run whether or not there are any riders. Therefore, an extra rider costs nothing. Therefore there is nothing lost by having a free rider so it isn't "theft" but simply uncompensated use of a service. Much like copyright infringement is.
Sorry, but after you spend 20 years or so teaching children all through school that it is their absolute right to download whatever they can find on the Internet for free - regardless of where it came from - you are going to have people defending this sort of behavior. It is a natural consequence.
Just in case someone sees this...
How does the above argument relate with persons that believe taking a child of one race and allowing adoption by parents of a different race equals "racial genocide", mostly when the child is of some supposedly disadvantaged race?
Sadly, we're a long, long way from treating members of the human population as all equals and ignoring race. Members of various races cling to their unique cultures as part of their "racial heritage" and try to pretend that denying them this is some kind of oppression. All the while where their culture reinforces lots of things that are easily shown to be isolating, offensive to others and generally continuing separation of members of this group. Think about the things that the US African-American population do to themselves all in the name of maintaining their "culture". A culture that seems to be steeped in slave traditions. Is this helping?
What you are describing is inefficiency, something the Internet tends to combat rather severely.
In an efficient system, the people that pirate the game (or other material) then pass it on to others. There are zero sales. Music is slowing approaching that point. When WalMart finally gives up selling CDs you will know it has pretty much reached that point - no more recorded music sales. I believe it has reached that in China already. The difference is that the US and Western Europe have many more people that can afford to shop at WalMart and the like but are not extremely computer literate.
The whole point of piracy is to zero out the sales. The truely dedicated folks out there are making purchases with stolen credit cards and then posting whatever they bought so nobody else has to steal to get the goods. I don't think there are a lot of truely dedicated pirates like that out there, but there are plenty that will spend $100 (time, computer hardware, etc.) to avoid paying $10 for music, movies, software, etc.
I think it is primarily bandwidth-limited. If (when?) the US has 10x the bandwidth available you will see a huge jump in pirate quality and distribution. Normal distribution channels will not be able to keep up. There is also a knowledge limitation. Today you have to know something about how to download and what software to use. In 20 years everyone that went to school will know this and the folks that do not will have died.
Take a hint from the car manufacturers. Today, high-end cars are using LED tail lights. They are also used on trucks. The main advantage is they do not burn out.
However, for most people in the world a burned-out tail light bulb is a minor safety issue and a minor expense. Replacing the bulb takes 10 minutes and maybe the owner's manual if you are truely clueless about how to do it. Also, many people own a car for 5+ years without ever having to replace a single bulb.
Compare this to the cost of a minor traffic accident where a tail light is cracked. No, you cannot replace the lens or any individual part, just the whole assembly. Instead of $100-$200 for an incandescent bulb assembly expect to pay $1500-$2000 for the LED tail light.
Sure, over the life of many vehicles it is a minor issue that bulbs will never burn out. But over the same number of vehicles it is far, far more likely that a lamp assembly will have to be replaced. The result is a far more expensive part to replace.
With trucks there is a certain amount of sense to be made with claiming that the bulbs do not have to be replaced. Replacing a bulb on a truck or semi-trailer can be a real hassle requiring a ladder and tools. However, again the likelyhood the bulb would ever need to be replaced vs. the lens being damaged is about the same as for cars. Basically, it is a complete rip-off.
Expect to see wired-in LED systems in household lamps where the fixture must be replaced because the bulbs cannot be. Expect to see the fixtures sold to builders with non-replacable bulbs will cost the builder only slightly more when bought in huge quantities but the homeowner will be faced with $1000 lamp fixtures should they ever need or desire to replace them.
Increasingly common? From what? Since 1850? Or since 1980? How about the fact that 12-year-olds have been having sex since the beginning of time. Sometimes, in earlier generations the parents have maintained a watchful eye over their offspring such that the opportunities for such adventures were few and far between. But since the advent of the working mother and latchkey kids...
Come on now, what do you think they are doing after school? Not all of them are having sex to be sure. But some are. And it has certainly gotten a lot more acceptable.
The result of banning guns means that it would be illegal to have a gun, right? That means that criminals would be sure that only fellow criminals would have guns. Since there are just about the same number of guns in the US today as their are people do you really believe any sort of "ban" would have any effect on people that breaking the law was irrelevent?
The trap that the US has gotten themselves in is with relatively "open" borders and trade, guns, drugs, people and just about anything else has streamed into the country. Other countries have effective border controls. If I try to import guns into Germany I will fail and likely be arrested. Importing of guns, legal and illegal, happens every day in the US.
Further, if I try to cross the border into Mexico I will be arrested and detained. Possibly imprisoned. On the other hand, thousands of people cross the border into the US every day and stopping them has become a "race" issue. No police or military even attempts to stop them. Many cities declare themselves to be a sanctuary for people that have crossed the border illegally.
Do you really think a gun ban would do anything except ensure that only criminals have guns?
Today, I can get a gun and a license to carry it. If a criminal tries to rob me, my business or another business that I am a customer at, why, he could get shot! This is about the only effective deterrent there is today with the crime situation the way it is. Remove the possibility that ordinary citizens can be carrying guns and this potential deterrent is removed completely. Is it an effective deterrent? I doubt it. But I assure you that a criminal that trys to rob a legal gun-carrying citizen is likely to be his last act on Earth. There are no future crimes.
First off, how does someone "track" the actions of a child-porn downloader? By IP address, you say? Well, ask NewYorkCountryLawyer about how much value there is to an IP address and how much proof there is that an IP address equals a person. So I doubt very much if you can do any meaningful "tracking".
Next would be the publishers. Did you know that it is possible to have a web site that hosts child porn? A web site that is absolutely protected against anyone finding out who the actual "owner" might be. A web site that protects the anonyminity of the "publisher" completely. Its very simple. It might be hard to do in the credit-card happy US but outside of the US it is perfectly legal to use cash. And to do so anonymously. And post any objectionable content you want. Would you want it any other way?
So you say that such illegal material should be prohibited. What about torrent trackers for copyright movies? How about links to bomb-making instructions? Abortion doctors home addresses? How about instructions for making sarin or VX gas? Where exactly do you draw the line for "objectionable" materials? And where do you require people to give up their anonymity?
Sorry, this is the Internet we're talking about. If you aren't incredibly stupid, it is almost impossible to track a "downloader" and connect up the actions that take place on an ISP account with an actual individual. Fortunately, most criminals are really incredibly stupid. So they brag about their exploits and what they have done - almost always to the wrong people. Which then gets them convicted, sued and whatnot.
How are you going to stop child porn really? You aren't going to stop it by making it illegal - there is way, way too much money in it. You aren't going to be able to track it down on the Internet because of the basic protections that web hosting providers and registrars are more than happy to provide to their customers. You aren't going to track downloaders because you will find grandmothers, 9 year old girls and dead people getting hauled into court - such are the perils of believing an IP address means anything at all.
Yes, child porn is a problem that involves at least 50% of all computer forensic technicians today and probably 30-50% of all law enforcement and prosecuters today. But no, I seriously doubt you are going to stop it any time soon. Millions of dollars change hands on a weekly basis because of child porn. Might as well just license it and tax it like drugs.
That is how it is handled in Muslim lands. The woman is generally viewed as the guilty party.
With the introduction of Sharia law in much of Europe being viewed as legitimate, look for this in England and Germany soon.
Open source software is just as unmodifiable to 99% of the population. The source is unreadable to them. It is all a matter of trust and confidence.
To a certain limited elite class open source software is readable and modifiable. If you believe you are part of this elite class, then it makes sense to make a strong differentiation between closed and open software.
To everyone outside of this limited elite class, it makes almost no difference at all.
No, stealing is when the original owner is prevented from ever getting another dime from the sale of their product, whatever it is.
Today, music is free. If anyone is able to sell music in a store, it is because of fraud and ignorance. The original has been stolen and WalMart, Sam Goode and all others no longer have the ability to charge for it. Therefore, it has been stolen.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that nobody is deprived of it any longer.
The same thing will happen with movies fairly soon. It is just a bandwidth problem. Why would anyone pay when it is free? Fraud (the store getting you to think you have to pay) and ignorance (not knowing it is available for free.)
There are a number of problems with this. In the UK the libel laws are quite different and the whole "absence of malice" defense that will get you a pass in the US does not apply. Therefore, the mother probably does have a case in the UK and will win.
The newspaper probably did not get authorization to republish the pictures from the web site. They were not reporting on what was on the web site but stealing the content that was published there. This is certainly a copyright problem and the prior publication of the material "on the Internet" means nothing. They took the material without authorization and used it to the detrement of the girl, her parents, etc. This should be a warning to anyone that just takes material and republishes it.
As far as fact-checking is concerned, obviously there was none and no editorial oversight. For a blog to steal the photos and commentary from a site is one thing - for a newspaper to do so should result in the reporter and editor both getting fired for not doing their job. If they had written a story about how this appeared on the web and how interesting it was without reusing the same materials that might have been a little different. Pointless, but different.
The fact that something was put on the Internet does not give everyone on the planet the right to republish it and use it for their own purposes and/or gain. There is such a thing as copyright. It would be nice if people would understand that. Clearly we are creating a generation that has utterly no understanding of that at all. If I can see it, it is mine is the new thinking.
I guess this is the result. Post it on the Internet and someone will steal it.
Actually, newspapers can print lies in the US. As long as they do not know they are lies.
UK laws a quite a bit different on this. Far more restrictive.
In the US the mother wouldn't have a chance at winning a libel suit. In the UK I believe she might win.
The problem in the US today is that in 2000 CBS announced Al Gore as the winner based on the results they had. This was taken to be official by a number of people. Gosh, it turned out they were wrong and in a couple of hours they retracted their claim. People that went to bed "knowing" Gore won woke up the next morning "knowing" that the election had been rigged and stolen. Everything that went on after that point was meaningless hand-waving to those people.
In 2008 if we have a close election it is a tossup as to who will announce the winner first - the election officials or the TV news media. The TV news folks pretty much have a requirement to announce a winner before midnight Pacific time. Otherwise millions of people will just turn off their TV sets and go to bed. The whole reason for staying up late and watching the commercials is to be one of the first to hear about the newly elected president. Should they not announce a winner it will cost them millions of dollars in 2012.
Therefore, no matter what, if we want official election results they have to be FAST. Counting paper ballots is not fast enough. Failure to have official results in a timely manner will absolutely result in the news media reporting a winner based on whatever results they have and their own speculations. Should there be a winner announced at 11:59 PM Pacific time and this result is retracted later there could indeed be a revolution in the US. Again people will know for a certainty that the election was rigged and stolen. The unelected bureaucracy can't have a revolution, so there will be FAST official results.
Do you get it?
Sure, CO2 from generating electricty might be a problem. But no matter how you slice it, using energy contributes to climate change in various ways.
If you believe that humans are causing the climate to change, the answer is fewer humans. Lots fewer. You can argue that before 1850 humans (all 50 million or so of them) had negligible effects on the climate. After that, well there has been an effect.
Continued growth of human population is going to be having a greater and greater effect. There is no getting away from it.
Your understanding may be somewhat flawed. The conventional thinking of what constitutes a "dirty bomb" is an explosive device with some amount of radioactive material that is a very, very fine particulate.
Now, if you just take some chunks of uranium and pile them on some dynamite you are quite correct - about the only danger is getting hit with something.
On the other hand, if you had some radioactive material as fine as dust and blew it into the air with an explosive this would pretty much mean the end of that area as a usable part of the Earth's surface for at least the half-life of the material, whatever it was. Anybody breathing it in would likely be dead. Set off this explosive in the middle of London or Manhattan and you would have a disaster and likely hundreds of thousands dead.
Yup, and that is why the US is a republic. While it might be nice to ask everyone to text in their vote on every decision the government made, it wouldn't really be practical.
You get the leadership you vote in. And you better hope the leader wants to do something besides take a poll every morning to see what to have for breakfast.
You seem to have forgotten Tibet. And a lot of threatening moves towards Taiwan.
While it is true that China has not made direct threats against other nations lately, they are viewed as a potential threat. They are also in an economic position that could lead them to attempt to expand their power in other directions.
China directly, and various US concerns indirectly, have also caused the death of a significant number of pets and illnesses of people. Lots and lots of people feel China as a whole has not done nearly enough to prevent this from happening in the future. This certainly could have a lot more impact very close to home for a lot of US citizens, far more than some petty tyrant in Germany in the 1930s, for example.
I would say that if the next industrial mishap causes the deaths of 100s of children in the US there would be a lot of people that would question the idea that the people of China aren't interested in fighting. And believe me, we are just as likely now to see something like this as we were a few years ago. Nothing has changed.
Unfortunately, what the leaders of the Western world are looking at is moving all material production to low-labor-cost countries and building their entire economies based on IP. So what you are advocating is reversing this entire trend. Not sure if this is gonna fly...
In some ways, the best thing that could happen would be a declared hot war with China and Islamic countries. With a naval blockade preventing any trade with them. This would cut the oil imports off and the free flow of goods from China, Singapore, Thailand, etc. The end result would be that the West would have to rebuild factories and we would all have to face paying more for manufactured goods.
Should this happen your vision of IP freedom might come to pass. Without that, I don't see it.
As long as the FBI is mandating that credit card fraud is "identity theft" there will never be any sort of accurate numbers as to real, honest-to-goodness identity theft. Today, every time someone uses your credit card number on an online site and the charge is really submitted, this is considered "identity theft".
The truth is that use of SSNs and fraudulently applying for loans and such is incredibly rare. It is so rare as to almost not be a problem - except the folks at Life Lock and others do not want you to find this out. They want to get their money from you for protecting you from something that almost never happens.
Almost everyone I know has been a "victim" of credit card fraud. Only problem was, they weren't really the victim. The merchant was. I've never heard of anyone actually losing anything because of credit card fraud. Now, if you use a debit card instead of a credit card you are asking for trouble because you will lose with those. No, I don't know anyone that has lost money - probably because they had more sense than to use a debit card for purchases.
You see, if nobody wanted the product that the RIAA and MPAA are producing, then they would just go away.
The problem is that there is demand for the product, and plenty of it. However, people have figured out that they no longer have to pay to obtain this product. It can be "shared" for free and purchased at greatly discounted prices from various semi-criminal enterprises. So why pay full price? Why would anyone pay full price when either paying a vastly discounted price or just grabbing for free is a possibility?
Sure, what we would all like is for everything to be free. It isn't going to happen anytime soon. What is far more likely is that we will see music distribution taken over by low-rent folks like allofmp3.com - get anything you want for a discounted price. Sort of like the pawn shop that sells stuff a really low, low prices and never seems to run out. The difference is that through the magic of the Internet the police can't seem to check out the sources for allofmp3.com like they can the pawn shop.
In the longer term I see it all being free. Why would anyone work to keep low-rent distribution in business when it doesn't benefit them? Altruism? Maybe, but that only goes so far in buying groceries.
Patronage worked fine for Beethoven and Mozart. Only problem was, there were many, many others creating and playing music at the same time. Nobody ever heard about them, nor did they prosper doing it. Sure, we are going to have our fair share of garage bands and part-time street musicians. But nobody is ever going to earn a living at that every again. And why should they?
First off, I doubt very much if France has anything like a "first sale" doctrine. So trying to argue something based on that is pointless in a French court.
The real problem is the grey market. Should you be able to buy a printer, computer, camera or handbag from a reseller that isn't authorized by the manufacturer? In many cases the stuff you are buying seems to have fallen off the back of a truck on its way to an "authorized" reseller which accounts for the deep discount you are getting on the grey market. Other times it is through less clearly criminal channels but are still unauthorized. The primary problem is one of trying to maintain a price point for products and the only way to do that today is through an authorized reseller program.
So going around it often gets the buyer the same product without a warranty the manufacturer will stand behind. It also creates a race-to-the-bottom situation where it can easily get out of hand with authorized resellers no longer able to sell the product because the price point has eroded. With Apple computers and many cameras this turns into a real problem because through the grey market there is no customer service. A first-time buyer attracted by the price ends up with an unusable product and a bad experience.
The obvious benefit for the buyer that doesn't want or need any customer service or warranty is a lower price. Unfortunately for the manufacturer the authorized resellers don't have a sustainable business at the lower price. Usually this is because of low volume. There doesn't seem to be a good solution that allows the selling at lower prices as well as the authorized resellers that can provide customer service.
The "Internet solution" seems to be screw the customer service, just give me lower prices! And clearly that is where we are heading where the lower price via some price-collecting tool is the only thing tool available to consumers. They can compare lower prices and see they are getting screwed by quality resellers, thus driving them out of business. This leaves the fly-by-night operators like the New York electronics merchants to sell everything at the lowest possible prices - no matter how often they try to cheat their customers. You see, a low price doesn't necessarily always win out. But today on the Internet all you have are low prices and zero customer service.