The RIAA doesn't sue over one item. They don't sue downloaders. They sue people that are sharing thousands or tens of thousands of files.
If you think the folks that have discovered they don't have to pay for music, movies and software anymore are going to run out and buy 4,000 CDs so they have a "license" for everything they are sharing, you are wrong.
Also, the fact that you bought it does not give you the right to share it, period. Not a defense.
Now what the original company is doing is trying to drag in downloaders and that just isn't going to fly very far.
Of course the mere fact they have an IP address and not your name, SSN, fingerprints and DNA means they have no real case even in civil court. They would have to prove you did it, rather than the neighbor kid next door that sneaks into your house to borrow your computer.
Sure, there is a difference between getting it and just trying. But remember, people go away for life in prison for attempted murder, just like a completely successful murder. Sometimes, in odd circumstances people get less time but not always.
Clearly the mission of the copyright holder (and the legal system) is not to proportionaly punish people for copyright infringement. It is to (a) make an example of them and (b) make sure they never, ever even think about copyright infringement again as long as they live. So it is highly unlikely there would be a difference between between "attempted infringement" and "successful infringement."
How about being able to take an IP address from your logs where someone is trying a brute-force password attack? You'd like them to stop, right? Fat chance!
The IP address is easily traceable to an ISP. The ISP knows who is doing this to you, but will not tell you because that information is "private". You can suggest that you send the logs to the ISP and would they contact their private, anonymous user and tell them to stop, but no ISP that I have ever encountered will do anything to help you.
Basically, you are screwed. Hope you change passwords often because brute force attacks will succeed... eventually.
It is illegal to break into computers, but no local law enforcement agency will ever go after someone without "real" damages, probably thousands of dollars. The FBI will go after people, but only after $25,000 in provable damages. It is highly unlikely someone brute-forcing your password file is going to cause you $25,000 in damages. The FBI has a lot more manpower than local agencies for computer crimes, so you can pretty much figure that you have to account for $25,000 in damages before anything is going to happen.
Most ISPs are going to ignore crap like this from an infringed copyright holder because there is no way they can cause the ISP any trouble and sifting through logs costs time and money. The ones that do something are pretty much going to just send their customer a letter about a letter they got and that is the end of it.
You can be intimidated by this if you want, but the truth is you are pretty much anonymous with your privacy secured by your ISP. If your ISP gives you up, you are the account holder and it would seem this doesn't mean much - the account holder does not seem to be responsible for actions on the account. This means you can just say "wasn't me" and there isn't much they can do about it. If they want your computer for analysis, just have your lawyer say "no" before they take it. They really don't have any grounds for action because there is no evidence that you personally committed any of the deeds they are trying to sue over.
The rest of the world is getting to be a lot better off as the comparatively weathly Americans come down a peg or two. Americans aren't saddled with 50-70% tax rates like much of the rest of the world. Americans aren't working in sweatshop conditions with the legal system of the country standing firmly behind the overseers.
But America is having its economy turned into one where only the highly intelligent knowledge workers have a job. Ordinary jobs requring ordinary skills will have been moved offshore - a lot today, all soon.
5 real Stinger missles, 10-20 fake ones (no warhead), 100 empty tubes that look like missles.
That is all it would take. Shoot down three jetliners in disparate parts of the country, pretty much any country. This would shut down air travel - all air travel, worldwide - for a while. When they start back up because obviously "the threat is gone", shoot down two more.
Air travel and cargo shipments would be over. Possibly forever. The economic ripples of this would give the West something to think about while Islamic nations had the freedom to do whatever they wanted. Iran would certainly annex Iraq and a few other places.
The good news is that pollution would be down and whatever anthropomorphic input there might be in to Global Warming would be over and done with.
This would take no more than five real missles, easily bought for less than $5 million US. And a lot of the West would be economically in ruins.
Just about anywhere in the world when you are denied a permit for a march or other assembly and do it anyway, you get arrested.
In the US this has happened with KKK and Nazi groups. I suspect it would happen to a Young Repuplicans march if they were (a) denied a permit and (b) marched anyway.
I would really welcome a federal, state and local system whereby all election expenses were provided to candidates.
It might take a year to figure it out, but I am sure there would be a way to (a) syphon off enough money for 2 years of modest living expenses and (b) run for something every two years. If your job is "running for office" you might even manage to get elected but you would never have to do anything else.
This is certainly one reason why we do not have publiclly supported candidates running for office. Another reason is that if you can't convince people to give you money, you probably can't convince others that your ideas are all that great either.
Almost everyone points to campaign contributions as the root of corruption. The problem really is that to get into office you need to really want power above all else. The campaign process is such a dirt throwing match now that anyone that doesn't really, really want a position of power would be a fool to get into it. So you get people that place an incredibly high value on being "in power". They will then do virtually anything to stay in power because the only goal they have is "being in power." This is a very silly way to run a government that virtually ensures that people with no ethics and whose only motivation is "being in power" run for office.
Nobody else is committed enough to go through the process.
Citizen A's tax contributions are hardly for "the common good." Most of your taxes go towards paying people to increase the bureaucracy, find new things to spend tax money on and generally cater to special interests. Perhaps 1/10th of what is paid as taxes goes towards supporting common infrastructure or social programs of any value. There are many social programs in the US that are of zero value - consider ineffective abstinence education for example. Or paying someone to go to college for 10 years because they are eligible and the authors of the grant program never dreamed anyone would game the system.
Your federal taxes are mostly going to salaries of people that figure out new and exciting ways to spend more tax money.
Secondly, you seem to have the idea that Citizen B's station in life is a static thing that isn't going to change when he/she grows up.
While I am not sure I agree with all of it, Robert Heinlein laid out some pretty specific ideas about a society where citizenship was earned, not given. If you didn't bother earning it, you got to live there and be supported on the dole but you were not eligible for voting or some other (unspecified) privileges.
One way to earn citizenship was military service, even in peacetime. There were other ways as well mostly glossed over because the principle focus of the book was military. The book is Starship Troopers and it is quite different from the movie. For the time at which it was written it was incredibly insightful into some of the problems the US military has had to face in the last 30-40 years.
Unless this person was exceptionally stupid and brags about it, they are home free. Their ISP will *not* release the information.
Of course, this does bring out that simply having someone sign an NDA in today's climate means nothing. If you release a product to beta testers, they are going to feel free to distribute it to potential competitors worldwide without any fear of retribution. Why? Because it can be done and it isn't going to be traceable.
I suppose you could watermark each copy that is distributed. It would be a hassle to do and still probably not really mean all that much. Yes, you might then be able to visit some kind of retribution on the person that did it. Do you really think they are going to care? I think most people these days would regard having letters sent to their employer from Microsoft as sort of a merit badge of achievement, even if it got them fired.
Any sort of anonyminity will result in this kind of behavior. Most people - not everyone, but most - will do things they would never consider doing if they believe their actions cannot be traced back to them. Would you rob a bank or steal someone's wallet? Most people would not. Would you pick up a wallet in an alley that was clearly abandoned and take whatever was inside? Most people would if they were sure nobody would see them. Nobody sees you on the Internet, and the ISPs believe they have an interest in keeping users isolated from consequences of their actions.
Yes, and then you can be sure that everyone is completely aware of there being no consequences for anything on the Internet.
This means any criminal act that would be prosecuted "off the net" would be a free ride if the Internet was used. No fraud prosecutions, you can threaten anyone in any manner, post naked pictures of your neighbors and try to scam people to your hearts content.
Wiki-anything is probably the best example of this sort of thinking there is. This is extraordinarly bad for schools and for people that do not have the capabilities to really think for themselves. This isn't something that can be trained - it is something that you pretty much have or don't have. Most people don't have it, leading to why we have popularly elected tyrants.
Lots of people here saying that Wikipedia has about the same level of accuracy as textbooks. They clearly have no understanding of how textbooks are created and reviewed for all but college level. Yes, there can be problems. But the level of review by both professionals and educators is pretty darn high.
Wikipedia isn't a valid source for anything - it is a collection of popular stuff and a clear insight into what people consider important. If it wasn't important to them, it wouldn't have gotten written. If other people don't agree, it is edited or deleted to make sure that the author population agrees with what is there. How can this be considered to be anything usable for academic purposes?
Actually, if one was doing a report on Britney Spears it would be a good place to start. If you wanted to find out what the name of the person that was on American Idol that sang "I'm so hot" it might be useful. If you needed to find out where Irving Berlin was born I wouldn't trust it any further than I could throw the monitor. Yes, I looked at the entry and the discussion and it is pretty humorous.
I guess blocking it for children below 6th grade or so might be reasonable. I would hope it would be worth spending a little time make sure that every grade after that understood how Wikipedia is constructed, why it cannot be trusted without carefully examining pages and discussions and why any reviewed resource is better. Children have to understand what is on web pages and how little of it is factual and how much of it is someone's opinion. Well-meaning opinion I am sure, but still not factual.
Except the fool users that already unpacked and executed the file will then just type in the appropriate password when required in order to apply the patch.
There is no chance of this not succeeding with people that have no business being responsible for administering a computer.
Wrong - Linux and Mac are completely vulnerable to this type of attack. You go to install something that you were told to do so and it prompts for the root password. The user then types it in and the machine is wide open.
Don't think that would happen? You must be dealing with a better class of users than exist in the wild. Of course it would happen, and happen at such a frequency that it would be just another massive exploit.
Windows is targeted because of market penetration. Why bother with less than 5% when you can get 95% in a single effort?
If the any computer is not properly administered, it will be compromised by users that don't know any better. They can't possibly be aware of the differences between Microsoft automatically applying updates and other such "software updates" that might be required.
One sort of computer doesn't need to be administered any more than your toaster or TV needs to be administered. If the programming cannot be changed by the user in any way and all it does is read email and browse the web. Period. Maybe play some music sometimes. Ideally, such a device has its programming in ROM (not flash) and cannot be changed in any way. No instructions are ever put on R/W memory, ever. Completely and utterly secure the way your toaster is. How many people have found exploits for a toaster?
Windows is perfectly secure when it is properly set up and administered. The problem is that you can't install software on such a computer and you can run all sorts of fun applications. Gee, isn't that too bad. One solution is to require every user to either (a) switch to a appliance that cannot be compromised, (b) pay the ISP to administer their computer or (c) pass a test to be qualified to have a general-purpose computer connected to the Internet. And yes, the test should be similar to the FCC license for HAM radio: long, incredibly detailed and most people can't pass it without lots of work.
The operating system cannot be made secure from users adding software if they are supposed to add software. But users aren't qualified to add software to their computers and if they are allowed to do so, they will add things that will eventually destroy the ability to use the Internet.
The list you refer to would seem to be the Specially Designated Nationals list. You somehow think this is something new.
I assure you, if you wanted to sell a ham sandwich to Mr. Adolf Hitler in 1943 you would find yourself deprived of that ability.
Yes, there is a nicely formal list of non-US people that cannot be involved in any transaction with US citizens for one reason or another. I suspect there might be a few that are on the list because of particularly strong anti-US viewpoints but most of them are likely there because they are involved in other things that US citizens aren't supposed to support. And engaging in any commercial transaction with someone is certainly supporting them in one way or another.
Look at it as a parallel to the Jewish boycott. Arabs are forbidden from having commercial dealings with Jews. We just don't have quite as broad a brush and actually list individuals instead of people by nation or religion.
John Kerry was unquestionably proven to be a "glory hound" in Vietnam. He served only a partial tour of duty, got the required number of Purple Heart medals to cut his tour short and returned to begin campaigning. Immediately he went from soldier to politician. He motiviation for being in the service was quite suspect - it would seem he did it entirely to build a portfolio to assist him in getting elected.
Then, while being married to one of the richest women on the face of the planet he wants to talk about how he can relate to the "common man".
It goes on and on.
Utterly reprehensible scum. He could run for dog catcher and people would vote for a rabid dog instead.
Yes, Bush has some problems but the one fact that people keep missing is how much of a figurehead the US president is. He is a symbol and wields very little power in reality. The Executive Branch power mostly comes from appointed people and lifelong bureaucrats. And Bush inherited a great number of those people from Clinton.
Why would the Palestinians ever recognize Israel when there are UN folks that want to keep the refugee camps open? Why would there ever be recognition when this would mean "defeat" for the Palestinian cause of wiping the scourge of Jews off the face of the Earth?
Unless someone forces the Palestinians to realize they can never defeat Israel, it will continue. The Arab nations with their boycott and propaganda reinforce the "no retreat, no surrender" idea constantly. Nobody on Israel's side will do anything overtly because that would mean war with the Arabs openly. And again, it would be the same Christians vs. Muslims war to end all wars.
Israel took a strip of desert land and made one of the richest and most productive nations out of it. The Palestinians took over Gaza and turned it into a toliet in a matter of months. And yet people continue to say that Israel should let the Palestinians "return" and become the majority in Israel. Wouldn't you think it highly likely that they would just turn Israel into the toliet Gaza is now?
Sure, it would make sense if Palestinians turned Gaza into a modern Arab city and showed the world they were ready to be civilized. Unfortunately, the people in charge like to have it as a toliet so they can stir up the youths to go blow something up. After all, they have nothing to lose living in a toliet like they do. Peace has no chance as long as the people in charge have something to gain from continuing the struggle.
The victims are Christian, the aggressors are Muslim. The Muslims want a nice clean Islamic country and will do whatever level of "ethnic cleansing" required to get it.
Anyone that steps in starts WW III, aka Islam vs. Christens : The Final Smackdown.
Anyone motivated to step in can easily be tied to the Christian side. You don't see the Saudis trying to stir up support, do you?
Why are NATO and others not on the ground here like they were in Bosnia? Because the West was supporting the Muslims in Bosnia, not the Christians. In Sudan it would be the West against the Muslims and that wouldn't be properly multicultural.
Have no doubt, between Thailand, Sudan and a few other places simmering away we are going to see some really large battles that the West is going to just have to sit out. Europe would be in real trouble because in some cities a significant part of the population are Muslim immigrants. You want peace in France and Germany? Stay the heck out of Sudan's local problems.
I seriously doubt we can keep this bottled up for very long. Iran vs. Israel is likely to be either a delaying action (Israel attacks but doesn't get a decisive victory) or a draw (both exchange nukes) but is something that cannot stand long term. Pakistan with an Islamic government would likely side with Iran and combine nuclear forces so we want to see that government remain secular as long as possible. Should a war come, and it probably will, you can expect any country siding with the Christians to have substantial problems with their Muslim population. It won't be anywhere near as clear as WW II or the Cold War were. This could easily turn into neighbor against neighbor in a lot of places in the world.
Don't think current goverments understand the stakes? Why didn't France call out the Army to put down their rebellion? Why is Germany adopting Sharia-friendly legal policies? Why is Australia giving police special training on Muslim customs like wife beating? No, the current crop of "world leaders" know full well what might come and how ill-prepared everyone's military is for a neighbor-vs-neighbor war.
So you get an IP address and this means exactly what? You call up the ISP and ask for information about this but the response is "we destroy all logs". Assuming you can get law enforcement involved or file a civil suit you might be able to get the ISP a subpoena. Of course, you find out they were lying about not having logs and they can indeed tell you what account had that IP address at the given time.
You have your culprit, right? Wrong - the account holder as no responsiblity. You cannot prove it was an individual, just that it was a computer possibly not under the control of the account holder. Dead end.
The story is worse if the attack originates across national borders. You can't sue, and law enforcement doesn't care until the damages are a large fraction of the GDP. And usually damages are to government directly. Dead end.
With spyware and such, so you track down who is the source for your infection and find a company. It better be in the same country or you find the same "Why would we care?" attitude. Even if it is in the same country, again how are you going to jail a company? You find a group of marketing folks that wouldn't know spyware from wash-n-wear. And their Eastern European "technical division" didn't seem to leave any business cards.
I don't see any enforcement being possible at all. Sure, you might catch up with some really arrogant folks that believe they can get away with anything, but this isn't going to stem the tide. You need enforcement that shows 90-100% of the perpetrators get caught and punished, not 2-3% because at the 2-3% level fines are just a cost of doing business. And business is very, very good.
Besides, this is the US we're talking about. Other countries aren't going to be volunteering to extradite people because they know "the US tortures people" and we have the death penalty. Besides, without PayPal scams, Ebay scams and the like the economy of some Eastern European countries would tank. Stupid Americans are funding these operations and nobody is that interested in making it stop. Except maybe the congresscritter representing these stupid Americans.
Re:Nowhere else for Palm to go...
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Palm to go Linux
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What Microsoft brought to the table was a single software and hardware platform. Previous to that if you were in the business of creating microcomputer applications you had far too many hardware platforms to try to support effectively. CP/M was a substantial player, but you had to contend with an OS that did nothing for console I/O and nothing for printing. That meant that just moving the cursor around on the screen required knowledge outside of the OS to specifically control every single type of console device that could be connected. And trust me, there were a lot of different types.
MS-DOS and the PC-compatible hardware platform gave everyone a single target to write applications to. It didn't hurt that IBM was strongly behind this and that gave it significantly better credibility than CP/M had before.
What Windows really did was extend the single platform to include better resolution graphics and printing. Now your application didn't have to have its own custom-developed printer driver for every single printer that existed. Compare the printing complexity of WordPerfect 5.0 with any Windows application.
Machines in the early 1980's weren't capable of running anything like a real UNIX OS. And without lots and lots of application development, the market wouldn't have grown as it did. Application development was tied completely to it being pretty easy to develop for a single very widespread hardware and OS platform. Without Microsoft things likely would have been built on CP/M 86 which wouldn't have forced things into as unified hardware platform as MS-DOS did. UNIX would still be a thing for minicomputers certainly and there would still be 100 different flavors of UNIX out there with no common hardware platform.
Re:Nowhere else for Palm to go...
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Palm to go Linux
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Absolutely untrue. You can't bring in just any phone, however. You need a phone that (a) works with their system and (b) they are capable of supporting. This means you pretty much need a phone that they consider to be current in their lineup of phones. There are a bunch of reasons why they do this, some good ones and some bad.
I have stood next to people trying to get their CDMA phone accepted for use with a PCS carrier and the "customer" had no clue what was going on. To them a phone is a phone is a phone and the sales person saying over and over again "But your phone will not work on our system" was not colliding with any brain cells.
I have also experienced the situation where the phone would actually work, but their people are clueless as to how one would activate it because it isn't in their book. This means it isn't in the customer service book either and the carrier does not want to be in the position of telling you they can't help you figure out how to listen to your voice mail with your particular model phone. Or turn off the ringer. Or reset the phone because of Java problems.
You will also pay more for service without a contract. Just the way that is.
Some carriers are a lot less open about this than others, so you may have varying degrees of success and it may depend on the specific customer service people you encounter. But I know of no carrier that will not let you activate a "current" phone in their lineup that they didn't sell you and do so without a contract.
They tried to unbundle DSL and allow competition. There are a few problems with that.
The first being one of resources. A competitive DSL carrier needs to have equipment colocated with the switchgear and there isn't infinte space. In Illinois they tried opening the market up and discovered this lack of infinite space. Several court cases ensued. The end result is pretty much that until there is sufficient space in the CO for all potential competitors, none could be accomodated because otherwise it was discriminatory.
Let's see... in the US a cell phone costs $350 or more. That is the list price from the manufacturer. You can find deals where you buy a phone and all the carrier does is provide the connectivity. Almost nobody does this in the US.
The other option is you pay $3-4 more a month and get a "free" cell phone with a minimum length contract. Almost everyone does this because phones break and they have zero resale value.
Also, different carriers in the US have different requirements for phones, different standards and different technicians. For the most part you can get them to activate any phone, as long as it is one they support. By "support" I mean that it works on the right frequencies (remember, three systems in the US) and they have it in their books so they can provide information about the phone when you call up and say something isn't working right.
This pretty much means that you need a new phone when you switch carriers, period. Selling used phones works, but only when the buyer uses the same carrier. And every carrier has their own testing program and vendor qualifications so the fact that you have a Nokia phone on Cingular doesn't mean that Verizon has qualified that phone model to work on their system, even if it would work on their equipment.
What this means is in the US until something changes with cell phones a plan is useless without a phone and a phone is useless without the plan that it came with. Value of phone without plan = 0. Can carriers be utterly unreasonable about termination? Sure. But they will also often waive the termination fee if you aren't coming in with too much attitude.
Remember, you are being screwed by having a job - you are being paid to work at someone else's direction and for their benefit. Obviously, this is interfereing with your freedom and should not be tolerated.
I certainly would not want anyone working for me that felt oppressed and screwed. They can leave anytime they want. And just feeling oppressed and/or screwed "by the man" is grounds for termination.
You are either going to be a slave (employee) or you are going to be a free man. Choose.
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The RIAA doesn't sue over one item. They don't sue downloaders. They sue people that are sharing thousands or tens of thousands of files.
If you think the folks that have discovered they don't have to pay for music, movies and software anymore are going to run out and buy 4,000 CDs so they have a "license" for everything they are sharing, you are wrong.
Also, the fact that you bought it does not give you the right to share it, period. Not a defense.
Now what the original company is doing is trying to drag in downloaders and that just isn't going to fly very far.
Of course the mere fact they have an IP address and not your name, SSN, fingerprints and DNA means they have no real case even in civil court. They would have to prove you did it, rather than the neighbor kid next door that sneaks into your house to borrow your computer.
Sure, there is a difference between getting it and just trying. But remember, people go away for life in prison for attempted murder, just like a completely successful murder. Sometimes, in odd circumstances people get less time but not always.
Clearly the mission of the copyright holder (and the legal system) is not to proportionaly punish people for copyright infringement. It is to (a) make an example of them and (b) make sure they never, ever even think about copyright infringement again as long as they live. So it is highly unlikely there would be a difference between between "attempted infringement" and "successful infringement."
How about being able to take an IP address from your logs where someone is trying a brute-force password attack? You'd like them to stop, right? Fat chance!
... eventually.
The IP address is easily traceable to an ISP. The ISP knows who is doing this to you, but will not tell you because that information is "private". You can suggest that you send the logs to the ISP and would they contact their private, anonymous user and tell them to stop, but no ISP that I have ever encountered will do anything to help you.
Basically, you are screwed. Hope you change passwords often because brute force attacks will succeed
It is illegal to break into computers, but no local law enforcement agency will ever go after someone without "real" damages, probably thousands of dollars. The FBI will go after people, but only after $25,000 in provable damages. It is highly unlikely someone brute-forcing your password file is going to cause you $25,000 in damages. The FBI has a lot more manpower than local agencies for computer crimes, so you can pretty much figure that you have to account for $25,000 in damages before anything is going to happen.
Most ISPs are going to ignore crap like this from an infringed copyright holder because there is no way they can cause the ISP any trouble and sifting through logs costs time and money. The ones that do something are pretty much going to just send their customer a letter about a letter they got and that is the end of it.
You can be intimidated by this if you want, but the truth is you are pretty much anonymous with your privacy secured by your ISP. If your ISP gives you up, you are the account holder and it would seem this doesn't mean much - the account holder does not seem to be responsible for actions on the account. This means you can just say "wasn't me" and there isn't much they can do about it. If they want your computer for analysis, just have your lawyer say "no" before they take it. They really don't have any grounds for action because there is no evidence that you personally committed any of the deeds they are trying to sue over.
It was "global" economy, not "American" economy.
The rest of the world is getting to be a lot better off as the comparatively weathly Americans come down a peg or two. Americans aren't saddled with 50-70% tax rates like much of the rest of the world. Americans aren't working in sweatshop conditions with the legal system of the country standing firmly behind the overseers.
But America is having its economy turned into one where only the highly intelligent knowledge workers have a job. Ordinary jobs requring ordinary skills will have been moved offshore - a lot today, all soon.
5 real Stinger missles, 10-20 fake ones (no warhead), 100 empty tubes that look like missles.
That is all it would take. Shoot down three jetliners in disparate parts of the country, pretty much any country. This would shut down air travel - all air travel, worldwide - for a while. When they start back up because obviously "the threat is gone", shoot down two more.
Air travel and cargo shipments would be over. Possibly forever. The economic ripples of this would give the West something to think about while Islamic nations had the freedom to do whatever they wanted. Iran would certainly annex Iraq and a few other places.
The good news is that pollution would be down and whatever anthropomorphic input there might be in to Global Warming would be over and done with.
This would take no more than five real missles, easily bought for less than $5 million US. And a lot of the West would be economically in ruins.
Just about anywhere in the world when you are denied a permit for a march or other assembly and do it anyway, you get arrested.
In the US this has happened with KKK and Nazi groups. I suspect it would happen to a Young Repuplicans march if they were (a) denied a permit and (b) marched anyway.
I would really welcome a federal, state and local system whereby all election expenses were provided to candidates.
It might take a year to figure it out, but I am sure there would be a way to (a) syphon off enough money for 2 years of modest living expenses and (b) run for something every two years. If your job is "running for office" you might even manage to get elected but you would never have to do anything else.
This is certainly one reason why we do not have publiclly supported candidates running for office. Another reason is that if you can't convince people to give you money, you probably can't convince others that your ideas are all that great either.
Almost everyone points to campaign contributions as the root of corruption. The problem really is that to get into office you need to really want power above all else. The campaign process is such a dirt throwing match now that anyone that doesn't really, really want a position of power would be a fool to get into it. So you get people that place an incredibly high value on being "in power". They will then do virtually anything to stay in power because the only goal they have is "being in power." This is a very silly way to run a government that virtually ensures that people with no ethics and whose only motivation is "being in power" run for office.
Nobody else is committed enough to go through the process.
Two points here.
Citizen A's tax contributions are hardly for "the common good." Most of your taxes go towards paying people to increase the bureaucracy, find new things to spend tax money on and generally cater to special interests. Perhaps 1/10th of what is paid as taxes goes towards supporting common infrastructure or social programs of any value. There are many social programs in the US that are of zero value - consider ineffective abstinence education for example. Or paying someone to go to college for 10 years because they are eligible and the authors of the grant program never dreamed anyone would game the system.
Your federal taxes are mostly going to salaries of people that figure out new and exciting ways to spend more tax money.
Secondly, you seem to have the idea that Citizen B's station in life is a static thing that isn't going to change when he/she grows up.
While I am not sure I agree with all of it, Robert Heinlein laid out some pretty specific ideas about a society where citizenship was earned, not given. If you didn't bother earning it, you got to live there and be supported on the dole but you were not eligible for voting or some other (unspecified) privileges.
One way to earn citizenship was military service, even in peacetime. There were other ways as well mostly glossed over because the principle focus of the book was military. The book is Starship Troopers and it is quite different from the movie. For the time at which it was written it was incredibly insightful into some of the problems the US military has had to face in the last 30-40 years.
Unless this person was exceptionally stupid and brags about it, they are home free. Their ISP will *not* release the information.
Of course, this does bring out that simply having someone sign an NDA in today's climate means nothing. If you release a product to beta testers, they are going to feel free to distribute it to potential competitors worldwide without any fear of retribution. Why? Because it can be done and it isn't going to be traceable.
I suppose you could watermark each copy that is distributed. It would be a hassle to do and still probably not really mean all that much. Yes, you might then be able to visit some kind of retribution on the person that did it. Do you really think they are going to care? I think most people these days would regard having letters sent to their employer from Microsoft as sort of a merit badge of achievement, even if it got them fired.
Any sort of anonyminity will result in this kind of behavior. Most people - not everyone, but most - will do things they would never consider doing if they believe their actions cannot be traced back to them. Would you rob a bank or steal someone's wallet? Most people would not. Would you pick up a wallet in an alley that was clearly abandoned and take whatever was inside? Most people would if they were sure nobody would see them. Nobody sees you on the Internet, and the ISPs believe they have an interest in keeping users isolated from consequences of their actions.
Yes, and then you can be sure that everyone is completely aware of there being no consequences for anything on the Internet.
This means any criminal act that would be prosecuted "off the net" would be a free ride if the Internet was used. No fraud prosecutions, you can threaten anyone in any manner, post naked pictures of your neighbors and try to scam people to your hearts content.
Isn't there enough crime on the Internet already?
Would just a little thinking hurt you too much?
If we can all agree, it might be true. Right?
Wiki-anything is probably the best example of this sort of thinking there is. This is extraordinarly bad for schools and for people that do not have the capabilities to really think for themselves. This isn't something that can be trained - it is something that you pretty much have or don't have. Most people don't have it, leading to why we have popularly elected tyrants.
Lots of people here saying that Wikipedia has about the same level of accuracy as textbooks. They clearly have no understanding of how textbooks are created and reviewed for all but college level. Yes, there can be problems. But the level of review by both professionals and educators is pretty darn high.
Wikipedia isn't a valid source for anything - it is a collection of popular stuff and a clear insight into what people consider important. If it wasn't important to them, it wouldn't have gotten written. If other people don't agree, it is edited or deleted to make sure that the author population agrees with what is there. How can this be considered to be anything usable for academic purposes?
Actually, if one was doing a report on Britney Spears it would be a good place to start. If you wanted to find out what the name of the person that was on American Idol that sang "I'm so hot" it might be useful. If you needed to find out where Irving Berlin was born I wouldn't trust it any further than I could throw the monitor. Yes, I looked at the entry and the discussion and it is pretty humorous.
I guess blocking it for children below 6th grade or so might be reasonable. I would hope it would be worth spending a little time make sure that every grade after that understood how Wikipedia is constructed, why it cannot be trusted without carefully examining pages and discussions and why any reviewed resource is better. Children have to understand what is on web pages and how little of it is factual and how much of it is someone's opinion. Well-meaning opinion I am sure, but still not factual.
Except the fool users that already unpacked and executed the file will then just type in the appropriate password when required in order to apply the patch.
There is no chance of this not succeeding with people that have no business being responsible for administering a computer.
Wrong - Linux and Mac are completely vulnerable to this type of attack. You go to install something that you were told to do so and it prompts for the root password. The user then types it in and the machine is wide open.
Don't think that would happen? You must be dealing with a better class of users than exist in the wild. Of course it would happen, and happen at such a frequency that it would be just another massive exploit.
Windows is targeted because of market penetration. Why bother with less than 5% when you can get 95% in a single effort?
If the any computer is not properly administered, it will be compromised by users that don't know any better. They can't possibly be aware of the differences between Microsoft automatically applying updates and other such "software updates" that might be required.
One sort of computer doesn't need to be administered any more than your toaster or TV needs to be administered. If the programming cannot be changed by the user in any way and all it does is read email and browse the web. Period. Maybe play some music sometimes. Ideally, such a device has its programming in ROM (not flash) and cannot be changed in any way. No instructions are ever put on R/W memory, ever. Completely and utterly secure the way your toaster is. How many people have found exploits for a toaster?
Windows is perfectly secure when it is properly set up and administered. The problem is that you can't install software on such a computer and you can run all sorts of fun applications. Gee, isn't that too bad. One solution is to require every user to either (a) switch to a appliance that cannot be compromised, (b) pay the ISP to administer their computer or (c) pass a test to be qualified to have a general-purpose computer connected to the Internet. And yes, the test should be similar to the FCC license for HAM radio: long, incredibly detailed and most people can't pass it without lots of work.
The operating system cannot be made secure from users adding software if they are supposed to add software. But users aren't qualified to add software to their computers and if they are allowed to do so, they will add things that will eventually destroy the ability to use the Internet.
The list you refer to would seem to be the Specially Designated Nationals list. You somehow think this is something new.
I assure you, if you wanted to sell a ham sandwich to Mr. Adolf Hitler in 1943 you would find yourself deprived of that ability.
Yes, there is a nicely formal list of non-US people that cannot be involved in any transaction with US citizens for one reason or another. I suspect there might be a few that are on the list because of particularly strong anti-US viewpoints but most of them are likely there because they are involved in other things that US citizens aren't supposed to support. And engaging in any commercial transaction with someone is certainly supporting them in one way or another.
Look at it as a parallel to the Jewish boycott. Arabs are forbidden from having commercial dealings with Jews. We just don't have quite as broad a brush and actually list individuals instead of people by nation or religion.
John Kerry was unquestionably proven to be a "glory hound" in Vietnam. He served only a partial tour of duty, got the required number of Purple Heart medals to cut his tour short and returned to begin campaigning. Immediately he went from soldier to politician. He motiviation for being in the service was quite suspect - it would seem he did it entirely to build a portfolio to assist him in getting elected.
Then, while being married to one of the richest women on the face of the planet he wants to talk about how he can relate to the "common man".
It goes on and on.
Utterly reprehensible scum. He could run for dog catcher and people would vote for a rabid dog instead.
Yes, Bush has some problems but the one fact that people keep missing is how much of a figurehead the US president is. He is a symbol and wields very little power in reality. The Executive Branch power mostly comes from appointed people and lifelong bureaucrats. And Bush inherited a great number of those people from Clinton.
Why would the Palestinians ever recognize Israel when there are UN folks that want to keep the refugee camps open? Why would there ever be recognition when this would mean "defeat" for the Palestinian cause of wiping the scourge of Jews off the face of the Earth?
Unless someone forces the Palestinians to realize they can never defeat Israel, it will continue. The Arab nations with their boycott and propaganda reinforce the "no retreat, no surrender" idea constantly. Nobody on Israel's side will do anything overtly because that would mean war with the Arabs openly. And again, it would be the same Christians vs. Muslims war to end all wars.
Israel took a strip of desert land and made one of the richest and most productive nations out of it. The Palestinians took over Gaza and turned it into a toliet in a matter of months. And yet people continue to say that Israel should let the Palestinians "return" and become the majority in Israel. Wouldn't you think it highly likely that they would just turn Israel into the toliet Gaza is now?
Sure, it would make sense if Palestinians turned Gaza into a modern Arab city and showed the world they were ready to be civilized. Unfortunately, the people in charge like to have it as a toliet so they can stir up the youths to go blow something up. After all, they have nothing to lose living in a toliet like they do. Peace has no chance as long as the people in charge have something to gain from continuing the struggle.
The victims are Christian, the aggressors are Muslim. The Muslims want a nice clean Islamic country and will do whatever level of "ethnic cleansing" required to get it.
Anyone that steps in starts WW III, aka Islam vs. Christens : The Final Smackdown.
Anyone motivated to step in can easily be tied to the Christian side. You don't see the Saudis trying to stir up support, do you?
Why are NATO and others not on the ground here like they were in Bosnia? Because the West was supporting the Muslims in Bosnia, not the Christians. In Sudan it would be the West against the Muslims and that wouldn't be properly multicultural.
Have no doubt, between Thailand, Sudan and a few other places simmering away we are going to see some really large battles that the West is going to just have to sit out. Europe would be in real trouble because in some cities a significant part of the population are Muslim immigrants. You want peace in France and Germany? Stay the heck out of Sudan's local problems.
I seriously doubt we can keep this bottled up for very long. Iran vs. Israel is likely to be either a delaying action (Israel attacks but doesn't get a decisive victory) or a draw (both exchange nukes) but is something that cannot stand long term. Pakistan with an Islamic government would likely side with Iran and combine nuclear forces so we want to see that government remain secular as long as possible. Should a war come, and it probably will, you can expect any country siding with the Christians to have substantial problems with their Muslim population. It won't be anywhere near as clear as WW II or the Cold War were. This could easily turn into neighbor against neighbor in a lot of places in the world.
Don't think current goverments understand the stakes? Why didn't France call out the Army to put down their rebellion? Why is Germany adopting Sharia-friendly legal policies? Why is Australia giving police special training on Muslim customs like wife beating? No, the current crop of "world leaders" know full well what might come and how ill-prepared everyone's military is for a neighbor-vs-neighbor war.
This is the Internet we're talking about, right?
So you get an IP address and this means exactly what? You call up the ISP and ask for information about this but the response is "we destroy all logs". Assuming you can get law enforcement involved or file a civil suit you might be able to get the ISP a subpoena. Of course, you find out they were lying about not having logs and they can indeed tell you what account had that IP address at the given time.
You have your culprit, right? Wrong - the account holder as no responsiblity. You cannot prove it was an individual, just that it was a computer possibly not under the control of the account holder. Dead end.
The story is worse if the attack originates across national borders. You can't sue, and law enforcement doesn't care until the damages are a large fraction of the GDP. And usually damages are to government directly. Dead end.
With spyware and such, so you track down who is the source for your infection and find a company. It better be in the same country or you find the same "Why would we care?" attitude. Even if it is in the same country, again how are you going to jail a company? You find a group of marketing folks that wouldn't know spyware from wash-n-wear. And their Eastern European "technical division" didn't seem to leave any business cards.
I don't see any enforcement being possible at all. Sure, you might catch up with some really arrogant folks that believe they can get away with anything, but this isn't going to stem the tide. You need enforcement that shows 90-100% of the perpetrators get caught and punished, not 2-3% because at the 2-3% level fines are just a cost of doing business. And business is very, very good.
Besides, this is the US we're talking about. Other countries aren't going to be volunteering to extradite people because they know "the US tortures people" and we have the death penalty. Besides, without PayPal scams, Ebay scams and the like the economy of some Eastern European countries would tank. Stupid Americans are funding these operations and nobody is that interested in making it stop. Except maybe the congresscritter representing these stupid Americans.
What Microsoft brought to the table was a single software and hardware platform. Previous to that if you were in the business of creating microcomputer applications you had far too many hardware platforms to try to support effectively. CP/M was a substantial player, but you had to contend with an OS that did nothing for console I/O and nothing for printing. That meant that just moving the cursor around on the screen required knowledge outside of the OS to specifically control every single type of console device that could be connected. And trust me, there were a lot of different types.
MS-DOS and the PC-compatible hardware platform gave everyone a single target to write applications to. It didn't hurt that IBM was strongly behind this and that gave it significantly better credibility than CP/M had before.
What Windows really did was extend the single platform to include better resolution graphics and printing. Now your application didn't have to have its own custom-developed printer driver for every single printer that existed. Compare the printing complexity of WordPerfect 5.0 with any Windows application.
Machines in the early 1980's weren't capable of running anything like a real UNIX OS. And without lots and lots of application development, the market wouldn't have grown as it did. Application development was tied completely to it being pretty easy to develop for a single very widespread hardware and OS platform. Without Microsoft things likely would have been built on CP/M 86 which wouldn't have forced things into as unified hardware platform as MS-DOS did. UNIX would still be a thing for minicomputers certainly and there would still be 100 different flavors of UNIX out there with no common hardware platform.
Don't for get Coherent for the 286.
Absolutely untrue. You can't bring in just any phone, however. You need a phone that (a) works with their system and (b) they are capable of supporting. This means you pretty much need a phone that they consider to be current in their lineup of phones. There are a bunch of reasons why they do this, some good ones and some bad.
I have stood next to people trying to get their CDMA phone accepted for use with a PCS carrier and the "customer" had no clue what was going on. To them a phone is a phone is a phone and the sales person saying over and over again "But your phone will not work on our system" was not colliding with any brain cells.
I have also experienced the situation where the phone would actually work, but their people are clueless as to how one would activate it because it isn't in their book. This means it isn't in the customer service book either and the carrier does not want to be in the position of telling you they can't help you figure out how to listen to your voice mail with your particular model phone. Or turn off the ringer. Or reset the phone because of Java problems.
You will also pay more for service without a contract. Just the way that is.
Some carriers are a lot less open about this than others, so you may have varying degrees of success and it may depend on the specific customer service people you encounter. But I know of no carrier that will not let you activate a "current" phone in their lineup that they didn't sell you and do so without a contract.
They tried to unbundle DSL and allow competition. There are a few problems with that.
The first being one of resources. A competitive DSL carrier needs to have equipment colocated with the switchgear and there isn't infinte space. In Illinois they tried opening the market up and discovered this lack of infinite space. Several court cases ensued. The end result is pretty much that until there is sufficient space in the CO for all potential competitors, none could be accomodated because otherwise it was discriminatory.
Let's see... in the US a cell phone costs $350 or more. That is the list price from the manufacturer. You can find deals where you buy a phone and all the carrier does is provide the connectivity. Almost nobody does this in the US.
The other option is you pay $3-4 more a month and get a "free" cell phone with a minimum length contract. Almost everyone does this because phones break and they have zero resale value.
Also, different carriers in the US have different requirements for phones, different standards and different technicians. For the most part you can get them to activate any phone, as long as it is one they support. By "support" I mean that it works on the right frequencies (remember, three systems in the US) and they have it in their books so they can provide information about the phone when you call up and say something isn't working right.
This pretty much means that you need a new phone when you switch carriers, period. Selling used phones works, but only when the buyer uses the same carrier. And every carrier has their own testing program and vendor qualifications so the fact that you have a Nokia phone on Cingular doesn't mean that Verizon has qualified that phone model to work on their system, even if it would work on their equipment.
What this means is in the US until something changes with cell phones a plan is useless without a phone and a phone is useless without the plan that it came with. Value of phone without plan = 0. Can carriers be utterly unreasonable about termination? Sure. But they will also often waive the termination fee if you aren't coming in with too much attitude.
Remember, you are being screwed by having a job - you are being paid to work at someone else's direction and for their benefit. Obviously, this is interfereing with your freedom and should not be tolerated.
I certainly would not want anyone working for me that felt oppressed and screwed. They can leave anytime they want. And just feeling oppressed and/or screwed "by the man" is grounds for termination.
You are either going to be a slave (employee) or you are going to be a free man. Choose.