In the EU it almost certainly would be illegal to do this. In the USA just about everywhere is a "right to work" state where you can be terminated at any time for no reason.
My understanding is that in the EU hiring someone is a long process where there is a real committment on the part of the employer. If there is a chance that the position might not exist in a few years, you better not hire someone because you will have an employee whether or not there is a position to fill. Makes for a lot higher unemployment which is then taken care of by the government.
The Internet has pretty much eliminated "value" from the equation. If you're not cheaper on Froogle, you aren't going to get as many sales. Period. You can have the most knowledgable and friendly sales staff in the world but if your prices aren't lower than the store down the street, people aren't coming in to meet your friendly sales staff.
There isn't a way to sort Froogle results by "knowledge" or "value", just price. Same thing with Pricewatch, PriceGrabber, MySimon and all the other pricing tools on the Internet. Value is pretty much dead for consumer sales.
You are unfairly excluding huge segments of the American population there and you better stop right away. Limiting a free university education to "anybody who is willing and able" would be slap in the face to many minorities. The minute you open up "free university education" they will be forced to admit those that are not willing and certainly not able. Barring them would be clear discrimination and illegal.
While it may not be open to all, at least the current system keeps most of the complete slackers out of the university program. The real problem is people that believe that everyone must have a university degree and be a "knowledge worker". The short answer is that not everyone is qualified to do such work and exporting all other jobs to China will eventually come back to bite us.
I thought the whole point of wikis was that "authorative sources" were considered suspect. That everyday people might have a better handle on subjects than academic professionals.
The difference between being an author included in a published encyclopedia and being a verified academic professional in an online encyclopedia is... well, nothing. Except there might be easier access to online publications. But this isn't the problem that Wikipedia was intended to solve.
The whole idea is credibility is not based on official credentials. Verification puts things back into the Encyclopedia Britannica mentality. No random contributions from anonymous sources that might just have a better handle on "truth" than academic professionals with their own agenda. Or so the thinking goes.
Of course, that does mean that Wikipedia is a journal of competing edits for anything remotely controversial. And there is no way to judge between a correct article and one that just echos groupthink. But again, that is the whole point.
The issue keeps coming up because while the idea of Wikipedia is an interesting one, having seen the result of "Everyman's Encyclopedia" one can quickly see that it isn't all that useful for anything except a source of opinion. Often restricted to popular opinions. Having something that is true, accurate and correct would be more useful, but that isn't Wikipedia. Trying to bring utility to Wikipedia will certainly destroy what it is.
Subpoena? For what? You thinking of suing a blogger for exercising his "freedom of speech"?
There are no laws being broken here. You might be able to sue someone for falsely representing something, but I doubt it. As far as I know "I was lying" is not actionable in any manner.
Maybe, just maybe some misrepresentations could be construed as slander, but probably not on the Internet.
I have sent notebook computers to HP for service without a hard drive and had the computer returned because it was non-functional and could not be diagnosed without a hard drive.
This cost a diagnostic fee and shipping.
Be very, very careful when shipping in a computer for service without a hard drive. Some places will work on it in that state and some will not. It is not necessarily the hardware manufacturer either - all of them outsource the service work somewhere else and policies differ between places actually doing the work.
Illegal? Where? How? Who is there to enforce any sort of "rules" for use of privately created web pages on the Internet?
There is no "right of free speech" here - there are no rights (or wrongs) at all. No authority except that which comes from the power to delete.
People know there are no consequences whatsoever for whatever they do on the Internet, so they are emboldened to do anything they want. No behavior, no matter how extreme, seems to have any real world effects connected with it. And, most of this stuff is anonymous anyway or with unverified identities.
This means that any female is a legitimate target. Haven't had any in a while? Chase down some female "in cyberspace" and rape her, figuratively speaking. Don't like what someone has to say? Out-edit them or shout them down. Delete them. Flood their email. Whatever. It is all fair game.
This is all about anonyminity and the side effects of knowing you can get away with anything.
It is bad because it drives out retailers that might offer better service and support. It drives down prices to the point where only the superbig high-volume retailers can exist.
As a side effect, it makes it possible for the "New York Photo Shop Scam" to exist where they advertise an item at an incredibly low price (grey market, of course) but then you are required to purchase something else to get the price. You find this all the time doing price searches for photo and electronics gear. Good thing? I don't think so, but that is what Internet price searches thrive on - low prices.
It is difficult to filter results with price searches by anything except low price - you see the same item listed for two prices both from web sites that you know nothing about. Maybe you can go to the trouble of figuring out that one of them is charging 3x or 4x real shipping costs to make up for it, but by then you have to go back through the whole process again to find the next lowest price.
Or, they charge you "sales tax" when you have no way of knowing they aren't paying tax.
Yes, this could be a new business model, but the model comes down to destruction of the environment. You start with looking for low prices and end up getting a series of sub-prime sellers each one trying to make up on shipping and phony sales tax what they are losing on item margins. It creates an environment of distrust and suspicion. It is also just a race to the bottom with the consumer hoping someone can afford a couple of ethics when they reach it. It is absolutely WalMart wins, Mom & Pop lose.
It used to be you would know when someone offered you a product on the street for 10% of the retail price that it was not legitimate. Today, there is virtually no protection for the consumer. The Internet retailer doesn't have a BBB rating or a writeup in a local newspaper - they have low, low, low prices and Froogle delivers hits.
Everyone knows the police are utterly blind to the Internet and anything younger people talk about, so it should be a complete surprise that before a meeting with folks identified as "Rethuglicans" and "war criminals" that they would take any kind of precautions. Certainly, police aren't smart enough to understand that protesters who post statements that the people attending should be shot or executed and assassination would be a good thing could possibly actually do anything other than protest.
The US has evolved completely into a nation of sheep that would never actually "do" anything, so what could they possibly be worried about? Muslim terrorists?
Besides, taking any kind of precautions against folks like that would be illegal discrimination. So, rather than acting on any real intelligence they can harass ordinary protesting white americans because they cannot be sued for violating anyone's civil rights.
It isn't greed at all. The issue is there is almost a formula for success and success is rewarded.
40 years ago the people in the publishing world did not have a solid grasp of what sold and what didn't. There was risk, quite a bit of risk. If an editor made great decisions, the publishing house made money and the authors made money. If the same editor went through a spell of bad decisions - books the flopped - eventually he was canned.
Publishing was seen as risk vs. reward and nobody had a handle on what would be a success. So editors were allowed a great deal of freedom.
Today, there are clear models of successful authors and successful books. The demographics are a known quantity. The publishing world pretty much knows why most books succeed. They don't know why all books succeed or fail and that introduces some element of remaining risk. But risk in a public company is not something that stockholders - especially institutional investors - want to be a part of. Would you rather your pension be invested in something stable or something risky?
So the formula for success has to be followed. Every once in a while someone will actually take a risk, but that is outside of the normal bounds. It isn't absolutely assured that following this formula will result in success 100% of the time, but it is proven that following it will minimize risk and lead to success most of the time.
In general, the risks are somewhat larger today than they were, and everyone is retreating from risks in general. Would you rather your employer took risks that could reap vast rewards or, if things went badly required cutting staff by 50%?
Rule 1: If if can have its programming altered in the field, it is not secure.
Rule 2: If it accepts executable instructions from any unauthorized source, it is not secure.
Rule 3: Any deviation from an assigned purpose can be considered to be a security breach.
It is difficult to have a toaster or microwave oven infected by malware or part of a botnet. You want security? Start using the "appliance" model and there will be security. A general-purpose computer that can have new programming installed is obviously a security risk and giving the user the ability to install such programming is an invitation to disaster.
Well, OK. But then you have Sony/BMG/EMI owning everything. It is all about distribution. If you remove copyright, then your neigborhood band can end up on the shelf at a store with a Sony label on the media. And, I'll bet you anything that Sony makes more money than the band does.
No copyright? No GPL.
No copyright? You will see zero investment in anything new and the last 20 years endlessly recycled. What is cheaper than cutting together Rocky IV and Independence Day for something really funny? Why isn't it done today? Primarily, copyright and a few other "rights".
Removal of copyright wouldn't be the utopia you think where you could just take and take without paying for anything. It would be the utimate ticket to large distributors to take and take without ever having to bother about creating anything. Or paying anyone for their creations. You could then have the Wal-Mart routeman at every bar recording whatever was on there so it could be sold in the store the next day. Who cares if it was 50% crap - it would be free. And people would buy it.
The question is what is a "mixup"? Is it a creative work that deserves protection as such? Or it is simply a plagarized work that belongs to some other people that are having their creative rights violated?
Further, do we want a "culture of mixups" or a culture of creativity? While I might think it the height of humor and artistry to take a well-known song and combine it with a silly video does this not affect the original creator?
I see the "culture of mixups" as a path of laziness and sloth. People "borrowing" and plagarizing when they are too lazy to make something original.
Electric service is not everywhere. I have seen places where you had to pay by the foot to get an electric line run to your house from the main line that was 1000 feet (or more) away.
Telephone they would run if it was available in the community because that is a requirement.
Electric service is a lot more like cable. You have to pay to get connected.
If broadband providers were able to openly and fairly compete on quality of service alone? If everyone had equal access to multiple providers at high speeds without any reference to where they were physically located or how affluent their neighbors were?
Wouldn't it be nice if the services were completely open and yet blocked spam, viruses, and malware? With just a little bit of intelligence so that ports were blocked for bad things and open for good things?
Wouldn't it be nice if this service cost no more than it actually cost to provide the service, perhaps with a minimal profit for the provider but not too much?
How about if the Canadian government (always better than the US at social programs) came in and provided broadband internet service to everyone in the US?
Yup, it would be nice. Take another toke and dream on.
If you do not respect it, about as much can be done as not respecting anyone or anything else.
We have moved to a period where a great deal of wealth is in the hands of patents, trademarks and copyrights. This means that "respecting copyright" or not can mean the difference between people being paid a salary or not. That starts to get pretty serious, at least as far as the affected people are concerned.
All the talk about rich corporations out to squeeze the last dime from the consumer is just a smoke screen. What it comes down to is can people rely on patents, trademarks and copyrights for a livelihood.
50 years ago the answer was an unqualified yes. Today, there are serious questions about this. In the near future the answer is likely to be no. This will certainly put a lot of people out on the street that today are employed because money can be had from patents, trademarks and copyrights.
I can't imagine that anyone growing up today will have any respect whatsoever for "copyright" in any form. Anything they can put their hands on will be redistributed, copied and plagiarized. DRM certainly isn't going to have the desired effect. Harsh lawsuits aren't having the desired effect. Education isn't working as most schools teach more about downloading music and copying software than the students find out of school.
MAPS entire function was to filter the Internet according to their standards. If you failed to meet their standards, they wanted to block you. Totally. Any way that was within their power to do so. This is the entire function of an RBL. The fact that enterprising folks decided to extend this beyond email should be considered simply an extension of the power of an RBL. Anti-spammers are a rabid crowd with all the morals of a mob.
More meaningless ranting about ISP pricing. Unfortunately, I copied the paragraph below:
Which leads to the third misconception: "Here's the thing that the 3Ns (Net Neutrality Nuts) don't get: bandwidth costs money... So, if a net neutrality law passes, don't be surprised when your costs to have an Internet account skyrocket." But it's not about how much a service costs, but about the ethics of double-billing for it. We know that ISP pricing models can already support the total traffic that people consume today, and ISPs do already follow net neutrality principles most of the time, so nobody's costs will "skyrocket" just because a neutrality law passes. If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell" as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r. Much as we all love our unmetered connections, it wouldn't be a violation of Net Neutrality for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth hogging, to keep everyone from going too far above today's levels. What ISPs should not do is charge users for implied full-throttle connections, and then turn around to charge publishers for moving bits over those same lines, or block the connection for any other reason.
Sadly, this guy is living in a fantasy world where people pay for stuff they use and companies deliver what their advertising says they are selling. ISPs today do not generally have any sort of "metered" plan - they have the one-size-fits-all jumbo-mega plan. They may have a secret cap at which they turn your connection off, but there isn't a higher priced plan that you can pay extra for and get the cap removed. Oh, and did you notice that with the lower prices the supposed speeds keep increasing but the actual content delivery rate remains the same? Sure, your connection to the ISP is at the rate they advertise but your ability to use that stops at their 2nd or 3rd router.
You see, what you are paying for today is a plan with a very high bit rate but is qualified with the term "bursting". This means that you can get a lot of bits very quickly for a short period of time but not continuously. They don't have the network capacity to provide you 10-12 megabits continuously. At least not when your neighbor wants it also. The good news is that today there isn't much content out there that the average Joe is looking for that requires anything better than a burstable connection that averages quite a bit less than whatever they think they are paying for. But this is beginning to change.
Are you paying more than $15 a month for DSL? If so, you are getting ripped off. SBC/Yahoo has been advertising $15 a month rates for "new customers" for quite a while now. Cable prices have been falling as well - mostly in an attempt to keep building customer base. Nobody is paying a rate commesurate with what the service actually costs anymore. You are paying a rate which has been carefully worked out to provide an increasing customer base - greater market penetration - and will let them pay salaries of people hooking up new customers. New equipment? Increased throughput? Better external connections? Nope, no money for that.
is that there are substantial costs for what passes for quality. You have reviewers, you have professionals looking at submissions and you have indexing.
Sure, all of this can be replicated for free on the web. It is just that you throw out the "professional review" and the "professional indexing" and instead have "groupthink" and "concensus".
Why do they want to limit access? To prevent redistribution without attribution and without their control. They may not own the rights to the original research, but they own the rights to their compliation of it. Like a phone book, the names are not what the publisher owns - they own the compilation and the index.
The current "answer" on the Internet is the Wiki-this and Wiki-that which for some things get more people involved and opens the field to anonymous contributions. It also reinforces groupthink and concensus-building so everyone that doesn't agree gets shouted down (or more accurately in the wiki case, out-edited). The end result is you have an open forum where you used to have professionals.
With the current thinking on copyright (bah!) and such, can you blame a professional journal trying to protect their existance? If their material is freely distributed, why would anyone pay for it? Worse, having some freely distributed but not everything puts a clear bias in peoples' minds.
If you wanted to help the environment, you would rip the engine out of your car and hook it to a horse. Or your fat neighbor who could work off some "American Lard" by pulling you around town.
The only problem with the environment is people. Too many of them. Get the population down to 100 million people and all of the environmental problems go away.
This is an example of bad things happening because of good intentions.
Getting government involved to subsidize things that aren't capable of standing on their own merit is almost always a sure way to short-circuit and protective effects a longer decision cycle would have. And now you have the momentum of the government programs behind ethanol. It will be years and years before we are clear of ethanol subsidies in the US.
Deeply flawed knowledge. Someone decided ethanol was a good thing and got folks to jump in. Without doing enough research on the front end. It would have been obvious in 1980 how much fertilizer and tractor fuel was involved in producing corn, if anyone had bothered to check. Now, 27 years later we are at the point where some people think ethanol is a waste of energy. Diving into things that change the environment without some decent attempts at studying the likely effects get create all sorts of problems.
The biggest problem we face today is overcoming the urge to just go out and "do something" without understanding the side effects that we know about. Worse, almost every action on a very, very large scale (like the ethanol experiment) has completely unforseen side effects that without thinking about it and making smaller scale tests are are unlikely to know about until these side effects are upon us.
Of course, the real answer to all of these problems is to fix the most basic problem. Too many people. We fix that in the next 20 years and we won't have to worry about any other problems for a long, long time.
External hard drives for backup have a relatively poor record - mostly because of intermittent use (powered on for an hour a week or so) and poor results in being moved (dropped). Also, when you exceed the size of a physical drive it gets complicated to restore.
Remote online services? Nobody has the bandwidth to back up "commercial" or "enterprise" levels of data that way.
CD and DVD is far, far less recoverable than tape. And while their transportability is pretty good, their data life isn't as good as tape in most cases.
Tape has a 50+ year history and while some drives (TRAVAN) are pretty awful, they make tape systems today that are extremely reliable. Certainly more reliable than anything else I've seen. Yes, such systems are a bit expensive, but enterprise-level backups are going to be expensive.
Wal-mart has certainly responded to this by stopping all sales of CDs and DVDs. Best Buy closed their CD section just last month. Music stores just don't exist anymore. Some folks had a clever idea about a used DVD store a while back, too bad it isn't worth anything today.
You have all seen this, right? Or have you? You know, Wal-Mart is a pretty financially responsible outfit that is unlikely to stay in a business very long if they are losing money. So, can you find a Wal-Mart selling CDs? How about DVDs? Does this perhaps tell you that your internet file-sharing model of the world needs a slight adjustment to conform to reality?
The problem today is that "casual piracy" is getting pretty common. So common that many people I know would never even consider paying any amount for software. It is as if it is their right to download stuff and use it.
This attitude is not something that fosters development. There are plenty of people that thought they could make a living at publishing shareware in the 1980's. Until the 5% rule came into effect - only about 5% (average) pay for shareware. It was then either "go pro" or go back to the day job because doing what you love would never, ever give you enough money to eat.
Yes, there are people that value their time at zero and give whatever they do away. Wonderful - we can all benefit from their generosity. But these people will never be able to live off doing something they want to do - they will instead have a day job they hate and live for a hobby that can never be more than that.
Compare this to someone that makes doll clothes. While it can be a hobby, it can also be something they do that brings in enough money to live on so they don't have to do anything else, ever. Sure, they aren't going to get rich but maybe they will be happy.
Today's casual piracy and the implicit understanding that is OK because everyone is doing it and nobody is going to jail eliminates the middle ground between hobby and professional. And don't think it is limited to teens with no money. If it is easy, everyone is doing it. Heck, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates probably have some pirated software, music or movies.
You may want to consider two things in respect to this.
One is that taking such advanced steps to make sure your computer can't divulge evidence is a clue that there is some evidence, somewhere. An unmotivated cop is your friend. He has lots of stuff to do, probably more pressing and more important. However, doing these things will make almost anyone think there is something being hidden and if they dig deep enough they will find something important. Maybe really, really important.
So then they bring in the ground penetrating radar and start digging up the garage floor. You have supplied the one thing that you should never do - motivation.
The second point is that wiping incriminating material is a crime. If there was evidence on your computer - no matter what it might be - and it is provably deleted you are guilty of spoilation. Judges don't like that much. Consider it like having a cop giving you a ticket for jaywalking and then you give him the finger and call him some choice names. Suddenly you find yourself with more than a jaywalking ticket.
Do not destroy evidence. It can go extremely hard on you. Do not believe for a moment that your computer contains all the evidence in total and there exists nothing else.
Except ICANN has proven themselves to be utterly useless at this sort of thing.
Domain registrations are supposed to be public so offending copyright violations can be referred to the domain owner. Not possible today because registrars aren't following the rules.
Somewhere I'm sure there is a rule against utterly stupid phishing domains. A few simple questions need to be asked when someone tries to register paypal-inc.com, but it isn't happening.
Most of the registration system is broken, mostly by out-of-control registrars. So, suing may be the only effective tool at their disposal.
Slashdot Mirror
In the EU it almost certainly would be illegal to do this. In the USA just about everywhere is a "right to work" state where you can be terminated at any time for no reason.
My understanding is that in the EU hiring someone is a long process where there is a real committment on the part of the employer. If there is a chance that the position might not exist in a few years, you better not hire someone because you will have an employee whether or not there is a position to fill. Makes for a lot higher unemployment which is then taken care of by the government.
The Internet has pretty much eliminated "value" from the equation. If you're not cheaper on Froogle, you aren't going to get as many sales. Period. You can have the most knowledgable and friendly sales staff in the world but if your prices aren't lower than the store down the street, people aren't coming in to meet your friendly sales staff.
There isn't a way to sort Froogle results by "knowledge" or "value", just price. Same thing with Pricewatch, PriceGrabber, MySimon and all the other pricing tools on the Internet. Value is pretty much dead for consumer sales.
You are unfairly excluding huge segments of the American population there and you better stop right away. Limiting a free university education to "anybody who is willing and able" would be slap in the face to many minorities. The minute you open up "free university education" they will be forced to admit those that are not willing and certainly not able. Barring them would be clear discrimination and illegal.
v ino/0203/vino21_4.1/newDegree.htm.
Of course, this would lead to university degrees in basket weaving and newspaper reading. Oh wait, we already have those - check http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/honors/pub/
While it may not be open to all, at least the current system keeps most of the complete slackers out of the university program. The real problem is people that believe that everyone must have a university degree and be a "knowledge worker". The short answer is that not everyone is qualified to do such work and exporting all other jobs to China will eventually come back to bite us.
I thought the whole point of wikis was that "authorative sources" were considered suspect. That everyday people might have a better handle on subjects than academic professionals.
... well, nothing. Except there might be easier access to online publications. But this isn't the problem that Wikipedia was intended to solve.
The difference between being an author included in a published encyclopedia and being a verified academic professional in an online encyclopedia is
The whole idea is credibility is not based on official credentials. Verification puts things back into the Encyclopedia Britannica mentality. No random contributions from anonymous sources that might just have a better handle on "truth" than academic professionals with their own agenda. Or so the thinking goes.
Of course, that does mean that Wikipedia is a journal of competing edits for anything remotely controversial. And there is no way to judge between a correct article and one that just echos groupthink. But again, that is the whole point.
The issue keeps coming up because while the idea of Wikipedia is an interesting one, having seen the result of "Everyman's Encyclopedia" one can quickly see that it isn't all that useful for anything except a source of opinion. Often restricted to popular opinions. Having something that is true, accurate and correct would be more useful, but that isn't Wikipedia. Trying to bring utility to Wikipedia will certainly destroy what it is.
Subpoena? For what? You thinking of suing a blogger for exercising his "freedom of speech"?
There are no laws being broken here. You might be able to sue someone for falsely representing something, but I doubt it. As far as I know "I was lying" is not actionable in any manner.
Maybe, just maybe some misrepresentations could be construed as slander, but probably not on the Internet.
I have sent notebook computers to HP for service without a hard drive and had the computer returned because it was non-functional and could not be diagnosed without a hard drive.
This cost a diagnostic fee and shipping.
Be very, very careful when shipping in a computer for service without a hard drive. Some places will work on it in that state and some will not. It is not necessarily the hardware manufacturer either - all of them outsource the service work somewhere else and policies differ between places actually doing the work.
Illegal? Where? How? Who is there to enforce any sort of "rules" for use of privately created web pages on the Internet?
There is no "right of free speech" here - there are no rights (or wrongs) at all. No authority except that which comes from the power to delete.
People know there are no consequences whatsoever for whatever they do on the Internet, so they are emboldened to do anything they want. No behavior, no matter how extreme, seems to have any real world effects connected with it. And, most of this stuff is anonymous anyway or with unverified identities.
This means that any female is a legitimate target. Haven't had any in a while? Chase down some female "in cyberspace" and rape her, figuratively speaking. Don't like what someone has to say? Out-edit them or shout them down. Delete them. Flood their email. Whatever. It is all fair game.
This is all about anonyminity and the side effects of knowing you can get away with anything.
It is bad because it drives out retailers that might offer better service and support. It drives down prices to the point where only the superbig high-volume retailers can exist.
As a side effect, it makes it possible for the "New York Photo Shop Scam" to exist where they advertise an item at an incredibly low price (grey market, of course) but then you are required to purchase something else to get the price. You find this all the time doing price searches for photo and electronics gear. Good thing? I don't think so, but that is what Internet price searches thrive on - low prices.
It is difficult to filter results with price searches by anything except low price - you see the same item listed for two prices both from web sites that you know nothing about. Maybe you can go to the trouble of figuring out that one of them is charging 3x or 4x real shipping costs to make up for it, but by then you have to go back through the whole process again to find the next lowest price.
Or, they charge you "sales tax" when you have no way of knowing they aren't paying tax.
Yes, this could be a new business model, but the model comes down to destruction of the environment. You start with looking for low prices and end up getting a series of sub-prime sellers each one trying to make up on shipping and phony sales tax what they are losing on item margins. It creates an environment of distrust and suspicion. It is also just a race to the bottom with the consumer hoping someone can afford a couple of ethics when they reach it. It is absolutely WalMart wins, Mom & Pop lose.
It used to be you would know when someone offered you a product on the street for 10% of the retail price that it was not legitimate. Today, there is virtually no protection for the consumer. The Internet retailer doesn't have a BBB rating or a writeup in a local newspaper - they have low, low, low prices and Froogle delivers hits.
Everyone knows the police are utterly blind to the Internet and anything younger people talk about, so it should be a complete surprise that before a meeting with folks identified as "Rethuglicans" and "war criminals" that they would take any kind of precautions. Certainly, police aren't smart enough to understand that protesters who post statements that the people attending should be shot or executed and assassination would be a good thing could possibly actually do anything other than protest.
The US has evolved completely into a nation of sheep that would never actually "do" anything, so what could they possibly be worried about? Muslim terrorists?
Besides, taking any kind of precautions against folks like that would be illegal discrimination. So, rather than acting on any real intelligence they can harass ordinary protesting white americans because they cannot be sued for violating anyone's civil rights.
It isn't greed at all. The issue is there is almost a formula for success and success is rewarded.
40 years ago the people in the publishing world did not have a solid grasp of what sold and what didn't. There was risk, quite a bit of risk. If an editor made great decisions, the publishing house made money and the authors made money. If the same editor went through a spell of bad decisions - books the flopped - eventually he was canned.
Publishing was seen as risk vs. reward and nobody had a handle on what would be a success. So editors were allowed a great deal of freedom.
Today, there are clear models of successful authors and successful books. The demographics are a known quantity. The publishing world pretty much knows why most books succeed. They don't know why all books succeed or fail and that introduces some element of remaining risk. But risk in a public company is not something that stockholders - especially institutional investors - want to be a part of. Would you rather your pension be invested in something stable or something risky?
So the formula for success has to be followed. Every once in a while someone will actually take a risk, but that is outside of the normal bounds. It isn't absolutely assured that following this formula will result in success 100% of the time, but it is proven that following it will minimize risk and lead to success most of the time.
In general, the risks are somewhat larger today than they were, and everyone is retreating from risks in general. Would you rather your employer took risks that could reap vast rewards or, if things went badly required cutting staff by 50%?
Rule 1: If if can have its programming altered in the field, it is not secure.
Rule 2: If it accepts executable instructions from any unauthorized source, it is not secure.
Rule 3: Any deviation from an assigned purpose can be considered to be a security breach.
It is difficult to have a toaster or microwave oven infected by malware or part of a botnet. You want security? Start using the "appliance" model and there will be security. A general-purpose computer that can have new programming installed is obviously a security risk and giving the user the ability to install such programming is an invitation to disaster.
Well, OK. But then you have Sony/BMG/EMI owning everything. It is all about distribution. If you remove copyright, then your neigborhood band can end up on the shelf at a store with a Sony label on the media. And, I'll bet you anything that Sony makes more money than the band does.
No copyright? No GPL.
No copyright? You will see zero investment in anything new and the last 20 years endlessly recycled. What is cheaper than cutting together Rocky IV and Independence Day for something really funny? Why isn't it done today? Primarily, copyright and a few other "rights".
Removal of copyright wouldn't be the utopia you think where you could just take and take without paying for anything. It would be the utimate ticket to large distributors to take and take without ever having to bother about creating anything. Or paying anyone for their creations. You could then have the Wal-Mart routeman at every bar recording whatever was on there so it could be sold in the store the next day. Who cares if it was 50% crap - it would be free. And people would buy it.
The question is what is a "mixup"? Is it a creative work that deserves protection as such? Or it is simply a plagarized work that belongs to some other people that are having their creative rights violated?
Further, do we want a "culture of mixups" or a culture of creativity? While I might think it the height of humor and artistry to take a well-known song and combine it with a silly video does this not affect the original creator?
I see the "culture of mixups" as a path of laziness and sloth. People "borrowing" and plagarizing when they are too lazy to make something original.
Electric service is not everywhere. I have seen places where you had to pay by the foot to get an electric line run to your house from the main line that was 1000 feet (or more) away.
Telephone they would run if it was available in the community because that is a requirement.
Electric service is a lot more like cable. You have to pay to get connected.
If broadband providers were able to openly and fairly compete on quality of service alone? If everyone had equal access to multiple providers at high speeds without any reference to where they were physically located or how affluent their neighbors were?
Wouldn't it be nice if the services were completely open and yet blocked spam, viruses, and malware? With just a little bit of intelligence so that ports were blocked for bad things and open for good things?
Wouldn't it be nice if this service cost no more than it actually cost to provide the service, perhaps with a minimal profit for the provider but not too much?
How about if the Canadian government (always better than the US at social programs) came in and provided broadband internet service to everyone in the US?
Yup, it would be nice. Take another toke and dream on.
If you do not respect it, about as much can be done as not respecting anyone or anything else.
We have moved to a period where a great deal of wealth is in the hands of patents, trademarks and copyrights. This means that "respecting copyright" or not can mean the difference between people being paid a salary or not. That starts to get pretty serious, at least as far as the affected people are concerned.
All the talk about rich corporations out to squeeze the last dime from the consumer is just a smoke screen. What it comes down to is can people rely on patents, trademarks and copyrights for a livelihood.
50 years ago the answer was an unqualified yes. Today, there are serious questions about this. In the near future the answer is likely to be no. This will certainly put a lot of people out on the street that today are employed because money can be had from patents, trademarks and copyrights.
I can't imagine that anyone growing up today will have any respect whatsoever for "copyright" in any form. Anything they can put their hands on will be redistributed, copied and plagiarized. DRM certainly isn't going to have the desired effect. Harsh lawsuits aren't having the desired effect. Education isn't working as most schools teach more about downloading music and copying software than the students find out of school.
More meaningless ranting about ISP pricing. Unfortunately, I copied the paragraph below:
Sadly, this guy is living in a fantasy world where people pay for stuff they use and companies deliver what their advertising says they are selling. ISPs today do not generally have any sort of "metered" plan - they have the one-size-fits-all jumbo-mega plan. They may have a secret cap at which they turn your connection off, but there isn't a higher priced plan that you can pay extra for and get the cap removed. Oh, and did you notice that with the lower prices the supposed speeds keep increasing but the actual content delivery rate remains the same? Sure, your connection to the ISP is at the rate they advertise but your ability to use that stops at their 2nd or 3rd router.
You see, what you are paying for today is a plan with a very high bit rate but is qualified with the term "bursting". This means that you can get a lot of bits very quickly for a short period of time but not continuously. They don't have the network capacity to provide you 10-12 megabits continuously. At least not when your neighbor wants it also. The good news is that today there isn't much content out there that the average Joe is looking for that requires anything better than a burstable connection that averages quite a bit less than whatever they think they are paying for. But this is beginning to change.
Are you paying more than $15 a month for DSL? If so, you are getting ripped off. SBC/Yahoo has been advertising $15 a month rates for "new customers" for quite a while now. Cable prices have been falling as well - mostly in an attempt to keep building customer base. Nobody is paying a rate commesurate with what the service actually costs anymore. You are paying a rate which has been carefully worked out to provide an increasing customer base - greater market penetration - and will let them pay salaries of people hooking up new customers. New equipment? Increased throughput? Better external connections? Nope, no money for that.
We are going to see some interesting
is that there are substantial costs for what passes for quality. You have reviewers, you have professionals looking at submissions and you have indexing.
Sure, all of this can be replicated for free on the web. It is just that you throw out the "professional review" and the "professional indexing" and instead have "groupthink" and "concensus".
Why do they want to limit access? To prevent redistribution without attribution and without their control. They may not own the rights to the original research, but they own the rights to their compliation of it. Like a phone book, the names are not what the publisher owns - they own the compilation and the index.
The current "answer" on the Internet is the Wiki-this and Wiki-that which for some things get more people involved and opens the field to anonymous contributions. It also reinforces groupthink and concensus-building so everyone that doesn't agree gets shouted down (or more accurately in the wiki case, out-edited). The end result is you have an open forum where you used to have professionals.
With the current thinking on copyright (bah!) and such, can you blame a professional journal trying to protect their existance? If their material is freely distributed, why would anyone pay for it? Worse, having some freely distributed but not everything puts a clear bias in peoples' minds.
If you wanted to help the environment, you would rip the engine out of your car and hook it to a horse. Or your fat neighbor who could work off some "American Lard" by pulling you around town.
The only problem with the environment is people. Too many of them. Get the population down to 100 million people and all of the environmental problems go away.
The biggest problem we face today is overcoming the urge to just go out and "do something" without understanding the side effects that we know about. Worse, almost every action on a very, very large scale (like the ethanol experiment) has completely unforseen side effects that without thinking about it and making smaller scale tests are are unlikely to know about until these side effects are upon us.
Of course, the real answer to all of these problems is to fix the most basic problem. Too many people. We fix that in the next 20 years and we won't have to worry about any other problems for a long, long time.
And what would you suggest?
External hard drives for backup have a relatively poor record - mostly because of intermittent use (powered on for an hour a week or so) and poor results in being moved (dropped). Also, when you exceed the size of a physical drive it gets complicated to restore.
Remote online services? Nobody has the bandwidth to back up "commercial" or "enterprise" levels of data that way.
CD and DVD is far, far less recoverable than tape. And while their transportability is pretty good, their data life isn't as good as tape in most cases.
Tape has a 50+ year history and while some drives (TRAVAN) are pretty awful, they make tape systems today that are extremely reliable. Certainly more reliable than anything else I've seen. Yes, such systems are a bit expensive, but enterprise-level backups are going to be expensive.
Wal-mart has certainly responded to this by stopping all sales of CDs and DVDs. Best Buy closed their CD section just last month. Music stores just don't exist anymore. Some folks had a clever idea about a used DVD store a while back, too bad it isn't worth anything today.
You have all seen this, right? Or have you? You know, Wal-Mart is a pretty financially responsible outfit that is unlikely to stay in a business very long if they are losing money. So, can you find a Wal-Mart selling CDs? How about DVDs? Does this perhaps tell you that your internet file-sharing model of the world needs a slight adjustment to conform to reality?
The problem today is that "casual piracy" is getting pretty common. So common that many people I know would never even consider paying any amount for software. It is as if it is their right to download stuff and use it.
This attitude is not something that fosters development. There are plenty of people that thought they could make a living at publishing shareware in the 1980's. Until the 5% rule came into effect - only about 5% (average) pay for shareware. It was then either "go pro" or go back to the day job because doing what you love would never, ever give you enough money to eat.
Yes, there are people that value their time at zero and give whatever they do away. Wonderful - we can all benefit from their generosity. But these people will never be able to live off doing something they want to do - they will instead have a day job they hate and live for a hobby that can never be more than that.
Compare this to someone that makes doll clothes. While it can be a hobby, it can also be something they do that brings in enough money to live on so they don't have to do anything else, ever. Sure, they aren't going to get rich but maybe they will be happy.
Today's casual piracy and the implicit understanding that is OK because everyone is doing it and nobody is going to jail eliminates the middle ground between hobby and professional. And don't think it is limited to teens with no money. If it is easy, everyone is doing it. Heck, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates probably have some pirated software, music or movies.
You may want to consider two things in respect to this.
One is that taking such advanced steps to make sure your computer can't divulge evidence is a clue that there is some evidence, somewhere. An unmotivated cop is your friend. He has lots of stuff to do, probably more pressing and more important. However, doing these things will make almost anyone think there is something being hidden and if they dig deep enough they will find something important. Maybe really, really important.
So then they bring in the ground penetrating radar and start digging up the garage floor. You have supplied the one thing that you should never do - motivation.
The second point is that wiping incriminating material is a crime. If there was evidence on your computer - no matter what it might be - and it is provably deleted you are guilty of spoilation. Judges don't like that much. Consider it like having a cop giving you a ticket for jaywalking and then you give him the finger and call him some choice names. Suddenly you find yourself with more than a jaywalking ticket.
Do not destroy evidence. It can go extremely hard on you. Do not believe for a moment that your computer contains all the evidence in total and there exists nothing else.
Except ICANN has proven themselves to be utterly useless at this sort of thing.
Domain registrations are supposed to be public so offending copyright violations can be referred to the domain owner. Not possible today because registrars aren't following the rules.
Somewhere I'm sure there is a rule against utterly stupid phishing domains. A few simple questions need to be asked when someone tries to register paypal-inc.com, but it isn't happening.
Most of the registration system is broken, mostly by out-of-control registrars. So, suing may be the only effective tool at their disposal.