What you are missing is the signature is agreeing to accept the DVR and nothing else. The DVR is likely distributed with the rest of the agreement implied. No agreement = no DVR. You will find that this is very common. By accepting receipt of the DVR you are agreeing to their terms for how it is distributed.
I'm sure if you don't like the agreement they will take the DVR back with no further charges at any time. It isn't like you are locked into a 2 year contract for the device.
The problem is the media producers have relied on financing and promotion for a long time. Can they operate without this or take over the job themselves? Current indications would say not - very very few independent films get into distribution and very very few bands achieve national or global success without promotion and/or financing.
How's your movie doing, anyway? Do you expect that all the people that could potentially be affected by your movie to see it? If so, you are getting incredible distribution. My guess is that you couldn't afford to produce enough DVDs for such distribution without external financing. And there is the problem. Not everyone on the planet gets they media from the Internet, at least not yet.
Similarly, let's assume your movie was a runaway success and Wal-Mart wanted to stock it. But in order to make that many DVDs you needed financing. Now a contract with Wal-Mart is a pretty marketable thing, so financing shouldn't be too much of a problem. How do you repay this if your movie gets picked up by pirates and they out-distribute Wal-Mart?
Once this happens more than a couple of times, nobody will finance music and movies anymore. No promotional dollars get spent and nobody would loan the producer a dime because it is too high a risk. The end of the game is likely that there isn't any such financing anymore, no stock for Wal-Mart to sell and nothing for anyone to buy.
We are then at the point where the only thing that causes music, movies and other recorded media to be produced is ego. If you know you are the best singer on the planet and need to share this with everyone else you would certainly pay any amount of money to make your talent available to everyone. You can assume most people that know they are the best singer on the planet might be something less than that in reality. But reality isn't going to upset their dream.
The rest of the people will play in their friend's band on weekends in bars.
I find your "morality" interesting. Why wouldn't you do your part to force the purveyors of DRM-laden content into bankrupcy by redistributing cracked content? Why shouldn't the world benefit from your skills and efforts? Also, why should the content company get to continue to exist doing something that you consider criminal?
Yes, people will put up with incredibily bad content in order to get something for free. And part of the attraction is that it is illegal or just somehow wrong to do it. In many ways, this is probably more than half the motivation in the first place.
Also correct in that it has to be stopped at the distribution level. Nobody really cares if you buy a DVD and make a copy of it for yourself. What they care about is you make a copy for the rest of the Internet-using folks on the planet. What scares content producers is the "Apple II scenario" - you sell one copy in the US (English), one copy in Madrid (Spanish) and one copy in Frankfurt (German) and never, ever another copy. This is certainly where things are going. It will happen with music and could happen with movies.
There is no doubt that content owners and their investors are going to want to stop mass distribution of their content without their permission. And it is also true that a substantial fraction of the population is going to fight them every step of the way. The content owners are going to win in the end, one way or another because they can always take their marbles and go home. The investors put their money into something else and everyone wins - except the content that fills the vacuum is very very different. Better? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly different.
DRM isn't the final solution, but merely a step along the way. No, I don't think it will take 20 years to resolve this because as broadband Internet access reaches more and more people the easy availability of free pirated material will increase. Fewer people will buy when faced with the decision of a perfect digital rip for free vs. higher and higher priced content serving an ever-shrinking buying public. I see pirate copies getting better, not worse, and with faster download speeds (and faster upload sharing speeds) it taking less and less time to get free content rather than paying for it. The end result will be drastically shrinking sales leading to a self-destructive pricing spiral. As the price of a music CD increases, more and more people will just download rather than paying.
So unless they can block mass redistribution, the content owners are pretty much doomed. The investors will walk away leaving them with no capital and no possibility of promoting anything. The music promotion business falls first, probably followed shortly by movies. I think we've pretty much convinced the book publishers to stay away from electronic formats for anything that might really sell, so they are immune. Software might have a chance, but most industry people think "Software As A Service" is the only way to stay financially afloat.
DRM isn't a solution. Maybe splitting the Internet into "luser service" which is just the web and email and a much higher-priced "geek service" that allows other protocols to be used. Maybe gradually replacing general-purpose computers with "web appliances" that would be incapable of sharing or downloading P2P content would work. Probably not. I think mass redistribution is pretty much unstoppable because the ISPs sell pirated content as a feature of their broadband service and turning it off would shrink market share. And we will soon have an entire generation that believes free content is their birthright.
The biggest problems in schools in the US today are the parents and administration. The teacher is caught in the middle.
Absolutely, any teacher that allowed something to be viewed that parents object to will be villified, investigated and possibly fired by the administration. It doesn't matter if it is pornography, white supremacy, or evolution. If the parents do not agree with the material, the teacher is in trouble for bringing it out in the classroom. And in most cases, the teacher is getting zero support from the administration.
This teacher that was told not to turn off the computer and couldn't seem to control it obviously had no business in a classroom with a computer in it. Any barrage of porn popups is going to be distracting, titilating and going to cause problems when the students talk about what they have seen. Sure, you can say "Titties for everyone" but the parents don't seem to agree. They want to control their children's access to explicit sexual materials and the school is telling them that they can. So when a teacher proves this control isn't present, the parents blame the school and the teacher.
Sex education in US schools has been watered down over the last 20-30 years so completely that it is almost pointless. The parents of even a minority of children can block this from being any meaningful exchange of information. The result is what the parents say they want - they control access to sexual information. So girls end up having sex at 12 without ever understanding this is where babies come from and yes, you can get pregnant if you do it standing up. But parents are demanding this kind of control so the school gives in.
Any sort of federal level has to be an improvement.
Today with the I-9 what we have a joke. Someone comes in and shows you a driver's license and hand-drawn social security card indicating they have the right to work in the US. Hand drawn? Sure - the I-9 specifically says the employer cannot attempt to validate the documents being presented as this would be unfair discrimination.
So what we have today is anyone claiming they can work in the US can work in the US. Employer penalties are next to non-existent because of this. Only the most blatent of offenses would even be considered.
Any attempt by an employer to actually hire Americans to work at American jobs can be met with lawsuits and potential sanctions. So nobody does any validation whatsoever.
So how about a fax number that you send the documents to and an answer comes back yes or no? How about some half-hearted attempt to say to illegal immigrants that if you come here bypassing legal immigration you can't work? How about some attempt to reduce American unemployment levels without giving jobs away to people that will work for 50% of the current market? Might raise prices and give some local folks a way to stay off welfare.
The problem is that people want more and more from the government. They want handouts, they want equality in those handouts and other special favors and they want to make sure that their neighbors aren't getting more than they are.
So, first off the government has to implement all sorts of tracking on what they are giving to whom. Lots of audits show up how bad individual departments are at tracking this information, so you create one big department (GAO in the US) to do all the tracking and auditing.
Next, you want both multiculturalism and equality in payments. This means the government has to know if you are black, white or green and where your parents came from so they can properly report on how multicultural they are being. Combine this with the auditing requirement above and you now have all of this tracking going on.
Then you start finding out that some people are getting more than others and this is a big problem. Enter more auditing, more tracking and more information gathered about each person and their history.
So how do you figure the government doesn't need all this information? If you want handouts and you want your neighbors to know they aren't getting less than you are, they need this and they need to share it with everyone.
Reproduced, rehashed, relabeled and re-released content is not scarce. Original, quality content is as scarce as it ever was.
It is going to take awhile and it is going to take the media companies ceasing operation, but people are going to figure out that user-contributed equals trash and amateur equals unprofessional. Until they figure this out, we are going to have a unlimited supply of user contributed, amateur trash and virtually zero "professional" content. Why? Because the latter costs lots of money to produce and there isn't going to be any money in the system to pay for it.
When you open the doors to free redistribution - as has pretty much happened - the content producers aren't going to get much, if any, money per copy. So they can sell one DVD for a million dollars or just forget about making that DVD. Or have it ad-supported like network television. Imagine Britney Spears singing about the wonders of Preparation H or Immodium AD. No, I don't think ad-supported is going to make it.
So while "professional" paid content is going to die pretty soon, content itself isn't going to. And you are going to see more remakes, rehashes, remixes, recreations and re-anything than you would believe because those are cheap and safe to make.
Problem is that most people (yes, I do mean most) have already proven beyond a shadow of any doubt that they are going to redistribute anything they possibly can. And not just to friends and family but everone on the planet.
This has happened a few times already. If one copy can be "shared" with the world then one copy is all you are going to be allowed to sell. No more.
This is likely to really come home when you start seeing ads for pirated content - come to xyz.com, download free content and see our Google ads. Why not advertise this service?
The Romainian government doesn't give a hoot about what some court in the US says. So, the ability of a company in the US to sue someone is Romainia is limited to the extent of that person coming to the US. Until then, they can forget about it.
Unless they know the name and address of the person in Romainia, they aren't even going to be able to file a suit. An IP address isn't going to be useful because the Romainian ISP isn't going to give up their customer and nothing is going to change that.
Proving who was on the other side of the keyboard from an IP address is also impossible. It could have been anyone claiming to be someone else.
Basically, there are no consequences to any action on the Internet. About time people understand that. If you don't like it, change it. Until it changes and every country on the planet signs on to that, you can't prosecute someone for something they did on the Internet.
Backup generators run off diesel fuel, not gasoline. Gasoline ages quickly and is more volatile than diesel.
If this stuff is that unstable, why not just use sodium? It produces hydrogen just as well and it also produces heat, which can pre-warm the fuel-air mix for combustion.
Read up on why the GM EV1 was treated as it was. It was illegal to sell the car because of the extremely (???) toxic nature of the batteries. So, they were leased and then returned to the company to be disposed of in a manner deemed safe by the toxic watchdogs. Or so it seems.
Today we have the technology to build a car powered by lead-acid batteries that would sell for not much more than an ordinary cheap car. But it would be a crime to sell such a car in California because of the carcinogenic nature of the lead, the toxic nature of sulfuric acid and on and on. The fact that every car today has a lead-acid battery in it already doesn't seem to matter to these people.
Until we get a sane view of what we are going to do about toxic materials, waste products and people an electric car has no possible future in the US. If one was made by a foreign car company with the understanding they would not be legal to sell in the US it might spur some action. Unfortunately most of Europe is even more wacky about such stuff.
Could South Korea build such a car for their market exclusively?
All of them, if they register and are found to be legitimate.
If you have a business that has nothing to do with banking or money and want a.bank domain, you should be able to get one - if you register and pass their requirements. This is why the article makes specific reference to.bank not being the ideal TLD but just one possibility. The idea is that you have a TLD that means the business that registered it has passed a bunch of requirements for being legitimate. Something that your friendly bunch of dropouts in Russia couldn't manage whereas today they can indeed register a.com domain. And, because of lax registrars, they can register ebay-inc.com or bannkofamerica.com and try to fool people.
Or perhaps you think registering bannkofamerica.com is a free speech right and anyone should be able to register it? And if the general public is too dumb to notice the difference they deserve to lose some money?
OK. so you are looking for something for nothing. Good luck finding it.
Seen the problem is that what you were hoping/asking for was something given away for free at the end of which it would take a positive action (subscribing) in order for it to mean something. A positive action which these days isn't all that common. The company's offer was to give you something that would take a positive action (that you probably wouldn't have done either) in order to cancel the sale.
The first was giving something away with little hope that your positive action would result. The second is giving something away with nearly 100% certainity that they would have another subscriber. You didn't bite, but for every customer that does it is almost always a new subscription.
Sorry, but that is where we are today. Same thing with rebates - 90% or more of the people don't send in rebates because it takes a postive action on their part.
They don't ask for id because the merchant agreement with the credit card company says specifically they are not supposed to ask for additional ID. Period. If they ask for ID they are breaking the agreement and can have their card acceptance cancelled. No more credit cards.
No, I don't believe there is any such law. I would offer that it would be hard to define an "illegal web site" from a judicial perspective and that such a law would be pointless.
What would make a lot of sense would be Google and other advertising providers offering a checkbox that says it is OK to offer an ad on sites that haven't been checked and found to be legal. Today there is an checkbox for offering the ad on adult sites - or at least there was the last time I looked into it.
How about another one for pirate sites and the like?
You get email from people you know and who know you. If you don't know them, it is spam. Period.
This is pretty much how email is coming to be viewed these days. A company wants to send you an acknowledgement of an order and they can't get it through. Someone wants to ask a question about something, someone that you've never heard of - it must be spam.
The problem is, it mostly is all spam these days. I get about 400 items a day. Our sales@ email address gets more like 1,000 and there are one or two real emails in there.
When we can't send mail to customers (things like receipts) that are plain text because they are agressively filtering and we can't sort out the good from the bad on our end either email has pretty much reached the end of usefulness. While a whitelist essentially ends the utility of email completely, it does solve the spam problem 100%.
Dell service sucks, no doubt. But what about HP service? How about Sony's telephone support? Just trying to get things fixed that are broken with these others is as bad or worse.
If someone thinks that customer service is bad with Dell, they are going to think it is universally bad and all computer makers need to be sued. Sadly, not very realistic.
We know today how to stop increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. If the situation was really as dire as articles like this seem to pretend it is, and if the outcomes were known to the level they would like us to believe, there would be no reason not to turn the switch off.
Yes, it is as easy as that. If the survival of the species was clearly threatened - as these folks would like to say - the justification would be there.
Now don't get me wrong, turning off the switch is not a trivial matter. But it is something that could be done in hours, not decades as people seem to be thinking. There would certainly be repercussions throughout the world, but humanity would go on.
Listen to these fools too much and you might think otherwise.
What is this magical switch that we could turn off? Simple:
Cease all passenger air travel. If you have to get somewhere, go by boat, rail or bus. Period.
Cease sales of gasoline to the public. It is available for public utilities and services, delivery trucks and certain other authorized uses.
This could be done in a day or less in the US. Some folks - a small number - would starve. Some people would be out of work. Tough, but there is welfare. A lot of businesses would collapse, putting more people out of work. Again, tough.
Why isn't anyone thinking about this or doing it? Simple - the problem is nowhere as clear-cut as the folks behind this article would like to believe. Yes, we could turn off the switch and people everywhere would just have to bear it if the problem was as severe as it is made out to be. Please omit the responses about how George W. Bush wouldn't allow this. Fine, it would have been done already in EU, Japan or elsewhere. The US might try to pretend for a while, but it would be clear they were standing in the way of a threat to the human race. So why hasn't anyone done this?
Because the problem isn't as clear cut with no obvious answers or solutions. Would drastic measures like this "solve" the climate change problem? Nobody knows, and the risks of turning the switch off are high enough that nobody is going to do this without being as certain as the article pretends people are. That level of certainity doesn't exist. And spreading the idea that it is that certain and that nobody is doing anything about it is a real disservice to everyone.
Should we find ways to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Probably. How should this be done over the next 10 years? Well, ethanol in the US isn't a solution. Neither is some false "trading" of imaginary carbon credits. Preparing to replace some coal-fired power plants with nuclear would be a good start. Putting real efforts into a strategy for electric vehicles in the US would be another good start, probably without a lot of environmental nonsense about where the batteries go, which is pretty much what killed off the EV1 and prevents the use of lead-acid batteries for such cars.
Should we be pressuring other countries into not going down the coal and oil road for their economic development? Absolutely. If they build an infrastructure dedicated to using fossil fuels it is going to be very difficult to convince them in 10, 20 or even 50 years to tear the whole thing down and start over. Notice that this is not being done, discussed or even considered today.
If you believe the article, you are a fool that believes every government on the planet is thinking only of their leaders stature and power rather to the detriment of the human race. Not a pretty picture to believe such a thing. The good news is that it is provably wrong. Pity that a goodly part of the human race is utterly convinced that another significant fraction of the human race is just evil, bent on destruction of the entire species.
Today we have a law against product tampering. Primarily because they didn't know what to charge people with back when it was all the rage to put cynaide into Tylenol. It wasn't a crime.
Today we do not have laws against using counterfeit products in place of tested ones in automobiles and aircraft. Or many medical situations. How does a hospital or doctor know that the defibrillator that has a UL stamp was really tested? Could it be faked? Today I do not believe there are any laws on the books against selling such products other than trademark infringement. You would be infringing on the UL trademark to stamp a product as "UL approved" when it is not.
So someone dies. Obviously, it is the doctor's fault for using an unapproved device, right? Well, that is where we are today. As the floodgates open wider and wider for offshore manufactured products with zero liability in this country. And huge numbers of counterfeit products being imported today with almost zero penalties for this.
How about instead the auto shop pays for and installs counterfit software that doesn't correctly diagnose problems?
How about fake medical devices like pacemakers that are sold from Chinese manufacturers at bargin prices because they just borrowed the design? And maybe their QA is a little shoddy, but they cover it up by putting it in the original manufacturer's box?
There is today no negligence in these acts - only in very rare circumstances is it negligent to use counterfit parts.
If you can step away from the keyboard for a moment, you might realize there are other things in life besides music, movies and software.
Currently, if you fabricate a medical device that is labelled as coming from a major supplier of such devices you are committing only a trademark infringement. If that device is then used on a patient and causes their death, no further penalty results. This is how you kill someone via an intellectual property crime.
You can think up 100 other situations today involving aircraft parts, automotive parts, electronic devices and other things that if they fail can cause people to die. Currently there are very weak laws protecting against such counterfit merchandise outside of a few restricted areas.
I would say life in prison for being responsible for people dying isn't all that bad an idea.
I don't believe they have to disclose anything ahead of a court filing. It would be like the police telling someone they have 48 hours to leave the country before they are arrested.
Assuming at some point there is some kind of legal document filed, that will be where the content is. Of course, the question is who would they file against exactly? Red Hat? Novell? IBM? Linux users in general? I don't understand what activity they think they might stop through this technique.
Unfortunately, you forgot the WTO. Punitative tariffs such as you propose are not allowed under WTO rules. We can't stop the flood of cheap Chinese goods into the country but they are allowed to block our imports because they don't meet with the proper cultural traditions and nonsense like that.
For some idiotic reason, someone thought it was a good idea to belong to this organization. We probably didn't have a choice in the end to keep trade open with EU and such. So now we are stuck with this awful agreement that virtually mandates destruction of the US manufacturing base.
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What you are missing is the signature is agreeing to accept the DVR and nothing else. The DVR is likely distributed with the rest of the agreement implied. No agreement = no DVR. You will find that this is very common. By accepting receipt of the DVR you are agreeing to their terms for how it is distributed.
I'm sure if you don't like the agreement they will take the DVR back with no further charges at any time. It isn't like you are locked into a 2 year contract for the device.
You generally have to return the opened software to the company directly, bypassing the retailer.
The problem is the media producers have relied on financing and promotion for a long time. Can they operate without this or take over the job themselves? Current indications would say not - very very few independent films get into distribution and very very few bands achieve national or global success without promotion and/or financing.
How's your movie doing, anyway? Do you expect that all the people that could potentially be affected by your movie to see it? If so, you are getting incredible distribution. My guess is that you couldn't afford to produce enough DVDs for such distribution without external financing. And there is the problem. Not everyone on the planet gets they media from the Internet, at least not yet.
Similarly, let's assume your movie was a runaway success and Wal-Mart wanted to stock it. But in order to make that many DVDs you needed financing. Now a contract with Wal-Mart is a pretty marketable thing, so financing shouldn't be too much of a problem. How do you repay this if your movie gets picked up by pirates and they out-distribute Wal-Mart?
Once this happens more than a couple of times, nobody will finance music and movies anymore. No promotional dollars get spent and nobody would loan the producer a dime because it is too high a risk. The end of the game is likely that there isn't any such financing anymore, no stock for Wal-Mart to sell and nothing for anyone to buy.
We are then at the point where the only thing that causes music, movies and other recorded media to be produced is ego. If you know you are the best singer on the planet and need to share this with everyone else you would certainly pay any amount of money to make your talent available to everyone. You can assume most people that know they are the best singer on the planet might be something less than that in reality. But reality isn't going to upset their dream.
The rest of the people will play in their friend's band on weekends in bars.
I find your "morality" interesting. Why wouldn't you do your part to force the purveyors of DRM-laden content into bankrupcy by redistributing cracked content? Why shouldn't the world benefit from your skills and efforts? Also, why should the content company get to continue to exist doing something that you consider criminal?
Yes, people will put up with incredibily bad content in order to get something for free. And part of the attraction is that it is illegal or just somehow wrong to do it. In many ways, this is probably more than half the motivation in the first place.
Also correct in that it has to be stopped at the distribution level. Nobody really cares if you buy a DVD and make a copy of it for yourself. What they care about is you make a copy for the rest of the Internet-using folks on the planet. What scares content producers is the "Apple II scenario" - you sell one copy in the US (English), one copy in Madrid (Spanish) and one copy in Frankfurt (German) and never, ever another copy. This is certainly where things are going. It will happen with music and could happen with movies.
There is no doubt that content owners and their investors are going to want to stop mass distribution of their content without their permission. And it is also true that a substantial fraction of the population is going to fight them every step of the way. The content owners are going to win in the end, one way or another because they can always take their marbles and go home. The investors put their money into something else and everyone wins - except the content that fills the vacuum is very very different. Better? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly different.
DRM isn't the final solution, but merely a step along the way. No, I don't think it will take 20 years to resolve this because as broadband Internet access reaches more and more people the easy availability of free pirated material will increase. Fewer people will buy when faced with the decision of a perfect digital rip for free vs. higher and higher priced content serving an ever-shrinking buying public. I see pirate copies getting better, not worse, and with faster download speeds (and faster upload sharing speeds) it taking less and less time to get free content rather than paying for it. The end result will be drastically shrinking sales leading to a self-destructive pricing spiral. As the price of a music CD increases, more and more people will just download rather than paying.
So unless they can block mass redistribution, the content owners are pretty much doomed. The investors will walk away leaving them with no capital and no possibility of promoting anything. The music promotion business falls first, probably followed shortly by movies. I think we've pretty much convinced the book publishers to stay away from electronic formats for anything that might really sell, so they are immune. Software might have a chance, but most industry people think "Software As A Service" is the only way to stay financially afloat.
DRM isn't a solution. Maybe splitting the Internet into "luser service" which is just the web and email and a much higher-priced "geek service" that allows other protocols to be used. Maybe gradually replacing general-purpose computers with "web appliances" that would be incapable of sharing or downloading P2P content would work. Probably not. I think mass redistribution is pretty much unstoppable because the ISPs sell pirated content as a feature of their broadband service and turning it off would shrink market share. And we will soon have an entire generation that believes free content is their birthright.
The biggest problems in schools in the US today are the parents and administration. The teacher is caught in the middle.
Absolutely, any teacher that allowed something to be viewed that parents object to will be villified, investigated and possibly fired by the administration. It doesn't matter if it is pornography, white supremacy, or evolution. If the parents do not agree with the material, the teacher is in trouble for bringing it out in the classroom. And in most cases, the teacher is getting zero support from the administration.
This teacher that was told not to turn off the computer and couldn't seem to control it obviously had no business in a classroom with a computer in it. Any barrage of porn popups is going to be distracting, titilating and going to cause problems when the students talk about what they have seen. Sure, you can say "Titties for everyone" but the parents don't seem to agree. They want to control their children's access to explicit sexual materials and the school is telling them that they can. So when a teacher proves this control isn't present, the parents blame the school and the teacher.
Sex education in US schools has been watered down over the last 20-30 years so completely that it is almost pointless. The parents of even a minority of children can block this from being any meaningful exchange of information. The result is what the parents say they want - they control access to sexual information. So girls end up having sex at 12 without ever understanding this is where babies come from and yes, you can get pregnant if you do it standing up. But parents are demanding this kind of control so the school gives in.
Any sort of federal level has to be an improvement.
Today with the I-9 what we have a joke. Someone comes in and shows you a driver's license and hand-drawn social security card indicating they have the right to work in the US. Hand drawn? Sure - the I-9 specifically says the employer cannot attempt to validate the documents being presented as this would be unfair discrimination.
So what we have today is anyone claiming they can work in the US can work in the US. Employer penalties are next to non-existent because of this. Only the most blatent of offenses would even be considered.
Any attempt by an employer to actually hire Americans to work at American jobs can be met with lawsuits and potential sanctions. So nobody does any validation whatsoever.
So how about a fax number that you send the documents to and an answer comes back yes or no? How about some half-hearted attempt to say to illegal immigrants that if you come here bypassing legal immigration you can't work? How about some attempt to reduce American unemployment levels without giving jobs away to people that will work for 50% of the current market? Might raise prices and give some local folks a way to stay off welfare.
The problem is that people want more and more from the government. They want handouts, they want equality in those handouts and other special favors and they want to make sure that their neighbors aren't getting more than they are.
So, first off the government has to implement all sorts of tracking on what they are giving to whom. Lots of audits show up how bad individual departments are at tracking this information, so you create one big department (GAO in the US) to do all the tracking and auditing.
Next, you want both multiculturalism and equality in payments. This means the government has to know if you are black, white or green and where your parents came from so they can properly report on how multicultural they are being. Combine this with the auditing requirement above and you now have all of this tracking going on.
Then you start finding out that some people are getting more than others and this is a big problem. Enter more auditing, more tracking and more information gathered about each person and their history.
So how do you figure the government doesn't need all this information? If you want handouts and you want your neighbors to know they aren't getting less than you are, they need this and they need to share it with everyone.
Wrong.
Reproduced, rehashed, relabeled and re-released content is not scarce. Original, quality content is as scarce as it ever was.
It is going to take awhile and it is going to take the media companies ceasing operation, but people are going to figure out that user-contributed equals trash and amateur equals unprofessional. Until they figure this out, we are going to have a unlimited supply of user contributed, amateur trash and virtually zero "professional" content. Why? Because the latter costs lots of money to produce and there isn't going to be any money in the system to pay for it.
When you open the doors to free redistribution - as has pretty much happened - the content producers aren't going to get much, if any, money per copy. So they can sell one DVD for a million dollars or just forget about making that DVD. Or have it ad-supported like network television. Imagine Britney Spears singing about the wonders of Preparation H or Immodium AD. No, I don't think ad-supported is going to make it.
So while "professional" paid content is going to die pretty soon, content itself isn't going to. And you are going to see more remakes, rehashes, remixes, recreations and re-anything than you would believe because those are cheap and safe to make.
Problem is that most people (yes, I do mean most) have already proven beyond a shadow of any doubt that they are going to redistribute anything they possibly can. And not just to friends and family but everone on the planet.
This has happened a few times already. If one copy can be "shared" with the world then one copy is all you are going to be allowed to sell. No more.
This is likely to really come home when you start seeing ads for pirated content - come to xyz.com, download free content and see our Google ads. Why not advertise this service?
Basically, there are no consequences to any action on the Internet. About time people understand that. If you don't like it, change it. Until it changes and every country on the planet signs on to that, you can't prosecute someone for something they did on the Internet.
Backup generators run off diesel fuel, not gasoline. Gasoline ages quickly and is more volatile than diesel.
If this stuff is that unstable, why not just use sodium? It produces hydrogen just as well and it also produces heat, which can pre-warm the fuel-air mix for combustion.
Read up on why the GM EV1 was treated as it was. It was illegal to sell the car because of the extremely (???) toxic nature of the batteries. So, they were leased and then returned to the company to be disposed of in a manner deemed safe by the toxic watchdogs. Or so it seems.
Today we have the technology to build a car powered by lead-acid batteries that would sell for not much more than an ordinary cheap car. But it would be a crime to sell such a car in California because of the carcinogenic nature of the lead, the toxic nature of sulfuric acid and on and on. The fact that every car today has a lead-acid battery in it already doesn't seem to matter to these people.
Until we get a sane view of what we are going to do about toxic materials, waste products and people an electric car has no possible future in the US. If one was made by a foreign car company with the understanding they would not be legal to sell in the US it might spur some action. Unfortunately most of Europe is even more wacky about such stuff.
Could South Korea build such a car for their market exclusively?
All of them, if they register and are found to be legitimate.
.bank domain, you should be able to get one - if you register and pass their requirements. This is why the article makes specific reference to .bank not being the ideal TLD but just one possibility. The idea is that you have a TLD that means the business that registered it has passed a bunch of requirements for being legitimate. Something that your friendly bunch of dropouts in Russia couldn't manage whereas today they can indeed register a .com domain. And, because of lax registrars, they can register ebay-inc.com or bannkofamerica.com and try to fool people.
If you have a business that has nothing to do with banking or money and want a
Or perhaps you think registering bannkofamerica.com is a free speech right and anyone should be able to register it? And if the general public is too dumb to notice the difference they deserve to lose some money?
OK. so you are looking for something for nothing. Good luck finding it.
Seen the problem is that what you were hoping/asking for was something given away for free at the end of which it would take a positive action (subscribing) in order for it to mean something. A positive action which these days isn't all that common. The company's offer was to give you something that would take a positive action (that you probably wouldn't have done either) in order to cancel the sale.
The first was giving something away with little hope that your positive action would result. The second is giving something away with nearly 100% certainity that they would have another subscriber. You didn't bite, but for every customer that does it is almost always a new subscription.
Sorry, but that is where we are today. Same thing with rebates - 90% or more of the people don't send in rebates because it takes a postive action on their part.
They don't ask for id because the merchant agreement with the credit card company says specifically they are not supposed to ask for additional ID. Period. If they ask for ID they are breaking the agreement and can have their card acceptance cancelled. No more credit cards.
No, I don't believe there is any such law. I would offer that it would be hard to define an "illegal web site" from a judicial perspective and that such a law would be pointless.
What would make a lot of sense would be Google and other advertising providers offering a checkbox that says it is OK to offer an ad on sites that haven't been checked and found to be legal. Today there is an checkbox for offering the ad on adult sites - or at least there was the last time I looked into it.
How about another one for pirate sites and the like?
You get email from people you know and who know you. If you don't know them, it is spam. Period.
This is pretty much how email is coming to be viewed these days. A company wants to send you an acknowledgement of an order and they can't get it through. Someone wants to ask a question about something, someone that you've never heard of - it must be spam.
The problem is, it mostly is all spam these days. I get about 400 items a day. Our sales@ email address gets more like 1,000 and there are one or two real emails in there.
When we can't send mail to customers (things like receipts) that are plain text because they are agressively filtering and we can't sort out the good from the bad on our end either email has pretty much reached the end of usefulness. While a whitelist essentially ends the utility of email completely, it does solve the spam problem 100%.
Dell service sucks, no doubt. But what about HP service? How about Sony's telephone support? Just trying to get things fixed that are broken with these others is as bad or worse.
If someone thinks that customer service is bad with Dell, they are going to think it is universally bad and all computer makers need to be sued. Sadly, not very realistic.
Yes, it is as easy as that. If the survival of the species was clearly threatened - as these folks would like to say - the justification would be there.
Now don't get me wrong, turning off the switch is not a trivial matter. But it is something that could be done in hours, not decades as people seem to be thinking. There would certainly be repercussions throughout the world, but humanity would go on.
Listen to these fools too much and you might think otherwise.
What is this magical switch that we could turn off? Simple:
This could be done in a day or less in the US. Some folks - a small number - would starve. Some people would be out of work. Tough, but there is welfare. A lot of businesses would collapse, putting more people out of work. Again, tough.
Why isn't anyone thinking about this or doing it? Simple - the problem is nowhere as clear-cut as the folks behind this article would like to believe. Yes, we could turn off the switch and people everywhere would just have to bear it if the problem was as severe as it is made out to be. Please omit the responses about how George W. Bush wouldn't allow this. Fine, it would have been done already in EU, Japan or elsewhere. The US might try to pretend for a while, but it would be clear they were standing in the way of a threat to the human race. So why hasn't anyone done this?
Because the problem isn't as clear cut with no obvious answers or solutions. Would drastic measures like this "solve" the climate change problem? Nobody knows, and the risks of turning the switch off are high enough that nobody is going to do this without being as certain as the article pretends people are. That level of certainity doesn't exist. And spreading the idea that it is that certain and that nobody is doing anything about it is a real disservice to everyone.
Should we find ways to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Probably. How should this be done over the next 10 years? Well, ethanol in the US isn't a solution. Neither is some false "trading" of imaginary carbon credits. Preparing to replace some coal-fired power plants with nuclear would be a good start. Putting real efforts into a strategy for electric vehicles in the US would be another good start, probably without a lot of environmental nonsense about where the batteries go, which is pretty much what killed off the EV1 and prevents the use of lead-acid batteries for such cars.
Should we be pressuring other countries into not going down the coal and oil road for their economic development? Absolutely. If they build an infrastructure dedicated to using fossil fuels it is going to be very difficult to convince them in 10, 20 or even 50 years to tear the whole thing down and start over. Notice that this is not being done, discussed or even considered today.
If you believe the article, you are a fool that believes every government on the planet is thinking only of their leaders stature and power rather to the detriment of the human race. Not a pretty picture to believe such a thing. The good news is that it is provably wrong. Pity that a goodly part of the human race is utterly convinced that another significant fraction of the human race is just evil, bent on destruction of the entire species.
Today we have a law against product tampering. Primarily because they didn't know what to charge people with back when it was all the rage to put cynaide into Tylenol. It wasn't a crime.
Today we do not have laws against using counterfeit products in place of tested ones in automobiles and aircraft. Or many medical situations. How does a hospital or doctor know that the defibrillator that has a UL stamp was really tested? Could it be faked? Today I do not believe there are any laws on the books against selling such products other than trademark infringement. You would be infringing on the UL trademark to stamp a product as "UL approved" when it is not.
So someone dies. Obviously, it is the doctor's fault for using an unapproved device, right? Well, that is where we are today. As the floodgates open wider and wider for offshore manufactured products with zero liability in this country. And huge numbers of counterfeit products being imported today with almost zero penalties for this.
How about instead the auto shop pays for and installs counterfit software that doesn't correctly diagnose problems?
How about fake medical devices like pacemakers that are sold from Chinese manufacturers at bargin prices because they just borrowed the design? And maybe their QA is a little shoddy, but they cover it up by putting it in the original manufacturer's box?
There is today no negligence in these acts - only in very rare circumstances is it negligent to use counterfit parts.
If you can step away from the keyboard for a moment, you might realize there are other things in life besides music, movies and software.
Currently, if you fabricate a medical device that is labelled as coming from a major supplier of such devices you are committing only a trademark infringement. If that device is then used on a patient and causes their death, no further penalty results. This is how you kill someone via an intellectual property crime.
You can think up 100 other situations today involving aircraft parts, automotive parts, electronic devices and other things that if they fail can cause people to die. Currently there are very weak laws protecting against such counterfit merchandise outside of a few restricted areas.
I would say life in prison for being responsible for people dying isn't all that bad an idea.
I don't believe they have to disclose anything ahead of a court filing. It would be like the police telling someone they have 48 hours to leave the country before they are arrested.
Assuming at some point there is some kind of legal document filed, that will be where the content is. Of course, the question is who would they file against exactly? Red Hat? Novell? IBM? Linux users in general? I don't understand what activity they think they might stop through this technique.
Unfortunately, you forgot the WTO. Punitative tariffs such as you propose are not allowed under WTO rules. We can't stop the flood of cheap Chinese goods into the country but they are allowed to block our imports because they don't meet with the proper cultural traditions and nonsense like that.
For some idiotic reason, someone thought it was a good idea to belong to this organization. We probably didn't have a choice in the end to keep trade open with EU and such. So now we are stuck with this awful agreement that virtually mandates destruction of the US manufacturing base.