Corporate security jobs, which you seem to be alluding to, are few and far between in requiring any real "forensic" background or knowledge.
Most of the people I know and work with that are in computer forensics are either in law enforcement or consulting work. Some very large corporations have the need of a forensic analyst or two but not many. The general preference is to hire an outsider to do the work, someone that is not part of the corporate political scene.
The one other place that hires forensic analysts is government agencies and other places where they have extreme auditing requirements. The Inspector Generals office for EPA, for example. I would expect to find a couple of people working at the Red Cross as well.
Law enforcement computer forensics is almost totally dedicated to child porn and criminal copyright prosecution. If looking at thumbnails of adults doing stuff with 3-year-olds isn't your bag, you might want to skip the law enforcement side. It is true that in some places they want to hire-from-within (i.e., promoting sworn officers) but in other departments the forensic analysts are civilians - they don't get to wear guns.
You can say it is all about control all you want. Sure, there is some aspect to the historic business of the recording companies that encompasses "control". But anyone that can add two numbers and get the same answer twice is going to understand that there is one threat and only one threat to the "music industry" today - not getting paid.
What people discovered with the release of Napster was that the treat they were promised with the Internet finally came true - unlimited stuff for zero dollars. As fast as you could download stuff you could have it, collect it and fill your hard drive with it. This put someone with only a dial-up connection at serious disadvantage and spawned huge numbers of people signing up for DSL and cable - to get more stuff for free.
Today, Napster has been replaced by two things: a myrid of BitTorrent offerings and pseudo-pay sites. The pseudo-pay sites are the biggest threat of all in they allow people to download movies and music while paying almost nothing. What the folks in Russia have learned is that "almost nothing" times millions is millions of dollars. This lets people think they aren't "stealing" because they are paying. For the most part, these services are treated the same way people selling stuff out of the back of vans in New York City are treated - occaisionally hassled but for the most part ignored.
What we have today is quickly evolving. Music as a business is going to fail in the short term because nobody is going to pay for recorded music entertainment in the near future. It will all be free. If you pin your hopes on creating music for people to listen to, you better plan on also being a greeter at WalMart where you can actually get money for food. You might find some company willing to pay you to play at their fast food restaurant openings, but it isn't going to be much of a living. You will not get paid for music that people listen to. You might get paid for public performances, but not at the levels seen by recent superstars.
And, far closer to the point, you will be competing with virtually everyone on the planet making their own music. You will also be competing with anyone that ever played music in the last 100 years for which there is a recording. Can you carve out a niche in this environment? Maybe. I'm not hopeful.
Today's Internet-consuming folks are perfectly happy to assign mainstream media to the trash with the accusations of being owned by the government and large multinational corporations with nobody's interests in mind except their own. OK, but then why are they flocking to mysapce, digg and reddit for their "news"?
Yes, the mainstream media is patheticly poor at delivering real meaning and is often sidetracked into entertaining news about entertainers rather than news. But the substitute today is for people to be quoting digg like people used to refer to seeing something from Walter Cronkite.
Many people are focused on the idea that if they see it on the Internet then it must have value or someone wouldn't have bothered.
The problem is that the CEO isn't necessarily the one making decisions. Lots of decisions get made by other C-level people and even more lower down. Sure, to some extent the CEO or president is supposedly "responsible", but that isn't actually how the law works.
So then you have some operations-level people - the folks actually charged with implementing how things are done - making decisions. Who are they? Well, as far as the public is concerned, nobody. Utterly faceless, no reputation and no known identity. But their decisions affect the operations of the company and may very well be the only decision that someone outside the company ever sees.
Is the CEO "responsible"? Not legally. The decision maker gets to hide behind "acting as an agent of the company" and there is plenty of insurance and legal staff to back that up. So what happens when this lower-level person screws up? There are two possible courses of action and neither one is all that great. The "company" can repudiate the agency of this person and literally say the person was acting outside of their authority. Well, that clearly says the company isn't in control of their operations and that is a bad sign. The other option is to back the person up with the full weight of the insurance and legal staff available saying that this is what the company wants and this person made the "right" decision. Of course, six months later this person might be out of a job...
The problem with the "company out of control" scenario is that it carries all sorts of risks. Would a bank carry any sort of credit for a company that was "out of control" like this? Probably not. Would the phone company? How about payroll? If management isn't standing by operational decisions who's to say what decision gets second-guessed and revised? Not any way to run a company. That is why this almost never happens.
You end up with the "company" standing firmly behind every decision, right or wrong, because doing otherwise leads to disaster. And it isn't the CEO making every decision or even being held responsible for every decision.
The real problem is that Seagate and a couple of other companies have spent the last 20 years or so moving from the ST-506 protocol to where we are today with EIDE and SATA. A huge investment has been made in deveoping this technology for efficiently communicating with a storage device.
Now, some other manufacturers who haven't participated in this development are able to swoop in at the last minute and take advantage of the latest developments. No R&D spending was necessary. Someone else did the work, now they can reap the advantages.
Patents are one way to prevent this kind of leeching, but the real problem comes along when someone proposes a business model based on the concept "first, THEY do the work, then WE get the money." This isn't far off of how a lot of Chinese companies are conceived. Why wouldn't it be just as reasonable for US companies to work the same way - let Philips or some other EU-based mega-corp do all the research work and then just come out with a cheaper product?
The fact that US corporations haven't been working this way for the last 100 years or so doesn't mean the strategy is a bad one. It certainly is the way things were in the US at the dawn of the industrial age.
It is going to be difficult in the 21st Century to justify R&D spending when it is much easier to let someone else rack up the expenses only to have another company beat them in the marketplace based on price alone. We are pretty much there today. Are patents the solution or perhaps there could be something call "ethics". Naw, those outmoded concepts are far too expensive for today's business climate. I guess we can just fall back to patents and hope for the best.
And how does passport records (assuming it is just entry & exit times) relate to Real ID in any fashion? Real ID is an attempt to eliminate the cartoon-drawing Driver's Licenses that some states hand out. Real ID is an attempt to eliminate the Mexican Government from "assisting" in getting Driver's Licenses to illegals.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway. Just ask Hillary about the FBI and IRS records for political foes the last time she lived at the White House.
The problem with ignoring pirates and piracy is that the pirates have an agenda - prevent others from paying. Sure, there are some isolated pirates out there that are just collecting all the software they can without any agenda, but in my experience this is a rarity.
The problem that pirates pose is their desire to "spread the wealth". They believe they have obtained something of value and their personal value (reputation, karma, whatever) will increase if they are able to spread this around.
It also must be understood that there are pirates and people that benefit from piracy. The pirates would like to think that there are no users, just pirates. They call the people benefiting from their efforts leeches but make few real attempts to prevent leeching from happening. The result is there is large ratio of benefiters (leeches) to pirates. The people benefiting from piracy probably wouldn't ever think of themselves as pirates. They just aren't the sort to turn down a free meal. Or movie. Or software.
Look at The Pirate Bay. Their sole reason for existance is to provide a means for others to benefit from the piracy of others. They derive their repuation and some level of revenue from providing a distribution channel. Now the consumer has a choice - they can visit Amazon and order a DVD or they can visit www.thepiratebay.com and download the same movie. This puts The Pirate Bay as a direct competitor to Amazon and believe me, there are individuals that want to spread the word.
This works the same way with software, for identical reasons. The piracy movement is evangelical, with the goal being the elimination of commercial distribution. When it is all available for free, what purpose does Adobe serve? Or Warner Brothers? Or some struggling shareware developer that actually does have a better application?
Secondarily, if I know about a great pirate software web site then I can get things that other people cannot. After a while, I can increase my value (reputation, karma, whatever) by telling others about the web site and educating them that they can stop paying and start downloading.
No, I don't believe for a second in "try before buy". If I go to McDonalds and get a free hamburger would I then buy one? No. After I have a high quality movie download and watch it why would I then run out to buy the DVD? The problem used to be that pirated materials were of inferior quality and you could get much better buy paying. This is no longer the case - most pirated media is from digital sources and is flawless. In fact, with the stripping of commercials, it can be said the pirated media is of higher quality than the original. So once I have a flawless movie or a working version of a software product, why would I buy the "original"? Well, I wouldn't. As for buying because of some sense of guilt, well, no. I was originally raised Catholic but that much guilt just didn't stick.
So sure, plenty of people making use of pirated materials are just collectors and not real customers. But the goal is to eliminate the revenue from the equation, and the pirates are currently winning. With higher broadband speeds more and more people will become digital "haves" thanks to evangelical pirates and people benefiting from piracy.
Can pirates be ignored? I don't think so. They are a economic force to be understood by anyone involved with entertainment or software. Discounting them is foolish and will lead to nothing but bankrupcy.
I bet that it is possible to fund a decent lifestyle based on nothing but running a semi-successful campaign for a state office every two or four years, as long as the campaign is publicly financed. It might be possible to do this on a federal level also, which would just mean a better lifestyle. This brings up the possibility of the professional candidate who appears on the ballot every time but without ever winning enough votes to actually be elected to an office.
Eliminating the two-party system for lots and lots of marginal parties would certainly assist in the formation of this new and exciting career path. It would be possible then to have quite a number of these professional candidates.
Exactly how do you think roads are going to be built? What heavy road-building equipment do you see in a lightweight environment?
I'd be looking for a lot of bicycles with heavy, knobby tires. Pedicabs. Maybe some horse-drawn wagons and some light rail streetcars.
Visit a construction site and check out the number of vehicles that use large diesel engines that are consuming vast quantities of energy. In an energy-depleted environment you aren't going to be able to waste that much energy on building stuff when people need that energy to survive. Let's see - build a road or heat hundreds of homes for the winter? Heating is going to win out every time. Build a road or harvest a crop? These are the sorts of decisions that a non-nuclear, non-oil, limited-resource-consumption society is going to have to make.
I'd expect that building a road might just be a capital offense, because it would certainly deprive others of life-sustaining energy resources.
Unfortunately. What I have seen is the progression from a culture where Niggers and Spicks were referred to in exactly that manner. But saying the work "fuck" would get a child slapped. An adult using "fuck" would be considered at least crude and unsocial.
Today, a child saying "nigger" might get slapped (or worse in some neighborhoods) but "fuck" has come into nearly common use.
Is this progress? It has been sixty years and while things change are we better off? Would it be better if neither nigger or fuck were in common use?
A point to consider is that we may have crossed the point of no return with "fuck". I seriously doubt that we can retract it from use today so you might as well get used to it. We did not get hear by concensus, it just sort of happened. Is it pointless to consider the role of the FCC because it is just too late?
I'd say for the most part social conventions that existed for a really long time have pretty much died out in the last fifty years. Things that were taken for granted as just not done publicly are now common. We have become a cruder, coarser society in many ways and this is a small point. I don't see us going back, though.
So you better get used to the idea that your children will be using "fuck" in everyday speech.
The problem is that OK, someone downloads a copy. Great. Now they have it instead of buying it. $15.
Then, being the good little net-citizen we all hope they are, they share it with the rest of the fsking planet and 100,000 people download it from them and sources obtained from them.
Unfortunately if you listen to the environmental lobby long enough you will discover that it is pretty commonly thought that the very last thing we should be doing is to "lift people to western standards of living". Doing so will increase their resource usage, increase the waste being produced and generally contribute to the end of the Earth being a good place for animals to live.
I firmly believe that our new president, assuming McCain doesn't win, will side with the people that believe it would be better for the planet if more people were living like Bangledeshi farmers rather than the US exporting its lifestyle to other countries.
The only way I believe you can count corn-derived ethanol as a positive energy source is to ignore the energy input by the farmer. There is no way that it makes sense to burn 1 gallon of diesel fuel (to plant, fertilize, weed and harvest the corn) to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It never will, no matter how much wishful thinking there is.
Biodiesel? Sure, but does it make any sense to burn 1 gallon of biodiesel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol?
Yes, it is probably illegal. But because it is happening on the Internet, nobody can prove who committed the crime. Sure, there was an IP address logged. What, exactly does that prove? Nothing. There isn't any reason to get overly technical about it - an IP address does not prove the identity of a person.
You can't be prosecuted for anything that you do on the Internet, as long as you aren't bragging about it in some identifiable way. Or connecting your Internet activities with a real identity in some othe way. Until society (US mostly, but really everywhere) comes to terms with the idea that the Internet cannot have conventional laws and conventional laws cannot be enforced there will be silly things like this.
People believe that their actions on the Internet should be anonymous and free. Until someone being anonymous and free ruins their life, their girlfriend's life or their child's life. Then they want someone to "enforce the law". Only there isn't any law - as long as it stays on the Internet.
Of course a web site like this is just an abuse waiting to happen. It allows people to rant and rave about some police action with no proof, no foundation and no accountability. But today's web folk will flock to a site like this and believe because it is on "The Internet" that is must be at least partly true.
If the US were to institute a policy like this, they would be slapped with fines and tariffs until they stopped. Larger companies would sue and win because such trade rules would be judged to be discriminatory. You could probably drag race and ethnicty into it as well so there would be double or triple damages.
We dug this hole and it is pretty deep. No really good ways out now. I suspect the best way would be a cold war with China and a naval blockade. Sure, the rest of the world would hate the US because of universally higher prices, but at least we'd have a few jobs back.
The problem is, when the idea of securing some private information comes around to affect YOU in a very personal way you will be right there saying "leave me alone".
Sorry, today I have the right to find out anything I can about you, photograph you in any way whatsoever - including ways that you may believe are wrong using infrared and other non-visible techniques and publish anything I want.
Have a wife? With sufficient motivation I bet I can make her life hell on earth. And I can do it completely on the Internet which today makes me immune from any sort of prosecution. As long as I do not physically come within arms length of you, your wife or your children there is nothing you can do to stop me.
Your only hope is that I am not motivated enough to do this. Today you are safe, because I and people like me are not motivated. But cut me off in traffic, spam me, kick my dog or let your children walk on my grass and that motivation may appear.
So what are you going to do? Do you like the world this way? Sure you do, because it hasn't yet happened to you, personally.
This is probably more like what the house of the future looks like. Say all you want about resource utilization and carbon footprints - the eco folk aren't going to be happy until there are 200 million people living like this.
Nice idea, but unfortunately cable and DSL systems do not work that way. You can't "upgrade" one user's connection - at any price. Nor is it really feasible to upgrade a network node. Today, new nodes are connected via fiber but older ones are using other technology.
Sure, as part of a system-wide upgrade plan you can get higher speeds to the nodes and then - eventually - higher speeds to the individual customers. But without that system-wide upgrade what you have is what you have. If one user is hogging the bandwidth there are few controls that can limit that one user at the network node.
You might say that a better all-around solution would be rate-limiting individual users at the network node to insure an even distribution of service. That would certainly be the effective way to do it and would prevent all of this nonsense about what is and is not possible. I do not believe the processing power exists at the network nodes to do this, or someone would be doing it. Today, the rate-limiting occurs as a blanket cap at the node - all users get to share X bandwidth, however unfairly that is happening.
Of course, what high-use users want is their own dedicated bandwidth to do with as they please. That isn't how the networks are constructed today and isn't likely to be the way networks are constructed in the future. Even with fiber to the home you are going to have nodes and concentrators where the bandwidth is shared on a common connection. Sure, there will be more aggregate bandwidth but there will still be the possibility of some users getting less than their fair share because of how the node is operating. Should the nodes be upgraded to ensure fair distribution of bandwidth? I suspect not - there are a lot of them and that kind of upgrade wouldn't be cheap.
Funny that the US is the only country with a healthcare system that spends 90% of its resources on the elderly - specifically in the last five years of life. The rest of the world seems to take the attitude that old people die, so shut up and die.
Comparisons about what country is the "healthiest" is pointless - everyone else long ago figured out that if the government was going to pay they weren't going to get neonatal intensive care or transplants for 70-year-olds. Apparently it was decided that was an OK bargain. Except in the US and a few other places. The result is oldsters come to the US for care they can't get and can't pay for in their own countries.
Funny, the AARP seems to be behind the move to get the government paying for medical care. Their members are the ones that should be the most interested in making sure the situation in other countries is not repeated in the US but with a massive PR campaign the likely outcome isn't being discussed.
There are three classes of potential customers: product owners, users, and criminals. If the researcher makes it clear they are willing to sell their information to the third class - criminals - then it matters little if they are also willing to sell to the other two classes or not.
Clearly, the implication is they do not want to sell to the product owner class as that would be a single sale. By selling the information to users and criminals they ensure that they have a substantial number of potential sales as well as motivating the users to buy rapidly or else they will be victims of the criminal class.
We now have questionable social "networking" sites where your past dating partners can rate you. We have an eternal archive of everything anyone ever posted about you on the Internet.
"Oh I never use my real name on the Internet" goes only so far - these aren't things you are posting about yourself, these are things other people are saying about you. Can they be connected to you? Depends on how detailed the person commenting on you wants to be.
Are we ready for having our children 15 years from now ask why you were so mean to people before?
So of course we have companies offering the chance to wipe the slate clean. A fresh start. For only a few dollars. After all, what is money compared to this.
This could actually get out of hand if people paid any attention at all to the Internet. Fortunately, most people don't.
Health care is simple - in the US we have this funny idea about putting off death. Most other countries figured it out a long time ago. Save the 90% that is spent in the US on the last year of life.
People die. Get over it. Save the money.
Not so popular with the over-50 crowd, but they aren't going to have much choice in the matter come November.
I don't understand. I certainly do not want to pay for my Internet connection being improved if I can elect someone that will make you pay for it. That's what America is all about for the last couple of decades - make the other fellow pay.
I'm really looking forward to President Obama. He gave a speech in Phoenix about how much he was going to give to everyone. Free education, free healthcare, free this and better that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but... wouldn't this make sense to implement in Iraq (or somewhere else) where the only "recent" cars are ones driven by Imperial Troops?
Corporate security jobs, which you seem to be alluding to, are few and far between in requiring any real "forensic" background or knowledge.
Most of the people I know and work with that are in computer forensics are either in law enforcement or consulting work. Some very large corporations have the need of a forensic analyst or two but not many. The general preference is to hire an outsider to do the work, someone that is not part of the corporate political scene.
The one other place that hires forensic analysts is government agencies and other places where they have extreme auditing requirements. The Inspector Generals office for EPA, for example. I would expect to find a couple of people working at the Red Cross as well.
Law enforcement computer forensics is almost totally dedicated to child porn and criminal copyright prosecution. If looking at thumbnails of adults doing stuff with 3-year-olds isn't your bag, you might want to skip the law enforcement side. It is true that in some places they want to hire-from-within (i.e., promoting sworn officers) but in other departments the forensic analysts are civilians - they don't get to wear guns.
You can say it is all about control all you want. Sure, there is some aspect to the historic business of the recording companies that encompasses "control". But anyone that can add two numbers and get the same answer twice is going to understand that there is one threat and only one threat to the "music industry" today - not getting paid.
What people discovered with the release of Napster was that the treat they were promised with the Internet finally came true - unlimited stuff for zero dollars. As fast as you could download stuff you could have it, collect it and fill your hard drive with it. This put someone with only a dial-up connection at serious disadvantage and spawned huge numbers of people signing up for DSL and cable - to get more stuff for free.
Today, Napster has been replaced by two things: a myrid of BitTorrent offerings and pseudo-pay sites. The pseudo-pay sites are the biggest threat of all in they allow people to download movies and music while paying almost nothing. What the folks in Russia have learned is that "almost nothing" times millions is millions of dollars. This lets people think they aren't "stealing" because they are paying. For the most part, these services are treated the same way people selling stuff out of the back of vans in New York City are treated - occaisionally hassled but for the most part ignored.
What we have today is quickly evolving. Music as a business is going to fail in the short term because nobody is going to pay for recorded music entertainment in the near future. It will all be free. If you pin your hopes on creating music for people to listen to, you better plan on also being a greeter at WalMart where you can actually get money for food. You might find some company willing to pay you to play at their fast food restaurant openings, but it isn't going to be much of a living. You will not get paid for music that people listen to. You might get paid for public performances, but not at the levels seen by recent superstars.
And, far closer to the point, you will be competing with virtually everyone on the planet making their own music. You will also be competing with anyone that ever played music in the last 100 years for which there is a recording. Can you carve out a niche in this environment? Maybe. I'm not hopeful.
Today's Internet-consuming folks are perfectly happy to assign mainstream media to the trash with the accusations of being owned by the government and large multinational corporations with nobody's interests in mind except their own. OK, but then why are they flocking to mysapce, digg and reddit for their "news"?
Yes, the mainstream media is patheticly poor at delivering real meaning and is often sidetracked into entertaining news about entertainers rather than news. But the substitute today is for people to be quoting digg like people used to refer to seeing something from Walter Cronkite.
Many people are focused on the idea that if they see it on the Internet then it must have value or someone wouldn't have bothered.
The problem is that the CEO isn't necessarily the one making decisions. Lots of decisions get made by other C-level people and even more lower down. Sure, to some extent the CEO or president is supposedly "responsible", but that isn't actually how the law works.
So then you have some operations-level people - the folks actually charged with implementing how things are done - making decisions. Who are they? Well, as far as the public is concerned, nobody. Utterly faceless, no reputation and no known identity. But their decisions affect the operations of the company and may very well be the only decision that someone outside the company ever sees.
Is the CEO "responsible"? Not legally. The decision maker gets to hide behind "acting as an agent of the company" and there is plenty of insurance and legal staff to back that up. So what happens when this lower-level person screws up? There are two possible courses of action and neither one is all that great. The "company" can repudiate the agency of this person and literally say the person was acting outside of their authority. Well, that clearly says the company isn't in control of their operations and that is a bad sign. The other option is to back the person up with the full weight of the insurance and legal staff available saying that this is what the company wants and this person made the "right" decision. Of course, six months later this person might be out of a job...
The problem with the "company out of control" scenario is that it carries all sorts of risks. Would a bank carry any sort of credit for a company that was "out of control" like this? Probably not. Would the phone company? How about payroll? If management isn't standing by operational decisions who's to say what decision gets second-guessed and revised? Not any way to run a company. That is why this almost never happens.
You end up with the "company" standing firmly behind every decision, right or wrong, because doing otherwise leads to disaster. And it isn't the CEO making every decision or even being held responsible for every decision.
The real problem is that Seagate and a couple of other companies have spent the last 20 years or so moving from the ST-506 protocol to where we are today with EIDE and SATA. A huge investment has been made in deveoping this technology for efficiently communicating with a storage device.
Now, some other manufacturers who haven't participated in this development are able to swoop in at the last minute and take advantage of the latest developments. No R&D spending was necessary. Someone else did the work, now they can reap the advantages.
Patents are one way to prevent this kind of leeching, but the real problem comes along when someone proposes a business model based on the concept "first, THEY do the work, then WE get the money." This isn't far off of how a lot of Chinese companies are conceived. Why wouldn't it be just as reasonable for US companies to work the same way - let Philips or some other EU-based mega-corp do all the research work and then just come out with a cheaper product?
The fact that US corporations haven't been working this way for the last 100 years or so doesn't mean the strategy is a bad one. It certainly is the way things were in the US at the dawn of the industrial age.
It is going to be difficult in the 21st Century to justify R&D spending when it is much easier to let someone else rack up the expenses only to have another company beat them in the marketplace based on price alone. We are pretty much there today. Are patents the solution or perhaps there could be something call "ethics". Naw, those outmoded concepts are far too expensive for today's business climate. I guess we can just fall back to patents and hope for the best.
And how does passport records (assuming it is just entry & exit times) relate to Real ID in any fashion? Real ID is an attempt to eliminate the cartoon-drawing Driver's Licenses that some states hand out. Real ID is an attempt to eliminate the Mexican Government from "assisting" in getting Driver's Licenses to illegals.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway. Just ask Hillary about the FBI and IRS records for political foes the last time she lived at the White House.
The problem with ignoring pirates and piracy is that the pirates have an agenda - prevent others from paying. Sure, there are some isolated pirates out there that are just collecting all the software they can without any agenda, but in my experience this is a rarity.
The problem that pirates pose is their desire to "spread the wealth". They believe they have obtained something of value and their personal value (reputation, karma, whatever) will increase if they are able to spread this around.
It also must be understood that there are pirates and people that benefit from piracy. The pirates would like to think that there are no users, just pirates. They call the people benefiting from their efforts leeches but make few real attempts to prevent leeching from happening. The result is there is large ratio of benefiters (leeches) to pirates. The people benefiting from piracy probably wouldn't ever think of themselves as pirates. They just aren't the sort to turn down a free meal. Or movie. Or software.
Look at The Pirate Bay. Their sole reason for existance is to provide a means for others to benefit from the piracy of others. They derive their repuation and some level of revenue from providing a distribution channel. Now the consumer has a choice - they can visit Amazon and order a DVD or they can visit www.thepiratebay.com and download the same movie. This puts The Pirate Bay as a direct competitor to Amazon and believe me, there are individuals that want to spread the word.
This works the same way with software, for identical reasons. The piracy movement is evangelical, with the goal being the elimination of commercial distribution. When it is all available for free, what purpose does Adobe serve? Or Warner Brothers? Or some struggling shareware developer that actually does have a better application?
Secondarily, if I know about a great pirate software web site then I can get things that other people cannot. After a while, I can increase my value (reputation, karma, whatever) by telling others about the web site and educating them that they can stop paying and start downloading.
No, I don't believe for a second in "try before buy". If I go to McDonalds and get a free hamburger would I then buy one? No. After I have a high quality movie download and watch it why would I then run out to buy the DVD? The problem used to be that pirated materials were of inferior quality and you could get much better buy paying. This is no longer the case - most pirated media is from digital sources and is flawless. In fact, with the stripping of commercials, it can be said the pirated media is of higher quality than the original. So once I have a flawless movie or a working version of a software product, why would I buy the "original"? Well, I wouldn't. As for buying because of some sense of guilt, well, no. I was originally raised Catholic but that much guilt just didn't stick.
So sure, plenty of people making use of pirated materials are just collectors and not real customers. But the goal is to eliminate the revenue from the equation, and the pirates are currently winning. With higher broadband speeds more and more people will become digital "haves" thanks to evangelical pirates and people benefiting from piracy.
Can pirates be ignored? I don't think so. They are a economic force to be understood by anyone involved with entertainment or software. Discounting them is foolish and will lead to nothing but bankrupcy.
I bet that it is possible to fund a decent lifestyle based on nothing but running a semi-successful campaign for a state office every two or four years, as long as the campaign is publicly financed. It might be possible to do this on a federal level also, which would just mean a better lifestyle. This brings up the possibility of the professional candidate who appears on the ballot every time but without ever winning enough votes to actually be elected to an office.
Eliminating the two-party system for lots and lots of marginal parties would certainly assist in the formation of this new and exciting career path. It would be possible then to have quite a number of these professional candidates.
Do you really think this wouldn't happen?
Exactly how do you think roads are going to be built? What heavy road-building equipment do you see in a lightweight environment?
I'd be looking for a lot of bicycles with heavy, knobby tires. Pedicabs. Maybe some horse-drawn wagons and some light rail streetcars.
Visit a construction site and check out the number of vehicles that use large diesel engines that are consuming vast quantities of energy. In an energy-depleted environment you aren't going to be able to waste that much energy on building stuff when people need that energy to survive. Let's see - build a road or heat hundreds of homes for the winter? Heating is going to win out every time. Build a road or harvest a crop? These are the sorts of decisions that a non-nuclear, non-oil, limited-resource-consumption society is going to have to make.
I'd expect that building a road might just be a capital offense, because it would certainly deprive others of life-sustaining energy resources.
Unfortunately. What I have seen is the progression from a culture where Niggers and Spicks were referred to in exactly that manner. But saying the work "fuck" would get a child slapped. An adult using "fuck" would be considered at least crude and unsocial.
Today, a child saying "nigger" might get slapped (or worse in some neighborhoods) but "fuck" has come into nearly common use.
Is this progress? It has been sixty years and while things change are we better off? Would it be better if neither nigger or fuck were in common use?
A point to consider is that we may have crossed the point of no return with "fuck". I seriously doubt that we can retract it from use today so you might as well get used to it. We did not get hear by concensus, it just sort of happened. Is it pointless to consider the role of the FCC because it is just too late?
I'd say for the most part social conventions that existed for a really long time have pretty much died out in the last fifty years. Things that were taken for granted as just not done publicly are now common. We have become a cruder, coarser society in many ways and this is a small point. I don't see us going back, though.
So you better get used to the idea that your children will be using "fuck" in everyday speech.
The problem is that OK, someone downloads a copy. Great. Now they have it instead of buying it. $15.
Then, being the good little net-citizen we all hope they are, they share it with the rest of the fsking planet and 100,000 people download it from them and sources obtained from them.
$1,500,015 is the total then. Right?
Unfortunately if you listen to the environmental lobby long enough you will discover that it is pretty commonly thought that the very last thing we should be doing is to "lift people to western standards of living". Doing so will increase their resource usage, increase the waste being produced and generally contribute to the end of the Earth being a good place for animals to live.
I firmly believe that our new president, assuming McCain doesn't win, will side with the people that believe it would be better for the planet if more people were living like Bangledeshi farmers rather than the US exporting its lifestyle to other countries.
The only way I believe you can count corn-derived ethanol as a positive energy source is to ignore the energy input by the farmer. There is no way that it makes sense to burn 1 gallon of diesel fuel (to plant, fertilize, weed and harvest the corn) to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It never will, no matter how much wishful thinking there is.
Biodiesel? Sure, but does it make any sense to burn 1 gallon of biodiesel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol?
Yes, it is probably illegal. But because it is happening on the Internet, nobody can prove who committed the crime. Sure, there was an IP address logged. What, exactly does that prove? Nothing. There isn't any reason to get overly technical about it - an IP address does not prove the identity of a person.
You can't be prosecuted for anything that you do on the Internet, as long as you aren't bragging about it in some identifiable way. Or connecting your Internet activities with a real identity in some othe way. Until society (US mostly, but really everywhere) comes to terms with the idea that the Internet cannot have conventional laws and conventional laws cannot be enforced there will be silly things like this.
People believe that their actions on the Internet should be anonymous and free. Until someone being anonymous and free ruins their life, their girlfriend's life or their child's life. Then they want someone to "enforce the law". Only there isn't any law - as long as it stays on the Internet.
Of course a web site like this is just an abuse waiting to happen. It allows people to rant and rave about some police action with no proof, no foundation and no accountability. But today's web folk will flock to a site like this and believe because it is on "The Internet" that is must be at least partly true.
Can you say WTO?
If the US were to institute a policy like this, they would be slapped with fines and tariffs until they stopped. Larger companies would sue and win because such trade rules would be judged to be discriminatory. You could probably drag race and ethnicty into it as well so there would be double or triple damages.
We dug this hole and it is pretty deep. No really good ways out now. I suspect the best way would be a cold war with China and a naval blockade. Sure, the rest of the world would hate the US because of universally higher prices, but at least we'd have a few jobs back.
The problem is, when the idea of securing some private information comes around to affect YOU in a very personal way you will be right there saying "leave me alone".
Sorry, today I have the right to find out anything I can about you, photograph you in any way whatsoever - including ways that you may believe are wrong using infrared and other non-visible techniques and publish anything I want.
Have a wife? With sufficient motivation I bet I can make her life hell on earth. And I can do it completely on the Internet which today makes me immune from any sort of prosecution. As long as I do not physically come within arms length of you, your wife or your children there is nothing you can do to stop me.
Your only hope is that I am not motivated enough to do this. Today you are safe, because I and people like me are not motivated. But cut me off in traffic, spam me, kick my dog or let your children walk on my grass and that motivation may appear.
So what are you going to do? Do you like the world this way? Sure you do, because it hasn't yet happened to you, personally.
This is probably more like what the house of the future looks like. Say all you want about resource utilization and carbon footprints - the eco folk aren't going to be happy until there are 200 million people living like this.
DSL differs from cable systems only slightly.
With DSL you have copper to a DSLAM which connects to a ATM connection. The DSLAM is shared by all users in the area, as is the ATM connection.
With cable you have copper to a node which connects to an ATM connection. The node is shared by all users in the area, as is the ATM connection.
So the big difference with DSL is what exactly?
Nice idea, but unfortunately cable and DSL systems do not work that way. You can't "upgrade" one user's connection - at any price. Nor is it really feasible to upgrade a network node. Today, new nodes are connected via fiber but older ones are using other technology.
Sure, as part of a system-wide upgrade plan you can get higher speeds to the nodes and then - eventually - higher speeds to the individual customers. But without that system-wide upgrade what you have is what you have. If one user is hogging the bandwidth there are few controls that can limit that one user at the network node.
You might say that a better all-around solution would be rate-limiting individual users at the network node to insure an even distribution of service. That would certainly be the effective way to do it and would prevent all of this nonsense about what is and is not possible. I do not believe the processing power exists at the network nodes to do this, or someone would be doing it. Today, the rate-limiting occurs as a blanket cap at the node - all users get to share X bandwidth, however unfairly that is happening.
Of course, what high-use users want is their own dedicated bandwidth to do with as they please. That isn't how the networks are constructed today and isn't likely to be the way networks are constructed in the future. Even with fiber to the home you are going to have nodes and concentrators where the bandwidth is shared on a common connection. Sure, there will be more aggregate bandwidth but there will still be the possibility of some users getting less than their fair share because of how the node is operating. Should the nodes be upgraded to ensure fair distribution of bandwidth? I suspect not - there are a lot of them and that kind of upgrade wouldn't be cheap.
Funny that the US is the only country with a healthcare system that spends 90% of its resources on the elderly - specifically in the last five years of life. The rest of the world seems to take the attitude that old people die, so shut up and die.
Comparisons about what country is the "healthiest" is pointless - everyone else long ago figured out that if the government was going to pay they weren't going to get neonatal intensive care or transplants for 70-year-olds. Apparently it was decided that was an OK bargain. Except in the US and a few other places. The result is oldsters come to the US for care they can't get and can't pay for in their own countries.
Funny, the AARP seems to be behind the move to get the government paying for medical care. Their members are the ones that should be the most interested in making sure the situation in other countries is not repeated in the US but with a massive PR campaign the likely outcome isn't being discussed.
Yes, but you have missed the key point.
There are three classes of potential customers: product owners, users, and criminals. If the researcher makes it clear they are willing to sell their information to the third class - criminals - then it matters little if they are also willing to sell to the other two classes or not.
Clearly, the implication is they do not want to sell to the product owner class as that would be a single sale. By selling the information to users and criminals they ensure that they have a substantial number of potential sales as well as motivating the users to buy rapidly or else they will be victims of the criminal class.
We now have questionable social "networking" sites where your past dating partners can rate you. We have an eternal archive of everything anyone ever posted about you on the Internet.
"Oh I never use my real name on the Internet" goes only so far - these aren't things you are posting about yourself, these are things other people are saying about you. Can they be connected to you? Depends on how detailed the person commenting on you wants to be.
Are we ready for having our children 15 years from now ask why you were so mean to people before?
So of course we have companies offering the chance to wipe the slate clean. A fresh start. For only a few dollars. After all, what is money compared to this.
This could actually get out of hand if people paid any attention at all to the Internet. Fortunately, most people don't.
Health care is simple - in the US we have this funny idea about putting off death. Most other countries figured it out a long time ago. Save the 90% that is spent in the US on the last year of life.
People die. Get over it. Save the money.
Not so popular with the over-50 crowd, but they aren't going to have much choice in the matter come November.
I don't understand. I certainly do not want to pay for my Internet connection being improved if I can elect someone that will make you pay for it. That's what America is all about for the last couple of decades - make the other fellow pay.
I'm really looking forward to President Obama. He gave a speech in Phoenix about how much he was going to give to everyone. Free education, free healthcare, free this and better that.
Wouldn't you rather someone else pay for it?