So you would be in favor of regulations that require some food products to be labelled with things like "this food may kill you" and "the effects of eating this are so far undetermined" and stuff like that?
We already have a law in California that requires products to be labelled as containing cancer-causing materals. This labelling is not required on the outside of the package (yet), but certainly achieves its goal. Products labelled in this fashion cause unreasonable fear and lead to lower sales and returns. So, if you buy an electronic device that lead-tin solder was used in the manufacturing, it requires this label. There are many other cases where such labelling is required without any real sense as to the risk factors involved.
Food labelling would likely follow the same absurd requirements. Virtually all food products would need to be labelled as cancer-causing because of one reason or another. This would not enhance people's buying decisions.
You could perhaps get more detailed and indicate specific medical conditions that eating food could cause and limit this to the top three items to limit the amount of label space required. Again, nearly every food product would be labelled as causing cancer, high blood pressure and obesity.
It is currently a belief that aluminum packaging and cookware is the leading cause of Alzheimer's. The fact that this belief has virtually no foundation other than popular belief should not deter the government, right? How about labelling every alumnium pot or can of beer and soda with a warning "this will make your brain rot?"
Please don't ask for more labelling. It will not be done "right" but it will be "simplified" in ways that you cannot imagine. The effects will be uninformative and destructive.
You generally cannot sue government agencies doing their designated work. Except in very special cases.
For example, you cannot sue the EPA for ignoring a cleanup site.
I would say there it no possibility the FDA would have any liability for this. The manufacturer of the drug might or might not - using the defense of it being approved by the FDA. That hasn't been carrying as much weight as it once did, however.
OK, it is acknowledged that personal computer storage space and processing speed are increasing.
Ever wanted to open a document file on something perhaps less powerful than a desktop computer? What about an underpowered long-battery life machine like a PDA or subnotebook?
Why would you want to define something broadly that is unusable by large segments of digital devices? Do you have any idea how many competing Word->PDA->Word products there are out there? Partly this is due to an overly complex architecture.
The key is the address on the front is printed and can be faked easily. The encrypted bar code on the back is much, much harder. So you can fake the front and copy a seemingly valid bar code from some other license. Obviously, when the bar code and front of the license aren't the same you have fake.
What law? How about being the insurer of last resort?
You see, if there is a "security failure" the airline does not have to solve the problem. The federal government almost certainly has to clean up the mess. The airlines have pretty much disclaimed responsibility and washed their hands of it. So, it clearly is the responsibility of the federal government.
The other alternative would be for the airlines to be responsible for security and any lapses. The airlines pretty much collapsed after 9/11 and most would be out of business today without the government supporting them. So, if United and American were made responsible for the damages and lawsuits stemming from 9/11 we wouldn't have those two companies around anymore. And, the government would have been tapped to take care of anyway.
I think the government ends up being responsible no matter what. I do not think classing most "security failures" in the realm of 9/11 is too far off the mark. We have had a bunch of attempts since then and so far TSA has pretty much failed utterly.
The problem is the airlines have proven they aren't going to do the job. Not that TSA is currently doing a lot better, by any means, but the airlines were worse.
Also, unless we hold the airlines responsible for security failures, giving them the job is pointless. Having the same organzation responsible for both security and security failures is the only way it should work.
The issue is that when the factory moves out, the low-skill jobs are gone. People that could work in a knowledge industry or one that required above-average skills already did that when they left college. The high-school graduates that could work in a factory and make decent money did what they could do.
You cannot take a 30-year-old factory worker that knows how to operate industrial machinery and train them to be a scientist. People are not interchangable widgits. They have their own limitations and mostly are working at the limit of their capabilities. You don't find math PhD's in factory jobs, at least not for very long.
What we are doing in the US - and Europe - is removing the low-skill jobs from the economy and at least in the US not replacing them with anything at all.
The problem is today the suppliers aren't paying US taxes. The US does virtually zero manufacturing and the manufacturing is done by foreign subsidiaries. No tax there.
You then pay most of your income to the foreign subsidiaries as cost of goods. Not much tax there.
Anyone not in this game isn't very big and is paying taxes out the wazoo. Therefore, their costs are higher than someone with a foreign subsidiary and when Wal-Mart comes calling their prices are too high.
Yes, there are some boutique shops that have are supplying a need but nearly all manufacturing has been moved outside the US for obvious reasons. This leads to global dependencies that mean the standard of living in the US and Europe is in the hands of Far East countries and there are fewer and fewer low-skill industrial jobs for people. If you aren't a "knowledge worker" you can clean floors or flip burgers but that's about it. Does everyone have the ability to be a "knowledge worker?" No. This creates a major social problem that some would fix with a permanent welfare (or dole) class.
Fair tax would change almost nothing in this entire situation, because fundamentally the tax is already being paid by middle and upper class folks. Sure, the so-called rich can afford to pay people to find ways to avoid paying 50-60% of their income as taxes. The one problem with Fair Tax proposals is it would certainly change what the lower and lower-middle classes are paying. Since these folks pay nothing or almost nothing today, it would be a big shock to them to be paying anything. And that is why Fair Tax will never pass, unless there is a very, very unfair exclusion for lower income people.
Why would you want to change the world to something you may not adapt to? Why not try to keep the world as we know and love.
Why do you think there is a choice? The Earth is a dynamic system with many inputs other than human produced CO2. Sunlight, orbitial dynamics, solar wind and 10 more things that we're not sure how they affect the planet yet.
The first thing to be aware of is that there is change and will always be change. You might not like it - humans generally don't - but you cannot stop it and for the most part cannot control it.
The second thing to be aware of is that there are cyclic changes that have occurred in the past that we do not know very much about. There isn't much documentation from the last warming period and the transition into what is called The Little Ice Age. And that was less than 1,000 years ago. We are dealing with cycles that are perhaps 100,000 years in duration or longer. The people that claim to have special knowledge of where things are going and how they are going be for the next 100, 200 or 10,000 years are deluded fools. We don't know - but we do know they will not be the same as the last 500 years which has been the best, most human-suited climate in a very long time. Perhaps more than 50,000 years.
Change is real, and having all of humanity in one basket means that there are no choices - adapt or die. The real choice is do we (as a species) keep all our "eggs" in one basket and hope a solar flare doesn't wipe out 50% of the planet anytime soon. This is a species-survival question and right now it seems we want to answer it with politicians out vote-getting rather than thinking. And people that don't want to "rock the boat" because they assume we can somehow stop cyclic changes of the planet. And that if we play nice with the Sun there won't be a massive flare in our lifetimes.
The limiting factor on software piracy in the 1980's was the limited speed of distributing floppies to friends and others. You would go to a floppy swap meet and everyone would go home with a copy of everything there. Or you would upload it a 2400 baud to a BBS.
With the Internet all this changed. Now, there is virtually no reason for anyone to pay for anything unless they are somehow inclined to give away their hard-earned money. Home users don't pay if they can avoid it. Companies are usually a little more careful about pirated software, but they will try to put one copy on 100 desktops if they can.
There are no $4 dongles. We are using about the cheapest ones out there for expensive products and they cost $25 each. Good ones, that can really be used for multiple products are more like $50 each. It is next to impossible to justify a dongle for a product less than $200. It also then requires physical shipment. And, dongle-protection isn't impossible to hack, just very difficult.
What are they? All the "enterprise-level" products I have heard of are Office and OpenOffice. WordPerfect or PerfectOffice has been out of that game so long as to not even be a real consideration.
Are you including things like KOffice?
Where is the compatibility certification that says the documents are rendered identically? You know that is going to come up, sooner or later. Because it is going to be important at a government level. You have preprinted forms that are filled in on the printer. Without identical rendering the spacing may be off just enough to matter.
What is needed is an ODF compatible version of WordStar.
The idea that at an enterprise level there are multiple vendors (real vendors, not distributors) of a word processor and spreadsheet program is a joke. There are perhaps three, and the two I know of are OpenOffice/StarOffice and Microsoft. And there are huge questions about the enterprise viability of OpenOffice that have yet to be answered.
Also, the level of complexity for ODF is such that it is unlikely that every implementation is going to render it the same. This means you create a document with one application and all the form fields are lined up. It is then printed with a different application - still using ODF - and the form fields are shifted over slightly. Maybe just enough to move from column D to column E on the form.
The level of complexity is utterly absurd for any cross-application compatibility. Micrsoft at least understands the problem and clearly indicates that such compatibility isn't going to happen. Reading their standard shows that. Without a committee overseeing development and implementation and certifying implementations, there will never be the level of compatibility that is required.
The basic problem with "music" as a generic substance is that... well, it isn't.
Show me a person that purchases music in unit quantities, either by the minute, kilogram, liter or parsec and I will show you someone that has no sense what music is.
You can try to promote "free music downloads" all you want, but the net effect is that people are interested not in specific categories of music but specific music which happens to belong to a few categories. This should be clear to anyone, but usually isn't.
For example, if someone likes Country Western music, that does not imply to anyone that they like all music belonging to the category Country Western. They like specific music, specific artists that happen to play Country Western. The same can be said for any other music category, except maybe things like electronica. Maybe.
So we have artists that are known and unknown. Sure maybe if you like rap you would be interested in finding out about some new rapper. And then you would find out if you liked that artist. Just saying "you can download rap at site www.abcdef.com" is pointless unless they have rap artists you are interested in.
I suppose if you have unlimited time on your hands it might be interesting and educational to explore random artists with the hope of finding something you like. Some external indexing or hinting - such as someone telling you about a previously-unknown artist - is extremely helpful and reduces the amount of time significantly. The problem is there is just so much out there and most of it is uninteresting badly-formed crap. So much crap that it would probably be easy to come up with a psychological torture based on playing random music freely downloaded on the Internet.
The one way that DRM can work is replacing the "personal computer" in home environments with a dedicated entertainment appliance.
This has numerous advantages for the home user because it can be immune to viruses, spyware and trojans. It can provide a superior entertainment experience apart from what constitutes a "home PC" today. And, it can be cheaper because there will be fewer options and support will be much, much cheaper.
And, because it is controlled, DRM can absolutely work. 100% of the time, just like CSS works on a DVD player today.
Microsoft clearly had limited options for "increasing security" as an objective. If you think back a long ways you can see the effects of some of these choices on other platforms.
The obvious choice would have been to break compatibility and force everyone to buy new software. Nothing from Windows XP would work on Vista if it did anything that required "rights" above those of a ordinary user.
It might have been possible to not break compatibility completely but to heavily restrict the API in ways that actually would break many, many applications. This wouldn't be unexpected because Microsoft has said over and over not to go outside of the Win32 API - but everyone does it. Again the result would likely be massive numbers of applications would fail.
Finally, what they did was something that was possible without breaking any compatibility. If the program wants to do something restricted, just warn the user and let it. For many (if not most) applications this means putting a blanket wrapper around the install which has been done. Not very effective but almost zero application breakage.
Apple has in recent memory broken compatibility twice. The latest processor switch doesn't seem to have made much of a difference in hard-core Mac users - after all, they were punished with the PowerPC switch not very long ago and stuck around. However, the prospect of re-buying all the software for most people and companies isn't an attractive one. Certainly for security, emulation wouldn't be an available option. Apple, perhaps not completely a result of these compatibility breakages but nevertheless a factor, has about 4% of the personal computer market.
IBM has had an extremely long run with the same external processor architecture. Today, if you buy a IBM mainframe system it runs essentially a superset of the System/360 instruction set. A program that was written for OS/360 in 1965 stands a very good chance of running today. IBM has had since the 1960's such a commanding lead in the mainframe market so as to push all other vendors out of the business completely, or to force them to jump through IBM's hoops by being completely compatible. It is unthinkable today to even look at a mainframe system that would not be IBM-compatible. For practical purposes, IBM has 100% of the market.
OK, so which model makes the most sense? Apple with 4% or IBM with 100%? Periodic breaks in compatibility requiring new software or continuous software compatibility for 50 years? There are clearly differences between the personal computer and mainframe markets, but the similar effects of a break in compatibility are quite instructive.
Why do you think Microsoft has stuck with compatibility for the last 20 years and pushed other considerations aside? Could it be they really like having nearly 100% of the market?
The problem here is we are looking at vast areas of potential massive destruction in the economy. Sure, if you are interested in getting stuff for free, this is a great time to be alive. If you work for any company involved in the distribution - for profit - of materials that can be in digital form, you should be concerned. Concerned to the point of getting a different job.
Let's say you work for a book publisher. Today it is impractical to redistribute a book that you buy in a book store. And books in digital form aren't generally sold or not sold without some kind of protection. This is likely to change. With today's attitudes about copying and even publishing, the big-name authors are likely to skip the book publishers completely. Unknown authors aren't going to have much of a chance except giving their stuff away on myspace. Better kiss that job at the publisher goodbye.
Oh, and the ad agency that the book publisher uses is going down the tubes as well. You see, individual authors aren't going to have the money to pay for advertising on the same scale. Any other services for the publisher are going to go down with them - ink, paper, financial services, managing the employee's 401K plan, and so on and so forth. Huge ripple effects.
Similar things will happen with music and movies. It is almost certainly too late to put the genie back in the bottle. We have almost a generation that believes respecting copyright is just somehow "wrong". And today, copyright is nothing more than a question of respect.
Yes, we are going to see battles like this, trying to enforce existing laws with stiffer and stiffer penalties. But the Internet is pretty much consequences-free. There might be a few people that get caught, but compare this to the millions or hundreds of millions of people that aren't getting caught. It will become like speeding where enforcement is on alternate Tuesdays for a quota and ignored the rest of the time. People get caught, but everyone speeds no matter what.
I think with the current trends we are likely to see more and more "enforcement" and less and less revenue. The "music business" is just about ready to throw in the towel - iTunes will still sell stuff to people that think that is the only way to put music in their iPod but the rest will just copy for free.
The question that needs to be asked is where will all those people work when Sony, EMI, BMG and others close their doors? We're not talking about "artists" but programmers, accountants and secretaries. The guy packing boxes in the shipping department. All of these people are going to be doing something else soon.
As a socially-responsible country, the UK government has to fund NHS to greater and greater levels. The UK is taking in lots of new immigrants and this requires more and more health care spending.
There are plenty of other socially-responsible programs that need funding as well.
You can only cut the pie so thin, and then somebody doesn't get a slice at all. NHS or science? People or theories? This is precisely the discussion going on in the US and so far the "theories" side is still winning by enough of a margin that there still is a NASA. It will be clear how things went when NASA is de-funded to support health care.
The paid-for service might eventually offer the same product at 100x (or 1,000,000x) the price. You see, a million times zero is still zero. You can't compete with free. And that is exactly what the music business wants to do.
Until very recently copyright for the consumer was principally a matter of practicality. It was impractical to copy a cassette and give one to 100 friends or to photocopy a book. Today, copyright is a matter of respect - and we have spent the last 15 years or so teaching folks that there is no such thing as respect for any corporation or anyone with any money. Therefore, it is OK to take anything and "share" it.
I don't see a way to stuff the genii back in the bottle. The essential battle is lost - there is no respect. So we might as well wrap this up. Eliminating DRM will probably just be one of the last nails in the coffin of the music business.
My guess is all forms of commercialized mass entertainment like movies, television, books and so forth are doomed as a profitable business.
Today, it is technically "wrong" to redistribute music. Very few people don't do it. DRM is a little added push away from it, because for some it just makes it too difficult.
So how is removing probably the last barrier to a complete free-for-all going to help the bottom line?
Of course, it might speed the exit from the market of commercial music that that would probably be a good thing. I mean, since it really will be free for everyone all the time how could anyone get revenue from selling music anymore? Sure, it could be an advertisement for porn or some kind of concert, but the music itself becomes valueless.
Not that it isn't pretty much valueless today anyway.
I figure there are some over-40 types that just don't know how to download stuff that are still paying. Some more that bought an iPod and just know they have to buy all their music from Apple or it might not work. Still a few more folks that are sure they money they are paying to some site in Russia will send some money to Donny & Marie because they deserve it. But aside from the above, is anyone really paying now?
So would removing DRM just make things easier for everyone and we can all drop the pretense of paying? Or does someone really think that paid-for commercial music has any kind of future at all?
Number one is probably licensing. The game or movie was licensed for the US market and cannot be exported without a license. UK says "change scenes 33 and 57 and we will approve it". France says "you cannot violate our customs with the anti-French statements in this game, change them if you want approval." Saudi Arabia says all references to biblical persons and events must be removed. And so on and so for, endlessly.
Globalization? Maybe when there is a single government that approves distribution of media everywhere on the planet at once. Until then, you can forget about it.
Why nobody has seemed to catch on to this simple fact. Standards. Censorship. The whole "protect the children" thing.
Are the laws, standards and community requirements for television the same in Australia as they are in the US? Ignoring translation differences, aren't their things that Aussie viewers do not want on their screens?
One of the biggest issues with movies is licensing for different areas. And the airplane version, which has to be the most restrictive of all. In the US you can show things that I know are not legal in Japan. I don't know about Australia, but it would not surprise me to find government regulations that affect some television shows.
It has been proven over and over again that shareware doesn't work. People do not pay when there is an alternative to paying.
Thieves - people that want something for nothing - think nothing of using any means, including 100's of hours of their own effort, to avoid paying for something no matter how trivial the cost. $17 isn't worth 15 minutes of my time, but there are people that will spend days trying to find a key that works rather than pay the author.
There are people that are convinced that commercial software is a dead end. It lacks "freedom" so they believe. Often, there is significant overlap with the thieves in the above group. As always, the end goal is to have something for nothing.
As a publisher of commercial software the people that refuse to pay piss me off to no end. It has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with respect. The folks that believe they are owed something from the world around them think nothing of taking, taking, taking. They do not respect the committment to delivering a product that someone makes and decide for themselves that it isn't worth the price being asked. But rather than going to find something else, they feel they can use it without paying if they can "find the key". It is like passing a test or meeting a challange - they win so they get to use the product for free.
I think taking out your frustration on the thieves is an interesting way to go about it. It could have some consequences, but probably not - this is the Internet after all. If more people decided to go about this it would very likely both decrease piracy and decrease non-programmer software use. After all, if any random downloaded software might strike back if you were seen as a pirate what would you trust? Programmers with open-source solutions they could inspect would be able to trust stuff. Non-programmers wouldn't be in the same position - they would have to trust others to verify the version they downloaded.
I don't necessarily agree with the approach, but if this person isn't just being juvenile and has thought this through then at least he/she is doing something.
What I would expect to see is mobs (thousands or more) storming businesses that are accused of some kind of unfair practices. Then we would start to see some action. A mob standing outside of a bank with pitchforks, axes and staves. Guns, too. Smashing everything in sight, killing anyone that seems to represent the business. This would get some action.
Some patheticly weak "boycott" where people decide they aren't going to buy their slave-labor products from one store and instead buy them at an inflated price down the street is a joke. People sending email to the CEO (actually his secretary) to complain about something is a joke. None of these things will inspire action.
People in the streets destroying property gets results. Look at the Watts riot or the nationwide unrest after Martin Luther King was shot. Of course, not much happened there because these focused on people destroying their own property and own community rather than the property of those they saw as oppressing them. What was the result? Their lives were worse than before because they destroyed what little they had. Misdirected anger, it was.
The principle problem is that today you have "activists" that are perfectly willing to sit behind a keyboard and type. Where are the people that claim the president is a war criminal and should be tried and executed? Behind keyboards, not out in the street where they might actually do something. They aren't going to do anything. Neither is anyone else. Oh sure, they will complain and in some cases someone will take pity on them and toss them a bone. But real change? No. Change is the domain of the strong and the courageous. There is no courage left in the US nor Western Europe. Courage is the now held by the people that know the way to win is to strike terror in the heart of their opponent. You behead a few schoolgirls. You blow up some restaurant where your opponent is comfortable, thinking they have nothing to fear. This is activism. This is courage.
Come out from behind your keyboard and do something if you feel that strongly about it. Stop whining.
The issue here sounds a lot like the child was committing a crime and the parent held the account used to commit the crime. Somehow, the parent got off without being responsible for the use of their account. Obviously, the minor child with no assets was not going to be sued because of both being a minor child and having no assets.
This sounds like an open door policy to me. How far can we go with this? If my Internet connection is used to send death threats to the president, I can always claim it was done by someone else and they have to let me go, right? Especially if a child steps up and says they did it. Wasn't me.
Does this just apply to the Internet? Or can we extend this to any act that involves resources that I would nominally be responsible for? What if I hand a 10-year-old a gun and tell them to go play outside. Would I have any responsibility for the aftermath?
This has always sounded incredibly silly. You have someone "sharing" music over an Internet connection and the bill is being paid by the parent. Aren't they responsible for what happens? Or is the Internet going to continue to be a consequences-free zone where it is next to impossible to bring any action against any offender? It is getting close to that today. This decision would appear to mean that the account holder is not liable in any way for actions committed using the account. You have to identify the person, which is not realistic.
Can we figure out how to commit murder on the Internet? Let's go for some real action here and see the lawyers run around in circles.
Huge difference is the number of towers it takes to support the customers.
In the US you have large buildings in cities which block signals. Then you have the suburbs where there are lots and lots of people and relatively large areas - more towers needed per customer.
Finally, you have the outer suburbs and rural areas. If you live outside of a major metropolitan area you didn't have cell phone coverage until 1995 or so. There are still large areas where cell phones simply do not work.
Finland has rural areas, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was zero coverage there and will continue to have zero coverage there for a long, long time.
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So you would be in favor of regulations that require some food products to be labelled with things like "this food may kill you" and "the effects of eating this are so far undetermined" and stuff like that?
We already have a law in California that requires products to be labelled as containing cancer-causing materals. This labelling is not required on the outside of the package (yet), but certainly achieves its goal. Products labelled in this fashion cause unreasonable fear and lead to lower sales and returns. So, if you buy an electronic device that lead-tin solder was used in the manufacturing, it requires this label. There are many other cases where such labelling is required without any real sense as to the risk factors involved.
Food labelling would likely follow the same absurd requirements. Virtually all food products would need to be labelled as cancer-causing because of one reason or another. This would not enhance people's buying decisions.
You could perhaps get more detailed and indicate specific medical conditions that eating food could cause and limit this to the top three items to limit the amount of label space required. Again, nearly every food product would be labelled as causing cancer, high blood pressure and obesity.
It is currently a belief that aluminum packaging and cookware is the leading cause of Alzheimer's. The fact that this belief has virtually no foundation other than popular belief should not deter the government, right? How about labelling every alumnium pot or can of beer and soda with a warning "this will make your brain rot?"
Please don't ask for more labelling. It will not be done "right" but it will be "simplified" in ways that you cannot imagine. The effects will be uninformative and destructive.
You generally cannot sue government agencies doing their designated work. Except in very special cases.
For example, you cannot sue the EPA for ignoring a cleanup site.
I would say there it no possibility the FDA would have any liability for this. The manufacturer of the drug might or might not - using the defense of it being approved by the FDA. That hasn't been carrying as much weight as it once did, however.
OK, it is acknowledged that personal computer storage space and processing speed are increasing.
Ever wanted to open a document file on something perhaps less powerful than a desktop computer? What about an underpowered long-battery life machine like a PDA or subnotebook?
Why would you want to define something broadly that is unusable by large segments of digital devices? Do you have any idea how many competing Word->PDA->Word products there are out there? Partly this is due to an overly complex architecture.
The key is the address on the front is printed and can be faked easily. The encrypted bar code on the back is much, much harder. So you can fake the front and copy a seemingly valid bar code from some other license. Obviously, when the bar code and front of the license aren't the same you have fake.
What law? How about being the insurer of last resort?
You see, if there is a "security failure" the airline does not have to solve the problem. The federal government almost certainly has to clean up the mess. The airlines have pretty much disclaimed responsibility and washed their hands of it. So, it clearly is the responsibility of the federal government.
The other alternative would be for the airlines to be responsible for security and any lapses. The airlines pretty much collapsed after 9/11 and most would be out of business today without the government supporting them. So, if United and American were made responsible for the damages and lawsuits stemming from 9/11 we wouldn't have those two companies around anymore. And, the government would have been tapped to take care of anyway.
I think the government ends up being responsible no matter what. I do not think classing most "security failures" in the realm of 9/11 is too far off the mark. We have had a bunch of attempts since then and so far TSA has pretty much failed utterly.
The problem is the airlines have proven they aren't going to do the job. Not that TSA is currently doing a lot better, by any means, but the airlines were worse.
Also, unless we hold the airlines responsible for security failures, giving them the job is pointless. Having the same organzation responsible for both security and security failures is the only way it should work.
Retrain? As what? Computer programmers? Graphic artists? Musicians? High-energy particle physics scientists?
The issue is that when the factory moves out, the low-skill jobs are gone. People that could work in a knowledge industry or one that required above-average skills already did that when they left college. The high-school graduates that could work in a factory and make decent money did what they could do.
You cannot take a 30-year-old factory worker that knows how to operate industrial machinery and train them to be a scientist. People are not interchangable widgits. They have their own limitations and mostly are working at the limit of their capabilities. You don't find math PhD's in factory jobs, at least not for very long.
What we are doing in the US - and Europe - is removing the low-skill jobs from the economy and at least in the US not replacing them with anything at all.
The problem is today the suppliers aren't paying US taxes. The US does virtually zero manufacturing and the manufacturing is done by foreign subsidiaries. No tax there.
You then pay most of your income to the foreign subsidiaries as cost of goods. Not much tax there.
Anyone not in this game isn't very big and is paying taxes out the wazoo. Therefore, their costs are higher than someone with a foreign subsidiary and when Wal-Mart comes calling their prices are too high.
Yes, there are some boutique shops that have are supplying a need but nearly all manufacturing has been moved outside the US for obvious reasons. This leads to global dependencies that mean the standard of living in the US and Europe is in the hands of Far East countries and there are fewer and fewer low-skill industrial jobs for people. If you aren't a "knowledge worker" you can clean floors or flip burgers but that's about it. Does everyone have the ability to be a "knowledge worker?" No. This creates a major social problem that some would fix with a permanent welfare (or dole) class.
Fair tax would change almost nothing in this entire situation, because fundamentally the tax is already being paid by middle and upper class folks. Sure, the so-called rich can afford to pay people to find ways to avoid paying 50-60% of their income as taxes. The one problem with Fair Tax proposals is it would certainly change what the lower and lower-middle classes are paying. Since these folks pay nothing or almost nothing today, it would be a big shock to them to be paying anything. And that is why Fair Tax will never pass, unless there is a very, very unfair exclusion for lower income people.
Why do you think there is a choice? The Earth is a dynamic system with many inputs other than human produced CO2. Sunlight, orbitial dynamics, solar wind and 10 more things that we're not sure how they affect the planet yet.
The first thing to be aware of is that there is change and will always be change. You might not like it - humans generally don't - but you cannot stop it and for the most part cannot control it.
The second thing to be aware of is that there are cyclic changes that have occurred in the past that we do not know very much about. There isn't much documentation from the last warming period and the transition into what is called The Little Ice Age. And that was less than 1,000 years ago. We are dealing with cycles that are perhaps 100,000 years in duration or longer. The people that claim to have special knowledge of where things are going and how they are going be for the next 100, 200 or 10,000 years are deluded fools. We don't know - but we do know they will not be the same as the last 500 years which has been the best, most human-suited climate in a very long time. Perhaps more than 50,000 years.
Change is real, and having all of humanity in one basket means that there are no choices - adapt or die. The real choice is do we (as a species) keep all our "eggs" in one basket and hope a solar flare doesn't wipe out 50% of the planet anytime soon. This is a species-survival question and right now it seems we want to answer it with politicians out vote-getting rather than thinking. And people that don't want to "rock the boat" because they assume we can somehow stop cyclic changes of the planet. And that if we play nice with the Sun there won't be a massive flare in our lifetimes.
Except there never was any honour.
The limiting factor on software piracy in the 1980's was the limited speed of distributing floppies to friends and others. You would go to a floppy swap meet and everyone would go home with a copy of everything there. Or you would upload it a 2400 baud to a BBS.
With the Internet all this changed. Now, there is virtually no reason for anyone to pay for anything unless they are somehow inclined to give away their hard-earned money. Home users don't pay if they can avoid it. Companies are usually a little more careful about pirated software, but they will try to put one copy on 100 desktops if they can.
There are no $4 dongles. We are using about the cheapest ones out there for expensive products and they cost $25 each. Good ones, that can really be used for multiple products are more like $50 each. It is next to impossible to justify a dongle for a product less than $200. It also then requires physical shipment. And, dongle-protection isn't impossible to hack, just very difficult.
If you find a $4 dongle, please let us know.
What are they? All the "enterprise-level" products I have heard of are Office and OpenOffice. WordPerfect or PerfectOffice has been out of that game so long as to not even be a real consideration.
Are you including things like KOffice?
Where is the compatibility certification that says the documents are rendered identically? You know that is going to come up, sooner or later. Because it is going to be important at a government level. You have preprinted forms that are filled in on the printer. Without identical rendering the spacing may be off just enough to matter.
What is needed is an ODF compatible version of WordStar.
The idea that at an enterprise level there are multiple vendors (real vendors, not distributors) of a word processor and spreadsheet program is a joke. There are perhaps three, and the two I know of are OpenOffice/StarOffice and Microsoft. And there are huge questions about the enterprise viability of OpenOffice that have yet to be answered.
Also, the level of complexity for ODF is such that it is unlikely that every implementation is going to render it the same. This means you create a document with one application and all the form fields are lined up. It is then printed with a different application - still using ODF - and the form fields are shifted over slightly. Maybe just enough to move from column D to column E on the form.
The level of complexity is utterly absurd for any cross-application compatibility. Micrsoft at least understands the problem and clearly indicates that such compatibility isn't going to happen. Reading their standard shows that. Without a committee overseeing development and implementation and certifying implementations, there will never be the level of compatibility that is required.
The basic problem with "music" as a generic substance is that ... well, it isn't.
Show me a person that purchases music in unit quantities, either by the minute, kilogram, liter or parsec and I will show you someone that has no sense what music is.
You can try to promote "free music downloads" all you want, but the net effect is that people are interested not in specific categories of music but specific music which happens to belong to a few categories. This should be clear to anyone, but usually isn't.
For example, if someone likes Country Western music, that does not imply to anyone that they like all music belonging to the category Country Western. They like specific music, specific artists that happen to play Country Western. The same can be said for any other music category, except maybe things like electronica. Maybe.
So we have artists that are known and unknown. Sure maybe if you like rap you would be interested in finding out about some new rapper. And then you would find out if you liked that artist. Just saying "you can download rap at site www.abcdef.com" is pointless unless they have rap artists you are interested in.
I suppose if you have unlimited time on your hands it might be interesting and educational to explore random artists with the hope of finding something you like. Some external indexing or hinting - such as someone telling you about a previously-unknown artist - is extremely helpful and reduces the amount of time significantly. The problem is there is just so much out there and most of it is uninteresting badly-formed crap. So much crap that it would probably be easy to come up with a psychological torture based on playing random music freely downloaded on the Internet.
The one way that DRM can work is replacing the "personal computer" in home environments with a dedicated entertainment appliance.
This has numerous advantages for the home user because it can be immune to viruses, spyware and trojans. It can provide a superior entertainment experience apart from what constitutes a "home PC" today. And, it can be cheaper because there will be fewer options and support will be much, much cheaper.
And, because it is controlled, DRM can absolutely work. 100% of the time, just like CSS works on a DVD player today.
Forget WebTV. Think OLPC for home entertainment.
Apple has in recent memory broken compatibility twice. The latest processor switch doesn't seem to have made much of a difference in hard-core Mac users - after all, they were punished with the PowerPC switch not very long ago and stuck around. However, the prospect of re-buying all the software for most people and companies isn't an attractive one. Certainly for security, emulation wouldn't be an available option. Apple, perhaps not completely a result of these compatibility breakages but nevertheless a factor, has about 4% of the personal computer market.
IBM has had an extremely long run with the same external processor architecture. Today, if you buy a IBM mainframe system it runs essentially a superset of the System/360 instruction set. A program that was written for OS/360 in 1965 stands a very good chance of running today. IBM has had since the 1960's such a commanding lead in the mainframe market so as to push all other vendors out of the business completely, or to force them to jump through IBM's hoops by being completely compatible. It is unthinkable today to even look at a mainframe system that would not be IBM-compatible. For practical purposes, IBM has 100% of the market.
OK, so which model makes the most sense? Apple with 4% or IBM with 100%? Periodic breaks in compatibility requiring new software or continuous software compatibility for 50 years? There are clearly differences between the personal computer and mainframe markets, but the similar effects of a break in compatibility are quite instructive.
Why do you think Microsoft has stuck with compatibility for the last 20 years and pushed other considerations aside? Could it be they really like having nearly 100% of the market?
The problem here is we are looking at vast areas of potential massive destruction in the economy. Sure, if you are interested in getting stuff for free, this is a great time to be alive. If you work for any company involved in the distribution - for profit - of materials that can be in digital form, you should be concerned. Concerned to the point of getting a different job.
Let's say you work for a book publisher. Today it is impractical to redistribute a book that you buy in a book store. And books in digital form aren't generally sold or not sold without some kind of protection. This is likely to change. With today's attitudes about copying and even publishing, the big-name authors are likely to skip the book publishers completely. Unknown authors aren't going to have much of a chance except giving their stuff away on myspace. Better kiss that job at the publisher goodbye.
Oh, and the ad agency that the book publisher uses is going down the tubes as well. You see, individual authors aren't going to have the money to pay for advertising on the same scale. Any other services for the publisher are going to go down with them - ink, paper, financial services, managing the employee's 401K plan, and so on and so forth. Huge ripple effects.
Similar things will happen with music and movies. It is almost certainly too late to put the genie back in the bottle. We have almost a generation that believes respecting copyright is just somehow "wrong". And today, copyright is nothing more than a question of respect.
Yes, we are going to see battles like this, trying to enforce existing laws with stiffer and stiffer penalties. But the Internet is pretty much consequences-free. There might be a few people that get caught, but compare this to the millions or hundreds of millions of people that aren't getting caught. It will become like speeding where enforcement is on alternate Tuesdays for a quota and ignored the rest of the time. People get caught, but everyone speeds no matter what.
I think with the current trends we are likely to see more and more "enforcement" and less and less revenue. The "music business" is just about ready to throw in the towel - iTunes will still sell stuff to people that think that is the only way to put music in their iPod but the rest will just copy for free.
The question that needs to be asked is where will all those people work when Sony, EMI, BMG and others close their doors? We're not talking about "artists" but programmers, accountants and secretaries. The guy packing boxes in the shipping department. All of these people are going to be doing something else soon.
As a socially-responsible country, the UK government has to fund NHS to greater and greater levels. The UK is taking in lots of new immigrants and this requires more and more health care spending.
There are plenty of other socially-responsible programs that need funding as well.
You can only cut the pie so thin, and then somebody doesn't get a slice at all. NHS or science? People or theories? This is precisely the discussion going on in the US and so far the "theories" side is still winning by enough of a margin that there still is a NASA. It will be clear how things went when NASA is de-funded to support health care.
Why would it ever change?
The paid-for service might eventually offer the same product at 100x (or 1,000,000x) the price. You see, a million times zero is still zero. You can't compete with free. And that is exactly what the music business wants to do.
Until very recently copyright for the consumer was principally a matter of practicality. It was impractical to copy a cassette and give one to 100 friends or to photocopy a book. Today, copyright is a matter of respect - and we have spent the last 15 years or so teaching folks that there is no such thing as respect for any corporation or anyone with any money. Therefore, it is OK to take anything and "share" it.
I don't see a way to stuff the genii back in the bottle. The essential battle is lost - there is no respect. So we might as well wrap this up. Eliminating DRM will probably just be one of the last nails in the coffin of the music business.
My guess is all forms of commercialized mass entertainment like movies, television, books and so forth are doomed as a profitable business.
Today, it is technically "wrong" to redistribute music. Very few people don't do it. DRM is a little added push away from it, because for some it just makes it too difficult.
So how is removing probably the last barrier to a complete free-for-all going to help the bottom line?
Of course, it might speed the exit from the market of commercial music that that would probably be a good thing. I mean, since it really will be free for everyone all the time how could anyone get revenue from selling music anymore? Sure, it could be an advertisement for porn or some kind of concert, but the music itself becomes valueless.
Not that it isn't pretty much valueless today anyway.
I figure there are some over-40 types that just don't know how to download stuff that are still paying. Some more that bought an iPod and just know they have to buy all their music from Apple or it might not work. Still a few more folks that are sure they money they are paying to some site in Russia will send some money to Donny & Marie because they deserve it. But aside from the above, is anyone really paying now?
So would removing DRM just make things easier for everyone and we can all drop the pretense of paying? Or does someone really think that paid-for commercial music has any kind of future at all?
Number one is probably licensing. The game or movie was licensed for the US market and cannot be exported without a license. UK says "change scenes 33 and 57 and we will approve it". France says "you cannot violate our customs with the anti-French statements in this game, change them if you want approval." Saudi Arabia says all references to biblical persons and events must be removed. And so on and so for, endlessly.
Globalization? Maybe when there is a single government that approves distribution of media everywhere on the planet at once. Until then, you can forget about it.
Why nobody has seemed to catch on to this simple fact. Standards. Censorship. The whole "protect the children" thing.
Are the laws, standards and community requirements for television the same in Australia as they are in the US? Ignoring translation differences, aren't their things that Aussie viewers do not want on their screens?
One of the biggest issues with movies is licensing for different areas. And the airplane version, which has to be the most restrictive of all. In the US you can show things that I know are not legal in Japan. I don't know about Australia, but it would not surprise me to find government regulations that affect some television shows.
As a publisher of commercial software the people that refuse to pay piss me off to no end. It has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with respect. The folks that believe they are owed something from the world around them think nothing of taking, taking, taking. They do not respect the committment to delivering a product that someone makes and decide for themselves that it isn't worth the price being asked. But rather than going to find something else, they feel they can use it without paying if they can "find the key". It is like passing a test or meeting a challange - they win so they get to use the product for free.
I think taking out your frustration on the thieves is an interesting way to go about it. It could have some consequences, but probably not - this is the Internet after all. If more people decided to go about this it would very likely both decrease piracy and decrease non-programmer software use. After all, if any random downloaded software might strike back if you were seen as a pirate what would you trust? Programmers with open-source solutions they could inspect would be able to trust stuff. Non-programmers wouldn't be in the same position - they would have to trust others to verify the version they downloaded.
I don't necessarily agree with the approach, but if this person isn't just being juvenile and has thought this through then at least he/she is doing something.
What I would expect to see is mobs (thousands or more) storming businesses that are accused of some kind of unfair practices. Then we would start to see some action. A mob standing outside of a bank with pitchforks, axes and staves. Guns, too. Smashing everything in sight, killing anyone that seems to represent the business. This would get some action.
Some patheticly weak "boycott" where people decide they aren't going to buy their slave-labor products from one store and instead buy them at an inflated price down the street is a joke. People sending email to the CEO (actually his secretary) to complain about something is a joke. None of these things will inspire action.
People in the streets destroying property gets results. Look at the Watts riot or the nationwide unrest after Martin Luther King was shot. Of course, not much happened there because these focused on people destroying their own property and own community rather than the property of those they saw as oppressing them. What was the result? Their lives were worse than before because they destroyed what little they had. Misdirected anger, it was.
The principle problem is that today you have "activists" that are perfectly willing to sit behind a keyboard and type. Where are the people that claim the president is a war criminal and should be tried and executed? Behind keyboards, not out in the street where they might actually do something. They aren't going to do anything. Neither is anyone else. Oh sure, they will complain and in some cases someone will take pity on them and toss them a bone. But real change? No. Change is the domain of the strong and the courageous. There is no courage left in the US nor Western Europe. Courage is the now held by the people that know the way to win is to strike terror in the heart of their opponent. You behead a few schoolgirls. You blow up some restaurant where your opponent is comfortable, thinking they have nothing to fear. This is activism. This is courage.
Come out from behind your keyboard and do something if you feel that strongly about it. Stop whining.
The issue here sounds a lot like the child was committing a crime and the parent held the account used to commit the crime. Somehow, the parent got off without being responsible for the use of their account. Obviously, the minor child with no assets was not going to be sued because of both being a minor child and having no assets.
This sounds like an open door policy to me. How far can we go with this? If my Internet connection is used to send death threats to the president, I can always claim it was done by someone else and they have to let me go, right? Especially if a child steps up and says they did it. Wasn't me.
Does this just apply to the Internet? Or can we extend this to any act that involves resources that I would nominally be responsible for? What if I hand a 10-year-old a gun and tell them to go play outside. Would I have any responsibility for the aftermath?
This has always sounded incredibly silly. You have someone "sharing" music over an Internet connection and the bill is being paid by the parent. Aren't they responsible for what happens? Or is the Internet going to continue to be a consequences-free zone where it is next to impossible to bring any action against any offender? It is getting close to that today. This decision would appear to mean that the account holder is not liable in any way for actions committed using the account. You have to identify the person, which is not realistic.
Can we figure out how to commit murder on the Internet? Let's go for some real action here and see the lawyers run around in circles.
Huge difference is the number of towers it takes to support the customers.
In the US you have large buildings in cities which block signals. Then you have the suburbs where there are lots and lots of people and relatively large areas - more towers needed per customer.
Finally, you have the outer suburbs and rural areas. If you live outside of a major metropolitan area you didn't have cell phone coverage until 1995 or so. There are still large areas where cell phones simply do not work.
Finland has rural areas, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was zero coverage there and will continue to have zero coverage there for a long, long time.