Problem is, who wants to pay? If you know that 98% of what you are paying for some piece of music is going to promote "music in general" via the association of artists, managers, publicity people and flunkys why would you pay if the alternative is free?
So far, there is no compelling case for "not free". Oooh, I might get caught is not a compelling case. "I want to support the artist" is not a compelling case, because your payment isn't helping the artist.
Unfortunately, most of what I have heard about direct payment leaves people not actively looking for stuff on the Internet out in the cold. If you assume people on dial-up are not really able to take advantage of most of the interactive material on the Internet, then a majority of the people in the US and a majority of people on the planet are left out in the cold.
How does this get fixed? I think the starting point is not paying for anything that you can take for free. After that, the business of music has to figure out another way to reach the 60-70% of the people without broadband connections or without the knowledge to use a broadband connection effectively.
First off, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children already has this "databae" or "library" of child porn images. They would be the maintainers of it, not the ISPs themselves. That is what the article says, and that would be the legal requirements - police and other government agencies cannot keep child porn even for sample purposes.
NCMEC will be undoubtably supplying a hash database to ISPs. MD5 or SHA1 probably as these are in common use today. This would enable matching of identical files quickly and easily.
Unfortunately, we are already running into the limits of simple MD5 matching with child porn cases today. You resize the picture or brighten it up a little bit and that changes the MD5 value and your database, library or whatever is then useless. You have a new, original picture with a new original hash value. There are other ways to accomplish this which do not suffer from these limitations without giving up high-speed autonomous comparisons. Check out http://www.infinadyne.com/icatch.html for some ideas.
Yes, I work at the company that is producing this product.
It is important to know that these sensors are not optical in any way. They are using sensors similar to those from Authentec which use an RF scan to penetrate the first layer of skin. This eliminates problems with "too wet" and "too dry" fingers and also prevents spoofing by just about everything except cutting the finger off.
There are some systems that can be fooled much easier, but they are not being used by PayByTouch. Nor is anyone serious about using a fingerprint scanner anymore.
Microsoft sells an optically-based fingerprint scanner that can be fooled by latex molds, gummi bears and lots of other stuff.
Have you driven in suburban roads and expressways recently? There are three kinds of vehicles there: motorcycles doing 90MPH on side roads, large cars and SUV's - I lump the 6-passenger Caddy in with the Ford Escape for this, and deathtrap Euro-boxes often older than the driver.
Oh, and then there is the commercial vehicles. Dump trucks, overloaded landscaping trucks with 5 passengers in the back with a trailer, semi's, etc.
You could buy a Toyota Prius, but if you get hit by anything in the 2nd or 4th class, you get scraped up with a spoon. Or you could by a small pickup truck - if you are single. Got kids? Your choices are real limited if you want to survive a collision of some kind. If you can afford it, you get the biggest vehicle that at least appear to be more survivable in case of the all-too-frequent collision.
Such life-changing collisions happen every day out in the suburban areas. And the more mothers with small children that see them the more large cars, minivans and SUVs get purchased. Just hoping to survive the next crash.
So get your head out of your butt and stop attributing "SUV buying" to greedy selfish Republicans that don't care about the environment. How about concerned mothers that would like their children to grow up?
Yes, right now the ISP's are getting paid. $19.95 a month for DSL in many cases. Offered at a loss to build market share and penetration. Even cable systems charging $40-$60 a month aren't really paying the whole bill.
Why is broadband service being oversold at a loss? Because everyone thinks this will turn into some financial windfall in the future when it is a must-have. Someone at one end of the connection or the other will be paying for it. We are now seeing the beginnings of that where the "at a loss" status is trying to be changed.
Do you want to pay $100 a month for your 10Mb broadband connection? Probably not. The DSL and cable providers do not want to charge you that either - they want people that want to reach out to you to pay the difference. If they can convince Google to pay to present ads to you, then your bill will not go up.
Trust me, the money to support this is going to come from somewhere. It will eventually be paid by the consumer, one way or another. The choice is directly or indirectly and every business in the world wants it to be indirectly.
First step to a sustainable environment and resource consumption on the planet Earth: kill about 5.8 billion people. Because of how long this will really take, you are going to have to kill off maybe 6.5 billion people to really have the necessary smaller population.
No stomach for that much killing? Then I suggest you figure out what reality is and stop with the enviro-weenie nonsense. The only way Earth survives is as an open system with resources coming in from elsewhere.
If people were "borrowing" your content and using it to advertise your site for them, they were being stupid. Charging to access your content should be something you try to go after.
But what I think would be worse would be using your content to advertise their pay site.
Remember that your definitions of "porn" may be a little weak. OK a blowjob video is pretty tame. How about a nice video of a girl being raped to death by a bull? What about an instructional video on the finer points of asphyxiation and how it enhances sexual pleasure?
What passes for porn these days can make even the above seem tame.
Wrong. As long as piracy is rampant and without consequence the quality will improve to be equal that of "offical" products. The pirates will win if we do not stop them. Winning means official products disappear or are replaced by hobbist created stuff. The "profession" of making music or movies will end just like the many other professions have disappeared.
Idiot. The same "illegal search and seizure" is practiced in many workplaces. You sign a form when you start that says they can search your locker, desk, tool box, whatever anytime they feel like it and may do so randomly just to check up on you. Why do employers do this? For the same reasons that high schools do it - people bring drugs to school and work.
Sure, if you want to smoke pot at high school and let it all pass by you in a haze, I guess maybe that should be your right. You are young enough to recover from it.
No, I do not think your average bus driver should have the right to toke up before taking the bus out for a spin. If searching his locker can prevent this by deterrance or remove the driver that does when it is discovered, I'm all for it.
Do not forget that when hardware was very expensive, the software that was possible was very limited in scope. So you could be paying for maybe 10 or 20 man-days of effort.
Today software is far larger in scope. You can easily be paying for 100 man-years of effort with some commercial packages. Something like Autocad you are probably closer to 1000 man-years of effort. Makes the $3000 price tag seem pretty reasonable.
Let's assume for a moment that your software is actually good enough and easy enough to use that it is possible for someone to read some online guide instead of paying you. Let's also assume you write some piece of software that you charge people $100 for and this is useful to others besides the one or two people that convinced you to write it in the first place.
There are two possible situations here. One is that you charge 100,000 people $10 each for this software after noticing that it actually is useful to others. You have a reasonably good income stream just from the interest on the money and are assured that you will never have to really work again in your life.
The other situation is that someone "copies" your software from you, gives to their close personal friends, who in turn give it to their close personal friends. You start getting a lot of email from people. Some just want to thank you for your contribution to society. Others, actually most of them, ask questions that because you are basically a decent person you try to answer. You end up spending a lot of time answering this email until it becomes overwhelming. Yes, you have 100,000 people using your software and taking up your time. But all you get is a nice reputation among 18-24 year old students that would really like to give you $10, if they had a spare $10 to give you. And asked really nicely in person.
This is the fundamental decision that we are looking at here. Which life would you like?
I am pretty sure you will find in some file at the RIAA HQ a little memo from each one of the recording contract holders saying that the RIAA is authorized to act as the agent for copyright enforcement for any and all copyrights held by the contract holder.
It is pretty much the same thing you would sign to authorize a real estate agent to sell your house. They are acting as your "agent" in the matter and have the right to do certain things without your direct involvement. In this case, they are pursuing infringement cases against violations of the copyright held by the contract holder.
Note that the contract holder may be a separate entity from "the record company" and a single record company may have multiple "contract holders".
I suppose you are disappointed that railroads were finally able to dispense with the position of "fireman" in the engine compartment. This position was required for stoking the boiler of steam locomotives but when diesel-electric engines came along the railroads were required to keep the "fireman" position even though this person had no function.
You are asking for the same kind of thing here.
Outsourcing to foreign workers is a natural occurrence of a global information economy. The work goes where the people are barely qualified and where they are paid less. This means that high-wage, high-tax countries lose jobs like crazy. Passing laws to prevent it is trying to roll back the clock. Do you really wish that telecommuting was impossible? That is what you are asking for.
All a union is going to do in this situation is create the same kind of featherbedding job situation that the railroads had. Sure, it is possible that some jobs will be retained, but look for the data center to be dropped in India when the company HQ is in SF, NY, LA or Chicago. That will eliminate that problem.
Good luck. Most companies treat requests for an employment contract as a refusal to accept the job. There is no contract, period. There is the state's at-will employment and that is all.
Your non-disclosure and non-compete agreement will also say it is not an employment contract specifically.
It would be nice if you had a clue what you were talking about.
You want to build a store the size of WalMart in your town? You will pay the town, the county and maybe the state to improve the roads so that your customers will be able to get to the store. Yes, then you will pay taxes for the maintenance of those roads just like everyone else - except sometimes they give the business a break on future taxes. But the infrastructure improvements go in on the front end of the process and the store owners aren't ducking those.
So yes, they are charging WalMart for the privilege of customers being able to get to the WalMart store. Absolutely.
Important clue here: VOIP from Vonage is IP traffic over the cable modem. Comcast VOIP is on not on the "internet" channels and is handled entirely separate from Internet traffic. In a sense, it is digitized voice on a separate, private digital channel. With considerably more reliability than the Internet infrastructure in the cable plant.
Comcast VOIP is telephone service and has nearly the same reliability as a copper pair to the (former) Bell Central Office in your neighborhood. I believe it is also VOIP only to the cable plant and then goes out on the telephone network, not the Internet.
Vonage relies on the cable Internet plant and there is far less of a requirement it stay up 100%.
Do not confuse the potential reliability of these two services. They are handled entirely differently and have entirely different implementations. I don't know about Cox and other cable providers, but Comcast's service is way different than Internet based VOIP.
Sorry, but T1 pricing has almost nothing to do with the bandwidth cost and everything to do with the "local loop" charge. You might be paying $400 for the wire and $200 for the bandwidth. And bandwidth is cheap - the wire is very, very expensive.
And no, content providers are not limited by their connections. You dump the whole thing on a multi-homed network center with multiple OC192 connections and bandwidth isn't a problem anymore. You can swamp anyone out there because they cannot possibly handle what the provider is capable of delivering. And the difference in cost between an OC3 (48MB) and OC192(around 10GB, I believe) is almost nothing. Once you have the connection.
The ISPs are selling "burst" bandwidth and we are starting to see "streaming" applications. This wasn't the case until recently which is how they got away with it. You are correct, changes are coming. Unfortunately, no ISP can afford to be the first to raise prices - their competition will take their market share away with the "low, low introductory offer." So we are stuck with a lot of this sillyness.
The problem with ISP's no longer "overselling" their bandwidth is they are in fact selling "burst" speeds not "continuous" speeds. OK, you can get 6MB/sec "burst" but when everyone on your network segment (DSL, cable or whatever) tries for 6MB/sec they are going to end up getting less. Fact of life today. The backbone isn't in place to deliver more than around 10GB/sec to the provider, period.
How long will it take before this is overrun? Not long, in some areas we are there already.
Do you want ISP's to explain the difference between "burst" and "streaming" to customers? They are not going to succeed. At best you will have a provider quoting one bandwidth and their competition quoting the other, driving the lower one - even if they are being realistic - out of the market. So today they are selling burst speeds and everyone that knows is aware it is impossible to deliver streaming at that rate.
I sat next to someone working on infrastructure at AOL and they are looking very hard at this problem. Yes, fiber to the curb or the house is a nice idea, but we do not have the backbone infrastructure to support this today. We barely have the infrastructure to support burst speeds that are being sold today if more than a few users are making active use of the maximum speeds.
Trying to change the marketing of broadband to consumers is not going to work. It is just like hard drives - one set of numbers on the box, a different set in reality. Just like automobile speedometers calibrated to 180 for sports cars. But this isn't just an ISP problem, not by any means.
To implement full use of what the broadband companies are selling would require a complete overhaul of "the Internet" in order to deliver things like IPTV. HD IPTV is a pipedream for now, and probably the next 10 years. The backbone isn't there for it and nobody is making so much money selling broadband service they can afford to invest in massive infrastructure improvements.
As far as I know, this hasn't come up yet. When it does, and I am sure it will, the porn site operator will lose. Because they allowed an underage minor to access the site. So the underage minor lied about their age... so what? They can't legally agree anyway, so it doesn't matter.
A while back you needed to fax a driver's license over to get them to give you access. This may indeed be what is needed again. Credit card verification doesn't cut it. If you can get by with just lying about your age, that doesn't cut it either.
Well, the truth of the matter with Enron is very simple. There was no "pension" as such. There was an employee-directed 401K plan. The employees that lost everything they had in the plan did so because they placed all of the money into the company stock.
Most companies will tell you that if you do that you are making a mistake. Any financial advisor worth anything will tell you putting all the money into even the same "sector" is a mistake and all the money in a single company sheer idiocy.
WorldCom the situation is somewhat less clear what is going on. United is just using the Federal Government to take over their underfunded pension program because they can either fund it or fly airplanes. Perhaps mistakenly, they chose to remain in business. For some reason the government allows this kind of decision.
Better count on the 2nd amendment then, because it will be the folks with guns that decide things. And today, the police are significantly outgunned by the gangs.
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Problem is, who wants to pay? If you know that 98% of what you are paying for some piece of music is going to promote "music in general" via the association of artists, managers, publicity people and flunkys why would you pay if the alternative is free?
So far, there is no compelling case for "not free". Oooh, I might get caught is not a compelling case. "I want to support the artist" is not a compelling case, because your payment isn't helping the artist.
Unfortunately, most of what I have heard about direct payment leaves people not actively looking for stuff on the Internet out in the cold. If you assume people on dial-up are not really able to take advantage of most of the interactive material on the Internet, then a majority of the people in the US and a majority of people on the planet are left out in the cold.
How does this get fixed? I think the starting point is not paying for anything that you can take for free. After that, the business of music has to figure out another way to reach the 60-70% of the people without broadband connections or without the knowledge to use a broadband connection effectively.
I seriously doubt you really mean that it would be good to put a high voltage power cable anywhere near a gas main.
Arcing to a gas main could easily set off a very big fire or explosion.
I suspect there are major regulations about this, just like there are for what order wires have to be from top to bottom on a pole.
First off, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children already has this "databae" or "library" of child porn images. They would be the maintainers of it, not the ISPs themselves. That is what the article says, and that would be the legal requirements - police and other government agencies cannot keep child porn even for sample purposes.
NCMEC will be undoubtably supplying a hash database to ISPs. MD5 or SHA1 probably as these are in common use today. This would enable matching of identical files quickly and easily.
Unfortunately, we are already running into the limits of simple MD5 matching with child porn cases today. You resize the picture or brighten it up a little bit and that changes the MD5 value and your database, library or whatever is then useless. You have a new, original picture with a new original hash value. There are other ways to accomplish this which do not suffer from these limitations without giving up high-speed autonomous comparisons. Check out http://www.infinadyne.com/icatch.html for some ideas.
Yes, I work at the company that is producing this product.
It is important to know that these sensors are not optical in any way. They are using sensors similar to those from Authentec which use an RF scan to penetrate the first layer of skin. This eliminates problems with "too wet" and "too dry" fingers and also prevents spoofing by just about everything except cutting the finger off.
There are some systems that can be fooled much easier, but they are not being used by PayByTouch. Nor is anyone serious about using a fingerprint scanner anymore.
Microsoft sells an optically-based fingerprint scanner that can be fooled by latex molds, gummi bears and lots of other stuff.
Have you driven in suburban roads and expressways recently? There are three kinds of vehicles there: motorcycles doing 90MPH on side roads, large cars and SUV's - I lump the 6-passenger Caddy in with the Ford Escape for this, and deathtrap Euro-boxes often older than the driver.
Oh, and then there is the commercial vehicles. Dump trucks, overloaded landscaping trucks with 5 passengers in the back with a trailer, semi's, etc.
You could buy a Toyota Prius, but if you get hit by anything in the 2nd or 4th class, you get scraped up with a spoon. Or you could by a small pickup truck - if you are single. Got kids? Your choices are real limited if you want to survive a collision of some kind. If you can afford it, you get the biggest vehicle that at least appear to be more survivable in case of the all-too-frequent collision.
Such life-changing collisions happen every day out in the suburban areas. And the more mothers with small children that see them the more large cars, minivans and SUVs get purchased. Just hoping to survive the next crash.
So get your head out of your butt and stop attributing "SUV buying" to greedy selfish Republicans that don't care about the environment. How about concerned mothers that would like their children to grow up?
Yes, right now the ISP's are getting paid. $19.95 a month for DSL in many cases. Offered at a loss to build market share and penetration. Even cable systems charging $40-$60 a month aren't really paying the whole bill.
Why is broadband service being oversold at a loss? Because everyone thinks this will turn into some financial windfall in the future when it is a must-have. Someone at one end of the connection or the other will be paying for it. We are now seeing the beginnings of that where the "at a loss" status is trying to be changed.
Do you want to pay $100 a month for your 10Mb broadband connection? Probably not. The DSL and cable providers do not want to charge you that either - they want people that want to reach out to you to pay the difference. If they can convince Google to pay to present ads to you, then your bill will not go up.
Trust me, the money to support this is going to come from somewhere. It will eventually be paid by the consumer, one way or another. The choice is directly or indirectly and every business in the world wants it to be indirectly.
First step to a sustainable environment and resource consumption on the planet Earth: kill about 5.8 billion people. Because of how long this will really take, you are going to have to kill off maybe 6.5 billion people to really have the necessary smaller population.
No stomach for that much killing? Then I suggest you figure out what reality is and stop with the enviro-weenie nonsense. The only way Earth survives is as an open system with resources coming in from elsewhere.
If people were "borrowing" your content and using it to advertise your site for them, they were being stupid. Charging to access your content should be something you try to go after.
But what I think would be worse would be using your content to advertise their pay site.
Remember that your definitions of "porn" may be a little weak. OK a blowjob video is pretty tame. How about a nice video of a girl being raped to death by a bull? What about an instructional video on the finer points of asphyxiation and how it enhances sexual pleasure?
What passes for porn these days can make even the above seem tame.
Wrong. As long as piracy is rampant and without consequence the quality will improve to be equal that of "offical" products. The pirates will win if we do not stop them. Winning means official products disappear or are replaced by hobbist created stuff. The "profession" of making music or movies will end just like the many other professions have disappeared.
Idiot. The same "illegal search and seizure" is practiced in many workplaces. You sign a form when you start that says they can search your locker, desk, tool box, whatever anytime they feel like it and may do so randomly just to check up on you. Why do employers do this? For the same reasons that high schools do it - people bring drugs to school and work.
Sure, if you want to smoke pot at high school and let it all pass by you in a haze, I guess maybe that should be your right. You are young enough to recover from it.
No, I do not think your average bus driver should have the right to toke up before taking the bus out for a spin. If searching his locker can prevent this by deterrance or remove the driver that does when it is discovered, I'm all for it.
Do not forget that when hardware was very expensive, the software that was possible was very limited in scope. So you could be paying for maybe 10 or 20 man-days of effort.
Today software is far larger in scope. You can easily be paying for 100 man-years of effort with some commercial packages. Something like Autocad you are probably closer to 1000 man-years of effort. Makes the $3000 price tag seem pretty reasonable.
Let's assume for a moment that your software is actually good enough and easy enough to use that it is possible for someone to read some online guide instead of paying you. Let's also assume you write some piece of software that you charge people $100 for and this is useful to others besides the one or two people that convinced you to write it in the first place.
There are two possible situations here. One is that you charge 100,000 people $10 each for this software after noticing that it actually is useful to others. You have a reasonably good income stream just from the interest on the money and are assured that you will never have to really work again in your life.
The other situation is that someone "copies" your software from you, gives to their close personal friends, who in turn give it to their close personal friends. You start getting a lot of email from people. Some just want to thank you for your contribution to society. Others, actually most of them, ask questions that because you are basically a decent person you try to answer. You end up spending a lot of time answering this email until it becomes overwhelming. Yes, you have 100,000 people using your software and taking up your time. But all you get is a nice reputation among 18-24 year old students that would really like to give you $10, if they had a spare $10 to give you. And asked really nicely in person.
This is the fundamental decision that we are looking at here. Which life would you like?
I am pretty sure you will find in some file at the RIAA HQ a little memo from each one of the recording contract holders saying that the RIAA is authorized to act as the agent for copyright enforcement for any and all copyrights held by the contract holder.
It is pretty much the same thing you would sign to authorize a real estate agent to sell your house. They are acting as your "agent" in the matter and have the right to do certain things without your direct involvement. In this case, they are pursuing infringement cases against violations of the copyright held by the contract holder.
Note that the contract holder may be a separate entity from "the record company" and a single record company may have multiple "contract holders".
I suppose you are disappointed that railroads were finally able to dispense with the position of "fireman" in the engine compartment. This position was required for stoking the boiler of steam locomotives but when diesel-electric engines came along the railroads were required to keep the "fireman" position even though this person had no function.
You are asking for the same kind of thing here.
Outsourcing to foreign workers is a natural occurrence of a global information economy. The work goes where the people are barely qualified and where they are paid less. This means that high-wage, high-tax countries lose jobs like crazy. Passing laws to prevent it is trying to roll back the clock. Do you really wish that telecommuting was impossible? That is what you are asking for.
All a union is going to do in this situation is create the same kind of featherbedding job situation that the railroads had. Sure, it is possible that some jobs will be retained, but look for the data center to be dropped in India when the company HQ is in SF, NY, LA or Chicago. That will eliminate that problem.
You can't stop it.
Good luck. Most companies treat requests for an employment contract as a refusal to accept the job. There is no contract, period. There is the state's at-will employment and that is all.
Your non-disclosure and non-compete agreement will also say it is not an employment contract specifically.
There is no contract. You aren't getting one.
It would be nice if you had a clue what you were talking about.
You want to build a store the size of WalMart in your town? You will pay the town, the county and maybe the state to improve the roads so that your customers will be able to get to the store. Yes, then you will pay taxes for the maintenance of those roads just like everyone else - except sometimes they give the business a break on future taxes. But the infrastructure improvements go in on the front end of the process and the store owners aren't ducking those.
So yes, they are charging WalMart for the privilege of customers being able to get to the WalMart store. Absolutely.
And the proposals are different from this how?
Important clue here: VOIP from Vonage is IP traffic over the cable modem. Comcast VOIP is on not on the "internet" channels and is handled entirely separate from Internet traffic. In a sense, it is digitized voice on a separate, private digital channel. With considerably more reliability than the Internet infrastructure in the cable plant.
Comcast VOIP is telephone service and has nearly the same reliability as a copper pair to the (former) Bell Central Office in your neighborhood. I believe it is also VOIP only to the cable plant and then goes out on the telephone network, not the Internet.
Vonage relies on the cable Internet plant and there is far less of a requirement it stay up 100%.
Do not confuse the potential reliability of these two services. They are handled entirely differently and have entirely different implementations. I don't know about Cox and other cable providers, but Comcast's service is way different than Internet based VOIP.
Sorry, but T1 pricing has almost nothing to do with the bandwidth cost and everything to do with the "local loop" charge. You might be paying $400 for the wire and $200 for the bandwidth. And bandwidth is cheap - the wire is very, very expensive.
And no, content providers are not limited by their connections. You dump the whole thing on a multi-homed network center with multiple OC192 connections and bandwidth isn't a problem anymore. You can swamp anyone out there because they cannot possibly handle what the provider is capable of delivering. And the difference in cost between an OC3 (48MB) and OC192(around 10GB, I believe) is almost nothing. Once you have the connection.
The ISPs are selling "burst" bandwidth and we are starting to see "streaming" applications. This wasn't the case until recently which is how they got away with it. You are correct, changes are coming. Unfortunately, no ISP can afford to be the first to raise prices - their competition will take their market share away with the "low, low introductory offer." So we are stuck with a lot of this sillyness.
The problem with ISP's no longer "overselling" their bandwidth is they are in fact selling "burst" speeds not "continuous" speeds. OK, you can get 6MB/sec "burst" but when everyone on your network segment (DSL, cable or whatever) tries for 6MB/sec they are going to end up getting less. Fact of life today. The backbone isn't in place to deliver more than around 10GB/sec to the provider, period.
How long will it take before this is overrun? Not long, in some areas we are there already.
Do you want ISP's to explain the difference between "burst" and "streaming" to customers? They are not going to succeed. At best you will have a provider quoting one bandwidth and their competition quoting the other, driving the lower one - even if they are being realistic - out of the market. So today they are selling burst speeds and everyone that knows is aware it is impossible to deliver streaming at that rate.
I sat next to someone working on infrastructure at AOL and they are looking very hard at this problem. Yes, fiber to the curb or the house is a nice idea, but we do not have the backbone infrastructure to support this today. We barely have the infrastructure to support burst speeds that are being sold today if more than a few users are making active use of the maximum speeds.
Trying to change the marketing of broadband to consumers is not going to work. It is just like hard drives - one set of numbers on the box, a different set in reality. Just like automobile speedometers calibrated to 180 for sports cars. But this isn't just an ISP problem, not by any means.
To implement full use of what the broadband companies are selling would require a complete overhaul of "the Internet" in order to deliver things like IPTV. HD IPTV is a pipedream for now, and probably the next 10 years. The backbone isn't there for it and nobody is making so much money selling broadband service they can afford to invest in massive infrastructure improvements.
Also Canada has a lot stiffer immigration policies. Just try to find yourself a job in Canada without proper government-supplied documentation.
Compare this to the USA where you can buy a fake ID for $100 in any large city.
As far as I know, this hasn't come up yet. When it does, and I am sure it will, the porn site operator will lose. Because they allowed an underage minor to access the site. So the underage minor lied about their age... so what? They can't legally agree anyway, so it doesn't matter.
A while back you needed to fax a driver's license over to get them to give you access. This may indeed be what is needed again. Credit card verification doesn't cut it. If you can get by with just lying about your age, that doesn't cut it either.
Well, the truth of the matter with Enron is very simple. There was no "pension" as such. There was an employee-directed 401K plan. The employees that lost everything they had in the plan did so because they placed all of the money into the company stock.
Most companies will tell you that if you do that you are making a mistake. Any financial advisor worth anything will tell you putting all the money into even the same "sector" is a mistake and all the money in a single company sheer idiocy.
WorldCom the situation is somewhat less clear what is going on. United is just using the Federal Government to take over their underfunded pension program because they can either fund it or fly airplanes. Perhaps mistakenly, they chose to remain in business. For some reason the government allows this kind of decision.
Better count on the 2nd amendment then, because it will be the folks with guns that decide things. And today, the police are significantly outgunned by the gangs.
Yes, just like in 1350 or so - pay the tax or convert. The terror will stop.