I suspect if the Fearless Leader of Kodak went on international TV and made a speech about how they were going to wipe "Fuji off the map" to eliminate their problems, someone might have wondered if they really needed that nuclear device. As it is, Iran is likely to get a lot closer to being able to eliminate their Israeli problem once and for all and settle the Palestinian issue - unless of course Israel decides that the survival of their population trumps getting brownie points in the international debating society.
My guess is Iran will get closer and then take a major hit from Israel. The US will do nothing except claim (still) that the sanctions are working.
Extreme precision is the key to automated driving vehicles, so without that you can forget letting the car drive itself.
And probably the best use of a self-driving vehicle is in the middle of nowhere on a limited-access freeway (i.e., an Interstate highway). If you limit the precision of GPS then forget about letting the car drive through Nebraska.
"International search warrant"? What's that? You mean there is a single uniform set of laws the govern the entire world? Naa, I didn't think that was what you meant because there isn't any such thing.
What we have is a clearly rogue state which is allowing anyone residing within their borders to do... well, anything they want, without any sort of control, knowledge or anything else.
There are plenty of documented situations where (a) mass murderer gets caught, (b) is sent to Yemen to be imprisoned for life, (c) is given "house arrest" and (d) walks away from house. It is like suggesting to the government of Somalia that they crack down on pirates - the pirates are operating as part of the government.
Sorry, but you are asking for something that can be called the "everyone should be at the top" problem. Yes, it would be nice if everyone could understand science, scientific methods and what constitutes the difference between one result and a confirmed, peer-reviewed body of research.
It isn't going to happen that way.
What we need is to stop publishing unconfirmed, preliminary results in popular media. That by itself solves 90% of the problem. So who gets to decide when something is ready for 60 Minutes, Fox and Friends in the Morning or the Today Show? I don't know, but I know it isn't the news media and it should not be the original team reporting some unconfirmed results. Just a rule that says nothing gets copied out of scientific journals until it is marked as having been confirmed by at least one independent team would go a long, long way.
Take for instance an electric iron. It might just be clogged up from hard water deposits that could be removed with some solution like CLR or LimeAway. The problem is, in order to get to the parts that are clogged you have to deal with sonic welding, adhesives and fasteners that were designed to be one-way. The only way to disassemble the unit is to break it and glue it back together, which is not very elegant nor safe when dealing with mains current plus heating elements.
Same thing goes for about 90% of small electric appliances today. They are not designed to be repairable.
Most of this is not so much cultural as others have pointed out but it all comes down to the cost of labor. At one time in the US decorative scrollwork in homes was hand-carved. The craftsman doing the work made maybe $0.25 a day which for the time wasn't all that bad but it was by no means extravagant. It would be comparable to what any common laborer would get paid or someone clerking in a store.
Today, to have someone skilled in wood carving come to your home and do some work would be easily $200 an hour. An experienced technician wouldn't be getting that individually, but you can figure a company in the business of appliance repair is going to be charging at least $100 an hour. Which makes a $30 electric iron absurd to even consider repairing - it would cost $30 for someone to spend 20 minutes on it. Even larger appliances begin to reach the point where it makes no sense to repair them simply because of the cost of labor. Why spend $200 to fix a washing machine that cost $250 to replace?
Where things get really confused is in the 1800s and early 1900s the US saw significant immigration from Europe of craftsmen and skilled workers. Someone that spent 20 years making fine furniture would come to the US and could find immediate work basically doing the same sort of thing for at least as much money if not more. Today, we have huge low-skill immigration which skews the wage scale in interesting ways. In some parts of the country it is cheaper to hire more people (immigrant labor) using hand tools to do a job than it is to use power tools or other modern assists with fewer people. This only works in low-skill areas, though. If the US had a huge number of immigrants coming in that were skilled electronics technicians or computer programmers it would be quite different.
What we have now is it is cheaper to hire five people to use hand tools to do landscaping work than one person with a power mower. But it is also cheaper to replace a $800 TV than it is to bring it to a technician to look at it because his labor is incredibly expensive. The US today is a confused mess of labor rates that will end up sorting itself out in the end, but likely as not things will shift to the low end of the scale.
From a considerable amount of contact with folks investigating child porn cases - people that are working on seized computers and media - I cannot believe there has ever been a federal case filed based solely on the content of the browser cache. This would not show any intent whatsoever, which is critical. Such a case would be tossed out very quickly and the defense would be gloating very publicly about their "win".
Now, if you save a picture on a DVD you have just shown intent. And I hear plenty about those cases considering the business I am in.
THIS IS NOT A DECISION. At most it is an affirmation.
I am not aware of any jurisdiction that will prosecute someone for the contents of their browser cache. Every law enforcement organization that I have had contact with (quite a number...) has confirmed this. If someone's computer is being examined and all they find are images in the browser cache, prosecution does not go forward. Period.
The number of people that believe they can be prosecuted on the basis of their browser cache is incredible nonetheless. I have never heard of such a case and doubt there has ever been such a prosecution. There are huge problems with such a thing, starting with there not being any indication of intent.
So again, this is not a "decision". There is no jurisdiction in the US and unlikely to be one outside the US where such a prosecution has ever taken place. Only a complete fool of a prosecutor would even file a case based on browser cache alone as there are a large number of defenses that would certainly be used.
Sorry, but once that phrase was co-opted by the enviro-wackos to mean that all chemicals were bad it should have been clear that things were going to take a turn for the worse. Today it is clear to everyone that "chemicals" are bad. Nearly everyone does not understand that "chemicals" are things that are present in the heavily filtered water you are drinking, the nice organic food you are eating and in the very air you are breathing. Most people think you can filter out all the "chemicals" and that if you do not, you aren't safe.
This has been going on since the 1970s and with 40 years of it behind us there is almost nothing anyone is going to be able to do to stop it.
We have politicians that believe this or at least profess to agree with their constituents who believe it. Laws are being made to accomodate these beliefs.
The biggest "bug exploited" is allowing unqualified people to install random software on a computer. This means that anything can be installed if it promises some kind of result - install this for a bigger dick, etc. You don't think there are things out there like that today?
Unfortunately, the direction you seem to be going towards is the licensing of software developers and requiring huge liability insurance policies. There is also the problem of where the blame lies - it is an exploit in Quickbooks that it will display a bank account number so a user can give it out over the phone? Or is this a user error? How about the encryption of data to prevent the user from gaining access to it without the proper credentials? If the user installs a product and misuses it - with the result being they lose all the money in their bank account - how does anyone assign blame?
If you compare this with civil engineering it is very simple - in order to build a program you need a license and a huge insurance policy. If you have lots of experience and are generally successful the insurance policy isn't very expensive but for a beginner it is very expensive. This would make it a lot simpler for the courts - if someone falls out a window of a 15 storey building, the engineer that signed off on the windows is to blame pretty much no matter what the user did. Could we really live with that in the world of software?
Why do poor areas have more crime than more affluent ones? Simple: taxes pay police and when there are low, low, low property taxes there is less police activity. Also, affluent areas have alarms, guard dogs, and people that feel they have something to protect. Poor areas have people that think (wrongly) they can't lose anything because they have nothing.
Of course, when a poor person discovers much to their suprise that someone will hold them at knifepoint for $1.46 in change they suddenly realize they might actually have something to lose.
Also, a lot of businesses cater specifically to cash transactions in less affluent areas. Think corner liquor stores - lots of cash in the register, not much in the way of security. Compare this to a well-lighted busy store in a strip mall with a working video system and you can understand why the corner liquor store is the one robbed every week whereas the strip mall location has never had a problem.
It has nothing to do with people's mindset about their being poor. It is all about grabbing something that they want, someone else has and can be made to give it up. It is well known among criminals today that few crimes actually result in jail time. You have much less than a 10% chance of going to jail today no matter what you do. That means unless you are incredibly unlucky you can rob a store or a person four or five times without ever facing any sort of punishment. And to most people in a crime mindset this means they are blessed and can get away with anything forever. Sure, they might get caught after 20-30 crimes but after 10 they are feeling invincible.
This is the sort of attitude that permeates the computer industry today. This is why we have people building software that absolutely and faithfully recreates the problems that were solved in the 1960s and 1970s - the people doing the work have absolutely rejected the idea that there is anything to learn from the past. History is dead to them because they think everything they are doing is new and different. They think they are striking out in unknown territory when in fact they are just walking alongside the same path that was covered 40 years ago.
Today, many of the same problems that are encountered are simply recreations of things that happened before. A huge problem is file systems that do not have sufficient robustness to deal with unexpected outages and hardware errors. If you have a file system that fails if you shut the power off unexpectedly at the wrong time you have something that was designed from a blank piece of paper. This kind of problem was dealt with in the 1970s in several different environments but nobody working on recent file systems have any experience with those solutions. Mostly because "it is all new" is an attitude and considering anyone over the age of 40 to be outmoded and incapable of dealing with all this new stuff.
One good example is Cox in Phoenix. They have one of the most capable systems and most recently upgraded, at least according to subcontractors and employees I have talked to.
Their configuration is a fiber link from the head end to each neighborhood node. This link runs at 1-3GB with the newer ones at 3GB. It might be possible to run this link in the future at (maybe) 10GB but that would require a lot of new hardware at both ends. Connected to the node are either 500 or 1000 homes - they are splitting up the 1000-home nodes to make 500-home nodes, but that is as far as they are going. You can expect a lot of systems in the US to be running 1GB to the node and 1000 homes on the node.
A little simple division makes the problem pretty clear. Assuming there is no cable TV anymore on the head end to node link that means there is 3GB available to 500 homes in the best areas and in the oldest, slowest areas it is 1GB for 1000 homes. That is 6Mb/sec best case for every house or 1Mb/sec at the worst. There is no more capacity that that.
Oh, and the cable TV offerings are taking a pretty big slice of that bandwidth today, so it is far more likely that even in the best areas there is a max of 1Mb/sec to 500 homes - if they are all using it. For the last five years or so it has worked wonderfully because 1 in 10 (or more likely 50) homes was using any sort of streaming IPTV service. So instead of 1Mb/sec per home it worked out to be more like 10Mb/sec for the homes using it. The rest? Just email and web surfing. Now, you move 50% of the homes to trying to use IPTV services and the whole system collapses - the bandwidth simply isn't there. And, it is unlikely that it will be any time soon. The last time the cable systems were upgraded it took about 10 years from start to end. Maybe if we are lucky by 2020 we could have guaranteed 20Mb/sec to every home on the cable system which would require a 100GB fiber link from the node to the head end. I don't know about you, but I don't think there is any 100GB link that goes any distance.
Maybe what is required is a separate fiber run from every house to the head end. Yeah, that would work. You can get that today if you don't mind spending about $3K a month and I don't think it is going to get a lot cheaper any time soon.
OK, let's say you work out a deal with a McDonalds to sell you hamburgers at half price as long as you buy 100 at a time. So you set up a stand across from the McDonalds and start selling hamburgers cheaper than McDonalds does. You have incredible sales for the first week or so.
Of course, based on that you get a couple of friends to loan you money to expand your business and start trying to negotiate a similar deal with a different McDonalds across town.
How long do you really think it is going to take McDonalds to figure out they are supplying you with hamburgers that you are using to take their customers away from them? Does this really sound like a viable business model?
The cable (and DSL) Internet providers are waking up to the fact that they are supplying a service which is being used to take their customers away from them. Why should Comcast supply a service that is used to get people to drop their cable TV subscription? It is like the phone company supplying DSL service so their customers can drop the phone service and go with Vonage. You can say the cable TV service should be independent of the cable Internet service all you want, but the truth is that one has subsidized the other since the beginning. For DSL the service wouldn't even exist without the driver of phone landline service to begin with. We are starting to see the fallout of this. Certainly the cable companies are realizing they are assisting in the cannibalization of their own customer base - and they are going to stop doing that, one way or another. Hulu is just the beginning.
They tried that trick in the US - forcing the owners of the copper to provide access below cost. It worked for about a year.
Technology marches on, however. DSL depends on a copper line from the CO to the home and new areas were being built with a fiber line to a neighborhood node and copper from there to the home. There was no place to put multiple competing DSLAM boxes at the neighborhood node and the legislation never envisioned such a thing so new neighborhoods had either no DSL or DSL only from the local line provider.
Today I don't think there are any more competing DSL providers because they have simply been edged out of the market. The telecom companies that were forced to provide access are still forced to provide access - except technology-wise there isn't any place to do that today. Except in old neighborhoods with copper to the CO. And there simply isn't enough revenue there.
Oh, and having to provide access below cost made the telecom companies neglect maintenance so the service got really bad. Forcing companies to do things where they lose money always results in the company finding some way to stop doing it. Or going out of business.
Hulu was meant to be an accessory - missed a show? Then watch on the Internet. But otherwise, stick with the broadcast version because it is higher quality and timelier.
Hulu might make a profit on its operation, but certainly not enough to justify potential cannibalization of the main revenue stream. And what they are seeing is exactly that, cannibalization of the primary revenue stream. Figure out a way to get that much revenue from Hulu and you could be the next media champ. Problem is, really smart people have looked at this and figured out there really isn't a way to get that much out of something like Hulu.
To do something like this would require a fairly significant capital outlay, but it would certainly be profitable.
Why would it be profitable? The problem here is that people aren't going to pay, period. No service is going to swoop in and snatch away the customers because the first thing any investor is going to look at is how is this service going to make money. Subscriptions? Nope. Ads? No revenue there. Pay-per-view? Nope, not going to fly.
End result is you might get some.com-era type financing for a short while but sooner or later reality will intrude. No revenue means no service and until someone can prove their model will work no investor is going to take the risk of putting money up for a business model that says "we'll figure out how to get paid when the money runs out." That worked in 1998 but it isn't working so well today.
As far as ad revenue is concerned, it keeps dropping and ads are worth less and less. Partly this is driven by there being a small number of ad "vendors" with Google now controlling the bulk of Internet advertising. The problem with any sort of IPTV ad is there is no good way to sort out the geography or demographics so you can't do "local" advertising and it is very difficult to split ads up by demographics, viewing time or anything else. So all you have are ads for the masses that are nationwide if not worldwide. Difficult ad market to serve when you don't know anything about your viewers. Broadcast TV solved this problem a long time ago but there may not be any good way to deal with this for IPTV.
So no, I don't think there is going to be any real solution for this. The content is just going to go away. We will have a huge number of providers offering the same old shows from 1950-1990. Endlessly.
I'd say the media companies "get it" pretty well. They know nobody is interested in a pay-for service on the Internet. Hulu Plus is more or less a dead end on portable devices and IPTV devices like Roku. So where exactly are people going to pay?
$4 a episode on Amazon or iTunes? Probably not.
Lots and lots of ads? Ad revenue keeps going down.
The cable subscription might be one thing that people would pay for that could be counted on. Only problem is, people are figuring out they can get the same materials without paying for them and free always wins out in the end.
No company is ever going to "get" the idea that they can exist without getting paid. No revenue pretty much means no company, no content, nothing. We are left with unbelievably crappy ego-driven self-produced stuff on YouTube and B&W shows from the 1950s.
I strongly suggest if you believe as you seem to that you get 10 of your bestest buddies together and shut down and/or destroy a coal-fired power plant nearby. It would have a huge effect - not just on locally produced CO2 but on the entire planet knowing that there are people that feel strongly enough about this issue to actually risk their lives, honor and freedom to do something about it.
So far, nobody has come forwarded. Nobody. Now, we are certainly living in an age where it is beyond most people's comprehension to do things as were done a few hundred years ago. The America Revolution was started and maintained by people that knew they might be killed for simply stating their beliefs and these folks were willing to start a war. In Scotland people were risking their lives and their families lives by revolting against the English King for 400 years. The few examples lately I can think of are people smuggling weapons into Palestine and a Greenpeace ship attacking the French Navy.
So far, nobody has stepped forward on the climate change front. I am pretty sure nobody has convictions that are that strong.
Except there is a choice: some hugely efficient storage mechanism or just turning stuff off at night.
So far, there is no hugely efficient storage mechanism. Pumped water works, but not on the kind of scale that would be needed. Thermal storage sort of works, but nobody has ever tried it on a large scale, not to mention a huge scale (as in nationwide). Batteries do not work, flywheels do not work, and neither do any other "conventional" energy storage technique.
Solar remains a supplement until storage problems are solved - and it is important to understand that they may never be solved in an adequate manner. It is certainly going to be cheaper and more efficient to run a nuclear plant that implement some type of storage technique that has losses above 25%. Can you imagine what the effects of using lead-acid batteries to power the nation at night would be?
Surely you jest! This is the Internet age of development where most of the bleeding-edge companies doing software development have completely bought into a agile development model where the requirements are "flexible" - usually so flexible that the development group is operating with a completely different set of requirements than the analyst or program manager. End result is you have something that works at the end but nobody quite knows what it is supposed to do only what it does do now.
Probably one of the funniest tales of software development is how FaceBook actually operates. I suspect much of Google is run the same way, only the search engine is probably overseen rather strictly. The rest? I suspect you could ask three people and get four different descriptions of what a particular product's requirements were today and if they were actually being implemented.
How do you think Android can have two separate email programs (one for Gmail and one for everything else) and the two apps have wildly divergent sets of options and default settings? This stuff just sneaks in, obviously. Did you really think there was a specification?
I don't think there is time for any thinking about things like compliance, export control or third party copyright considerations in any place that is trying to keep up with the Internet today and operating an agile development environment. These considerations are thought to have died in the 1970s.
The problem is that if you look closely at the average human they are far more interested in a genetic makeup that would allow for drunkenness without hangovers or an endless orgasmic orgy than eliminating cancer that might - might - affect them in 50 years.
What if those sorts of genetic modifications were able to be inherited? Are we ready for a sub-species of human that can more accurately described as "party animal"? How about not just grafted-on wings or a third arm (as some have already done), but real, grown wings - not enabling flight (humans are too heavy and changes to allow flight would be severe) but for decoration?
No, I do not see the widespread use of genetics for amateur productions to be a good thing. Nor do I see today's body modification proponents being the sort of people that I think should be the leading edge of humanity. I see humans having far more trivial interests short term and it is going to take a really long time for us to escape from short term thinking.
Global warming - or climate change - might be able to be affected still. There are a number of conditions that would be required - and the biggest one is firm knowledge that it is human-created CO2 that is doing all the work. If there is any natural system at work as well, there is nothing that could be done about it.
So how do we, as a planet, turn things around? Well, for starters we assemble the "eco-minded" and start destroying coal-fired power plants. The theory being that for each one destroyed a million or so people get to live longer. Whether or not that is true is a real question that we do not have an answer for - but it is taken as certain fact by the eco-minded apparently.
Moving on, we start demolishing (one way or another) bridges leading to major cities. If the roads no longer go into the city then the only alternative is mass transit rail. So when cars are less useful they will be used less. It would also be good to cease all passenger air travel. Freight might be needed but nobody needs to fly to Disneyland when they can take the train instead. Or just stay home.
The would probably best be done as a worldwide effort but it could certainly be done by a smaller band roving from country to country. Yes, there is quite a bit of destruction here that would require some supporting infrastructure, like a lot of explosives, but not beyond the means of folks like Mr. Gore. Would he personally support a group hell-bent on blowing up power plants in the US? Probably not, but there are rich people that would be happy to support such an endeavor when it is explaned to them that this is the only way to save humanity and the very planet itself.
Of course, if you do not believe in the idea that humans are destroying the planet, such direct action might see a little bit over the top. Even if you think that climate change is something that humans have 100% control over, you might not think that such drastic measures are really needed. Well, so far from what I have seen, nobody seems to be all that convinced - even Mr. Gore.
I suspect their policy is quite intentional. If they meant that derivative works would only be used for searching and indexing and display of information based on searching and indexing they might have said so. Since they didn't and didn't in quite a volumnous manner, it shouldn't take much effort to see that it is intentional.
This means if you put a picture up there that they like, they can use it in whatever way strikes their fancy. A document describing some novel concept can show up the next week as a Google patent application. A manuscript can show up being offered through Google Books.
After all, isn't the cloud all about sharing and openness?
Without screening, there is no liability insurance for the airlines.
Without liability insurance the airlines will not fly the plane.
This was pretty much settled in the 1970s when the whole security screening process got started to eliminate handguns and grenades from airplanes. A few airlines were slow to pick up on their new responsibility and learned from their insurance carriers they did not have a choice.
Sorry, but you are 40 years too late to deal with the screening issue. The only possible question is who is doing it, and again I think the insurance is going to dictate that the government must do it because the airlines were "lax" in allowing 9/11 to happen. So, no government screening = no flying.
There is no big fat insurance carrier for the airport. Blow up 100 people and the airport would simply shug and say their insurance doesn't cover that. Since most airports are attached to the municipality, there is literally nobody to sue. Sort of loses the impact.
Contrast this with an airliner where the surviving families each sue for 10 million each. And the insurance makes a big deal about it. The case goes on and on in the press until finally a settlement is made 20 years later. An airliner crash is a gift that keeps on giving in terms of publicity.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect if the Fearless Leader of Kodak went on international TV and made a speech about how they were going to wipe "Fuji off the map" to eliminate their problems, someone might have wondered if they really needed that nuclear device. As it is, Iran is likely to get a lot closer to being able to eliminate their Israeli problem once and for all and settle the Palestinian issue - unless of course Israel decides that the survival of their population trumps getting brownie points in the international debating society.
My guess is Iran will get closer and then take a major hit from Israel. The US will do nothing except claim (still) that the sanctions are working.
Extreme precision is the key to automated driving vehicles, so without that you can forget letting the car drive itself.
And probably the best use of a self-driving vehicle is in the middle of nowhere on a limited-access freeway (i.e., an Interstate highway). If you limit the precision of GPS then forget about letting the car drive through Nebraska.
"International search warrant"? What's that? You mean there is a single uniform set of laws the govern the entire world? Naa, I didn't think that was what you meant because there isn't any such thing.
What we have is a clearly rogue state which is allowing anyone residing within their borders to do ... well, anything they want, without any sort of control, knowledge or anything else.
There are plenty of documented situations where (a) mass murderer gets caught, (b) is sent to Yemen to be imprisoned for life, (c) is given "house arrest" and (d) walks away from house. It is like suggesting to the government of Somalia that they crack down on pirates - the pirates are operating as part of the government.
Sorry, but you are asking for something that can be called the "everyone should be at the top" problem. Yes, it would be nice if everyone could understand science, scientific methods and what constitutes the difference between one result and a confirmed, peer-reviewed body of research.
It isn't going to happen that way.
What we need is to stop publishing unconfirmed, preliminary results in popular media. That by itself solves 90% of the problem. So who gets to decide when something is ready for 60 Minutes, Fox and Friends in the Morning or the Today Show? I don't know, but I know it isn't the news media and it should not be the original team reporting some unconfirmed results. Just a rule that says nothing gets copied out of scientific journals until it is marked as having been confirmed by at least one independent team would go a long, long way.
Take for instance an electric iron. It might just be clogged up from hard water deposits that could be removed with some solution like CLR or LimeAway. The problem is, in order to get to the parts that are clogged you have to deal with sonic welding, adhesives and fasteners that were designed to be one-way. The only way to disassemble the unit is to break it and glue it back together, which is not very elegant nor safe when dealing with mains current plus heating elements.
Same thing goes for about 90% of small electric appliances today. They are not designed to be repairable.
Most of this is not so much cultural as others have pointed out but it all comes down to the cost of labor. At one time in the US decorative scrollwork in homes was hand-carved. The craftsman doing the work made maybe $0.25 a day which for the time wasn't all that bad but it was by no means extravagant. It would be comparable to what any common laborer would get paid or someone clerking in a store.
Today, to have someone skilled in wood carving come to your home and do some work would be easily $200 an hour. An experienced technician wouldn't be getting that individually, but you can figure a company in the business of appliance repair is going to be charging at least $100 an hour. Which makes a $30 electric iron absurd to even consider repairing - it would cost $30 for someone to spend 20 minutes on it. Even larger appliances begin to reach the point where it makes no sense to repair them simply because of the cost of labor. Why spend $200 to fix a washing machine that cost $250 to replace?
Where things get really confused is in the 1800s and early 1900s the US saw significant immigration from Europe of craftsmen and skilled workers. Someone that spent 20 years making fine furniture would come to the US and could find immediate work basically doing the same sort of thing for at least as much money if not more. Today, we have huge low-skill immigration which skews the wage scale in interesting ways. In some parts of the country it is cheaper to hire more people (immigrant labor) using hand tools to do a job than it is to use power tools or other modern assists with fewer people. This only works in low-skill areas, though. If the US had a huge number of immigrants coming in that were skilled electronics technicians or computer programmers it would be quite different.
What we have now is it is cheaper to hire five people to use hand tools to do landscaping work than one person with a power mower. But it is also cheaper to replace a $800 TV than it is to bring it to a technician to look at it because his labor is incredibly expensive. The US today is a confused mess of labor rates that will end up sorting itself out in the end, but likely as not things will shift to the low end of the scale.
From a considerable amount of contact with folks investigating child porn cases - people that are working on seized computers and media - I cannot believe there has ever been a federal case filed based solely on the content of the browser cache. This would not show any intent whatsoever, which is critical. Such a case would be tossed out very quickly and the defense would be gloating very publicly about their "win".
Now, if you save a picture on a DVD you have just shown intent. And I hear plenty about those cases considering the business I am in.
THIS IS NOT A DECISION. At most it is an affirmation.
I am not aware of any jurisdiction that will prosecute someone for the contents of their browser cache. Every law enforcement organization that I have had contact with (quite a number ...) has confirmed this. If someone's computer is being examined and all they find are images in the browser cache, prosecution does not go forward. Period.
The number of people that believe they can be prosecuted on the basis of their browser cache is incredible nonetheless. I have never heard of such a case and doubt there has ever been such a prosecution. There are huge problems with such a thing, starting with there not being any indication of intent.
So again, this is not a "decision". There is no jurisdiction in the US and unlikely to be one outside the US where such a prosecution has ever taken place. Only a complete fool of a prosecutor would even file a case based on browser cache alone as there are a large number of defenses that would certainly be used.
Sorry, but once that phrase was co-opted by the enviro-wackos to mean that all chemicals were bad it should have been clear that things were going to take a turn for the worse. Today it is clear to everyone that "chemicals" are bad. Nearly everyone does not understand that "chemicals" are things that are present in the heavily filtered water you are drinking, the nice organic food you are eating and in the very air you are breathing. Most people think you can filter out all the "chemicals" and that if you do not, you aren't safe.
This has been going on since the 1970s and with 40 years of it behind us there is almost nothing anyone is going to be able to do to stop it.
We have politicians that believe this or at least profess to agree with their constituents who believe it. Laws are being made to accomodate these beliefs.
The biggest "bug exploited" is allowing unqualified people to install random software on a computer. This means that anything can be installed if it promises some kind of result - install this for a bigger dick, etc. You don't think there are things out there like that today?
Unfortunately, the direction you seem to be going towards is the licensing of software developers and requiring huge liability insurance policies. There is also the problem of where the blame lies - it is an exploit in Quickbooks that it will display a bank account number so a user can give it out over the phone? Or is this a user error? How about the encryption of data to prevent the user from gaining access to it without the proper credentials? If the user installs a product and misuses it - with the result being they lose all the money in their bank account - how does anyone assign blame?
If you compare this with civil engineering it is very simple - in order to build a program you need a license and a huge insurance policy. If you have lots of experience and are generally successful the insurance policy isn't very expensive but for a beginner it is very expensive. This would make it a lot simpler for the courts - if someone falls out a window of a 15 storey building, the engineer that signed off on the windows is to blame pretty much no matter what the user did. Could we really live with that in the world of software?
Why do poor areas have more crime than more affluent ones? Simple: taxes pay police and when there are low, low, low property taxes there is less police activity. Also, affluent areas have alarms, guard dogs, and people that feel they have something to protect. Poor areas have people that think (wrongly) they can't lose anything because they have nothing.
Of course, when a poor person discovers much to their suprise that someone will hold them at knifepoint for $1.46 in change they suddenly realize they might actually have something to lose.
Also, a lot of businesses cater specifically to cash transactions in less affluent areas. Think corner liquor stores - lots of cash in the register, not much in the way of security. Compare this to a well-lighted busy store in a strip mall with a working video system and you can understand why the corner liquor store is the one robbed every week whereas the strip mall location has never had a problem.
It has nothing to do with people's mindset about their being poor. It is all about grabbing something that they want, someone else has and can be made to give it up. It is well known among criminals today that few crimes actually result in jail time. You have much less than a 10% chance of going to jail today no matter what you do. That means unless you are incredibly unlucky you can rob a store or a person four or five times without ever facing any sort of punishment. And to most people in a crime mindset this means they are blessed and can get away with anything forever. Sure, they might get caught after 20-30 crimes but after 10 they are feeling invincible.
This is the sort of attitude that permeates the computer industry today. This is why we have people building software that absolutely and faithfully recreates the problems that were solved in the 1960s and 1970s - the people doing the work have absolutely rejected the idea that there is anything to learn from the past. History is dead to them because they think everything they are doing is new and different. They think they are striking out in unknown territory when in fact they are just walking alongside the same path that was covered 40 years ago.
Today, many of the same problems that are encountered are simply recreations of things that happened before. A huge problem is file systems that do not have sufficient robustness to deal with unexpected outages and hardware errors. If you have a file system that fails if you shut the power off unexpectedly at the wrong time you have something that was designed from a blank piece of paper. This kind of problem was dealt with in the 1970s in several different environments but nobody working on recent file systems have any experience with those solutions. Mostly because "it is all new" is an attitude and considering anyone over the age of 40 to be outmoded and incapable of dealing with all this new stuff.
Got that right.
One good example is Cox in Phoenix. They have one of the most capable systems and most recently upgraded, at least according to subcontractors and employees I have talked to.
Their configuration is a fiber link from the head end to each neighborhood node. This link runs at 1-3GB with the newer ones at 3GB. It might be possible to run this link in the future at (maybe) 10GB but that would require a lot of new hardware at both ends. Connected to the node are either 500 or 1000 homes - they are splitting up the 1000-home nodes to make 500-home nodes, but that is as far as they are going. You can expect a lot of systems in the US to be running 1GB to the node and 1000 homes on the node.
A little simple division makes the problem pretty clear. Assuming there is no cable TV anymore on the head end to node link that means there is 3GB available to 500 homes in the best areas and in the oldest, slowest areas it is 1GB for 1000 homes. That is 6Mb/sec best case for every house or 1Mb/sec at the worst. There is no more capacity that that.
Oh, and the cable TV offerings are taking a pretty big slice of that bandwidth today, so it is far more likely that even in the best areas there is a max of 1Mb/sec to 500 homes - if they are all using it. For the last five years or so it has worked wonderfully because 1 in 10 (or more likely 50) homes was using any sort of streaming IPTV service. So instead of 1Mb/sec per home it worked out to be more like 10Mb/sec for the homes using it. The rest? Just email and web surfing. Now, you move 50% of the homes to trying to use IPTV services and the whole system collapses - the bandwidth simply isn't there. And, it is unlikely that it will be any time soon. The last time the cable systems were upgraded it took about 10 years from start to end. Maybe if we are lucky by 2020 we could have guaranteed 20Mb/sec to every home on the cable system which would require a 100GB fiber link from the node to the head end. I don't know about you, but I don't think there is any 100GB link that goes any distance.
Maybe what is required is a separate fiber run from every house to the head end. Yeah, that would work. You can get that today if you don't mind spending about $3K a month and I don't think it is going to get a lot cheaper any time soon.
OK, let's say you work out a deal with a McDonalds to sell you hamburgers at half price as long as you buy 100 at a time. So you set up a stand across from the McDonalds and start selling hamburgers cheaper than McDonalds does. You have incredible sales for the first week or so.
Of course, based on that you get a couple of friends to loan you money to expand your business and start trying to negotiate a similar deal with a different McDonalds across town.
How long do you really think it is going to take McDonalds to figure out they are supplying you with hamburgers that you are using to take their customers away from them? Does this really sound like a viable business model?
The cable (and DSL) Internet providers are waking up to the fact that they are supplying a service which is being used to take their customers away from them. Why should Comcast supply a service that is used to get people to drop their cable TV subscription? It is like the phone company supplying DSL service so their customers can drop the phone service and go with Vonage. You can say the cable TV service should be independent of the cable Internet service all you want, but the truth is that one has subsidized the other since the beginning. For DSL the service wouldn't even exist without the driver of phone landline service to begin with. We are starting to see the fallout of this. Certainly the cable companies are realizing they are assisting in the cannibalization of their own customer base - and they are going to stop doing that, one way or another. Hulu is just the beginning.
They tried that trick in the US - forcing the owners of the copper to provide access below cost. It worked for about a year.
Technology marches on, however. DSL depends on a copper line from the CO to the home and new areas were being built with a fiber line to a neighborhood node and copper from there to the home. There was no place to put multiple competing DSLAM boxes at the neighborhood node and the legislation never envisioned such a thing so new neighborhoods had either no DSL or DSL only from the local line provider.
Today I don't think there are any more competing DSL providers because they have simply been edged out of the market. The telecom companies that were forced to provide access are still forced to provide access - except technology-wise there isn't any place to do that today. Except in old neighborhoods with copper to the CO. And there simply isn't enough revenue there.
Oh, and having to provide access below cost made the telecom companies neglect maintenance so the service got really bad. Forcing companies to do things where they lose money always results in the company finding some way to stop doing it. Or going out of business.
Hulu was meant to be an accessory - missed a show? Then watch on the Internet. But otherwise, stick with the broadcast version because it is higher quality and timelier.
Hulu might make a profit on its operation, but certainly not enough to justify potential cannibalization of the main revenue stream. And what they are seeing is exactly that, cannibalization of the primary revenue stream. Figure out a way to get that much revenue from Hulu and you could be the next media champ. Problem is, really smart people have looked at this and figured out there really isn't a way to get that much out of something like Hulu.
To do something like this would require a fairly significant capital outlay, but it would certainly be profitable.
Why would it be profitable? The problem here is that people aren't going to pay, period. No service is going to swoop in and snatch away the customers because the first thing any investor is going to look at is how is this service going to make money. Subscriptions? Nope. Ads? No revenue there. Pay-per-view? Nope, not going to fly.
End result is you might get some .com-era type financing for a short while but sooner or later reality will intrude. No revenue means no service and until someone can prove their model will work no investor is going to take the risk of putting money up for a business model that says "we'll figure out how to get paid when the money runs out." That worked in 1998 but it isn't working so well today.
As far as ad revenue is concerned, it keeps dropping and ads are worth less and less. Partly this is driven by there being a small number of ad "vendors" with Google now controlling the bulk of Internet advertising. The problem with any sort of IPTV ad is there is no good way to sort out the geography or demographics so you can't do "local" advertising and it is very difficult to split ads up by demographics, viewing time or anything else. So all you have are ads for the masses that are nationwide if not worldwide. Difficult ad market to serve when you don't know anything about your viewers. Broadcast TV solved this problem a long time ago but there may not be any good way to deal with this for IPTV.
So no, I don't think there is going to be any real solution for this. The content is just going to go away. We will have a huge number of providers offering the same old shows from 1950-1990. Endlessly.
I'd say the media companies "get it" pretty well. They know nobody is interested in a pay-for service on the Internet. Hulu Plus is more or less a dead end on portable devices and IPTV devices like Roku. So where exactly are people going to pay?
$4 a episode on Amazon or iTunes? Probably not.
Lots and lots of ads? Ad revenue keeps going down.
The cable subscription might be one thing that people would pay for that could be counted on. Only problem is, people are figuring out they can get the same materials without paying for them and free always wins out in the end.
No company is ever going to "get" the idea that they can exist without getting paid. No revenue pretty much means no company, no content, nothing. We are left with unbelievably crappy ego-driven self-produced stuff on YouTube and B&W shows from the 1950s.
I strongly suggest if you believe as you seem to that you get 10 of your bestest buddies together and shut down and/or destroy a coal-fired power plant nearby. It would have a huge effect - not just on locally produced CO2 but on the entire planet knowing that there are people that feel strongly enough about this issue to actually risk their lives, honor and freedom to do something about it.
So far, nobody has come forwarded. Nobody. Now, we are certainly living in an age where it is beyond most people's comprehension to do things as were done a few hundred years ago. The America Revolution was started and maintained by people that knew they might be killed for simply stating their beliefs and these folks were willing to start a war. In Scotland people were risking their lives and their families lives by revolting against the English King for 400 years. The few examples lately I can think of are people smuggling weapons into Palestine and a Greenpeace ship attacking the French Navy.
So far, nobody has stepped forward on the climate change front. I am pretty sure nobody has convictions that are that strong.
Except there is a choice: some hugely efficient storage mechanism or just turning stuff off at night.
So far, there is no hugely efficient storage mechanism. Pumped water works, but not on the kind of scale that would be needed. Thermal storage sort of works, but nobody has ever tried it on a large scale, not to mention a huge scale (as in nationwide). Batteries do not work, flywheels do not work, and neither do any other "conventional" energy storage technique.
Solar remains a supplement until storage problems are solved - and it is important to understand that they may never be solved in an adequate manner. It is certainly going to be cheaper and more efficient to run a nuclear plant that implement some type of storage technique that has losses above 25%. Can you imagine what the effects of using lead-acid batteries to power the nation at night would be?
Surely you jest! This is the Internet age of development where most of the bleeding-edge companies doing software development have completely bought into a agile development model where the requirements are "flexible" - usually so flexible that the development group is operating with a completely different set of requirements than the analyst or program manager. End result is you have something that works at the end but nobody quite knows what it is supposed to do only what it does do now.
Probably one of the funniest tales of software development is how FaceBook actually operates. I suspect much of Google is run the same way, only the search engine is probably overseen rather strictly. The rest? I suspect you could ask three people and get four different descriptions of what a particular product's requirements were today and if they were actually being implemented.
How do you think Android can have two separate email programs (one for Gmail and one for everything else) and the two apps have wildly divergent sets of options and default settings? This stuff just sneaks in, obviously. Did you really think there was a specification?
I don't think there is time for any thinking about things like compliance, export control or third party copyright considerations in any place that is trying to keep up with the Internet today and operating an agile development environment. These considerations are thought to have died in the 1970s.
The problem is that if you look closely at the average human they are far more interested in a genetic makeup that would allow for drunkenness without hangovers or an endless orgasmic orgy than eliminating cancer that might - might - affect them in 50 years.
What if those sorts of genetic modifications were able to be inherited? Are we ready for a sub-species of human that can more accurately described as "party animal"? How about not just grafted-on wings or a third arm (as some have already done), but real, grown wings - not enabling flight (humans are too heavy and changes to allow flight would be severe) but for decoration?
No, I do not see the widespread use of genetics for amateur productions to be a good thing. Nor do I see today's body modification proponents being the sort of people that I think should be the leading edge of humanity. I see humans having far more trivial interests short term and it is going to take a really long time for us to escape from short term thinking.
Global warming - or climate change - might be able to be affected still. There are a number of conditions that would be required - and the biggest one is firm knowledge that it is human-created CO2 that is doing all the work. If there is any natural system at work as well, there is nothing that could be done about it.
So how do we, as a planet, turn things around? Well, for starters we assemble the "eco-minded" and start destroying coal-fired power plants. The theory being that for each one destroyed a million or so people get to live longer. Whether or not that is true is a real question that we do not have an answer for - but it is taken as certain fact by the eco-minded apparently.
Moving on, we start demolishing (one way or another) bridges leading to major cities. If the roads no longer go into the city then the only alternative is mass transit rail. So when cars are less useful they will be used less. It would also be good to cease all passenger air travel. Freight might be needed but nobody needs to fly to Disneyland when they can take the train instead. Or just stay home.
The would probably best be done as a worldwide effort but it could certainly be done by a smaller band roving from country to country. Yes, there is quite a bit of destruction here that would require some supporting infrastructure, like a lot of explosives, but not beyond the means of folks like Mr. Gore. Would he personally support a group hell-bent on blowing up power plants in the US? Probably not, but there are rich people that would be happy to support such an endeavor when it is explaned to them that this is the only way to save humanity and the very planet itself.
Of course, if you do not believe in the idea that humans are destroying the planet, such direct action might see a little bit over the top. Even if you think that climate change is something that humans have 100% control over, you might not think that such drastic measures are really needed. Well, so far from what I have seen, nobody seems to be all that convinced - even Mr. Gore.
I suspect their policy is quite intentional. If they meant that derivative works would only be used for searching and indexing and display of information based on searching and indexing they might have said so. Since they didn't and didn't in quite a volumnous manner, it shouldn't take much effort to see that it is intentional.
This means if you put a picture up there that they like, they can use it in whatever way strikes their fancy. A document describing some novel concept can show up the next week as a Google patent application. A manuscript can show up being offered through Google Books.
After all, isn't the cloud all about sharing and openness?
The problem is:
This was pretty much settled in the 1970s when the whole security screening process got started to eliminate handguns and grenades from airplanes. A few airlines were slow to pick up on their new responsibility and learned from their insurance carriers they did not have a choice.
Sorry, but you are 40 years too late to deal with the screening issue. The only possible question is who is doing it, and again I think the insurance is going to dictate that the government must do it because the airlines were "lax" in allowing 9/11 to happen. So, no government screening = no flying.
There is no big fat insurance carrier for the airport. Blow up 100 people and the airport would simply shug and say their insurance doesn't cover that. Since most airports are attached to the municipality, there is literally nobody to sue. Sort of loses the impact.
Contrast this with an airliner where the surviving families each sue for 10 million each. And the insurance makes a big deal about it. The case goes on and on in the press until finally a settlement is made 20 years later. An airliner crash is a gift that keeps on giving in terms of publicity.