Birth control? I think it's a little late if you want to manage resources by population reduction. Think more along the lines of 1943 in Poland.
To get pollution and resource consumption down to "sustainable" levels where waste products are natually recycled again we need to cut the population to no more than 200 million people. And that is assuming a high level of technology to support that many. Without a lot of technology, maybe more like 50 million is realistic.
Birth control isn't going to help when we are talking about a 97% drop in population. To do this within the next 20 years would require killing a million people a day for 20 years. However, if we want "sustainable" and restrict the environment to what is here on Earth alone we better get started because the problem is just getting worse every day.
The FCC might not have a lot to say about it, but the FAA certainly would. Air carriers are licensed to operate by the FCC, even those that are not US based.
The first one is the idea that there are people that would like to remove all pornography in all forms from the Internet. Unproven except in a few cases of extreme wackiness. I doubt anyone seriously considers this to be an option.
The second point is as uncontrolled as the Internet can be, there is really no limit on what purveyors of filth can do. So you end up with the bukkake fest or the faked dog gangrape scene being shown to a preteen girl. This can seriously affect people's views of sex and their relationship to it, often for a very long time.
There are some that would simply say that if said preteen girl ran across this during a search for material at school that it is her own fault if it turned her off sex for life. I don't find this a particularly valid answer. "Careful surfing" isn't an answer - porn is driven by ad clicks and people will do almost anything to get clicks. Including trying to drag in people that have no interest in eventually paying, just to get the clicks.
Also, all porn isn't some nice friendly Westernized Playboy magazine. There are a number of cultures where seriously degrading and objectifying women is just plain fun. Add in some careful editing and you can have three dogs (unclean animals to start with) having their way with a girl in a school uniform. You might not find it funny and interesting but some folks think this would be great. Would your daughter?
OK, so assuming there is some stuff out there that has no place in a school environment how does one deal with it? Blocking software is mostly stupid because there is no binary determination of "degrading porn" yes or no. The blocking companies seem to also push other agendas as well, filtering out "hate speech" (Republicans) and "profanity" (Democrats). With domain registration in the hands of people that have no responsibility for anything except making money, it isn't even possible to contact the owner of a web site any longer. How does one get a few binary yes/no categories into a web site and enforced today? I don't think there is a good way to do that at all.
This means we will continue to see a lot of bad ad-hoc implementations that try to solve a problem that needs to be moved upstream.
What the heck is wrong with the idea that Americans can be doing American jobs?
Sure, many employers would rather hire someone that needs permission to change jobs and can pay them something less than someone born in the USA. Why do we want to give them that privilege?
This has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The illegals are being exploited in the US almost as much (but not quite) as they were exploited and abused in their home country. But given that the reward of working in the US is so much higher than any compensation possible in their home country, the risk of dying to get here is perfectly acceptable. It is very difficult to combat that. Maybe in 100 years the economy in Central America might be better so the differential would be so much less that it wouldn't be practical for people to go to the US. But these economies are so rife with corruption and graft that it would take a miracle for such a transformation to occur. So it isn't going to be soon.
Throwing open the borders isn't a solution, it is just a suicide pact. All that does is transform the culture of the US into being another corrupt, graft-driven Central American country.
Fortunately, the "increasingly useless POTS" system is the one that has requirements for reliability and service. There are no such tariffs in place for VOIP - the level of service is up to the vendor and if they go down for 24 hours no regulator is going to be at their doorstep. It is the same as if your cable TV goes out for 24 hours. No big deal.
Vonage would not be able to compete with Verizon or any other POTS provider if the same rules were in place on it. Neither would the other VOIP carriers. They are, for the most part, utilizing the in-place infrastructure of the POTS system and other broadband services to sell you something that costs them virtually nothing. None of the hardware is theirs, or such an incredibly small part of it is theirs that it doesn't matter.
As a businss model this is wonderful - you get to have a business that collects money for something that they do not have to build or maintain. Essentially they are selling bits at a pretty high price.
If you take this to the extreme point of Verizon shutting down their POTS system, where would that leave Vonage and others? Their business wouldn't exist either because the broadband DSL customers would be gone and the phones that people call would be gone. Yes, you could call your friends with cell phones but try ordering a pizza or calling the fire department. This is the absurd trap that we seem to be moving towards.
If the POTS system becomes unviable to operate the US phone system will look an awful lot more like places like Italy. Phones work sometimes and not others and you can never be sure if someone you want to call can actually be reached.
Let's end the bullshit and just continue to use paper. It has worked for ~230 years and just because our society wants "instant reporting" doesn't mean it's a good idea to do this.
The news media will report the results, real or imagined, instantly no matter what. The news media cannot be controlled by the government or blocked from reporting results based on exit polls and theories. We cannot choose whether or not such results are reported.
We get to choose whether or not the results are real. Imagine if Kerry was the announced winner at 9:00 PM EST and the next night this was rescinded in favor of Bush.
How long did it take to count paper ballots in the last election you are familiar with? When did the news media announce the winner - before or after the votes were counted?
In the US there will be a winner announced before the end of the night after the voting is done. The news media will do this and it can be based on exit polls or real results. Real results could be partial or complete.
Electronic voting gets us back away from news media coronations. The last two presidential elections the news media came dangerously close to declaring the winner long before anyone was sure. And make no mistake about it, if the news media announced Kerry won and then the next day said they were just kidding, Bush won there would be violence in the streets.
Do not believe the news media would care - they would just get better ratings for covering it.
Part of the problem is certainly the old public arena requirements/specifications nonsense. But there are also other aspects that drive this. One is the US government is very reluctant to get into the hardware business, either for military or civilian purposes. Public access to the source code would pretty much require that the government take over design. Maybe manufacturing as well.
The problem is that there is no "unique hardware" anymore. Patent protection isn't really going to work either. So someone builds the machine and spends two years developing the software that can be verified according to mil-spec rules. This is also known as "provably correct" and isn't trivial to write code like that. Nor is it easy to collect the requirements for something like that.
OK, then the software is released for review. Two months later, you can buy the same machine for 1/10 the cost with identical software that passes the same reviews. Nobody is going to sign on for that kind of abuse unless the government pretty much guarantees a single supplier. Which would be a violation of so many federal and state laws it isn't funny. Forcing the supplier to be a US based company isn't going to fly either. Ownership rules probably wouldn't really matter. So, this would be a one-time gift to some Taiwanese or Chinese company. Not going to happen.
So the government has to pay for the requirements gathering and the development process. They could then farm out the manufacturing (maybe) the way that tanks were made during WW II. The government provides the specifications and the manufacturer gets to make some small profit on each piece of hardware. Nobody in the US would touch it, but lots of Asian companies would jump on such a deal. Fine, they would get made.
Only problem is the requirements phase of such a government project would probably take 10 years to complete. And it would be the most bloated over-specified piece of junk imaginable because it would embody the compromises needed to get every county in every state to sign on. Even if they got by that, it would still be some topheavy government project. Just like some other big goverment projects we know about for the IRS and FBI.
This could only be done by a private entity that just rams the result down the thoats of the states and counties. Just like what we have today. Keeping the government out of the process as much as possible is where we are today and at least there is something to point at. With the government doing the work or running the show we wouldn't have anything at all until 2012, and it wouldn't see light of day until 2017 at least.
Think I'm wrong? How many goverment projects have been on time and under budget?
It is a crisis of faith. Not faith in some supreme being, but faith in the human ability to move beyond this current situation.
In 1969 humans landed on another world. Then, the planet turned their backs on it even to the extent of trying to "prove" it was all a hoax. Today a significant number of people believe that the Moon landing was faked. It has become part of popular culture.
Could we do it again? Most young people either do not believe so or believe that it would be better to spend that money on supposed "aid" for poor and underprivileged people. Well, the poor have been getting aid since the Roman Empire and it hasn't helped. Some say "but not enough aid" and in the face of significant evidence to the contrary, we keep sending money and food to African warlords to enrich them.
Science and technology are suffering from this crisis of faith. Today fewer Western young people than ever are seeing a future in science and technology, at least since the Industrial Revolution. We are importing scientists and technicians from Asia as fast as we can to American and European youths can be social workers and hotel managers. Unfortunately, India and China do not have the same history of vision that the West does. They are perfectly content to grow in place without much thought of "the future".
An easy way to tell about this is how many major Science Fiction writers have had their work translated into English from Chinese? How many Indian Science Fiction writers are there? I don't know the demographic breakdown of SWFA (Science Fiction Writers of America), but I bet we are looking at an awful lot of Americans of European heritage. The rest of the world doesn't have the same vision that we used to have.
Can we get it back? Not with Hillary or Barack in power - everything is going to be sent in the direction of social programs and aid for the poor and underprivileged. Everything. Not that I see all aid as a meaningless feel-good exercise, but most of it is and has been proven to be over time. But rather than carve out something that would help (a) humanity, (b) humanity's future on the planet and (c) everyone living today's future we are going to send it all somewhere else. And in most cases it will be helping the people that least need our help.
How many lottery tickets are purchased by people on welfare and foodstamps in the US? Why? More to the point, why is this even allowed to happen?
It is certainly within the power of people on the Internet to eliminate all profit associated with DVD movies. Almost overnight.
The question that people need to think about is "We have the power. Should we use it?" This was done in the 1980's for the Apple platform - nobody produced games for this after around 1984 or so because pirate BBS were so prevalent that it was impossible to make any money selling a game. The same can be done for DVD movies.
It can also be done for music. Books are a little harder, but as soon as Google Books is cracked there will be little need for anyone to actually do something hard to acquire the text of a book.
Why isn't this happening? Mostly, laziness I feel. And lack of organization.
The issue is whom exactly is the RIAA going after and what level of responsibility do they have? Somehow, some fairly bright guys seem to have messed this up. Unbelieveable!
So the mother is the holder of the Internet account and denies any knowledge. Some folks come along and pretty much say that there is no evidence on that computer. If the holder of the Internet account has no further responsibility, then there is clearly no point to trying any legal action whatsoever - anyone could have used the "account resources" and provide a quite adequate defense.
Obviously what the RIAA would like to have is what any sane individual would want - the account holder is responsible for activity using the account. This is especially true since the true user of the account is invisible.
If only the "end user" (anonymous and unknowable) is liable, then there is no point to any prosecution involving the Internet. I can always claim that it was a son or daughter or a neighbor and they cannot prove otherwise.
Now, this business of going after other potential user's computers to prove that the activity took place on the account would seem pointless. They (obviously) have proof that the account was used. That should be all that is needed to prove - the account holder is responsible. This would seem to be going down the road of the account holder not being responsible. Then it is clearly just a fishing expedition and there is no legal basis for holding anyone at all accountable.
Set up a fund with PayPal or something which is dedicated to purchasing all of the DRM-free catalog.
Purchase it! Every single unprotected song.
Make it all available via BitTorrent!
Of course, this being the Internet the same thing will be accomplished with less organization and over a much longer period of time. Why do they think they can still sell music?
How about the environment that preceeded Windows? Pretty much this was PC-DOS on IBM compatible hardware, period. But every software package needed to individually support every hardware device that could be installed. This meant very little hardware flexibility.
Same thing with CP/M - no common hardware support. Macintosh sort of provided this, but the amount of hardware available for these computers was very limited in the beginning.
Multiple, disparate operating systems are not going to be supported because there is just too much UI involved. And none of the multiplatform toolkits provide enough performance and/or flexibility to be used. So if you are really lucky there will be two or maybe three platforms supported. And that is just a matter of economics.
And the dropping of "legacy" hardware is somehow Microsoft's issue with Vista?
I will agree that removing parallel, MIDI/Game ports, 2 serial ports and so on from desktop machines doesn't really make a lot of sense. The assumption seems to be that everyone has migrated over to USB completely.
But this isn't a Microsoft issue at all and has nothing to do with Vista.
Maybe you should be allowed to sue Geocities if they (a) allow your content to be uploaded by anonymous parties without restriction or review, and (b) have 1,000 people individually making sure that every time you complain and it is taken down it is reposted five minutes later.
The problem is not one of dealing with individual owners of a web site (as was envisioned at the time) but public forums where anonymous contributors can completely outstrip the ability of the infringed party to do anything about it.
Face it, the YouTube user community at large can ensure that any small number of videos simple continue to be reposted and there is nothing that can be done about it within the framework of the DMCA. For every temp Viacom hires to look at YouTube content, 10 more YouTube users can repost whatever is taken down.
And all the time in the background Google is raking in money from page views and ads.
The solution is simple: it is all free for everyone and anyone trying to make money still is just a greedy capitalist!
Now go down the hall and tell your boss that they should be giving away everything and you will work for free from now on. No?
Unfortunately, there isn't much of a middle ground between "free" and "not free" when it comes to money. If people insist that they want stuff for free, they better expect to be paid in kind as most jobs today rely on somebody paying for someting that is in digital form and can be pirated.
Why would anyone with a pirated copy that is fully functional ever, ever buy a legitimate copy? Because of the greatly improved support and documentation that comes with such a copy? Or would it be because of the significant reduction in cost when purchasing upgrades later?
Face it, free is free and money is better in my pocket than someone else's. If you have the ability to get something for free you are not going to give up that privilege and run out and pay for it no matter how much you like the folks that are selling it.
Of course, you could always contribute to your favorite criminal enterprise and buy from one of these fake "OEM Software" stores. Why pay full price when you can be suckered into paying $50 for Photoshop or $20 for Vista.
Set up a server in a country where it is nearly impossible to get shut down. I guess that is anywhere but the US today.
For a couple of months before launch collect every freely distributed bit of music it is possible to collect. This would take some searching and downloading, but it would result in a significant collection.
Make it all available with an ad-supported service and use the ad revenue to buy up anything else available from folks like the Russian mob (allofmp3.com) and various other quasi-legal services. Grab their collection before they are shut down.
Extend this into P2P, collecting more and more and mixing it in so it would be impossible to tell for any given music clip where it came from. Allow anonymous user contributions and hide behind the DMCA like YouTube. Take something down and it would immediately pop up again from anonymous contributors.
Have a rating and keyword system for finding stuff. All free and just ad supported. Of course, since the original material was freely distributed or "contributed" the ads just support the service - no need for any revenue sharing except you could mail out prepaid Visa cards every so often to people that put in an address. Nothing large, say $20 or so just to keep the interest up. Still utterly anonymous.
Could it be that most users can't seem to understand that surfing to porn sites leads to malware being installed? How about clicking on random attachments leads to compromised computers?
Perhaps computers meant to be used as email appliances should really be email appliances rather than general purpose programmable (and repurposeable) computers.
The alternative to this is to figure out a way to make sure that it is impossible for users to ever install anything on their computer that will compromise it. Sounds impossible to me. Making an idiot-proof email application is just a stopgap until someone comes along with a better idiot.
Either there is no such thing as "intellectual property" and the student's papers have no value or there is such a thing and they do. You can't have copyright when you want it and not when you do not.
I would say that clearly Turnitin's repository needs to be kept in a manner which completely and utterly disallows extracting things once they have been put in. Sort of like a one-way password encryption for text. OK, they can develop a hash of phrases and paragraphs and keep that.
But they certainly cannot have a repository that allows them to sell student's papers on the Internet. That seems like an obvious way to make money off this and encourage even more use of the teacher's service because if the teacher isn't using it they cannot tell when such a bought paper is turned in.
Sure, and there is no more originality in anything because it has all been tried before in the last few hundred years. It's all just a remix mashup, right?
Well, let's take your vocabulary and extrapolate from that. Since you seem to be able to use the word "canto" I am going to guess that you have a vocabulary exceeding 5,000 words. That means a sentence of seven words could be composed at most 35,000**7 ways, or 64,339,296,875,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There is a lot of slop in that calculation, so I would roughly estimate that it is too large by a factor of at least 10,000.
Let's say that your neighbor has only a 600 word vocabulary and is having real trouble in high school. He might only have 27,993,600,000,000,000,000 to assemble that seven-word sentance. Assuming that is also 10,000 times too large, we're still left with quite a lot of ways to say the same thing even with a reduced vocabulary.
The Sun will have burned out long before people run out of creative ways to say things. Even the same things will have new ways to express them. The important point is that creativity isn't as bounded as you might like to think. Sorry, people are better than that.
There are a bunch of side issues here, like what is fair use when considering a video clip of some duration. But there is one big issue:
Entity A has a service by which lots of stuff gets picked up and made available to others. Some of this is owned by other people and Entity A has no rights to it at all. Is it Entity A's responsibility to ensure they do not collect such material, or is it the owner's? DMCA pretty clearly says it is the owner's and this works on a small scale pretty well.
But when Entity A is the size of Waste Management and they "accidently" pick up every car in your neighborhood to sell them at auction, is it necessarily a good move to say that every car owner has to sue them individually?
YouTube is a vacuum cleaner of mammoth proportions and is certainly capable of sucking up whatever content there is to acquire through the dillgent efforts of anonymous contributors. There are vast similarites with Napster here - sure there is a lot of non-infringing content but also lots of infringing content as well. Grokster pretty much said the service can be held liable for copyright abuses of its users.
I don't think this is at all clear cut. Yes, Viacom probably could do a better job at identifying infringing material and a compromise might be to enable Viacom (and others) to have easy access to recently-uploaded materials for such identification purposes. But in no way does YouTube (or anyone else) get to say they have no responsibility in the matter at all.
So your contention is that there is no illegal copyright infringement going on? I don't think that matches up with the reality that I see where nobody pays for music, people download ripped copies of DVDs and software is available for free from Eastern European web sites.
No, I think the RIAA is trying to follow civil procedures. Unfortunately, what we have is a clueless Mom with an Internet account while the teenager downloads music to fill that 30Gb iPod. Mom gets a letter and cluelessly says "I don't download music, prove it!" and the comedy begins.
Evidently there isn't much of a precedent for the "owner" of an Internet account being liable for activity on it. So, if your name isn't on the account you are pretty much untraceable. Maybe you knuckle under to lawyers, maybe not. Clearly they have no idea whose fingers are on the keyboard so that means everyone gets off scot free, right?
I think there will be a rude awakening with this somewhere along the line. I think the only choice is the account holder is responsible for all activity. Period. If your wireless access point isn't secured, you would then be liable for whatever transferred over your equipment and your account.
And you were going to pay them more if they were friendly and knowledgable? Ha.
You were always going to shop by price. Any good will that might be generated by one particular person would be instantly erased when you got to the checkout person that treated you like a stray cow on the way to being slaughtered. No, no, no sir, you must walk over here, through this longer line.
If Circuit City has higher prices than Best Buy, it isn't because they can do a better job. It is because Best Buy employs cheaper idiots to staff their store. Service doesn't count for much when you can go online and find the cheapest prices either via net-delivery or store-pickup. Low prices count.
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Birth control? I think it's a little late if you want to manage resources by population reduction. Think more along the lines of 1943 in Poland.
To get pollution and resource consumption down to "sustainable" levels where waste products are natually recycled again we need to cut the population to no more than 200 million people. And that is assuming a high level of technology to support that many. Without a lot of technology, maybe more like 50 million is realistic.
Birth control isn't going to help when we are talking about a 97% drop in population. To do this within the next 20 years would require killing a million people a day for 20 years. However, if we want "sustainable" and restrict the environment to what is here on Earth alone we better get started because the problem is just getting worse every day.
The FCC might not have a lot to say about it, but the FAA certainly would. Air carriers are licensed to operate by the FCC, even those that are not US based.
The first one is the idea that there are people that would like to remove all pornography in all forms from the Internet. Unproven except in a few cases of extreme wackiness. I doubt anyone seriously considers this to be an option.
The second point is as uncontrolled as the Internet can be, there is really no limit on what purveyors of filth can do. So you end up with the bukkake fest or the faked dog gangrape scene being shown to a preteen girl. This can seriously affect people's views of sex and their relationship to it, often for a very long time.
There are some that would simply say that if said preteen girl ran across this during a search for material at school that it is her own fault if it turned her off sex for life. I don't find this a particularly valid answer. "Careful surfing" isn't an answer - porn is driven by ad clicks and people will do almost anything to get clicks. Including trying to drag in people that have no interest in eventually paying, just to get the clicks.
Also, all porn isn't some nice friendly Westernized Playboy magazine. There are a number of cultures where seriously degrading and objectifying women is just plain fun. Add in some careful editing and you can have three dogs (unclean animals to start with) having their way with a girl in a school uniform. You might not find it funny and interesting but some folks think this would be great. Would your daughter?
OK, so assuming there is some stuff out there that has no place in a school environment how does one deal with it? Blocking software is mostly stupid because there is no binary determination of "degrading porn" yes or no. The blocking companies seem to also push other agendas as well, filtering out "hate speech" (Republicans) and "profanity" (Democrats). With domain registration in the hands of people that have no responsibility for anything except making money, it isn't even possible to contact the owner of a web site any longer. How does one get a few binary yes/no categories into a web site and enforced today? I don't think there is a good way to do that at all.
This means we will continue to see a lot of bad ad-hoc implementations that try to solve a problem that needs to be moved upstream.
What the heck is wrong with the idea that Americans can be doing American jobs?
Sure, many employers would rather hire someone that needs permission to change jobs and can pay them something less than someone born in the USA. Why do we want to give them that privilege?
This has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The illegals are being exploited in the US almost as much (but not quite) as they were exploited and abused in their home country. But given that the reward of working in the US is so much higher than any compensation possible in their home country, the risk of dying to get here is perfectly acceptable. It is very difficult to combat that. Maybe in 100 years the economy in Central America might be better so the differential would be so much less that it wouldn't be practical for people to go to the US. But these economies are so rife with corruption and graft that it would take a miracle for such a transformation to occur. So it isn't going to be soon.
Throwing open the borders isn't a solution, it is just a suicide pact. All that does is transform the culture of the US into being another corrupt, graft-driven Central American country.
Fortunately, the "increasingly useless POTS" system is the one that has requirements for reliability and service. There are no such tariffs in place for VOIP - the level of service is up to the vendor and if they go down for 24 hours no regulator is going to be at their doorstep. It is the same as if your cable TV goes out for 24 hours. No big deal.
Vonage would not be able to compete with Verizon or any other POTS provider if the same rules were in place on it. Neither would the other VOIP carriers. They are, for the most part, utilizing the in-place infrastructure of the POTS system and other broadband services to sell you something that costs them virtually nothing. None of the hardware is theirs, or such an incredibly small part of it is theirs that it doesn't matter.
As a businss model this is wonderful - you get to have a business that collects money for something that they do not have to build or maintain. Essentially they are selling bits at a pretty high price.
If you take this to the extreme point of Verizon shutting down their POTS system, where would that leave Vonage and others? Their business wouldn't exist either because the broadband DSL customers would be gone and the phones that people call would be gone. Yes, you could call your friends with cell phones but try ordering a pizza or calling the fire department. This is the absurd trap that we seem to be moving towards.
If the POTS system becomes unviable to operate the US phone system will look an awful lot more like places like Italy. Phones work sometimes and not others and you can never be sure if someone you want to call can actually be reached.
The news media will report the results, real or imagined, instantly no matter what. The news media cannot be controlled by the government or blocked from reporting results based on exit polls and theories. We cannot choose whether or not such results are reported.
We get to choose whether or not the results are real. Imagine if Kerry was the announced winner at 9:00 PM EST and the next night this was rescinded in favor of Bush.
How long did it take to count paper ballots in the last election you are familiar with? When did the news media announce the winner - before or after the votes were counted?
In the US there will be a winner announced before the end of the night after the voting is done. The news media will do this and it can be based on exit polls or real results. Real results could be partial or complete.
Electronic voting gets us back away from news media coronations. The last two presidential elections the news media came dangerously close to declaring the winner long before anyone was sure. And make no mistake about it, if the news media announced Kerry won and then the next day said they were just kidding, Bush won there would be violence in the streets.
Do not believe the news media would care - they would just get better ratings for covering it.
Part of the problem is certainly the old public arena requirements/specifications nonsense. But there are also other aspects that drive this. One is the US government is very reluctant to get into the hardware business, either for military or civilian purposes. Public access to the source code would pretty much require that the government take over design. Maybe manufacturing as well.
The problem is that there is no "unique hardware" anymore. Patent protection isn't really going to work either. So someone builds the machine and spends two years developing the software that can be verified according to mil-spec rules. This is also known as "provably correct" and isn't trivial to write code like that. Nor is it easy to collect the requirements for something like that.
OK, then the software is released for review. Two months later, you can buy the same machine for 1/10 the cost with identical software that passes the same reviews. Nobody is going to sign on for that kind of abuse unless the government pretty much guarantees a single supplier. Which would be a violation of so many federal and state laws it isn't funny. Forcing the supplier to be a US based company isn't going to fly either. Ownership rules probably wouldn't really matter. So, this would be a one-time gift to some Taiwanese or Chinese company. Not going to happen.
So the government has to pay for the requirements gathering and the development process. They could then farm out the manufacturing (maybe) the way that tanks were made during WW II. The government provides the specifications and the manufacturer gets to make some small profit on each piece of hardware. Nobody in the US would touch it, but lots of Asian companies would jump on such a deal. Fine, they would get made.
Only problem is the requirements phase of such a government project would probably take 10 years to complete. And it would be the most bloated over-specified piece of junk imaginable because it would embody the compromises needed to get every county in every state to sign on. Even if they got by that, it would still be some topheavy government project. Just like some other big goverment projects we know about for the IRS and FBI.
This could only be done by a private entity that just rams the result down the thoats of the states and counties. Just like what we have today. Keeping the government out of the process as much as possible is where we are today and at least there is something to point at. With the government doing the work or running the show we wouldn't have anything at all until 2012, and it wouldn't see light of day until 2017 at least.
Think I'm wrong? How many goverment projects have been on time and under budget?
It is a crisis of faith. Not faith in some supreme being, but faith in the human ability to move beyond this current situation.
In 1969 humans landed on another world. Then, the planet turned their backs on it even to the extent of trying to "prove" it was all a hoax. Today a significant number of people believe that the Moon landing was faked. It has become part of popular culture.
Could we do it again? Most young people either do not believe so or believe that it would be better to spend that money on supposed "aid" for poor and underprivileged people. Well, the poor have been getting aid since the Roman Empire and it hasn't helped. Some say "but not enough aid" and in the face of significant evidence to the contrary, we keep sending money and food to African warlords to enrich them.
Science and technology are suffering from this crisis of faith. Today fewer Western young people than ever are seeing a future in science and technology, at least since the Industrial Revolution. We are importing scientists and technicians from Asia as fast as we can to American and European youths can be social workers and hotel managers. Unfortunately, India and China do not have the same history of vision that the West does. They are perfectly content to grow in place without much thought of "the future".
An easy way to tell about this is how many major Science Fiction writers have had their work translated into English from Chinese? How many Indian Science Fiction writers are there? I don't know the demographic breakdown of SWFA (Science Fiction Writers of America), but I bet we are looking at an awful lot of Americans of European heritage. The rest of the world doesn't have the same vision that we used to have.
Can we get it back? Not with Hillary or Barack in power - everything is going to be sent in the direction of social programs and aid for the poor and underprivileged. Everything. Not that I see all aid as a meaningless feel-good exercise, but most of it is and has been proven to be over time. But rather than carve out something that would help (a) humanity, (b) humanity's future on the planet and (c) everyone living today's future we are going to send it all somewhere else. And in most cases it will be helping the people that least need our help.
How many lottery tickets are purchased by people on welfare and foodstamps in the US? Why? More to the point, why is this even allowed to happen?
It is certainly within the power of people on the Internet to eliminate all profit associated with DVD movies. Almost overnight.
The question that people need to think about is "We have the power. Should we use it?" This was done in the 1980's for the Apple platform - nobody produced games for this after around 1984 or so because pirate BBS were so prevalent that it was impossible to make any money selling a game. The same can be done for DVD movies.
It can also be done for music. Books are a little harder, but as soon as Google Books is cracked there will be little need for anyone to actually do something hard to acquire the text of a book.
Why isn't this happening? Mostly, laziness I feel. And lack of organization.
The issue is whom exactly is the RIAA going after and what level of responsibility do they have? Somehow, some fairly bright guys seem to have messed this up. Unbelieveable!
So the mother is the holder of the Internet account and denies any knowledge. Some folks come along and pretty much say that there is no evidence on that computer. If the holder of the Internet account has no further responsibility, then there is clearly no point to trying any legal action whatsoever - anyone could have used the "account resources" and provide a quite adequate defense.
Obviously what the RIAA would like to have is what any sane individual would want - the account holder is responsible for activity using the account. This is especially true since the true user of the account is invisible.
If only the "end user" (anonymous and unknowable) is liable, then there is no point to any prosecution involving the Internet. I can always claim that it was a son or daughter or a neighbor and they cannot prove otherwise.
Now, this business of going after other potential user's computers to prove that the activity took place on the account would seem pointless. They (obviously) have proof that the account was used. That should be all that is needed to prove - the account holder is responsible. This would seem to be going down the road of the account holder not being responsible. Then it is clearly just a fishing expedition and there is no legal basis for holding anyone at all accountable.
Of course, this being the Internet the same thing will be accomplished with less organization and over a much longer period of time. Why do they think they can still sell music?
How about the environment that preceeded Windows? Pretty much this was PC-DOS on IBM compatible hardware, period. But every software package needed to individually support every hardware device that could be installed. This meant very little hardware flexibility.
Same thing with CP/M - no common hardware support. Macintosh sort of provided this, but the amount of hardware available for these computers was very limited in the beginning.
Multiple, disparate operating systems are not going to be supported because there is just too much UI involved. And none of the multiplatform toolkits provide enough performance and/or flexibility to be used. So if you are really lucky there will be two or maybe three platforms supported. And that is just a matter of economics.
And the dropping of "legacy" hardware is somehow Microsoft's issue with Vista?
I will agree that removing parallel, MIDI/Game ports, 2 serial ports and so on from desktop machines doesn't really make a lot of sense. The assumption seems to be that everyone has migrated over to USB completely.
But this isn't a Microsoft issue at all and has nothing to do with Vista.
Maybe you should be allowed to sue Geocities if they (a) allow your content to be uploaded by anonymous parties without restriction or review, and (b) have 1,000 people individually making sure that every time you complain and it is taken down it is reposted five minutes later.
The problem is not one of dealing with individual owners of a web site (as was envisioned at the time) but public forums where anonymous contributors can completely outstrip the ability of the infringed party to do anything about it.
Face it, the YouTube user community at large can ensure that any small number of videos simple continue to be reposted and there is nothing that can be done about it within the framework of the DMCA. For every temp Viacom hires to look at YouTube content, 10 more YouTube users can repost whatever is taken down.
And all the time in the background Google is raking in money from page views and ads.
The solution is simple: it is all free for everyone and anyone trying to make money still is just a greedy capitalist!
Now go down the hall and tell your boss that they should be giving away everything and you will work for free from now on. No?
Unfortunately, there isn't much of a middle ground between "free" and "not free" when it comes to money. If people insist that they want stuff for free, they better expect to be paid in kind as most jobs today rely on somebody paying for someting that is in digital form and can be pirated.
Why would anyone with a pirated copy that is fully functional ever, ever buy a legitimate copy? Because of the greatly improved support and documentation that comes with such a copy? Or would it be because of the significant reduction in cost when purchasing upgrades later?
Face it, free is free and money is better in my pocket than someone else's. If you have the ability to get something for free you are not going to give up that privilege and run out and pay for it no matter how much you like the folks that are selling it.
Of course, you could always contribute to your favorite criminal enterprise and buy from one of these fake "OEM Software" stores. Why pay full price when you can be suckered into paying $50 for Photoshop or $20 for Vista.
Set up a server in a country where it is nearly impossible to get shut down. I guess that is anywhere but the US today.
For a couple of months before launch collect every freely distributed bit of music it is possible to collect. This would take some searching and downloading, but it would result in a significant collection.
Make it all available with an ad-supported service and use the ad revenue to buy up anything else available from folks like the Russian mob (allofmp3.com) and various other quasi-legal services. Grab their collection before they are shut down.
Extend this into P2P, collecting more and more and mixing it in so it would be impossible to tell for any given music clip where it came from. Allow anonymous user contributions and hide behind the DMCA like YouTube. Take something down and it would immediately pop up again from anonymous contributors.
Have a rating and keyword system for finding stuff. All free and just ad supported. Of course, since the original material was freely distributed or "contributed" the ads just support the service - no need for any revenue sharing except you could mail out prepaid Visa cards every so often to people that put in an address. Nothing large, say $20 or so just to keep the interest up. Still utterly anonymous.
And the RIAA would be powerless to stop it.
Could it be that most users can't seem to understand that surfing to porn sites leads to malware being installed? How about clicking on random attachments leads to compromised computers?
Perhaps computers meant to be used as email appliances should really be email appliances rather than general purpose programmable (and repurposeable) computers.
The alternative to this is to figure out a way to make sure that it is impossible for users to ever install anything on their computer that will compromise it. Sounds impossible to me. Making an idiot-proof email application is just a stopgap until someone comes along with a better idiot.
Either there is no such thing as "intellectual property" and the student's papers have no value or there is such a thing and they do. You can't have copyright when you want it and not when you do not.
I would say that clearly Turnitin's repository needs to be kept in a manner which completely and utterly disallows extracting things once they have been put in. Sort of like a one-way password encryption for text. OK, they can develop a hash of phrases and paragraphs and keep that.
But they certainly cannot have a repository that allows them to sell student's papers on the Internet. That seems like an obvious way to make money off this and encourage even more use of the teacher's service because if the teacher isn't using it they cannot tell when such a bought paper is turned in.
Sure, and there is no more originality in anything because it has all been tried before in the last few hundred years. It's all just a remix mashup, right?
Well, let's take your vocabulary and extrapolate from that. Since you seem to be able to use the word "canto" I am going to guess that you have a vocabulary exceeding 5,000 words. That means a sentence of seven words could be composed at most 35,000**7 ways, or 64,339,296,875,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There is a lot of slop in that calculation, so I would roughly estimate that it is too large by a factor of at least 10,000.
Let's say that your neighbor has only a 600 word vocabulary and is having real trouble in high school. He might only have 27,993,600,000,000,000,000 to assemble that seven-word sentance. Assuming that is also 10,000 times too large, we're still left with quite a lot of ways to say the same thing even with a reduced vocabulary.
The Sun will have burned out long before people run out of creative ways to say things. Even the same things will have new ways to express them. The important point is that creativity isn't as bounded as you might like to think. Sorry, people are better than that.
There are a bunch of side issues here, like what is fair use when considering a video clip of some duration. But there is one big issue:
Entity A has a service by which lots of stuff gets picked up and made available to others. Some of this is owned by other people and Entity A has no rights to it at all. Is it Entity A's responsibility to ensure they do not collect such material, or is it the owner's? DMCA pretty clearly says it is the owner's and this works on a small scale pretty well.
But when Entity A is the size of Waste Management and they "accidently" pick up every car in your neighborhood to sell them at auction, is it necessarily a good move to say that every car owner has to sue them individually?
YouTube is a vacuum cleaner of mammoth proportions and is certainly capable of sucking up whatever content there is to acquire through the dillgent efforts of anonymous contributors. There are vast similarites with Napster here - sure there is a lot of non-infringing content but also lots of infringing content as well. Grokster pretty much said the service can be held liable for copyright abuses of its users.
I don't think this is at all clear cut. Yes, Viacom probably could do a better job at identifying infringing material and a compromise might be to enable Viacom (and others) to have easy access to recently-uploaded materials for such identification purposes. But in no way does YouTube (or anyone else) get to say they have no responsibility in the matter at all.
So your contention is that there is no illegal copyright infringement going on? I don't think that matches up with the reality that I see where nobody pays for music, people download ripped copies of DVDs and software is available for free from Eastern European web sites.
No, I think the RIAA is trying to follow civil procedures. Unfortunately, what we have is a clueless Mom with an Internet account while the teenager downloads music to fill that 30Gb iPod. Mom gets a letter and cluelessly says "I don't download music, prove it!" and the comedy begins.
Evidently there isn't much of a precedent for the "owner" of an Internet account being liable for activity on it. So, if your name isn't on the account you are pretty much untraceable. Maybe you knuckle under to lawyers, maybe not. Clearly they have no idea whose fingers are on the keyboard so that means everyone gets off scot free, right?
I think there will be a rude awakening with this somewhere along the line. I think the only choice is the account holder is responsible for all activity. Period. If your wireless access point isn't secured, you would then be liable for whatever transferred over your equipment and your account.
And you were going to pay them more if they were friendly and knowledgable? Ha.
You were always going to shop by price. Any good will that might be generated by one particular person would be instantly erased when you got to the checkout person that treated you like a stray cow on the way to being slaughtered. No, no, no sir, you must walk over here, through this longer line.
If Circuit City has higher prices than Best Buy, it isn't because they can do a better job. It is because Best Buy employs cheaper idiots to staff their store. Service doesn't count for much when you can go online and find the cheapest prices either via net-delivery or store-pickup. Low prices count.
Except it is hardly likely that sales floor staff get retirement benefits, longer vacations or anything of the sort.