The reason the tax system isn't as simple as just taking a percentage of earnings is because anytime someone suggests such a thing it is met with howls of how it is "regressive" and what is needed is a "progressive" tax system. What that means, most people don't have a clue but it sounds nice.
The folks complaining about simplified tax systems are concerned because they think rich people should support poor people and people with high incomes can afford higher taxation so people with lower incomes can keep all their income. "Progressive" in this case is just a codeword for income redistribution - taking from those that have and giving it to those that have not.
What a simplified tax system would do is certainly put most accountants and tax lawyers out of business. And for the most part, they would gladly go. There is no "tax lobby" that tries to keep a complicated tax code. But there is a serious lobbying effort against any sort of "regressive" tax code that wouldn't redistribute income. Once you give in to the idea that you aren't going to have something all that simple, you get everyone coming out with their pet projects. The National Realtors Association fights for home mortgage deductions so more people can afford houses - supposedly. Education deductions help private schools and universities. Take away the deduction for being blind and people will howl that you are punishing blind people.
Yes, a much better system would be to take 10% or 15% of what everyone earns and leave it at that. The government would likely get more tax revenue this way, or from what I recall of previous studies, it would be at least neutral. Let the employers send it in so there is no more "tax season". But we aren't going to get there in any foreseeable future.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, many people live in an environment developed in the late middle ages known as a "city". Except for a few places in the US, there are few farmers, cows or other livestock in these "cities".
While the concept of a high-density pre-packaged form of humanity may seem obsolete and unnecessary in an age of "sustainable growth", if you check down the road a piece you will discover that there are still many, many people living in these cities. They do not have the option of locally grown food from local farmers.
Are you suggesting they just sit and starve? I suspect once this becomes known to them some few will decide to take matters into their own hands and come out of the city to avoid starving. If it is only a few, your well-armed USA farmer will likely be able to drive them away, at least down the road to the next farm. If it is a great many city-dwellers, you will find that the farms have become just like the cities, only dirtier.
A pre-emptive strike is recommended before the city-dwellers know what is coming. This is the path to sustainability.
I think this is an incredibly wrong attitude. The youth of the 1920s and 1930s were the ones that were excited by the possibilities of space exploration. They grew up with the beginnings of space oriented science fiction and this formed the basis for everyone from Chuck Yeager to Neil Armstrong.
Today's fantasys are shaped by authors which focus far more on dark gothic horror and sex. Look where we are today.
No, it isn't the youth that eventually mature into beliving in space exploration, it is the youth that push the rest of the stay-at-homes into investing in the future.
It is dangerous and foolhardy to place the future of the human race at the mercy of the planet Earth. And viewing the planet as a closed system, without access to off-world resources is equally short sighted. As someone else once said, Humanity is too valuable to place all our eggs in one basket.
Why isn't it the account holder's responsibility for whatever infringment has occurred? If Ms. Lindon's account with Verizon was being used, then it should be her problem.
Otherwise, you are claiming the account holder has no responsibility for the account usage. Something I think Verizon would dispute to the very end.
During the second world war, just before the Normandy Invasion, Allied reporters were briefed in FULL by Eisinowher (the then commanding C-in-C). He told them exactly when and where the invastion would happen, but told them it is their responsibility to keep it secret. The reporters cried "dirty pool", but kept their mouths shut UNTIL the invasion had taken place. No One, i mean NO ONE sold the secrets to the Enemy. FFW to 3 years ago, and the families of the troops were offiically NOT told about their spouses deployment to Iraq. They were just told (even though it was WELL known) that they are going to fight abroad.
Ha ha ha. Very good joke. OK, can anyone think of a single "journalist" that wouldn't spill the beans if they had an "exclusive" or "scoop" like the Normandy invasion? Do you think CNN has the ethics to kill a story based on "it isn't in the country's best interest?"
What about the current reporting based on a phony Iraqi policeman about executions in Iraq outside a mosque? It was reported by the US press to make the US Army look bad - and when the "evidence" turns out to be faked and the "source" doesn't exist, does anyone report that fact? No, they have moved on.
In the 1940's the press had some idea of "responsibility". In the Gulf war (Desert Storm) the press had to be managed closely because otherwise they would be reporting plans to the enemy. There is no "responsibility". There are no "ethics". They are out to make a buck and selling out the US or making the US look bad sells advertising space.
We've put ourselves into this situation. The secrets are there because the "public" cannot be told. What percentage of the "public" today is Muslim and would always come down on the side of Muslims vs. the US? No, we let people into the US that place the interests of foreign organizations ahead of those of the US. We have one now as a congressman who is going to try to take the oath of office on a Quran.
Why? Why should they make the programs available? The program is the wrapper containing the advertisement and it is the advertisement that they want you to watch. Period.
The program (or wrapper) is meaningless and serves only to get you to look at the ads. The idea of a show having "ratings" is simply a vehicle to price the ads for that show higher. Without that, there would be no ratings at all. No ads = no shows.
Problem being that once you release the material nobody ever needs to pay again. Therefore, it is produced once, sold for a fraction of the cost because the creator knows they can sell it over and over again and released. Once released the original creator is now holding a non-asset - it is worthless.
Of course you could try to "license" it so it could be viewed by the public but not reused or redistributed. Sure. That is working really well with music and video today. So someone in a small town that would rather spend their money on the annual holiday festival just downloads a copy and says "Here it is. See what good work we did!"
Today, public access is pretty much equivalent to free redistribute and reuse. Once it gets out that is about the end of the value of the work.
Contrary to popular media, RFID is not something that enables tracking by satellites, black helicoptors or mysterious vans you see roaming your neighborhood streets.
It is a passive device that requires a RF signal strong enough to induce an electric current in an antenna so the chip can transmit a response.
No, you aren't going to be able to detect this without transmitting the proper frequency signal at a high enough power to trigger the chip to respond. It isn't going to respond unless "prompted" by a reader either. This prompting isn't any sort of encryption because RFID is not secure. But the only way to read TI RFID tags is with a TI reader. Oh, you want to read Motorola tags... well, then you need a Motorola reader. Yes, it is likely this sort of thing with manufacturer incompatabilities.
Yes, there is a standard... or more correctly there are many standards. You just need to figure out what standard(s) you would like to be able to interact with and get the proper reader device. I'm sure a generic one is possible but very likely rather pricey.
I suggest when you grow up you should actually work in a field where economics does not apply.
One of the biggest problems that Western nations face today is that whatever is researched in the West can then be mass produced using cheap labor in the Far East and Asia for pennies. One result of this is moving all manufacturing to these areas where the labor cost and regulations allow for cheap manufacturing. The other thing that happens is an individual or company can spend years researching something only to have it copied and produced by others.
100 years ago, the cost of the manufacturing plant was the barrier to entry that prevented this. Today, the profits are high enough that it is possible to find financial backing to build the factory to produce the product just based on the potential returns. This means that most patent discussions are pointless - unless Western nations are ready to block imports of copied goods, patents are meaningless.
Since the Asian and Far East "factories" aren't in a position to do meaningful R&D, they are going to rely on stealing the output of other R&D efforts. Today, we allow this and it drives down the cost of consumer goods. It also means there never will be a new manufacturing job in the US in the forseeable future. It is beginning to mean that any research done in the US will have the results stolen and used to increase the profits of Chinese and Indian "factories" that are manufacturing stuff based on Western R&D.
The choice we face is pretty simple. We can give up on patent protection and allow this to happen. Eventually, we will have to rely on these factories to start to do some kind of research because nobody will finance it in the US or Europe. Either that or the government will have to pay for the research while all the profits result elsewhere - unlikely.
Of course we could just refuse import of unlicensed, infringing goods. I don't see this happening today except maybe for medicine. And the price difference between licensed US pills and unlicensed Indian pills is significant. Should we just give up? It would mean everything is cheaper for a while. And then it would probably suck. Enforcing patents and such would mean we are paying lots more (maybe 10x) for stuff than the rest of the world does, but people would be employed making it.
If there was any reason to believe that people wouldn't redistribute electronic books, this is certainly something that would have value. Unfortunately, it is just a fancy way to move books from being a revenue stream to being something distributed for free, like music is now.
Today, who pays for music? I don't - it is freely available. Some people seem to value posters and other little pieces of paper so pay for these. Me, all I am interested in is the sound and it comes in little files for free.
Moving books to the same environment would mean the same thing - some fools still buying e-books and the rest of the world getting them for free.
Experiments have been tried with the idea of "appliance computing", but it hasn't worked out very well. Partly because these attempts have been with dial-up networking and very limited capabilities in terms of both processor, RAM, local storage and display.
Maybe what is really needed is something that is an "appliance" in the form of a notebook computer. Sadly, the browsers are not cooperating with this much - downloadable executable stuff completely violates the "appliance" model. You can't have stability if there is the possibilty of spyware, malware or trojans.
You could probably have a manufacturer-only update with signed code, but it is possible even for this to leak out. And these units would be a tempting target because there would very likely be a lot of them.
Let us assume that a diagnostic test is found which indicates a strong correlation (more than 80%, say) that a person will be involved in raping women. This is proven over a long period of time and no alarming discrepancies in the prison population are found. 20% or less of the people that test positive are not in prison for committing rape and the question arises that maybe these people just haven't been caught.
So, we then have a situation where a simple test can be performed on adolescent males which will show if they are likely to rape in the future. Do you believe that Western society would tolerate not performing the test or just letting people walk around after testing positive?
Better yet, ask your wife, gf or secretary what they would think. I'll bet that the female perspective might be a bit different.
The problem is that very little is as clear cut as the described scenario. But, as you can see with child molesters in the US today, it is getting to the point where the general public agrees with the idea of locking them up forever. Just in case.
The court system in the US (and most of the Western world) is not going to be able to cope very well with the idea of "no free will" or "he didn't have a choice". The legal and corrections system is based entirely on the idea that you do have a choice. And, you chose badly if you are in prison. Period. If there is even a 50/50 chance of proving the perpetrator of a crime didn't really have a choice most people would be very reluctant to put them in prison.
Think about the starving man stealing a loaf of bread. Did he have a choice, really?
At the same time, where some activists would like things to go is to say that poor African-American people in the US do not have a choice - because of their oppression by whites they have to commit crimes just to survive. What would you think of just giving all poor black people a free ride because they are (or have been) oppressed?
You also need to allow the RIAA and others to combat "crimes" of a lessor magnitude before they are faced with an adult that belives nothing can touch them so it is OK to hack into web sites and deface them. Or to redistribute movies and music in bulk.
What has instead happened is the RIAA cannot contact the mother and say "Your kid is getting out of control with this file sharing stuff." without bringing a lawsuit. The threshold for filing the lawsuit is high enough that they need lots and lots of evidence of infringement because the costs of filing are high. So, everyone sits and waits until the problem is of a large enough magnitude that it justifies the time and expense of the lawsuit. When it could have been "nipped in the bud" a long time ago.
I would offer that the Internet account holder is responsible for the traffic on that account, period.
If the IP address assigned at a particular date and time is to a particular account holder, then whatever happens during that session is the responsibility of the account holder. How else would you have it? Would it seem reasonable to just say "Oh, I didn't do it, must have been one of the kids." and that is the end of the matter?
Of course, the Internet has been known as a consequences-free zone for a long time. This just goes to prove it.
The car was manufactured by a soulless evil corporation. Do they deserve your money so they can continue exploiting workers? Is it not a moral act to deprive them of their car so they may be able to exploit one or two fewer workers next year? How about what they spend the money you give them on? Do you see any humanitarian programs? Anything to benefit the poor? No? So why would you give them money? It is just a car, like millions of others they have made on the backs of the poor workers that they underpay and exploit.
Alternatively, the artist that should be paid for their creative work (music) is far more likely to be doing good in the world. They are some soulless corporation exploiting workers. They are far more likely to be an individual trying to feed and clothe themselves.
So, wouldn't you agree that it is better to steal the car than the music? Because in either case the "owner" is being deprived of payment.
Making the losing side pay for legal fees is a sure route to no more civil lawsuits by individuals against corporations. Period.
Why would someone take the chance that they could be liable for tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) if things went against them? Today, you can find a lawyer that will represent you just for the possibility that you may get something out of it. Sure, they research the case pretty well, but there is always the risk that the jury isn't going to agree. Or, that the defendent will pull something out of a hat that wasn't expected. Like the plantiff being at least partially at fault.
Today, it is possible to get representation and sue someone with only your time being invested. If that is all you have, fine - if there is a good chance of winning you will find someone to represent you.
Make the loser pay and suddenly you now just don't end up with nothing, you would have to pay a great deal of money. Nobody is going to take that chance. The risk is far too great. Besides, what court would allow a destitute person to file anything without assets to cover their possible loss?
I suppose you might get Bill Gates to donate to a legal defense fund.
The whole idea behind the legal system today is it is a way for a small percentage of people to get very, very rich without working hard at all.
Taking the sidewalk example, if the business does not put salt or other material down, some cities give you a pass because snow is an "act of God". However, someone that slips can still sue in spite of this because a jury may be swayed by it being clearly negligence.
So you put salt down. Now it is no longer an act of God but your own fault if someone slips. They can sue because you put salt down and it was like walking on marbles. Any smart lawyer is going to be able to at least get a sizable settlement out of that.
If you are injured or can fake an injury and go to some quack that will write it up as a permanent disability, you have hit the jackpot. You can get government assistance which can then be used to sway the jury that you are permanently disabled. The business in question will want to settle quickly because they don't need the publicity. Imagine a WalMart with a truck out in front with a sign saying how this person can never work again because of heartless and cruel WalMart. They will pay plently to keep that from happening.
I don't see any morality or responsibility here. The whole concept is that today there are plenty of people that feel entitled to take whatever they can get. And there are lawyers and insurance companies that are ready to help them out. And, the people that serve on juries want to help out their fellow man and step on those evil corporations.
The odds today are significantly better than the lottery. You need a business that can't afford to fight or can't afford to take the publicity. Or, an insurance company that knows what the fraud is worth vs. what settlement can be done. It is cheaper just to settle than fight even when the settlement is $300,000.
So, have you thought about playing the insurance lottery today? Trust me, people in your neighborhood have and about the only way to be safe from this is either (a) plenty of insurance or (b) zero assets.
It is this kind of legal wrangling that goes on endlessly. Sure, if everything in the entire country was controlled by The Government there would be fewer people to sue over stuff like this. But I hardly think that would be a solution most people would find acceptable in the end. Like many things, it sounds good until you find out the details.
OK, so there should be competitive entities. Well, if you are going to spend a billion or so dollars you need to mitigate every risk, right? Unfortunately, the lawyers have set things up such that one risk that is very difficult to mitigate is someone else suing you over some perceived wrong. And yes, trying to run a fiber link is going to distrupt many businesses and push a few under. When those entities have been forced to jump through other legal hurdles to combat all the NIMBY lawsuits and "beautification" lawsuits (you know, those wires are really ugly...) and endless other lawsuits a lot of people feel very justified in suing over what will essentially put them out of business.
Sure, it is just the changing face of technology. But cable TV has been over-regulated in most US cities for so long that it is going to be a real battle to convince those owners that they bought nothing with all of their franchise fees, taxes, and public meetings.
To 99% of the population a PC is an appliance for sending email, surfing the web, playing games, etc. Nothing more. It is not a general-purpose programming platform. It is not something to install other stuff on, unless it is malware that just seems to install itself.
If when they take it out of the box and plug it is it does not run the applications that are required, they will return it and get one that does.
A computer without an OS is unusable for its intended purpose by 99% of the population. If you are incapable of installing an OS on a "naked" PC, you would find a computer without software pre-installed as unusable as a cellphone without an OS.
Face it, 99% of the population is using a computer as an appliance to run a small number of applications. Very small number.
It was acknowledged by game developers in the 1980s that you would sell two copies of a game for the Apple platform, one on the East Coast of the US and one on the West Coast. Everyone else would get theirs from BBS systems. This virtually stopped game development for that platform.
While it was "sharing" cassette tapes between friends, there was no problem with "music sharing" and it was all treated as either fair use or just a cost of doing business. Today, I can buy some recording and post it on the Internet for the world to download. I can do this in some cases before mass distribution by the content owner, thereby "beating" them to the sale.
Whatever you think of content ownership and copyright, this isn't going to stand. You cannot have a situation where one group quashes the revenue and business of another group. When this happens between rival criminal gangs, the result is a gang war. When this happens between countries, the result is a war. When this happens between companies or companies and individuals, one of them is going down - and the individuals have all the advantage here.
Yes, if this situation continues the individuals will win out in the end. But it will be rather strange victory - most of what we consider today to be "commercial" and "professional" recorded entertainment will disappear. Will traveling minstrels replace them? Maybe, for the folks that can't do anything else. But no commercial entity will put up money to make a recording again.
We, the Internet using people of the world, have a choice. We can continue to "share" everything possible or we can contain our greed and selfishness and pay for entertainment. Sure, you get to choose what you pay for and you have a right to be angry when you are ripped off. But, you do not get to decide not to pay. At least not if we like the current arrangement. While patronage by the rich and powerful worked for a long time, it was an awful system.
Unless you are terrified of losing your job because someone from Brazil can come here and work for half of what you are making.
I live in the Phoenix area. Read the article about how you can get a fake SSN + drivers license + immigrant ID for $160 on the street corner in Phoenix.
Today, it is barely possible to verify the "credentials" of a prospective employee. DHS rules (as stated on the I-9 employment documentation form) says employers are not supposed to attempt to verify the validity of documents presented. So, if someone comes along with a driver's license drawn in crayon we are supposed to accept this.
One quick step to ending illegal immigration and "undocumented" workers is to make employer's liable for hiring people that aren't supposed to be here. A year in jail would go a long way towards ending it and there would be a mass exodus southward. The problem right now is there is no central authority for validating documents. There isn't even a consistent method on a state-by-state basis. If someone shows you an Illinois driver's license in Arizona as far as I know there is no way whatsoever to know if it is real, faked or "borrowed".
This also has an effect on just about everything else that today requires some kind of identification. If I go into a bank they want a local driver's license. One from another state isn't good enough. Why? Because they have no idea how to validate out-of-state identification.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with "terrorists" since many of them are state-sponsored and have access to whatever resources are required to defeat this kind of thing. However, we can all be concerned, if not terrified that today it is easier and cheaper to hire an undocumented worker than a citizen - because the citizen wants a fair wage and benefits. The undocumented worker wants nothing except more money than he was getting at home - which is an incredibly low bar to meet.
The web caters to people that think "everyman should be able to do this", even when they can't. So, "citizen journalists" will eventually overwhelm paid profressionals just because people have no way to determine the difference.
It all comes down to what are people looking for. Quality? Or just quantity. Or just a low price? A newspaper or web news site can "afford" far more when publishing freely contributed content vs. professional content they have to pay for. So, we're more likely to see free stuff. Not only that, but the difference between professional and amateur may not mean much for tiny, cropped down images on a web site.
The other thing the web can't stand is the idea that material isn't being published because it isn't "appropriate". Would a newspaper or TV news program show a picture of a person "believed to be a rapist?" However, if someone has a cell phone camera picture of someone leaving the scene of a rape, you can bet some web site will put it up with the caption "He did it!!!!" What does this do to the idea of a fair trial?
The idea of the "citizen journalist" pushes this over to a distributed model. Authority is a difficult problem in distributed systems and the "democratic" nature of the web seems to abhore the idea of any authority at all. This makes it very difficult to tell if you are looking at a clever fake or the truth. Sure, you might get different web sites with different material. OK, what is truth? Majority wins? Or is there something else that we can judge this stuff by? Right now, I would say it is unlikely there will be a standard and people will be left on their own. Truth could be a very slippery concept.
I believe once material is released into the public domain it can be freely copied and made use of in ways completely unforseen by the creator.
For example, it would be no problem to use public-domain Beatles music as the sound track for a series of sodomy rape movies. While some would consider this to be a form of advertising, it probably would be so utterly negative that all Beatles music would be banned from public playing.
While you own the copyright, you can sue such folks into oblivion. However, about all you could try to do without the copyright would be to sue for slander or defamation. Such things generally don't go as well as the victim would like, however, so they might just have to shut up and take it.
How about releasing a dubbed version of a George W. Bush speech where he sounds more like Porky Pig, stuttering and spraying? Want to bet you get shut down because of copyright violation rather than something else?
Slashdot Mirror
(Ignoring some of the other silliness above)
The reason the tax system isn't as simple as just taking a percentage of earnings is because anytime someone suggests such a thing it is met with howls of how it is "regressive" and what is needed is a "progressive" tax system. What that means, most people don't have a clue but it sounds nice.
The folks complaining about simplified tax systems are concerned because they think rich people should support poor people and people with high incomes can afford higher taxation so people with lower incomes can keep all their income. "Progressive" in this case is just a codeword for income redistribution - taking from those that have and giving it to those that have not.
What a simplified tax system would do is certainly put most accountants and tax lawyers out of business. And for the most part, they would gladly go. There is no "tax lobby" that tries to keep a complicated tax code. But there is a serious lobbying effort against any sort of "regressive" tax code that wouldn't redistribute income. Once you give in to the idea that you aren't going to have something all that simple, you get everyone coming out with their pet projects. The National Realtors Association fights for home mortgage deductions so more people can afford houses - supposedly. Education deductions help private schools and universities. Take away the deduction for being blind and people will howl that you are punishing blind people.
Yes, a much better system would be to take 10% or 15% of what everyone earns and leave it at that. The government would likely get more tax revenue this way, or from what I recall of previous studies, it would be at least neutral. Let the employers send it in so there is no more "tax season". But we aren't going to get there in any foreseeable future.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, many people live in an environment developed in the late middle ages known as a "city". Except for a few places in the US, there are few farmers, cows or other livestock in these "cities".
While the concept of a high-density pre-packaged form of humanity may seem obsolete and unnecessary in an age of "sustainable growth", if you check down the road a piece you will discover that there are still many, many people living in these cities. They do not have the option of locally grown food from local farmers.
Are you suggesting they just sit and starve? I suspect once this becomes known to them some few will decide to take matters into their own hands and come out of the city to avoid starving. If it is only a few, your well-armed USA farmer will likely be able to drive them away, at least down the road to the next farm. If it is a great many city-dwellers, you will find that the farms have become just like the cities, only dirtier.
A pre-emptive strike is recommended before the city-dwellers know what is coming. This is the path to sustainability.
I think this is an incredibly wrong attitude. The youth of the 1920s and 1930s were the ones that were excited by the possibilities of space exploration. They grew up with the beginnings of space oriented science fiction and this formed the basis for everyone from Chuck Yeager to Neil Armstrong.
Today's fantasys are shaped by authors which focus far more on dark gothic horror and sex. Look where we are today.
No, it isn't the youth that eventually mature into beliving in space exploration, it is the youth that push the rest of the stay-at-homes into investing in the future.
It is dangerous and foolhardy to place the future of the human race at the mercy of the planet Earth. And viewing the planet as a closed system, without access to off-world resources is equally short sighted. As someone else once said, Humanity is too valuable to place all our eggs in one basket.
Why isn't it the account holder's responsibility for whatever infringment has occurred? If Ms. Lindon's account with Verizon was being used, then it should be her problem.
Otherwise, you are claiming the account holder has no responsibility for the account usage. Something I think Verizon would dispute to the very end.
Ha ha ha. Very good joke. OK, can anyone think of a single "journalist" that wouldn't spill the beans if they had an "exclusive" or "scoop" like the Normandy invasion? Do you think CNN has the ethics to kill a story based on "it isn't in the country's best interest?"
What about the current reporting based on a phony Iraqi policeman about executions in Iraq outside a mosque? It was reported by the US press to make the US Army look bad - and when the "evidence" turns out to be faked and the "source" doesn't exist, does anyone report that fact? No, they have moved on.
In the 1940's the press had some idea of "responsibility". In the Gulf war (Desert Storm) the press had to be managed closely because otherwise they would be reporting plans to the enemy. There is no "responsibility". There are no "ethics". They are out to make a buck and selling out the US or making the US look bad sells advertising space.
We've put ourselves into this situation. The secrets are there because the "public" cannot be told. What percentage of the "public" today is Muslim and would always come down on the side of Muslims vs. the US? No, we let people into the US that place the interests of foreign organizations ahead of those of the US. We have one now as a congressman who is going to try to take the oath of office on a Quran.
Why? Why should they make the programs available? The program is the wrapper containing the advertisement and it is the advertisement that they want you to watch. Period.
The program (or wrapper) is meaningless and serves only to get you to look at the ads. The idea of a show having "ratings" is simply a vehicle to price the ads for that show higher. Without that, there would be no ratings at all. No ads = no shows.
Problem being that once you release the material nobody ever needs to pay again. Therefore, it is produced once, sold for a fraction of the cost because the creator knows they can sell it over and over again and released. Once released the original creator is now holding a non-asset - it is worthless.
Of course you could try to "license" it so it could be viewed by the public but not reused or redistributed. Sure. That is working really well with music and video today. So someone in a small town that would rather spend their money on the annual holiday festival just downloads a copy and says "Here it is. See what good work we did!"
Today, public access is pretty much equivalent to free redistribute and reuse. Once it gets out that is about the end of the value of the work.
Contrary to popular media, RFID is not something that enables tracking by satellites, black helicoptors or mysterious vans you see roaming your neighborhood streets.
... well, then you need a Motorola reader. Yes, it is likely this sort of thing with manufacturer incompatabilities.
It is a passive device that requires a RF signal strong enough to induce an electric current in an antenna so the chip can transmit a response.
No, you aren't going to be able to detect this without transmitting the proper frequency signal at a high enough power to trigger the chip to respond. It isn't going to respond unless "prompted" by a reader either. This prompting isn't any sort of encryption because RFID is not secure. But the only way to read TI RFID tags is with a TI reader. Oh, you want to read Motorola tags
Yes, there is a standard... or more correctly there are many standards. You just need to figure out what standard(s) you would like to be able to interact with and get the proper reader device. I'm sure a generic one is possible but very likely rather pricey.
I suggest when you grow up you should actually work in a field where economics does not apply.
One of the biggest problems that Western nations face today is that whatever is researched in the West can then be mass produced using cheap labor in the Far East and Asia for pennies. One result of this is moving all manufacturing to these areas where the labor cost and regulations allow for cheap manufacturing. The other thing that happens is an individual or company can spend years researching something only to have it copied and produced by others.
100 years ago, the cost of the manufacturing plant was the barrier to entry that prevented this. Today, the profits are high enough that it is possible to find financial backing to build the factory to produce the product just based on the potential returns. This means that most patent discussions are pointless - unless Western nations are ready to block imports of copied goods, patents are meaningless.
Since the Asian and Far East "factories" aren't in a position to do meaningful R&D, they are going to rely on stealing the output of other R&D efforts. Today, we allow this and it drives down the cost of consumer goods. It also means there never will be a new manufacturing job in the US in the forseeable future. It is beginning to mean that any research done in the US will have the results stolen and used to increase the profits of Chinese and Indian "factories" that are manufacturing stuff based on Western R&D.
The choice we face is pretty simple. We can give up on patent protection and allow this to happen. Eventually, we will have to rely on these factories to start to do some kind of research because nobody will finance it in the US or Europe. Either that or the government will have to pay for the research while all the profits result elsewhere - unlikely.
Of course we could just refuse import of unlicensed, infringing goods. I don't see this happening today except maybe for medicine. And the price difference between licensed US pills and unlicensed Indian pills is significant. Should we just give up? It would mean everything is cheaper for a while. And then it would probably suck. Enforcing patents and such would mean we are paying lots more (maybe 10x) for stuff than the rest of the world does, but people would be employed making it.
Cheap stuff or jobs? Tough decision.
If there was any reason to believe that people wouldn't redistribute electronic books, this is certainly something that would have value. Unfortunately, it is just a fancy way to move books from being a revenue stream to being something distributed for free, like music is now.
Today, who pays for music? I don't - it is freely available. Some people seem to value posters and other little pieces of paper so pay for these. Me, all I am interested in is the sound and it comes in little files for free.
Moving books to the same environment would mean the same thing - some fools still buying e-books and the rest of the world getting them for free.
Experiments have been tried with the idea of "appliance computing", but it hasn't worked out very well. Partly because these attempts have been with dial-up networking and very limited capabilities in terms of both processor, RAM, local storage and display.
Maybe what is really needed is something that is an "appliance" in the form of a notebook computer. Sadly, the browsers are not cooperating with this much - downloadable executable stuff completely violates the "appliance" model. You can't have stability if there is the possibilty of spyware, malware or trojans.
You could probably have a manufacturer-only update with signed code, but it is possible even for this to leak out. And these units would be a tempting target because there would very likely be a lot of them.
Let us assume that a diagnostic test is found which indicates a strong correlation (more than 80%, say) that a person will be involved in raping women. This is proven over a long period of time and no alarming discrepancies in the prison population are found. 20% or less of the people that test positive are not in prison for committing rape and the question arises that maybe these people just haven't been caught.
So, we then have a situation where a simple test can be performed on adolescent males which will show if they are likely to rape in the future. Do you believe that Western society would tolerate not performing the test or just letting people walk around after testing positive?
Better yet, ask your wife, gf or secretary what they would think. I'll bet that the female perspective might be a bit different.
The problem is that very little is as clear cut as the described scenario. But, as you can see with child molesters in the US today, it is getting to the point where the general public agrees with the idea of locking them up forever. Just in case.
The court system in the US (and most of the Western world) is not going to be able to cope very well with the idea of "no free will" or "he didn't have a choice". The legal and corrections system is based entirely on the idea that you do have a choice. And, you chose badly if you are in prison. Period. If there is even a 50/50 chance of proving the perpetrator of a crime didn't really have a choice most people would be very reluctant to put them in prison.
Think about the starving man stealing a loaf of bread. Did he have a choice, really?
At the same time, where some activists would like things to go is to say that poor African-American people in the US do not have a choice - because of their oppression by whites they have to commit crimes just to survive. What would you think of just giving all poor black people a free ride because they are (or have been) oppressed?
You also need to allow the RIAA and others to combat "crimes" of a lessor magnitude before they are faced with an adult that belives nothing can touch them so it is OK to hack into web sites and deface them. Or to redistribute movies and music in bulk.
What has instead happened is the RIAA cannot contact the mother and say "Your kid is getting out of control with this file sharing stuff." without bringing a lawsuit. The threshold for filing the lawsuit is high enough that they need lots and lots of evidence of infringement because the costs of filing are high. So, everyone sits and waits until the problem is of a large enough magnitude that it justifies the time and expense of the lawsuit. When it could have been "nipped in the bud" a long time ago.
I would offer that the Internet account holder is responsible for the traffic on that account, period.
If the IP address assigned at a particular date and time is to a particular account holder, then whatever happens during that session is the responsibility of the account holder. How else would you have it? Would it seem reasonable to just say "Oh, I didn't do it, must have been one of the kids." and that is the end of the matter?
Of course, the Internet has been known as a consequences-free zone for a long time. This just goes to prove it.
Well, not really.
The car was manufactured by a soulless evil corporation. Do they deserve your money so they can continue exploiting workers? Is it not a moral act to deprive them of their car so they may be able to exploit one or two fewer workers next year? How about what they spend the money you give them on? Do you see any humanitarian programs? Anything to benefit the poor? No? So why would you give them money? It is just a car, like millions of others they have made on the backs of the poor workers that they underpay and exploit.
Alternatively, the artist that should be paid for their creative work (music) is far more likely to be doing good in the world. They are some soulless corporation exploiting workers. They are far more likely to be an individual trying to feed and clothe themselves.
So, wouldn't you agree that it is better to steal the car than the music? Because in either case the "owner" is being deprived of payment.
Making the losing side pay for legal fees is a sure route to no more civil lawsuits by individuals against corporations. Period.
Why would someone take the chance that they could be liable for tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) if things went against them? Today, you can find a lawyer that will represent you just for the possibility that you may get something out of it. Sure, they research the case pretty well, but there is always the risk that the jury isn't going to agree. Or, that the defendent will pull something out of a hat that wasn't expected. Like the plantiff being at least partially at fault.
Today, it is possible to get representation and sue someone with only your time being invested. If that is all you have, fine - if there is a good chance of winning you will find someone to represent you.
Make the loser pay and suddenly you now just don't end up with nothing, you would have to pay a great deal of money. Nobody is going to take that chance. The risk is far too great. Besides, what court would allow a destitute person to file anything without assets to cover their possible loss?
I suppose you might get Bill Gates to donate to a legal defense fund.
The whole idea behind the legal system today is it is a way for a small percentage of people to get very, very rich without working hard at all.
Taking the sidewalk example, if the business does not put salt or other material down, some cities give you a pass because snow is an "act of God". However, someone that slips can still sue in spite of this because a jury may be swayed by it being clearly negligence.
So you put salt down. Now it is no longer an act of God but your own fault if someone slips. They can sue because you put salt down and it was like walking on marbles. Any smart lawyer is going to be able to at least get a sizable settlement out of that.
If you are injured or can fake an injury and go to some quack that will write it up as a permanent disability, you have hit the jackpot. You can get government assistance which can then be used to sway the jury that you are permanently disabled. The business in question will want to settle quickly because they don't need the publicity. Imagine a WalMart with a truck out in front with a sign saying how this person can never work again because of heartless and cruel WalMart. They will pay plently to keep that from happening.
I don't see any morality or responsibility here. The whole concept is that today there are plenty of people that feel entitled to take whatever they can get. And there are lawyers and insurance companies that are ready to help them out. And, the people that serve on juries want to help out their fellow man and step on those evil corporations.
The odds today are significantly better than the lottery. You need a business that can't afford to fight or can't afford to take the publicity. Or, an insurance company that knows what the fraud is worth vs. what settlement can be done. It is cheaper just to settle than fight even when the settlement is $300,000.
So, have you thought about playing the insurance lottery today? Trust me, people in your neighborhood have and about the only way to be safe from this is either (a) plenty of insurance or (b) zero assets.
Duct Tape
It is this kind of legal wrangling that goes on endlessly. Sure, if everything in the entire country was controlled by The Government there would be fewer people to sue over stuff like this. But I hardly think that would be a solution most people would find acceptable in the end. Like many things, it sounds good until you find out the details.
OK, so there should be competitive entities. Well, if you are going to spend a billion or so dollars you need to mitigate every risk, right? Unfortunately, the lawyers have set things up such that one risk that is very difficult to mitigate is someone else suing you over some perceived wrong. And yes, trying to run a fiber link is going to distrupt many businesses and push a few under. When those entities have been forced to jump through other legal hurdles to combat all the NIMBY lawsuits and "beautification" lawsuits (you know, those wires are really ugly...) and endless other lawsuits a lot of people feel very justified in suing over what will essentially put them out of business.
Sure, it is just the changing face of technology. But cable TV has been over-regulated in most US cities for so long that it is going to be a real battle to convince those owners that they bought nothing with all of their franchise fees, taxes, and public meetings.
To 99% of the population a PC is an appliance for sending email, surfing the web, playing games, etc. Nothing more. It is not a general-purpose programming platform. It is not something to install other stuff on, unless it is malware that just seems to install itself.
If when they take it out of the box and plug it is it does not run the applications that are required, they will return it and get one that does.
A computer without an OS is unusable for its intended purpose by 99% of the population.
If you are incapable of installing an OS on a "naked" PC, you would find a computer without software pre-installed as unusable as a cellphone without an OS.
Face it, 99% of the population is using a computer as an appliance to run a small number of applications. Very small number.
DRM is the industry answer to rampent "sharing".
It was acknowledged by game developers in the 1980s that you would sell two copies of a game for the Apple platform, one on the East Coast of the US and one on the West Coast. Everyone else would get theirs from BBS systems. This virtually stopped game development for that platform.
While it was "sharing" cassette tapes between friends, there was no problem with "music sharing" and it was all treated as either fair use or just a cost of doing business. Today, I can buy some recording and post it on the Internet for the world to download. I can do this in some cases before mass distribution by the content owner, thereby "beating" them to the sale.
Whatever you think of content ownership and copyright, this isn't going to stand. You cannot have a situation where one group quashes the revenue and business of another group. When this happens between rival criminal gangs, the result is a gang war. When this happens between countries, the result is a war. When this happens between companies or companies and individuals, one of them is going down - and the individuals have all the advantage here.
Yes, if this situation continues the individuals will win out in the end. But it will be rather strange victory - most of what we consider today to be "commercial" and "professional" recorded entertainment will disappear. Will traveling minstrels replace them? Maybe, for the folks that can't do anything else. But no commercial entity will put up money to make a recording again.
We, the Internet using people of the world, have a choice. We can continue to "share" everything possible or we can contain our greed and selfishness and pay for entertainment. Sure, you get to choose what you pay for and you have a right to be angry when you are ripped off. But, you do not get to decide not to pay. At least not if we like the current arrangement. While patronage by the rich and powerful worked for a long time, it was an awful system.
Unless you are terrified of losing your job because someone from Brazil can come here and work for half of what you are making.
I live in the Phoenix area. Read the article about how you can get a fake SSN + drivers license + immigrant ID for $160 on the street corner in Phoenix.
Today, it is barely possible to verify the "credentials" of a prospective employee. DHS rules (as stated on the I-9 employment documentation form) says employers are not supposed to attempt to verify the validity of documents presented. So, if someone comes along with a driver's license drawn in crayon we are supposed to accept this.
One quick step to ending illegal immigration and "undocumented" workers is to make employer's liable for hiring people that aren't supposed to be here. A year in jail would go a long way towards ending it and there would be a mass exodus southward. The problem right now is there is no central authority for validating documents. There isn't even a consistent method on a state-by-state basis. If someone shows you an Illinois driver's license in Arizona as far as I know there is no way whatsoever to know if it is real, faked or "borrowed".
This also has an effect on just about everything else that today requires some kind of identification. If I go into a bank they want a local driver's license. One from another state isn't good enough. Why? Because they have no idea how to validate out-of-state identification.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with "terrorists" since many of them are state-sponsored and have access to whatever resources are required to defeat this kind of thing. However, we can all be concerned, if not terrified that today it is easier and cheaper to hire an undocumented worker than a citizen - because the citizen wants a fair wage and benefits. The undocumented worker wants nothing except more money than he was getting at home - which is an incredibly low bar to meet.
The web caters to people that think "everyman should be able to do this", even when they can't. So, "citizen journalists" will eventually overwhelm paid profressionals just because people have no way to determine the difference.
It all comes down to what are people looking for. Quality? Or just quantity. Or just a low price? A newspaper or web news site can "afford" far more when publishing freely contributed content vs. professional content they have to pay for. So, we're more likely to see free stuff. Not only that, but the difference between professional and amateur may not mean much for tiny, cropped down images on a web site.
The other thing the web can't stand is the idea that material isn't being published because it isn't "appropriate". Would a newspaper or TV news program show a picture of a person "believed to be a rapist?" However, if someone has a cell phone camera picture of someone leaving the scene of a rape, you can bet some web site will put it up with the caption "He did it!!!!" What does this do to the idea of a fair trial?
The idea of the "citizen journalist" pushes this over to a distributed model. Authority is a difficult problem in distributed systems and the "democratic" nature of the web seems to abhore the idea of any authority at all. This makes it very difficult to tell if you are looking at a clever fake or the truth. Sure, you might get different web sites with different material. OK, what is truth? Majority wins? Or is there something else that we can judge this stuff by? Right now, I would say it is unlikely there will be a standard and people will be left on their own. Truth could be a very slippery concept.
I believe once material is released into the public domain it can be freely copied and made use of in ways completely unforseen by the creator.
For example, it would be no problem to use public-domain Beatles music as the sound track for a series of sodomy rape movies. While some would consider this to be a form of advertising, it probably would be so utterly negative that all Beatles music would be banned from public playing.
While you own the copyright, you can sue such folks into oblivion. However, about all you could try to do without the copyright would be to sue for slander or defamation. Such things generally don't go as well as the victim would like, however, so they might just have to shut up and take it.
How about releasing a dubbed version of a George W. Bush speech where he sounds more like Porky Pig, stuttering and spraying? Want to bet you get shut down because of copyright violation rather than something else?