This is exactly the attitude that leads to crap like this. FOAD. Yeah, sure. They'll show you.
Today, DRM isn't that effective and isn't that obtrusive - there are ways around it but it does discourage some folks. Should this attitude persist, do you want to see what comes next?
Today DRM is seriously hampered by the "general purpose" nature of the home computer. We are clearly approaching the crossroads where either applications for this general-purpose environment are easy to use and reliable or they are not. They are not today - there is no argument about that. If they don't get much, much better and soon we will see locked-down unmodifable "appliances" for reading email, browsing store web pages and watching Google videos. Oh want to add some new application? Sorry, that's the next generation.
How do you make something like this secure? Forget flash upgrade - masked ROM only. It gets tested and a new version comes out once a year or so. No disk. No programs from R/W memory. A giant leap forward in security but someting like this would be have the last word in DRM.
Wise up. Everything can be free for just so long. It isn't going to be just regulation of the Internet, but regulation of your lives that will be at stake.
Google is a multinational company. Assuming they owe any alligence to the US is a mistake. If they can profit by assisting anti-US forces, they are certainly going to do exactly that.
Also, with a significant number of their employees in the US, it is currently fashionable to assume the US is wrong, especially in areas like that around San Francisco. Therefore, it is unlikely that such employees would want to be caught assisting US forces in any way. If it gets a few soldiers killed, isn't that what they are there for? If you have trouble following this, I suggest reading some more at www.dailykos.com.
Now assuming the US could suggest to Google (or any other commercial entity) that they might foresake a few profits so some soldiers aren't killed would seem perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, this would probably raise all sorts of questions about the motives of such a request. What is the Government hiding and all of that. So, no such request - however reasonable - is going to be made.
We are in a new age and we might as well get used to it. The people want their MTV and 500 movie channels. Soldiers and war aren't part of the MTV age. We have proven to the world that the US has no stomach for anything except quick raids - a protracted conflict is always going to be a disaster. When the military and administration fully internalize this, the shape of the military will change so that only "quick raids" are possible. It is the only reasonable solution at this point.
Most people buy content because it isn't easier (and cheaper) to get it any other way. If it is just as easy to download a perfect copy - not some crappy camcorder recording from a movie theater - they will download it.
Yes, DRM is likely to be a failure. But the result isn't going to be "free entertainment for everyone" - the result will be no digital distribution of entertainment. Period. How is a company supposed to make a profit when they sell one copy in one place on the planet? Answer is, they aren't going to make a profit. Investors are watching this pretty closely and companies aren't going to get started unless an investor says "Go for it!"
New business model based on advertising? Do you want your DVD with 33% commercials? I don't think so.
New business model based on rich people paying and the rest getting a free ride? Possible, but unlikely.
New business model based on government-supported entertainment or rich people-supported entertainment? Again, possible but unlikely to work in the US. Maybe Europe.
I see movie studios giving up on DVDs, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray DVDs and everything else before they will give them away. Maybe there will still be music videos (which are really just ads for the music) but as broadband penetration increases and P2P sharing is uncontrolled, what choice do they have?
Xeroxing a book is HARD. It takes time and considerable manual effort. It also pretty much requires trashing the original book.
What the MPAA and similar folks would like to prevent is it being EASY to copy their stuff. So easy that it is simpler to borrow a disc from a friend, copy it and never, ever buy it. Even better when you can "borrow" a disc from someone half a planet away that you have never met and get a 100% perfect copy.
Mostly because of simple greed, selfishness and stupidity digital entertainment media is going to become obsolete. Nobody can afford to sell one copy - unless it is chock full of advertisements that someone else is paying for. At that point, nobody would want it anyway.
WW II involved genocide because of racial and religious views, so it isn't just ancient tribes. Justifying genocide with religion goes on every day - look at Sudan.
Has nothing to do with education. Today, most power comes from mental ability, in one form or another. Even to some extent professional sports players.
If you don't have it, you lose. It can't be educated into you and you can't go to a training program to get it.
100 years ago you worked in a factory and made a decent living. Where do you go today?
These days it would make far more sense to go and sit in a Indian Casino (they are just about everywhere) and put $5 in to a slot machine. Your chances of winning a jackpot are not all that bad, at least when compared with winning a state lottery.
OK, there is the (pick a liberal) solution: take money through taxation and give it back to people as a government handout. There are a number of problems with that approach, probably the biggest one is that it fosters dependence on the government as the supplier of all that is good in life.
While some might argue that that is what government should be, it doesn't work very well. So while concentrating power in the hands of a few is bad, concentrating power in the hands of the government (or unelected bureaucracy) is provably worse.
Most of what we are seeing today is a direct outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution where the concept of one man working produced one man's work output was negated. One man with a machine suddenly became capable of producing much more than a different man with hand tools. And the machines cost money, lots of money. This leads directly to Marx, with the idea that the workers should own the maans of production rather than the factory owner that figured out how to get the money for the machines.
Today, many of us are "factory owners" - we own a computer that is a more powerful machine than anything dreamed of in 1850. This machine can produce wealth, but only with skills to operate it. The unskilled are in an extremely bad position because now we don't need hundreds of unskilled laborers in our "factory" to make money with our machines.
We don't need them and they have few choices because the skills we are talking about are not the result of rote learning and hands-on training. They are available to a few that are genetically predisposed to be able to manipulate symbols and logic in particular ways. If you don't have that ability, you aren't going to be able to be an effective person with a computer.
Today we have the workforce which is perfectly suited for 1850's factory work. They have been trained by an education system and society to expect that role and wonder why it isn't available. After all, for generations their parents were able to do this. Where is the work? Unfortunately, in the US is isn't here and it isn't likely to come back. Not only is it not cost effective, given the cost of living in the US, but it simply isn't required any longer in most cases. We have grown past the point where hundreds of workers are required - now it only takes on with special skills to sit in the office and use the computer which controls the machinees.
Where do these people go and what do we do with them? That is a very good question, and one that nobody wants to answer.
I can't imagine anyone is suing downloaders. Uploading? Contributing to the spread of illicitly redistributed movies? Yes, absolutely those people are going to get sued.
Oh, BitTorrent makes everyone an uploader as well as a downloader? Too bad, that.
Yes, I would fire anyone downloading material that is a violation of copyright, especially if it was done on company hardware with company data links. Fake? So what - the intent was there.
I know this is a difficult concept to get your head around, but there are some people that do not download music. There are some people that do not have access to the Internet for entertainment.
The question for this band is "Can you live without these people?" If the answer is yes, then they are headed in the right direction.
So far, the answer has been a resounding "No way".
Good luck with getting the creditor to accept this. If they don't, you haven't paid. Also, good luck with getting a bank to want to get in the middle of some disagreement as a third party.
Now, if you owe the money to the bank or the creditor does, then maybe they aren't really a third party and have some interest in this. In that case the bank might even help push the creditor to accept such an escrow deal.
What the ISPs are selling you is not 100% dedicated 8Mb/256k ADSL. They are selling you perhaps 5% usage of that bandwidth, maybe less. It's called "bursting" and it enables them to sell a great number of customers something and most of them will never even reach the 5% utilization mark. At least is was that way in 2002.
Along comes content. Downloadable (legal) movies. Music. Streaming video. YouTube. And so on and so forth. This pretty much has pushed the utilization for some users way past the 5% mark, or whatever they were actually selling.
So, there are relatively few choices. They can have angry customers that aren't getting the service they think they should have - like you. Or, they can upgrade the entire physical plant to accomodate 20x the level of service they were capable of providing. Only that costs money. They can charge their customers 10x their current bill, which will put the home user on the same billing level as they charge business customers today, or they can find some other way to pay for it.
Government subsidy is probably out of the question. It isn't a priority and nobody understands.
So, they can charge the folks with billions of dollars to spend. This sounds a lot better to the consumer because they aren't seeing the bill. But the ad-supported businesses aren't in favor of that idea. They want the relatively free ride they have now to continue. And they want millions of ad-readers to continue reading the ads they are showing.
Yes, we can have laws that keep the ISPs from charging for access to consumers and ad-readers. But the result will be in the end we are all paying lots more directly to the ISP. Of course, we're going to end up paying more for goods and services because the ads cost more anyway, so it may not matter in the end. But it is going to feel a lot nicer to people to have a $25 ISP bill rather than a $100-150 ISP bill.
You mention 50W, 8-10KW and then 550W. So which is it?
At 50W, solar makes some sense because a larger array can charge batteries with minimal sunlight in a few hours and the batteries can last for days at a 50W draw.
At 8-10KW trying to do this with solar will be quite expensive and the batteries to run this load at night will be nothing but astonishing. Yes, take your 550W array and multiply the cost 16x. Then add a bunch more for 80KWH worth of batteries to run it at night. Then look for the 50ft semi-trailer to haul this stuff around.
550W with the batteries is only a medium size proposition. Yes, the array is going to be pricey and do not forget the batteries for at least 24 hours without sunlight. But the price for going solar will be amortized over a long, long period of fuel costs for a generator. If this is really something that is only seldom used you are talking about literally zero fuel costs most of the time. This means you are paying a premium to be free of the fuel requirements rather than just countering fuel costs.
I would think about this a long time before spending 5-10x what you might need for a properly sized generator and a fairly minimal amount of fuel to keep it running.
Writing software today is in some ways comparable to sword making in about 800AD. Lots of people want to do it, some actually know how and fewer still know the right way. Doing wrong can get people (and projects) killed, but still there are a lot of folks doing it that just barely know how.
Things didn't really get better until the whole process was "industralized", probably closer to 1400AD.
Software development beyond just mathematical processes is only perhaps 50 years old. Software development as any real sort of "engineering" is maybe 20 years old, if that. Call back in 100 years and maybe, just maybe, there will be as much progress as there was between 800AD and 1400AD in sword making.
OK, really now. You don't actually believe any of that, do you?
Given that Open Source development would be completely outside of the conspiracy to make things harder, any Open Source development should be orders of magnitude simpler than writing something for Windows. The APIs would be simple, clear and well documented. Everything would be much simpler because it could be and nobody would be pushing back to make it more complex.
Unless of course Richard Stallman and Linus had been somehow bought and subverted. Yes, that would explain it - obviously Open Source development is just as polluted by greedy CIOs to make it more complex because... well, otherwise it would be simple. Right?
The issue in the US has primarily grown up in the last 40-50 years or so. In 1950 all of major centers of employment were in large factories in industrial sections of cities and in offices in the center. For a number of reasons, the industrial sections are gone or no longer employ large numbers of people. The city centers are almost gone with most businesses having moved out to suburban locations.
In 1950 there was a high likelyhood that 10 people in a suburban housing area were all going to either an industrial center or the city center. Such a high likelyhood that it was practical to run buses to take people to trains which then went to industrial sections and city centers. Transportation problem solved.
Unfortunately, things have changed. Now, with the wider dispersion of offices in suburban locations and no more large industrial employers, there is no likelyhood whatsoever that people will be going to the same place. They are going to many different places. This is true in almost every US city today.
This was a result of taxation, city planning, real estate values and urban crime. It might not be too late to change it back, but it will probably take 40-50 years to do so. And I do not see anyone motivated to do so.
One big problem is that to sell an EV-1 in the State of California would require a huge sticker on it that says it is made from materials that are known to cause cancer. Privately disposing of an EV-1 is illegal in every state. It contains toxic materials and in no way did GM get any kind of federal waiver on this.
From what I understand they were allowed to market the car on the condition that it was leased and never sold and GM was eternally responsible for proper disposal of the cars. So you couldn't buy one at any price.
We have yet to see what happens when hybrid vehicle batteries start turning up in auto junkyards. It hasn't happened much yet, and I know of no cases where this has been an issue, possibly because the manufacturers quietly "recycle" the cars that are totaled in accidents. I do know you do not want to put a Li-ion battery into a car crusher.
Of course it is a problem. But you wouldn't want to scare people, would you?
Today, the "other" use is to send spam. Lots and lots of spam - 10x more than a year ago or so. But the Eastern European protection racket is still there and these people are still getting paid off.
The concept of "publishing" on the Internet is restricted, regulated and can only be done by duely authorized people. The result is the 1955 version of the New York Times.
People give up and realize there is nothing that is special, private or reserved any longer.
Today, I can record anything - anything at all - and post it on the Internet. If it is salacious or titilating, it will be redistributed. It seems to be the common belief if most posters that it is then impossible to take down or suppress.
Therefore, if I put a camera in a public toliet and make the recordings freely available (instead of charging for them as is done today), you can't sue me, you can't take it down and you can't suppress it. Ask yourself and the nearest female near you if this is a good thing.
Why isn't this happening today? It is - but most of the really raunchy stuff is too good to give away so it is charged for and restricted in ways that make redistribution difficult. It will absolutely begin happening unless we stop it. And believe me, everyone should want to stop it. Unless they never use the bathroom, have sex or do anything embarrassing.
The problem is there is a lot of money being made on the Internet. And, most of it isn't going to the carriers but they get to build out capacity.
Sure, you can say that is there job. But what we have been seeing is competitive pricing in an effort to gain market share. OK, so Comcast has market share now. What are they going to do with it? The simple answer isn't raise prices as would be true in many other situations. However, to support their build-out and low prices they are certainly going to look for revenue from other sources.
Charging high-volume feeds to their system is one way. It isn't necessarily the most obvious or clear-cut way but it gets around that nasty problem of raising prices to the customer. Which would certainly have the effect of driving down usage and taking customers away from Google and others.
So, would you rather see Google pay or you pay yourself? Yes, you are likely going to be paying in any event because when Google has to pay they are going to charge more for ads which will then be passed on to everyone buying stuff advertised on Google.
I'm sure 9 out of 10 people would rather get hit with increased costs they cannot directly see rather than just having their Internet access bill jump by $5-$10 a month.
If we see the "death" of reliable POTS service in favor of Vonage (not tariffed as reliable at least), we are certainly going to see the telecommunications companies charging more for data links. Either that or just quietly go out of business when telephone service dies. This money is going to come from somewhere.
You get to choose - directly from your pocket or indirectly from your pocket.
In the US you are lucky if the automated system has time to talk to you. Normally you get rushed through because the automated system is busy and has more important things to do than talking with a customer with a problem - when the problem is almost certainly the customer's and not the bank's.
Face it, when the ATM machine encouraged banks to charge for teller vists and a couple tried it customer service at a bank was lost and isn't likely to reappear anytime soon. In Arizona they have tellers but many of them are minimum-wage barely-English-speaking folks that can't get a job at McDonalds. If you find a bank with people you can talk to, it has a line outside the door.
So disclosure is supposed to be the hammer over the vendor's head to "make" them fix it?
Well, what if they have difficulties or other reasons that make it unlikely they are going to fix it? In other words, what if they don't care about your hammer? Then disclosure just insures that it is out there to be used as a weapon against humanity at large.
Of course, this assumes that you (a) care about "humanity at large" and (b) might be caught in the destruction as well. You know, if you like actually used Windows or something like that. Since you probably don't and don't give a rats behind about the people that do, then I guess so what?
Sorry, IE is here to stay in Windows. Why? Because they dropped WinHelp and created the replacement as HTMLHelp. Can't render HTML without a browser, therefore you can't display help for the OS without IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, DRM isn't that effective and isn't that obtrusive - there are ways around it but it does discourage some folks. Should this attitude persist, do you want to see what comes next?
Today DRM is seriously hampered by the "general purpose" nature of the home computer. We are clearly approaching the crossroads where either applications for this general-purpose environment are easy to use and reliable or they are not. They are not today - there is no argument about that. If they don't get much, much better and soon we will see locked-down unmodifable "appliances" for reading email, browsing store web pages and watching Google videos. Oh want to add some new application? Sorry, that's the next generation.
How do you make something like this secure? Forget flash upgrade - masked ROM only. It gets tested and a new version comes out once a year or so. No disk. No programs from R/W memory. A giant leap forward in security but someting like this would be have the last word in DRM.
Wise up. Everything can be free for just so long. It isn't going to be just regulation of the Internet, but regulation of your lives that will be at stake.
Google is a multinational company. Assuming they owe any alligence to the US is a mistake. If they can profit by assisting anti-US forces, they are certainly going to do exactly that.
Also, with a significant number of their employees in the US, it is currently fashionable to assume the US is wrong, especially in areas like that around San Francisco. Therefore, it is unlikely that such employees would want to be caught assisting US forces in any way. If it gets a few soldiers killed, isn't that what they are there for? If you have trouble following this, I suggest reading some more at www.dailykos.com.
Now assuming the US could suggest to Google (or any other commercial entity) that they might foresake a few profits so some soldiers aren't killed would seem perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, this would probably raise all sorts of questions about the motives of such a request. What is the Government hiding and all of that. So, no such request - however reasonable - is going to be made.
We are in a new age and we might as well get used to it. The people want their MTV and 500 movie channels. Soldiers and war aren't part of the MTV age. We have proven to the world that the US has no stomach for anything except quick raids - a protracted conflict is always going to be a disaster. When the military and administration fully internalize this, the shape of the military will change so that only "quick raids" are possible. It is the only reasonable solution at this point.
How about
1. Download music for free
2. Put on your music device
3. See, no DRM
Music is free now. It will continue to be free until P2P is shut down completely and utterly. This is extremely unlikely.
If you purchase music you are supporting something that makes fools out of people. Only a fool pays for something that is free.
Most people buy content because it isn't easier (and cheaper) to get it any other way. If it is just as easy to download a perfect copy - not some crappy camcorder recording from a movie theater - they will download it.
Only a fool pays for what is free.
Yes, DRM is likely to be a failure. But the result isn't going to be "free entertainment for everyone" - the result will be no digital distribution of entertainment. Period. How is a company supposed to make a profit when they sell one copy in one place on the planet? Answer is, they aren't going to make a profit. Investors are watching this pretty closely and companies aren't going to get started unless an investor says "Go for it!"
New business model based on advertising? Do you want your DVD with 33% commercials? I don't think so.
New business model based on rich people paying and the rest getting a free ride? Possible, but unlikely.
New business model based on government-supported entertainment or rich people-supported entertainment? Again, possible but unlikely to work in the US. Maybe Europe.
I see movie studios giving up on DVDs, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray DVDs and everything else before they will give them away. Maybe there will still be music videos (which are really just ads for the music) but as broadband penetration increases and P2P sharing is uncontrolled, what choice do they have?
Xeroxing a book is HARD. It takes time and considerable manual effort. It also pretty much requires trashing the original book.
What the MPAA and similar folks would like to prevent is it being EASY to copy their stuff. So easy that it is simpler to borrow a disc from a friend, copy it and never, ever buy it. Even better when you can "borrow" a disc from someone half a planet away that you have never met and get a 100% perfect copy.
Mostly because of simple greed, selfishness and stupidity digital entertainment media is going to become obsolete. Nobody can afford to sell one copy - unless it is chock full of advertisements that someone else is paying for. At that point, nobody would want it anyway.
End of game. Sorry, you lose.
WW II involved genocide because of racial and religious views, so it isn't just ancient tribes. Justifying genocide with religion goes on every day - look at Sudan.
Has nothing to do with education. Today, most power comes from mental ability, in one form or another. Even to some extent professional sports players.
If you don't have it, you lose. It can't be educated into you and you can't go to a training program to get it.
100 years ago you worked in a factory and made a decent living. Where do you go today?
The lottery? Are you nuts?
These days it would make far more sense to go and sit in a Indian Casino (they are just about everywhere) and put $5 in to a slot machine. Your chances of winning a jackpot are not all that bad, at least when compared with winning a state lottery.
Nice, but ... then what?
OK, there is the (pick a liberal) solution: take money through taxation and give it back to people as a government handout. There are a number of problems with that approach, probably the biggest one is that it fosters dependence on the government as the supplier of all that is good in life.
While some might argue that that is what government should be, it doesn't work very well. So while concentrating power in the hands of a few is bad, concentrating power in the hands of the government (or unelected bureaucracy) is provably worse.
Most of what we are seeing today is a direct outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution where the concept of one man working produced one man's work output was negated. One man with a machine suddenly became capable of producing much more than a different man with hand tools. And the machines cost money, lots of money. This leads directly to Marx, with the idea that the workers should own the maans of production rather than the factory owner that figured out how to get the money for the machines.
Today, many of us are "factory owners" - we own a computer that is a more powerful machine than anything dreamed of in 1850. This machine can produce wealth, but only with skills to operate it. The unskilled are in an extremely bad position because now we don't need hundreds of unskilled laborers in our "factory" to make money with our machines.
We don't need them and they have few choices because the skills we are talking about are not the result of rote learning and hands-on training. They are available to a few that are genetically predisposed to be able to manipulate symbols and logic in particular ways. If you don't have that ability, you aren't going to be able to be an effective person with a computer.
Today we have the workforce which is perfectly suited for 1850's factory work. They have been trained by an education system and society to expect that role and wonder why it isn't available. After all, for generations their parents were able to do this. Where is the work? Unfortunately, in the US is isn't here and it isn't likely to come back. Not only is it not cost effective, given the cost of living in the US, but it simply isn't required any longer in most cases. We have grown past the point where hundreds of workers are required - now it only takes on with special skills to sit in the office and use the computer which controls the machinees.
Where do these people go and what do we do with them? That is a very good question, and one that nobody wants to answer.
I can't imagine anyone is suing downloaders. Uploading? Contributing to the spread of illicitly redistributed movies? Yes, absolutely those people are going to get sued.
Oh, BitTorrent makes everyone an uploader as well as a downloader? Too bad, that.
Yes, I would fire anyone downloading material that is a violation of copyright, especially if it was done on company hardware with company data links. Fake? So what - the intent was there.
I know this is a difficult concept to get your head around, but there are some people that do not download music. There are some people that do not have access to the Internet for entertainment.
The question for this band is "Can you live without these people?" If the answer is yes, then they are headed in the right direction.
So far, the answer has been a resounding "No way".
Good luck with getting the creditor to accept this. If they don't, you haven't paid. Also, good luck with getting a bank to want to get in the middle of some disagreement as a third party.
Now, if you owe the money to the bank or the creditor does, then maybe they aren't really a third party and have some interest in this. In that case the bank might even help push the creditor to accept such an escrow deal.
Right. You don't understand.
What the ISPs are selling you is not 100% dedicated 8Mb/256k ADSL. They are selling you perhaps 5% usage of that bandwidth, maybe less. It's called "bursting" and it enables them to sell a great number of customers something and most of them will never even reach the 5% utilization mark. At least is was that way in 2002.
Along comes content. Downloadable (legal) movies. Music. Streaming video. YouTube. And so on and so forth. This pretty much has pushed the utilization for some users way past the 5% mark, or whatever they were actually selling.
So, there are relatively few choices. They can have angry customers that aren't getting the service they think they should have - like you. Or, they can upgrade the entire physical plant to accomodate 20x the level of service they were capable of providing. Only that costs money. They can charge their customers 10x their current bill, which will put the home user on the same billing level as they charge business customers today, or they can find some other way to pay for it.
Government subsidy is probably out of the question. It isn't a priority and nobody understands.
So, they can charge the folks with billions of dollars to spend. This sounds a lot better to the consumer because they aren't seeing the bill. But the ad-supported businesses aren't in favor of that idea. They want the relatively free ride they have now to continue. And they want millions of ad-readers to continue reading the ads they are showing.
Yes, we can have laws that keep the ISPs from charging for access to consumers and ad-readers. But the result will be in the end we are all paying lots more directly to the ISP. Of course, we're going to end up paying more for goods and services because the ads cost more anyway, so it may not matter in the end. But it is going to feel a lot nicer to people to have a $25 ISP bill rather than a $100-150 ISP bill.
You mention 50W, 8-10KW and then 550W. So which is it?
At 50W, solar makes some sense because a larger array can charge batteries with minimal sunlight in a few hours and the batteries can last for days at a 50W draw.
At 8-10KW trying to do this with solar will be quite expensive and the batteries to run this load at night will be nothing but astonishing. Yes, take your 550W array and multiply the cost 16x. Then add a bunch more for 80KWH worth of batteries to run it at night. Then look for the 50ft semi-trailer to haul this stuff around.
550W with the batteries is only a medium size proposition. Yes, the array is going to be pricey and do not forget the batteries for at least 24 hours without sunlight. But the price for going solar will be amortized over a long, long period of fuel costs for a generator. If this is really something that is only seldom used you are talking about literally zero fuel costs most of the time. This means you are paying a premium to be free of the fuel requirements rather than just countering fuel costs.
I would think about this a long time before spending 5-10x what you might need for a properly sized generator and a fairly minimal amount of fuel to keep it running.
Writing software today is in some ways comparable to sword making in about 800AD. Lots of people want to do it, some actually know how and fewer still know the right way. Doing wrong can get people (and projects) killed, but still there are a lot of folks doing it that just barely know how.
Things didn't really get better until the whole process was "industralized", probably closer to 1400AD.
Software development beyond just mathematical processes is only perhaps 50 years old. Software development as any real sort of "engineering" is maybe 20 years old, if that. Call back in 100 years and maybe, just maybe, there will be as much progress as there was between 800AD and 1400AD in sword making.
Very funny. Wow.
... well, otherwise it would be simple. Right?
OK, really now. You don't actually believe any of that, do you?
Given that Open Source development would be completely outside of the conspiracy to make things harder, any Open Source development should be orders of magnitude simpler than writing something for Windows. The APIs would be simple, clear and well documented. Everything would be much simpler because it could be and nobody would be pushing back to make it more complex.
Unless of course Richard Stallman and Linus had been somehow bought and subverted. Yes, that would explain it - obviously Open Source development is just as polluted by greedy CIOs to make it more complex because
The issue in the US has primarily grown up in the last 40-50 years or so. In 1950 all of major centers of employment were in large factories in industrial sections of cities and in offices in the center. For a number of reasons, the industrial sections are gone or no longer employ large numbers of people. The city centers are almost gone with most businesses having moved out to suburban locations.
In 1950 there was a high likelyhood that 10 people in a suburban housing area were all going to either an industrial center or the city center. Such a high likelyhood that it was practical to run buses to take people to trains which then went to industrial sections and city centers. Transportation problem solved.
Unfortunately, things have changed. Now, with the wider dispersion of offices in suburban locations and no more large industrial employers, there is no likelyhood whatsoever that people will be going to the same place. They are going to many different places. This is true in almost every US city today.
This was a result of taxation, city planning, real estate values and urban crime. It might not be too late to change it back, but it will probably take 40-50 years to do so. And I do not see anyone motivated to do so.
One big problem is that to sell an EV-1 in the State of California would require a huge sticker on it that says it is made from materials that are known to cause cancer. Privately disposing of an EV-1 is illegal in every state. It contains toxic materials and in no way did GM get any kind of federal waiver on this.
From what I understand they were allowed to market the car on the condition that it was leased and never sold and GM was eternally responsible for proper disposal of the cars. So you couldn't buy one at any price.
We have yet to see what happens when hybrid vehicle batteries start turning up in auto junkyards. It hasn't happened much yet, and I know of no cases where this has been an issue, possibly because the manufacturers quietly "recycle" the cars that are totaled in accidents. I do know you do not want to put a Li-ion battery into a car crusher.
Of course it is a problem. But you wouldn't want to scare people, would you?
Today, the "other" use is to send spam. Lots and lots of spam - 10x more than a year ago or so. But the Eastern European protection racket is still there and these people are still getting paid off.
Just another cost of business on the Internet.
Today, I can record anything - anything at all - and post it on the Internet. If it is salacious or titilating, it will be redistributed. It seems to be the common belief if most posters that it is then impossible to take down or suppress.
Therefore, if I put a camera in a public toliet and make the recordings freely available (instead of charging for them as is done today), you can't sue me, you can't take it down and you can't suppress it. Ask yourself and the nearest female near you if this is a good thing.
Why isn't this happening today? It is - but most of the really raunchy stuff is too good to give away so it is charged for and restricted in ways that make redistribution difficult. It will absolutely begin happening unless we stop it. And believe me, everyone should want to stop it. Unless they never use the bathroom, have sex or do anything embarrassing.
The problem is there is a lot of money being made on the Internet. And, most of it isn't going to the carriers but they get to build out capacity.
Sure, you can say that is there job. But what we have been seeing is competitive pricing in an effort to gain market share. OK, so Comcast has market share now. What are they going to do with it? The simple answer isn't raise prices as would be true in many other situations. However, to support their build-out and low prices they are certainly going to look for revenue from other sources.
Charging high-volume feeds to their system is one way. It isn't necessarily the most obvious or clear-cut way but it gets around that nasty problem of raising prices to the customer. Which would certainly have the effect of driving down usage and taking customers away from Google and others.
So, would you rather see Google pay or you pay yourself? Yes, you are likely going to be paying in any event because when Google has to pay they are going to charge more for ads which will then be passed on to everyone buying stuff advertised on Google.
I'm sure 9 out of 10 people would rather get hit with increased costs they cannot directly see rather than just having their Internet access bill jump by $5-$10 a month.
If we see the "death" of reliable POTS service in favor of Vonage (not tariffed as reliable at least), we are certainly going to see the telecommunications companies charging more for data links. Either that or just quietly go out of business when telephone service dies. This money is going to come from somewhere.
You get to choose - directly from your pocket or indirectly from your pocket.
Ah, personal service.
In the US you are lucky if the automated system has time to talk to you. Normally you get rushed through because the automated system is busy and has more important things to do than talking with a customer with a problem - when the problem is almost certainly the customer's and not the bank's.
Face it, when the ATM machine encouraged banks to charge for teller vists and a couple tried it customer service at a bank was lost and isn't likely to reappear anytime soon. In Arizona they have tellers but many of them are minimum-wage barely-English-speaking folks that can't get a job at McDonalds. If you find a bank with people you can talk to, it has a line outside the door.
So disclosure is supposed to be the hammer over the vendor's head to "make" them fix it?
Well, what if they have difficulties or other reasons that make it unlikely they are going to fix it? In other words, what if they don't care about your hammer? Then disclosure just insures that it is out there to be used as a weapon against humanity at large.
Of course, this assumes that you (a) care about "humanity at large" and (b) might be caught in the destruction as well. You know, if you like actually used Windows or something like that. Since you probably don't and don't give a rats behind about the people that do, then I guess so what?
Sorry, IE is here to stay in Windows. Why? Because they dropped WinHelp and created the replacement as HTMLHelp. Can't render HTML without a browser, therefore you can't display help for the OS without IE.