There is hunger crisis that can be solved with money. Guns, maybe. Money, no. We've been pouring money in since the 1950's and have made the problem worse, if anything.
Real medical care? I assume you mean you would like people to get care without having to pay for it, since they can't. Check out other places in the world and check out how they spend money on health care. Then look at the US and exactly how money is spent. It is very, very different. So different in fact that there is almost no way to compare the two. To adopt a European-style healthcare system would require that people in the US adopt European-style attitudes about death and dying. Until that happens, you can forget about "universal health care" in the US.
See, the difference is that in the US most of the money is spent on neonatal care and in the last year of life. This isn't the way it works in Europe or most other places. Canada is trying to strike a balance and failing miserably. The NHS in UK has been on the brink of collapse for quite a while because of trying to be more US-like and less European-like. It doesn't work.
For "universal health care" to work within a budget you have to be willing to tell people that their baby isn't going to make it because there isn't enough money to save the baby. That nobody cares enough about the baby because money is more important. Money for helping younger people. You also need to be able to tell older people that it is time to die and make room for younger people. Neither of these is especially palatable to people in the US and aren't going to happen anytime soon. Both of these things happen every day in places where the government takes care of all health needs of their people.
Substituting a different fuel isn't going to solve the problem if the problem is waste heat from human activities. If the problem is from solar activity, there isn't much we can do about it either.
If the problem is CO2 from human activities we might be able to do something about that. The problem is we have no way of knowing - as of yet - how much CO2 is bad. Meaning, when you pop the top on a can of Pepsi it releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Is this perhaps something condemming millions of people to death? Do we need to stop producing carbonated beverages because of the released CO2 from the millions of cans opened every day?
Nobody knows. Right now, nobody has any idea but lots of people have "solutions". Skipping over the small part of figuring out what the problem is and moving right into the solution stage is a sure-fire way of creating a disaster.
I would put this on about the same level as challanging the arresting officer's ability to discern impaired behavior because he has not received sufficient training in physiology and other disciplines to be able to accurately determine the level of impairment.
Couple that with the inability to determine precisely the amount of alcohol consumed by the defendant. Without knowing to the mililiter the amount consumed it would be very easy to dispute the findings of blood alcohol level - such levels could be normal for the individual and the state would be incapable of proving otherwise.
What happens when you go down this road is very simple. If you have a stupid and greedy attorney, he will take your case and present your defense all the while spending your money like it is water. A slightly smarter and less greedy attorney will tell you up front that all of these points are irrelevent to the case.
I suspect this guy is grabbing at straws and this isn't the first offense.
As I've explained to my judge: essentially, states needs to learn that it is a very bad idea to sign contracts to acquire closed source devices to which they will have no access or ability to test. The same goes for voting machines.
Breathalizer equipment is probably one of the most heavily tested categories of machines in the world. Radar guns are just after that. Tested? They are tested on rigorious schedules with recertification required periodically.
Yes, people have gotten off because of miscalibrated and uncertified machines. This isn't supposed to happen but when it does the evidence supplied by the machine is thrown out. This usually isn't a free ride for the driver because he was generally observed driving in an improper and unsafe manner.
While the source code may not be available, the test records of the machines are pretty much public record.
I strongly suspect this has been taken into account via a large sampling of human test subjects. If there was as much variance as you are implying, any breathalizer test would be worthless because of this variability and the only valid measurement would be a blood test.
In Illinois you can demand a blood test instead of a breathalizer test, possibly with the idea that a blood test is more accurate. However, I can't imagine that in the 20-30 years we have had breathalizer tests that this issue wouldn't have come up already. Some defendent with more money than sense thinking they could get off somehow. And sure, a defense attorney could probably find some expert witness to try this tactic. My guess is this was settled in 1975 and is buried somewhere in Lexis.
Well, you might be understating things a little bit.
No, there isn't going to be a Muslim army that lands on the beaches and "takes over" the USA. That is silly.
However, we are seeing court decisions implementing Sharia law in Germany for Muslims. What do you think it would take for this to happen in the USA? How far away are we actually from allowing Muslim men to beat their wives with impunity? Would you not call "taking over" our laws?
How about the idea of people having Driver's License pictures taken while wearing a mask? Well, some states now allow fully covered (hajib) women photographed.
How about cab drivers that refuse to take unclean animals (guide dogs) or transport banned beverages (alcholic)? Yes, there is right now a fight over this in several cities.
No, the Muslim army isn't landing anytime soon, but you can start to see evidence that the USA is making over its laws and customs to be more in line with Muslim beliefs.
I firmly believe that a substantial difference in healthcare spending is a very different cultural attitude towards death and dying.
In the US death is a foe to be fought at every turn with every possible resource until the fight finally becomes unwinnable. The amount of money spent in the last year of life is more than 10 times the amount spent throughout the rest of a person's life.
Contrast this with a different and perhaps somewhat healthier view of death and dying in other countries and you see nothing like the tremendous outporing of spending in the last year of life. This drastically changes both the outlook for the elderly and the amount of resources spent on people that are no longer contributing members of society.
Of course, this is why you have old people from every country on Earth coming to the US for care.
In a direct election system in the US almost nobody's vote would really count. A candidate would focus their entire effort on the minimum number of locations where more than 60-70% of the voters are located. Nobody outside of those areas would count at all.
Direct fraud would be much, much easier if it was truely a national election. And it would be rampant because of the success factor. Losing a neavily Democratic district's votes would have a nationwide, direct result. Compare that to today where this only makes any sense at all in a few places in the country that are contested in a meaningful way. Also in a direct election you would need nationwide standards rather than local control. This means the relatively well-known problems in Chicago would need to be fixed rather than just being ignored. Yes, vote fraud in Chicago could easily swing the entire election rather than being isolated to Illinois where the Republicans already know they are going to lose the state.
You also have the "News factor". If the results of the election aren't ready by the 10:00 PM TV News program, the results would have to be reported anyway. The government doesn't control the news as it does in other countries - the news far more controls the government. So we get made-up "interim results" that tell people what they want to hear. This is one thing that happened in 2000 that we are still recovering from - Gore was announced as the winner and then it was changed to Bush after some people went to bed knowing that Gore had won. They still haven't gotten over that and are still sure that somehow in the night Bush stole the election. It happens again and we're looking at TV News inciting riots in major cities.
Might as well face up to it. The US "manufacturing base" isn't going to exist soon and everything will be made in countries where the labor cost is lower. Whether it is Mexico, China, or Indonesia the stuff is going to be made there and shipped here.
The US has pretty much priced itself out of the labor market. The same thing is going to happen in the EU as well because even with lots of protectionist trade policies sooner or later the raw fact is going to be that you can either get locally made stuff or foreign made stuff at 1/10th the price.
While small pieces are likely to be burned up in the atmosphere, this isn't exactly a joyous event.
Atmospheric heating of the objects, if there are enough of them, can result in a significant increase in the temperature of the atmosphere in general. This is the very, very bad effect of either the "Armageddon" or the endgame in "Deep Impact".
Deflection is the right answer. Probably the only good answer.
Evidently for most intents and purposes copyright is a meaningless concept today. Piracy is a non-issue until someone sues and even then it isn't very meaningful.
Not that I wish it to be this way, but reality is after all reality.
200 years? I think you are more likely to see a significant change in 20 years. Either people like you get to decide there is no IP and nothing to sell or the people like you lose. Losing means in a generation the genii is really back in the bottle and piracy is extinct.
Which do I think is more likely? I don't really know. I do know that content and IP in general is the only thing that can or will be "manufactured" or sold in the West soon. There isn't anything else - the US and EU have priced themselves out of the physical goods business. The US could grow food for the rest of the world and sell that, but the EU is going to basically be bankrupt without something to sell that the rest of the world wants.
Sure, we could see a massive economic collapse that revalues labor such that human labor is worth almost nothing. Then the EU would indeed have something to sell - except the population disparity with the East would still make competing over labor next to impossible. So even with an economic collapse that might not work out either.
No, I think the only way the West to survive is for people with your beliefs to go away. Piracy (and its devaluation of the only thing worth anything in the West) ends. Spoiled little boys that want everything for free learn they can't have it.
So? Microsoft has paid the development costs to put together the product from all these ideas lying around on the floor. They put a product together. They did something that so far nobody has been able to successfully replicate - get 90% of the world's computers running the same basic software so there is a market for off-the-shelf software.
Now you might like it if their work counted for nothing. It would certainly make for a different sort of economy. One thing to keep in mind is that very, very few things that have no economic reward get done for very long. There are few unpaid missionaries in the world compared to the number of priests that get paid. These are people that are dedicated and motivated by things other than money, but life today pretty much requires money to have much of a life. Check out the Amish - they don't want much but still do things to get money.
Take the money of the equation and the "thing" disappears. Could it happen to software? Maybe.
"Piracy", COPYING, is legitimate free market competition. Vista itself too only exists *because* it too COPIED the innumerable ideas of others. If Microsoft was really against the COPYING of Vista, Microsoft would never have even made, or been allowed to make, Vista in the first place. Any complaints of "piracy" are pure hypocricy, in absolutely every single case whatsoever.
Based on this thinking, GM has copied the idea of the car from Henry Ford and innumerable others. Therefore, we should all help GM end their delusions of owning anything by going down to the nearest dealer and releaving them of the burden of having so many cars.
First problem - finding NORMAL people. By this I assume you mean people that aren't immediately addicted or become overly dependent very quickly.
The second problem is there are certainly people that can handle drugs but there is a large number of people that cannot. How do you separate them out? The people that will utterly freak out on PCP or LSD. The people that after three doses of coke will do literally anything for the next, including sell their children, rob relatives, etc.
As far as I know, there isn't a test you can give someone that will say they can handle some drug. Ever seen any of the above behavior? It's not pretty and current laws pretty much prevent them from being confined in any way until they actually do something to harm others. Even stealing from relatives can get you a pass from the police unless the victim is willing to (a) press charges and (b) show up in court. (a) is tough enough, (b) is very, very difficult when it is a granddaughter. So the kid gets a complete pass and is free to continue.
He's a nutter and America's just in it for the oil. Big fucking moral difference there.
So where is the oil? How many US soldiers are guarding oil fields? How many tankers have left Iraq for the US? Where is the US $0.39 gasoline that we should have now with all that oil? After all, there is no national authority in Iraq to stop us from taking all the oil there is, right? We are illegally "occupying" Iraq and controlling everything there, right?
SO WHERE IS THE OIL?
It isn't about the oil. Only a complete brainwasted idiot still thinks it is about the oil. Zero oil has come out of Iraq since the first day troops landed in Iraq.
Attention: I believe iTunes has about 1% of the "market" in downloaded music, assuming you include P2P. If you don't then they have maybe 90-99%. Sure, they sold 3 billion or whatever the number is. It doesn't matter because 300 billion downloads happened during the same time period.
Nobody is paying. But they are still putting the music onto iPods and that is all Mr. Jobs cares about.
VOD will certainly come, but it will be pirated content. We are going to see broadband go from 1Mb/sec to more like 100Mb/sec in the next few years. When that happens there isn't any point for cable TV, movie rentals or anything else. It will all be there for the taking. And you will be able to take it pretty fast. You might be able to buy some kind of VOD service, but it will be competing with free services.
Today the bandwidth doesn't exist to do this. When it does, you will have a choice between pirated content and maybe a small number of legitimate services. I just don't see a legitimate service being cost effective.
I think the issue right now might be the DVD mills to some extent. The real problem on the horizon is with people having 20-100Mb broadband connections and being able to download a movie in a few hours via P2P. Once that threshold is crossed buying a physical DVD will be like buying a 45 record is today. Sure, you might know a place to get one but you have never visited the store.
I really think the solution is for media companies to limit what reaches the digital domain. You want a blockbuster movie the makes 100-200 million? Show it in theaters only. No DVD's at least for years. Then maybe capitalize on a new audience with DVDs. Today you can download a DVD rip of a movie from a screener the day before the movie shows up in the theater. They are never going to be able to lock that down so the only answer is to not have the problem at all. Camera copies? That is already getting locked down.
It is just reality that you can't secure digital copies and you can't trust users to not redistribute.
Carrying a gun (permit or not) into a public building in against the law. I believe it is a felony. AZ is a concealed carry state and there is one of these notices outside every public building or office.
Re:Bad arguments and bad reasoning
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Marijuana and other drug laws absolutely keep some people away from the stuff. They (a) have fear of authority and (b) zero self control.
We do not want to see these folks roaming the streets on drugs. A few times a year someone does something utterly boneheaded and gives their friend drugs. Then finds out their friend falls into the above category and get to watch while they (a) destroy their life with drug-seeking behavior, (b) do unbelievable stuff like burning down their house, running over little old ladies, etc. and (c) end up in a head-ward or jail.
Some people do not belong getting drunk. Some people do not belong using drugs. Some people should never, ever smoke marijuana.
Yup. The problem is that the difference between "for the use of the copier" and "hog wild distribution for the planet at large" is in the mind of the copier and nowhere else. It does not manifest itself in any other modality.
Thus preventing many (or maybe most) of the users from "hog wild distribution for the planet at large" also prevents any other sort of copying, format transfer or anything else.
In the mind of the media content owner they see the 10% (or 20% or 30%) of the piracy they aren't stopping and extrapolate that to 3-10x the scale of the piracy issue they are seeing. So you do a search for The Simpsons Movie today (less than a week in theaters) and I am sure you can download it right now. I assure you if I downloaded that movie I would not be spending $20 (2 tickets) to see it in the theater. Ever. And why would I buy the DVD? For the "Interview with Homer" special feature? I doubt it.
Do you think the media companies would be comfortable with the idea that without any sort of DRM their piracy problem would be 3x (minimum) to 10x (probable maximum) of what it is today? Sure, that is probably the worse-case way of looking at it. But it isn't a completely unreasonable assumption.
I believe piracy is going to get a lot more convenient in the near future. Today you have bandwidth-choaked distributors that are on fairly low-bandwidth circuits. This is almost certainly going to change. When you see the difference between a 1Mb upload (cable) and a 20Mb upload (fiber) the effect will make significant changes for piracy.
It is all going to get a lot faster, easier and simpler for everyone.
This will (of course) result in most of the piracy predictions "ending the world as we know it" come true. But the pirates won't care.
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There is hunger crisis that can be solved with money. Guns, maybe. Money, no. We've been pouring money in since the 1950's and have made the problem worse, if anything.
Real medical care? I assume you mean you would like people to get care without having to pay for it, since they can't. Check out other places in the world and check out how they spend money on health care. Then look at the US and exactly how money is spent. It is very, very different. So different in fact that there is almost no way to compare the two. To adopt a European-style healthcare system would require that people in the US adopt European-style attitudes about death and dying. Until that happens, you can forget about "universal health care" in the US.
See, the difference is that in the US most of the money is spent on neonatal care and in the last year of life. This isn't the way it works in Europe or most other places. Canada is trying to strike a balance and failing miserably. The NHS in UK has been on the brink of collapse for quite a while because of trying to be more US-like and less European-like. It doesn't work.
For "universal health care" to work within a budget you have to be willing to tell people that their baby isn't going to make it because there isn't enough money to save the baby. That nobody cares enough about the baby because money is more important. Money for helping younger people. You also need to be able to tell older people that it is time to die and make room for younger people. Neither of these is especially palatable to people in the US and aren't going to happen anytime soon. Both of these things happen every day in places where the government takes care of all health needs of their people.
Substituting a different fuel isn't going to solve the problem if the problem is waste heat from human activities. If the problem is from solar activity, there isn't much we can do about it either.
If the problem is CO2 from human activities we might be able to do something about that. The problem is we have no way of knowing - as of yet - how much CO2 is bad. Meaning, when you pop the top on a can of Pepsi it releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Is this perhaps something condemming millions of people to death? Do we need to stop producing carbonated beverages because of the released CO2 from the millions of cans opened every day?
Nobody knows. Right now, nobody has any idea but lots of people have "solutions". Skipping over the small part of figuring out what the problem is and moving right into the solution stage is a sure-fire way of creating a disaster.
I would put this on about the same level as challanging the arresting officer's ability to discern impaired behavior because he has not received sufficient training in physiology and other disciplines to be able to accurately determine the level of impairment.
Couple that with the inability to determine precisely the amount of alcohol consumed by the defendant. Without knowing to the mililiter the amount consumed it would be very easy to dispute the findings of blood alcohol level - such levels could be normal for the individual and the state would be incapable of proving otherwise.
What happens when you go down this road is very simple. If you have a stupid and greedy attorney, he will take your case and present your defense all the while spending your money like it is water. A slightly smarter and less greedy attorney will tell you up front that all of these points are irrelevent to the case.
I suspect this guy is grabbing at straws and this isn't the first offense.
Breathalizer equipment is probably one of the most heavily tested categories of machines in the world. Radar guns are just after that. Tested? They are tested on rigorious schedules with recertification required periodically.
Yes, people have gotten off because of miscalibrated and uncertified machines. This isn't supposed to happen but when it does the evidence supplied by the machine is thrown out. This usually isn't a free ride for the driver because he was generally observed driving in an improper and unsafe manner.
While the source code may not be available, the test records of the machines are pretty much public record.
I strongly suspect this has been taken into account via a large sampling of human test subjects. If there was as much variance as you are implying, any breathalizer test would be worthless because of this variability and the only valid measurement would be a blood test.
In Illinois you can demand a blood test instead of a breathalizer test, possibly with the idea that a blood test is more accurate. However, I can't imagine that in the 20-30 years we have had breathalizer tests that this issue wouldn't have come up already. Some defendent with more money than sense thinking they could get off somehow. And sure, a defense attorney could probably find some expert witness to try this tactic. My guess is this was settled in 1975 and is buried somewhere in Lexis.
Well, you might be understating things a little bit.
No, there isn't going to be a Muslim army that lands on the beaches and "takes over" the USA. That is silly.
However, we are seeing court decisions implementing Sharia law in Germany for Muslims. What do you think it would take for this to happen in the USA? How far away are we actually from allowing Muslim men to beat their wives with impunity? Would you not call "taking over" our laws?
How about the idea of people having Driver's License pictures taken while wearing a mask? Well, some states now allow fully covered (hajib) women photographed.
How about cab drivers that refuse to take unclean animals (guide dogs) or transport banned beverages (alcholic)? Yes, there is right now a fight over this in several cities.
No, the Muslim army isn't landing anytime soon, but you can start to see evidence that the USA is making over its laws and customs to be more in line with Muslim beliefs.
I firmly believe that a substantial difference in healthcare spending is a very different cultural attitude towards death and dying.
In the US death is a foe to be fought at every turn with every possible resource until the fight finally becomes unwinnable. The amount of money spent in the last year of life is more than 10 times the amount spent throughout the rest of a person's life.
Contrast this with a different and perhaps somewhat healthier view of death and dying in other countries and you see nothing like the tremendous outporing of spending in the last year of life. This drastically changes both the outlook for the elderly and the amount of resources spent on people that are no longer contributing members of society.
Of course, this is why you have old people from every country on Earth coming to the US for care.
In a direct election system in the US almost nobody's vote would really count. A candidate would focus their entire effort on the minimum number of locations where more than 60-70% of the voters are located. Nobody outside of those areas would count at all.
Direct fraud would be much, much easier if it was truely a national election. And it would be rampant because of the success factor. Losing a neavily Democratic district's votes would have a nationwide, direct result. Compare that to today where this only makes any sense at all in a few places in the country that are contested in a meaningful way. Also in a direct election you would need nationwide standards rather than local control. This means the relatively well-known problems in Chicago would need to be fixed rather than just being ignored. Yes, vote fraud in Chicago could easily swing the entire election rather than being isolated to Illinois where the Republicans already know they are going to lose the state.
You also have the "News factor". If the results of the election aren't ready by the 10:00 PM TV News program, the results would have to be reported anyway. The government doesn't control the news as it does in other countries - the news far more controls the government. So we get made-up "interim results" that tell people what they want to hear. This is one thing that happened in 2000 that we are still recovering from - Gore was announced as the winner and then it was changed to Bush after some people went to bed knowing that Gore had won. They still haven't gotten over that and are still sure that somehow in the night Bush stole the election. It happens again and we're looking at TV News inciting riots in major cities.
What is really needed is for 10% of the people in the US to absolutely 100% refuse to purchase anything made by a corporation. That would teach them.
It would certainly teach someone something all right.
Might as well face up to it. The US "manufacturing base" isn't going to exist soon and everything will be made in countries where the labor cost is lower. Whether it is Mexico, China, or Indonesia the stuff is going to be made there and shipped here.
The US has pretty much priced itself out of the labor market. The same thing is going to happen in the EU as well because even with lots of protectionist trade policies sooner or later the raw fact is going to be that you can either get locally made stuff or foreign made stuff at 1/10th the price.
While small pieces are likely to be burned up in the atmosphere, this isn't exactly a joyous event.
Atmospheric heating of the objects, if there are enough of them, can result in a significant increase in the temperature of the atmosphere in general. This is the very, very bad effect of either the "Armageddon" or the endgame in "Deep Impact".
Deflection is the right answer. Probably the only good answer.
Evidently for most intents and purposes copyright is a meaningless concept today. Piracy is a non-issue until someone sues and even then it isn't very meaningful.
Not that I wish it to be this way, but reality is after all reality.
200 years? I think you are more likely to see a significant change in 20 years. Either people like you get to decide there is no IP and nothing to sell or the people like you lose. Losing means in a generation the genii is really back in the bottle and piracy is extinct.
Which do I think is more likely? I don't really know. I do know that content and IP in general is the only thing that can or will be "manufactured" or sold in the West soon. There isn't anything else - the US and EU have priced themselves out of the physical goods business. The US could grow food for the rest of the world and sell that, but the EU is going to basically be bankrupt without something to sell that the rest of the world wants.
Sure, we could see a massive economic collapse that revalues labor such that human labor is worth almost nothing. Then the EU would indeed have something to sell - except the population disparity with the East would still make competing over labor next to impossible. So even with an economic collapse that might not work out either.
No, I think the only way the West to survive is for people with your beliefs to go away. Piracy (and its devaluation of the only thing worth anything in the West) ends. Spoiled little boys that want everything for free learn they can't have it.
So? Microsoft has paid the development costs to put together the product from all these ideas lying around on the floor. They put a product together. They did something that so far nobody has been able to successfully replicate - get 90% of the world's computers running the same basic software so there is a market for off-the-shelf software.
Now you might like it if their work counted for nothing. It would certainly make for a different sort of economy. One thing to keep in mind is that very, very few things that have no economic reward get done for very long. There are few unpaid missionaries in the world compared to the number of priests that get paid. These are people that are dedicated and motivated by things other than money, but life today pretty much requires money to have much of a life. Check out the Amish - they don't want much but still do things to get money.
Take the money of the equation and the "thing" disappears. Could it happen to software? Maybe.
Based on this thinking, GM has copied the idea of the car from Henry Ford and innumerable others. Therefore, we should all help GM end their delusions of owning anything by going down to the nearest dealer and releaving them of the burden of having so many cars.
Right?
First problem - finding NORMAL people. By this I assume you mean people that aren't immediately addicted or become overly dependent very quickly.
The second problem is there are certainly people that can handle drugs but there is a large number of people that cannot. How do you separate them out? The people that will utterly freak out on PCP or LSD. The people that after three doses of coke will do literally anything for the next, including sell their children, rob relatives, etc.
As far as I know, there isn't a test you can give someone that will say they can handle some drug. Ever seen any of the above behavior? It's not pretty and current laws pretty much prevent them from being confined in any way until they actually do something to harm others. Even stealing from relatives can get you a pass from the police unless the victim is willing to (a) press charges and (b) show up in court. (a) is tough enough, (b) is very, very difficult when it is a granddaughter. So the kid gets a complete pass and is free to continue.
So where is the oil? How many US soldiers are guarding oil fields? How many tankers have left Iraq for the US? Where is the US $0.39 gasoline that we should have now with all that oil? After all, there is no national authority in Iraq to stop us from taking all the oil there is, right? We are illegally "occupying" Iraq and controlling everything there, right?
SO WHERE IS THE OIL?
It isn't about the oil. Only a complete brainwasted idiot still thinks it is about the oil. Zero oil has come out of Iraq since the first day troops landed in Iraq.
The sad (but true) facts are:
Sad, yes. But inescapably true.
Attention: I believe iTunes has about 1% of the "market" in downloaded music, assuming you include P2P. If you don't then they have maybe 90-99%. Sure, they sold 3 billion or whatever the number is. It doesn't matter because 300 billion downloads happened during the same time period.
Nobody is paying. But they are still putting the music onto iPods and that is all Mr. Jobs cares about.
VOD will certainly come, but it will be pirated content. We are going to see broadband go from 1Mb/sec to more like 100Mb/sec in the next few years. When that happens there isn't any point for cable TV, movie rentals or anything else. It will all be there for the taking. And you will be able to take it pretty fast. You might be able to buy some kind of VOD service, but it will be competing with free services.
Today the bandwidth doesn't exist to do this. When it does, you will have a choice between pirated content and maybe a small number of legitimate services. I just don't see a legitimate service being cost effective.
I think the issue right now might be the DVD mills to some extent. The real problem on the horizon is with people having 20-100Mb broadband connections and being able to download a movie in a few hours via P2P. Once that threshold is crossed buying a physical DVD will be like buying a 45 record is today. Sure, you might know a place to get one but you have never visited the store.
I really think the solution is for media companies to limit what reaches the digital domain. You want a blockbuster movie the makes 100-200 million? Show it in theaters only. No DVD's at least for years. Then maybe capitalize on a new audience with DVDs. Today you can download a DVD rip of a movie from a screener the day before the movie shows up in the theater. They are never going to be able to lock that down so the only answer is to not have the problem at all. Camera copies? That is already getting locked down.
It is just reality that you can't secure digital copies and you can't trust users to not redistribute.
I believe the correct view today is that it should all be free. Maybe supported by a few unobtrusive text ads.
Carrying a gun (permit or not) into a public building in against the law. I believe it is a felony. AZ is a concealed carry state and there is one of these notices outside every public building or office.
Marijuana and other drug laws absolutely keep some people away from the stuff. They (a) have fear of authority and (b) zero self control.
We do not want to see these folks roaming the streets on drugs. A few times a year someone does something utterly boneheaded and gives their friend drugs. Then finds out their friend falls into the above category and get to watch while they (a) destroy their life with drug-seeking behavior, (b) do unbelievable stuff like burning down their house, running over little old ladies, etc. and (c) end up in a head-ward or jail.
Some people do not belong getting drunk. Some people do not belong using drugs. Some people should never, ever smoke marijuana.
Yup. The problem is that the difference between "for the use of the copier" and "hog wild distribution for the planet at large" is in the mind of the copier and nowhere else. It does not manifest itself in any other modality.
Thus preventing many (or maybe most) of the users from "hog wild distribution for the planet at large" also prevents any other sort of copying, format transfer or anything else.
In the mind of the media content owner they see the 10% (or 20% or 30%) of the piracy they aren't stopping and extrapolate that to 3-10x the scale of the piracy issue they are seeing. So you do a search for The Simpsons Movie today (less than a week in theaters) and I am sure you can download it right now. I assure you if I downloaded that movie I would not be spending $20 (2 tickets) to see it in the theater. Ever. And why would I buy the DVD? For the "Interview with Homer" special feature? I doubt it.
Do you think the media companies would be comfortable with the idea that without any sort of DRM their piracy problem would be 3x (minimum) to 10x (probable maximum) of what it is today? Sure, that is probably the worse-case way of looking at it. But it isn't a completely unreasonable assumption.
I believe piracy is going to get a lot more convenient in the near future. Today you have bandwidth-choaked distributors that are on fairly low-bandwidth circuits. This is almost certainly going to change. When you see the difference between a 1Mb upload (cable) and a 20Mb upload (fiber) the effect will make significant changes for piracy.
It is all going to get a lot faster, easier and simpler for everyone.
This will (of course) result in most of the piracy predictions "ending the world as we know it" come true. But the pirates won't care.