You might recall that during the Vietnam war that children were often used to carry bombs. American soldiers would rush to get the kid out of the line of fire and to "safety" and once back in the lines - BOOM! I don't think this was the first time it was done either.
Wikipedia is edited by 20-somethings that really think the world began when they were born and nothing before that counts... sort of pre-historical times.
Sorry, SPF is meaningless. When registrars will provide obvious domain names that are in conflict with legitimate businesses. For example, you have www.bankofamerica.com, which has EV SSL and is the real site. OK, so now user gets an email from www.bankofamericachecking.com and provides a link to - you guessed it - www.bankofamericachecking.com. Of course this site doesn't have much longevity because it is hosted in the US.
Alternatively, you have the site hosted in Netherlands (with strong privacy committments) or China (who thinks ripping off Americans is funny) and it could last a couple of months.
The point is, as long as a registrar will issue a domain name like www.bankofamericachecking.com the system is completely screwed up. Yes, you can also get an EV SSL certificate for www.bankofamericachecking.com from some folks. All you need is proof that you have some connection to "americachecking" or some part of the name like that. Not every SSL provider will do it, but the ones that will are likely well known in the phishing circles.
So SPF means nothing if you control the domain. Which is easy enough.
iTunes is such an incredibly small part of the music download landscape that it doesn't matter. Also, iTunes did make a big deal about how you were giving away your credit card if you redistribute music which is no small deterrent.
No, people aren't fundamentally honest. Ever go into a store (you know the old 20th Century mode of shopping) where they have a guy checking people as they leave? Why is that? It is because they love their customers so much they just hate to see them leave? No, it is because it is known to retailers that 10% of their customers are walking out with stuff they didn't pay for. If it was a lot lower percentage the guy at the door would have nothing to do all day.
DRM free books means everyone can sell these, not only Amazon. Diversity in the supply chain is good for everyone. Good for the publishers that are not beholden to one buyer, and good for consumers that can choose the store/s from which to buy ebooks.
Do you understand that the publishers have a contract with Amazon which limits where they sell their books and DRM has nothing do with it? I have hundreds of books on my Kindle that didn't come from Amazon and have no DRM. The Mobipocket format (which is what Kindle uses) is sufficiently open to allow anyone to create books in this format. DRM is not locking publishers in - Amazon is quite capable of doing that and will continue to do that DRM or no DRM.
There is no vendor lock-in on ebooks. Doesn't exist. Anyone that says there is does not understand and probably doesn't own any of the current devices. There might have been some kind of lock-in with the early Sony devices, but not with Kindle (ever) or the current Nook.
I believe we have explored quite throughly the populations of "will pay", "will pay if you make me" and "won't pay". It turns out about 5% of the world belongs to "will pay" when they do not have to vs. around 90% belonging to "will pay if you make me".
iTunes dropping DRM was pretty meaningless - they account for 1-2% of music downloads and it exists to support the iPod platform. The rest of the people are just downloading for free. Sure, you might find a Napster (new version) customer now and then, but by and large nobody is buying music any longer. Amazon dropping DRM would have a much, much bigger effect as they are arguably a huge portion of the ebook marketplace - I would guess at least 30% and maybe a lot more.
So what happens if you take 30% of the ebooks in the world and remove DRM restrictions on redistribution? Well, I am sure you would get a heck of a lot of redistribution. Today it is possible to strip the DRM from a Kindle book from Amazon - it is just complicated enough that nobody is doing it on a large scale. So the redistribution of Amazon ebooks is pretty low. Open it up and I suspect you would easily see that the 5% that will pay will continue but the 95% that suddenly do not have to are going to be exercising their abilities to not pay.
Then why are we still doing it? If things were that clear I would expect some people would be motivated to start turning things off - burning cars, trashing airplanes, blowing up power plants.
Standing on the corner with a sign "Please turn out the lights" isn't going to do much good other than getting you branded as a nut.
However, what we are seeing is nothing more than people with signs and not much more. No "direct action". If millions of people are going to die because it is getting warmer then how come none of them are stepping up to the plate to try to save (a) themselves, (b) their families, and (c) the rest of humanity?
Sorry, but if things are even approaching the scale that is being talked about - mass extinctions, coastal regions underwater, huge areas becoming arid and having to move farm production much further north, etc. - "find renewable energy sources" isn't going to do anything. Neither will "use less energy" unless it is on a scale that actually means something.
Does replacing a US-made 100 watt incandescent light bulb with one made in China (shipped over to the US), filled with mercury, and assembled badly by slaves but only using 7 watts make sense? In a global sense, no it makes no sense at all because counting everything (shipping, mercury, lifespan, etc.) the energy difference is negligable. If you assume the worse-case for coal-fired power plants there might be some justification, but not much.
Shutting off residential electric service during the day (when everyone is working) might make a difference. If you want power to be on, get $30,000 worth of solar panels. Tearing up the roads going into US cities to force everyone unconditionally to use mass transit to get into the city would help. Eliminating passenger air travel would do something. "Find renewable sources" is a little weak but it seems to be all we can muster.
Tell me, if millions are going to die because of it getting warmer, how come nobody is taking things into their own hands?
Problem with the "rate" idea is that the climate has certainly been known to change rapidly in the past. They have uncovered frozen Mammoths with semi-tropical plants in their stomachs - undigested. While it is theoretically possible that the animals in question were flown from a semi-tropical environment to the frozen wastes where they were entombed, the somewhat more reasonable explanation is that they were frozen in place by an extremely rapid (think special effects from "The After Tomorrow") cooling - so rapid that the plants and animals were frozen instantly.
I'd call that a pretty rapid change myself. I don't think 40,000 years ago there was much human involvement, although it might have been those super-scientists from Atlantis some folks keep writing books about. But it would appear to be a natural process at work.
I do not have similar evidence of rapid warming (heating?) off hand, but it is pretty simple to believe that if it can happen with cooling that it can also happen with warming.
The problem with "saving the ozone layer from CFCs" is that while there was a hole and it seems to have closed up nobody really knows why. It disappeared quite a bit faster than could possibly be from eliminating all CFC's (which we didn't do).
So I understand there is quite a bit of interest in exactly what did happen. It wasn't the CFCs that were causing it in the first place, possibly. Or, it is a natural process that nobody noticed before and it is cyclic. In short, while everyone is clapping themselves on the back for a job well done, nobody really knows what happened. Or if it could happen again.
Well, you can blame the move to regulate every part of our lives by the government. You see, when you beg for regulation of finance companies, banks, credit card companies, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and every other business under the sun, there is a certain amount of collateral damage that results.
You get regulations about who can interfere with regulated businesses, for one thing. It is impossible to "regulate businesses" and still have the door open for someone to operate a business without said regulation. Nope, regulation is an all-or-nothing sort of thing which means that private individuals doing business which is regulated end up being regulated.
A very important trick for low-current devices is what the Palm Pilot did. It ran on two AAA batteries but it would suck them down to less than 1 volt each. How did it manage such a feat? Well, the key was a DC voltage converter that would take the battery voltage and output 3.3V to run the device. It eliminated the regulators and such completely and it would operate down to something less than 2V from the batteries.
This resulted in a battery life of around 3-4 weeks with a lot of usage. Sure, the display was 4-level monochrome with a green electroluminescent backlight - very, very low current - but it got the job done. The impressive thing is that similar devices, using the same batteries, would get anywhere from a few days to a week of battery life. I used to joke that if you held the Casio (maybe it was an A-11) up to your ear you could hear a whistling sound - the sound of the batteries being sucked dry.
I am not sure if this would work with current rechargable batteries as most of them drop rather suddenly from 1.2V per cell to about zero in the span of minutes. The slow taper down of battery voltage is a thing of the past.
Deutsch Bank was a huge player in the selling of "insurance" against mortgage-backed securities. But, they were doing the selling in New York and other places as well.
My family has three Kindles on the same account and all the books are shared between them. I would suppose that any type of subscription would apply to that same model as well. So, one subscription on all three devices.
The downside is they must be all on the same account, but that should be obvious.
Facebook produces gaping customers that are ready for the plucking by advertisers. It is really one of the few commodities that can be produced in the US today. It doesn't pollute, it isn't involved in any sort of racial profiling and it doesn't require raw materials from either a strip mine or China.
The problem is if someone - mostly anyone - gets a photo of some athelete wearing Reebok shoes and they are being compensated for promoting Nike shoes you can be Reebok is going to use that picture to death, and they paid nothing for it. Nike comes along and says we paid $X millions to have this guy wear Nike shoes and the one time he didn't somebody got a photo of it. Of course, Nike is going to sue.
Want to eliminate the lawsuits and the free photo advertising? That is what rules like this are designed to do.
No, the answer isn't to open it up or prohibit sponsorship. It is to deal with the litigious nonsense that happens in the US.
It might not fit in with what so-called climate experts are promoting today, but the idea that the climate wasn't warmer before is utter bunk.
Any study of fossils presents a clear picture that the North American continent was both a lot warmer and a lot colder than it is today. Greenland? Well, grapes were grown in both Greenland and Newfoundland 1000 years ago. We have both written records of this as well as (I understand) artifacts from the grape growing itself.
The other thing that people just can't get their head around is the fact that the climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. We might like it the way it is now, but like things are in Chicago, just wait - it will be different soon. The Earth has seen dramatic changes over the last 40,000 years or so and for the most part there have been humans around to see this. North America was covered in ice 40,000 years ago and it left behind the Great Lakes and a lot of rocks in Wisconsin that were not there before.
Similarly, there have been fossilized evidience of plants that are known to only grow in tropical climates found in Canada. Not sure of the time scale for this, but it is a clear indication that things have been at the very least different on the planet in the past.
We can try as hard as we want to control the climate and hope that things do not change - we will not be successful in this endeavor.
It is pretty much accepted that there is a changing climate. Unfortunately for the people that want significant societal changes the climate has been changing since the Earth was formed and there isn't anything humans can do to stop the climate from changing.
So the real question is if the climate change we are seeing is solely caused by human activities, specifically CO2 emissions. So far the science that i have seen has at best said maybe. Even more significant on the topic of societal change is the question "If we stopped putting out CO2 today would the climate return to where we think it should be?" And clearly the answer to that is nobody knows. A lot of people would really like to believe the answer is yes, but the basis for their assurances are weak and often motivated by other issues.
We do know that the climate is bound to change. We also know that the appearance of stability for the last 400 years or so is nothing to judge things on. The climate was different before 1600 and it is likely to be different in the future.
How much can we control it? We do know that putting CO2 into the atmosphere is one thing we can control and it appears it could be significant. But we have zero control over all of the other inputs. One troubling scenario that has come up time and time again since the 1960s is the idea that if the solar input to our climate were to decrease slightly the only thing that might keep much of the planet habitable would be increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
We do know that nobody on the planet feels strongly enough to take direct action on this issue and that is troubling in and of itself. If there was a group of people that went around shutting down coal-fired power plants in the name of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere that would be an interesting data point. I'm not saying it would be effective or that it would be a good thing - but just the fact that nobody is doing it means nobody feels strongly enough on the matter to stake their lives, fortunes and sacred honor (as I believe the phrasing goes) on it.
Most of the "real solutions" that people have been talking about are going to have a huge impact of the standard of living, if not the very lives of people in the Western world. Nobody in any governmental body has seriously taken steps toward a "real solution" so far. The small steps that have been taken are either meaningless - Kyoto, for example - or are immediately balanced out by negative measures. Carbon credits, for example, are an exercise in mental masterbation that will in the end benefit only a few that should not be deriving any benefit from this at all.
Just for discussion purposes, some real solutions might be:
Eliminate passenger air travel completely. Freight might be needed but not passengers.
Eliminate private cars in all US cities. Tear up the roads so the cities are unreachable by car.
Shut down immediately all coal-fired power plants. Start building nuclear and whatever else you can think of but no more burning.
Tax all CO2 production with an eye towards suppression. If your car cost $100,000 a year to operate you would think twice about using it, right? If turning on a light cost $20 you wouldn't do it, right? This is the end goal of cap-and-trade but without enriching a few at the expense of the many. So what if there isn't a viable alternative right now - people in the 1800s lived just fine without cars and electric light.
I guess I would say right now the side effects of a "real solution" are so incredibly drastic that they rival the supposed problems caused by doing nothing. And nothing short of these things are likely to do anything at all.
Well, that is an interesting perspective, but in the Western world law and government have long held that intent is an important aspect of all acts. Thus, if your intent is to harm a pregnant women and the child she carries you will find yourself prosecuted under any number of laws on the books today. However, if your intent is benign toward the woman and/or fetus, the law takes a completely different view of the matter.
Similarly, if I am driving down the street and run over a child I may or may not be prosecuted. If the child runs out into the street we have a tragic accident whereas if I drive up on the sidewalk I will likely be facing 2nd degree murder charges. Intent makes all the difference in the world in how the act is interpreted, at least legally.
There has been some movement to try to eliminate the qualification of intent in some trials recently, even as far back as the 1980s. It is a silly thing to do because anyone can see without intent there can be no crime in so many cases. Therefore, the idea of prosecuting a woman for a miscarriage is silly - unless her intent is to be rid of the child. And there have been convictions in court for that sort of thing since at least the 1800s if not before then.
The problem is that as many have expected the move to make abortion more palatable has indeed advanced the acceptance of euthanasia in other venues as well. When you can sit down with your doctor and decide that a human life isn't worth continuing this is troubling on many fronts, whether it is an unborn baby, a elderly person with health issues or a mentally retarted person. Enabling the decision to terminate life affects all of these equally - you cannot isolate this to simply abortion and leave it at that.
I am somewhat supportive of abortion as a birth control measure of last resort, but it really does need to be the last resort. Unfortunately, it has been used as a substitute for other methods all too often and this certainly has an effect on people around the issue. But no matter where you come down on the issue of abortion it needs to be made perfectly clear that if you can easily justify the termination of a pregnancy that you can also easily justify the termination of someone with a "reduced quality of life" no matter the age of the person.
I do not wish to be part of a society that can, through legal or medical decision making, enable even the idea that there is a threshold of "quality of life" that must be exceeded to allow the person to continue to live. We have had recent periods where this has been the case and it didn't work out all that well. We have likely all read stories about possible futures where continued life must be justified simply to be continued. I don't think that is a good idea - and making abortion easy, conflict-free and readily available brings us closer and closer to that sort of environment.
Far closer to the idea that he has 100 customers but needs 10,000 to fund the operations. Can something like this ever get enough customers to operate? Not if they charge a penny more than a non-privacy protecting ISP - it simply isn't a priority for most people. A few, yes, and that is all the customers something like this would ever have.
Far too few to make a go of it. No reason for anyone to attack it - it will die of lack of interest.
You could have an agreement with who you sold it to, but they would be under no obligation to have a similar agreement with whomever they in turn sold it to. I am not a lawyer, but I highly doubt there is any way to enforce something like that on down the line of future sales.
A clause in a sales contract that said all future sales had to include the following terms... would be unlikely to be enforceable. So sure, you could put it in, but then what? If it isn't enforcible and auditable leave it out and make the agreement simpler. That rule goes for just about everything.
Will people pay for supposed "privacy"? Sure, a few would but absolutely not everyone. Or even a majority of people.
The fact that the local police or FBI can subpoena records held by your ISP to find out what you have been doing online and that Google will disclose that you have been researching poisons if your spouse suddenly dies of some rare and obscure poison is irrelevent to most people. Most people more or less figure that if you have been researching poisons and your spouse dies from one that you probably did it and deserve what is coming.
The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them.
If you are downloading movies, music, software, ebooks and whatever else you can grab off BitTorrent today and after a huge legal effort you get caught, well, most people's attitude is (a) I wish I knew how to do that... and (b) sucks to be you. Again, the offender is 99% of the time the person getting nailed and while there is a possiblity of the wrong person getting stuck with the bill we have seen through history that it is rare enough that most people discount it ever possibly happening to them. So it isn't important.
So this can be planned and might attract a few geeky investors. But it is extremely unlikely to survive even one year and probably won't ever be launched. The reality is that almost nobody cares will sink in and doom the project.
Nice idea. Too bad nobody cares. I do not see it affecting mainstream cable companies in the slightest little bit.
First off, the publisher doesn't have any of the issues that you are talking about - printing and shipping books is really cheap. Maybe $2 for most soft-cover books and maybe $0.25 to ship it (with others in a box) anywhere in the US. After it gets there, it is the book store's problem which does not affect the price the publisher is charging. Same thing with getting stolen - not the publisher's problem.
Most of the book's cost is the editing and promotion. No editing has been tried and it sucks. You can find many self-edited books for the Kindle on Amazon and almost universally they aren't worth the $0.99 they are charging for them. Authors are not editors. Promotion isn't optional either - if you don't get the book noticed, nobody will buy it. Promotion isn't all advertising to the consumer, either. There is a lot of promotion that goes on just to get a book store to put it on the shelf or a reviewer to bother to read it instead of the hundred other books they got that week. So the reviewer reads it, writes about it and the book store puts it on the shelf because money was spent promoting it. End result is people hear about it and buy it.
Want to guess how many books are produced each week that nobody knows anything about? Promotion is the only way out of that trap.
If you can figure out how to replace editing and promotion (which is what the publisher does and nearly all of what they do) and get rid of the publisher, great. But not doing those things is not an option.
By the way, I'll bet you didn't know that publishers do not print books - that is done by a book printing company which is usually far, far away from the publisher. Again the publisher provides editing and promotion and that is about all they do.
Traffic laws in Germany are perhaps the most draconian I have ever heard of. Speeding three times is enough to get your license revoked forever. Driving in any manner that could be considered to be reckless - such as an illegal lane change - can get your license revoked forever for one occurrance.
OK, maybe it is better elsewhere in Europe but do not make the mistake of thinking German traffic laws are lax in any way or that there is the possibility of getting a warning or getting asked not to do it again.
Of course one side effect of this is German city streets are pretty easy to drive on.
Absolutely. It is much, much harder to fire people or "downsize" in Europe compared to the US. This means that if you are starting a business and think you need 15 people in the US you bring in 15 and if after 8 or 9 months you discover you can't really afford to pay all 15 you dismiss some. In Europe in exactly the same situation you hire 5 people because you are really, really sure you can pay them and utilize them fully. After two years maybe you hire five more. Because of this you may not be able to bid on all the work you would have if you had more people but you cannot withstand the problems created by having to dismiss people.
This is one of the huge differences in unemployment between the US and Europe. Most of the time the US unemployment rate is far less than that of Europe because it is much less of a long term risk to hire someone. It does mean that people in the US tend to have shorter term jobs at many different companies compared to nearly lifetime employment at a single company in Europe.
Another thing this creates is if you are going to start a company in Europe you need to have a huge amount of financing in place to do so. You are potentially making a lifetime committment to employees. In the US you can start a company on a shoestring and if things go bad you don't lose your entire life savings, home, car and every other possession. In Europe a partnership starting a company and failing will pretty much wipe out the entire lives of the partners. Makes it a huge risk and one that not a lot of people are willing to take. Comparatively in the US it is easy to start a business and if it fails you can move on and build up some cash to try again. In no way it is a life-ending stigma that the government chases you around for the rest of your life.
Most of my experience with this is from Germany and a lot of it from the 1990s. I don't think things have changed there all that much and I do believe most of Europe operates similarly to Germany.
I would offer that you are pretty much correct about the TSA. It would be wildly unpopular to actually perform the task that the TSA is assigned. The security forces for El Al actually perform their mission, and I assure you it is very unpopular. You need to arrive at the airport at least 4 hours before your flight and you may not be on the plane you scheduled even so. However, they haven't had an incident in a very, very long time. So clearly in the face of huge opposition they are doing their job.
This is not a job that could easily be done in the US, nor would the airlines find it reasonable. So the job isn't getting done. However, if the government didn't put up a front to make it seem like there was something being done insurance companies would simply refuse to insure the airlines unless something - pretty much anything - was done. WIth a single incident having the power to bankrupt an airline there would be no more passenger flights without insurance. So it is simple - we either have the TSA with their flaws or we have no air travel.
The government taking over insuring the airlines would have pretty much the same parameters as the TSA does today. Might be better, might be worse but the differences would be minor.
Clearly the government and the airlines do not want this sort of understanding rubbed in people's faces. The fact that the TSA cannot do the job the way that Mossad does mean that the job is likely not getting done effectively. OK, anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes and knows anything about what the security problems are understands this. But it isn't on the nightly news and never will be. A TSA employee that doesn't understand how the system works isn't doing anyone a favor by trying to explain it - especially when that message is taken public.
Another aspect of this is the usual chain of command problem. If you see a problem and report it up through the chain of command nobody really has an issue with the person reporting the problem. Trying to jump around the chain of command or bring outsiders in is never appreciated and usually has nasty consequences for the person doing so. This applies to any organization - be it the military, a commercial enterprise or something as mundain as a hospital. If you take this one item away from this it will be a valuable lesson.
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Well, for folks that actually read stuff...
You might recall that during the Vietnam war that children were often used to carry bombs. American soldiers would rush to get the kid out of the line of fire and to "safety" and once back in the lines - BOOM! I don't think this was the first time it was done either.
Wikipedia is edited by 20-somethings that really think the world began when they were born and nothing before that counts... sort of pre-historical times.
Sorry, SPF is meaningless. When registrars will provide obvious domain names that are in conflict with legitimate businesses. For example, you have www.bankofamerica.com, which has EV SSL and is the real site. OK, so now user gets an email from www.bankofamericachecking.com and provides a link to - you guessed it - www.bankofamericachecking.com. Of course this site doesn't have much longevity because it is hosted in the US.
Alternatively, you have the site hosted in Netherlands (with strong privacy committments) or China (who thinks ripping off Americans is funny) and it could last a couple of months.
The point is, as long as a registrar will issue a domain name like www.bankofamericachecking.com the system is completely screwed up. Yes, you can also get an EV SSL certificate for www.bankofamericachecking.com from some folks. All you need is proof that you have some connection to "americachecking" or some part of the name like that. Not every SSL provider will do it, but the ones that will are likely well known in the phishing circles.
So SPF means nothing if you control the domain. Which is easy enough.
iTunes is such an incredibly small part of the music download landscape that it doesn't matter. Also, iTunes did make a big deal about how you were giving away your credit card if you redistribute music which is no small deterrent.
No, people aren't fundamentally honest. Ever go into a store (you know the old 20th Century mode of shopping) where they have a guy checking people as they leave? Why is that? It is because they love their customers so much they just hate to see them leave? No, it is because it is known to retailers that 10% of their customers are walking out with stuff they didn't pay for. If it was a lot lower percentage the guy at the door would have nothing to do all day.
DRM free books means everyone can sell these, not only Amazon. Diversity in the supply chain is good for everyone. Good for the publishers that are not beholden to one buyer, and good for consumers that can choose the store/s from which to buy ebooks.
Do you understand that the publishers have a contract with Amazon which limits where they sell their books and DRM has nothing do with it? I have hundreds of books on my Kindle that didn't come from Amazon and have no DRM. The Mobipocket format (which is what Kindle uses) is sufficiently open to allow anyone to create books in this format. DRM is not locking publishers in - Amazon is quite capable of doing that and will continue to do that DRM or no DRM.
There is no vendor lock-in on ebooks. Doesn't exist. Anyone that says there is does not understand and probably doesn't own any of the current devices. There might have been some kind of lock-in with the early Sony devices, but not with Kindle (ever) or the current Nook.
I believe we have explored quite throughly the populations of "will pay", "will pay if you make me" and "won't pay". It turns out about 5% of the world belongs to "will pay" when they do not have to vs. around 90% belonging to "will pay if you make me".
iTunes dropping DRM was pretty meaningless - they account for 1-2% of music downloads and it exists to support the iPod platform. The rest of the people are just downloading for free. Sure, you might find a Napster (new version) customer now and then, but by and large nobody is buying music any longer. Amazon dropping DRM would have a much, much bigger effect as they are arguably a huge portion of the ebook marketplace - I would guess at least 30% and maybe a lot more.
So what happens if you take 30% of the ebooks in the world and remove DRM restrictions on redistribution? Well, I am sure you would get a heck of a lot of redistribution. Today it is possible to strip the DRM from a Kindle book from Amazon - it is just complicated enough that nobody is doing it on a large scale. So the redistribution of Amazon ebooks is pretty low. Open it up and I suspect you would easily see that the 5% that will pay will continue but the 95% that suddenly do not have to are going to be exercising their abilities to not pay.
Then why are we still doing it? If things were that clear I would expect some people would be motivated to start turning things off - burning cars, trashing airplanes, blowing up power plants.
Standing on the corner with a sign "Please turn out the lights" isn't going to do much good other than getting you branded as a nut.
However, what we are seeing is nothing more than people with signs and not much more. No "direct action". If millions of people are going to die because it is getting warmer then how come none of them are stepping up to the plate to try to save (a) themselves, (b) their families, and (c) the rest of humanity?
Sorry, but if things are even approaching the scale that is being talked about - mass extinctions, coastal regions underwater, huge areas becoming arid and having to move farm production much further north, etc. - "find renewable energy sources" isn't going to do anything. Neither will "use less energy" unless it is on a scale that actually means something.
Does replacing a US-made 100 watt incandescent light bulb with one made in China (shipped over to the US), filled with mercury, and assembled badly by slaves but only using 7 watts make sense? In a global sense, no it makes no sense at all because counting everything (shipping, mercury, lifespan, etc.) the energy difference is negligable. If you assume the worse-case for coal-fired power plants there might be some justification, but not much.
Shutting off residential electric service during the day (when everyone is working) might make a difference. If you want power to be on, get $30,000 worth of solar panels. Tearing up the roads going into US cities to force everyone unconditionally to use mass transit to get into the city would help. Eliminating passenger air travel would do something. "Find renewable sources" is a little weak but it seems to be all we can muster.
Tell me, if millions are going to die because of it getting warmer, how come nobody is taking things into their own hands?
Problem with the "rate" idea is that the climate has certainly been known to change rapidly in the past. They have uncovered frozen Mammoths with semi-tropical plants in their stomachs - undigested. While it is theoretically possible that the animals in question were flown from a semi-tropical environment to the frozen wastes where they were entombed, the somewhat more reasonable explanation is that they were frozen in place by an extremely rapid (think special effects from "The After Tomorrow") cooling - so rapid that the plants and animals were frozen instantly.
I'd call that a pretty rapid change myself. I don't think 40,000 years ago there was much human involvement, although it might have been those super-scientists from Atlantis some folks keep writing books about. But it would appear to be a natural process at work.
I do not have similar evidence of rapid warming (heating?) off hand, but it is pretty simple to believe that if it can happen with cooling that it can also happen with warming.
The problem with "saving the ozone layer from CFCs" is that while there was a hole and it seems to have closed up nobody really knows why. It disappeared quite a bit faster than could possibly be from eliminating all CFC's (which we didn't do).
So I understand there is quite a bit of interest in exactly what did happen. It wasn't the CFCs that were causing it in the first place, possibly. Or, it is a natural process that nobody noticed before and it is cyclic. In short, while everyone is clapping themselves on the back for a job well done, nobody really knows what happened. Or if it could happen again.
Well, you can blame the move to regulate every part of our lives by the government. You see, when you beg for regulation of finance companies, banks, credit card companies, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and every other business under the sun, there is a certain amount of collateral damage that results.
You get regulations about who can interfere with regulated businesses, for one thing. It is impossible to "regulate businesses" and still have the door open for someone to operate a business without said regulation. Nope, regulation is an all-or-nothing sort of thing which means that private individuals doing business which is regulated end up being regulated.
Gosh, maybe there are a few too many regulations.
A very important trick for low-current devices is what the Palm Pilot did. It ran on two AAA batteries but it would suck them down to less than 1 volt each. How did it manage such a feat? Well, the key was a DC voltage converter that would take the battery voltage and output 3.3V to run the device. It eliminated the regulators and such completely and it would operate down to something less than 2V from the batteries.
This resulted in a battery life of around 3-4 weeks with a lot of usage. Sure, the display was 4-level monochrome with a green electroluminescent backlight - very, very low current - but it got the job done. The impressive thing is that similar devices, using the same batteries, would get anywhere from a few days to a week of battery life. I used to joke that if you held the Casio (maybe it was an A-11) up to your ear you could hear a whistling sound - the sound of the batteries being sucked dry.
I am not sure if this would work with current rechargable batteries as most of them drop rather suddenly from 1.2V per cell to about zero in the span of minutes. The slow taper down of battery voltage is a thing of the past.
Deutsch Bank was a huge player in the selling of "insurance" against mortgage-backed securities. But, they were doing the selling in New York and other places as well.
Yes.
My family has three Kindles on the same account and all the books are shared between them. I would suppose that any type of subscription would apply to that same model as well. So, one subscription on all three devices.
The downside is they must be all on the same account, but that should be obvious.
Facebook produces gaping customers that are ready for the plucking by advertisers. It is really one of the few commodities that can be produced in the US today. It doesn't pollute, it isn't involved in any sort of racial profiling and it doesn't require raw materials from either a strip mine or China.
The problem is if someone - mostly anyone - gets a photo of some athelete wearing Reebok shoes and they are being compensated for promoting Nike shoes you can be Reebok is going to use that picture to death, and they paid nothing for it. Nike comes along and says we paid $X millions to have this guy wear Nike shoes and the one time he didn't somebody got a photo of it. Of course, Nike is going to sue.
Want to eliminate the lawsuits and the free photo advertising? That is what rules like this are designed to do.
No, the answer isn't to open it up or prohibit sponsorship. It is to deal with the litigious nonsense that happens in the US.
It might not fit in with what so-called climate experts are promoting today, but the idea that the climate wasn't warmer before is utter bunk. Any study of fossils presents a clear picture that the North American continent was both a lot warmer and a lot colder than it is today. Greenland? Well, grapes were grown in both Greenland and Newfoundland 1000 years ago. We have both written records of this as well as (I understand) artifacts from the grape growing itself. The other thing that people just can't get their head around is the fact that the climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. We might like it the way it is now, but like things are in Chicago, just wait - it will be different soon. The Earth has seen dramatic changes over the last 40,000 years or so and for the most part there have been humans around to see this. North America was covered in ice 40,000 years ago and it left behind the Great Lakes and a lot of rocks in Wisconsin that were not there before. Similarly, there have been fossilized evidience of plants that are known to only grow in tropical climates found in Canada. Not sure of the time scale for this, but it is a clear indication that things have been at the very least different on the planet in the past. We can try as hard as we want to control the climate and hope that things do not change - we will not be successful in this endeavor.
So the real question is if the climate change we are seeing is solely caused by human activities, specifically CO2 emissions. So far the science that i have seen has at best said maybe. Even more significant on the topic of societal change is the question "If we stopped putting out CO2 today would the climate return to where we think it should be?" And clearly the answer to that is nobody knows. A lot of people would really like to believe the answer is yes, but the basis for their assurances are weak and often motivated by other issues.
We do know that the climate is bound to change. We also know that the appearance of stability for the last 400 years or so is nothing to judge things on. The climate was different before 1600 and it is likely to be different in the future.
How much can we control it? We do know that putting CO2 into the atmosphere is one thing we can control and it appears it could be significant. But we have zero control over all of the other inputs. One troubling scenario that has come up time and time again since the 1960s is the idea that if the solar input to our climate were to decrease slightly the only thing that might keep much of the planet habitable would be increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
We do know that nobody on the planet feels strongly enough to take direct action on this issue and that is troubling in and of itself. If there was a group of people that went around shutting down coal-fired power plants in the name of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere that would be an interesting data point. I'm not saying it would be effective or that it would be a good thing - but just the fact that nobody is doing it means nobody feels strongly enough on the matter to stake their lives, fortunes and sacred honor (as I believe the phrasing goes) on it.
Most of the "real solutions" that people have been talking about are going to have a huge impact of the standard of living, if not the very lives of people in the Western world. Nobody in any governmental body has seriously taken steps toward a "real solution" so far. The small steps that have been taken are either meaningless - Kyoto, for example - or are immediately balanced out by negative measures. Carbon credits, for example, are an exercise in mental masterbation that will in the end benefit only a few that should not be deriving any benefit from this at all.
Just for discussion purposes, some real solutions might be:
I guess I would say right now the side effects of a "real solution" are so incredibly drastic that they rival the supposed problems caused by doing nothing. And nothing short of these things are likely to do anything at all.
Well, that is an interesting perspective, but in the Western world law and government have long held that intent is an important aspect of all acts. Thus, if your intent is to harm a pregnant women and the child she carries you will find yourself prosecuted under any number of laws on the books today. However, if your intent is benign toward the woman and/or fetus, the law takes a completely different view of the matter. Similarly, if I am driving down the street and run over a child I may or may not be prosecuted. If the child runs out into the street we have a tragic accident whereas if I drive up on the sidewalk I will likely be facing 2nd degree murder charges. Intent makes all the difference in the world in how the act is interpreted, at least legally. There has been some movement to try to eliminate the qualification of intent in some trials recently, even as far back as the 1980s. It is a silly thing to do because anyone can see without intent there can be no crime in so many cases. Therefore, the idea of prosecuting a woman for a miscarriage is silly - unless her intent is to be rid of the child. And there have been convictions in court for that sort of thing since at least the 1800s if not before then.
The problem is that as many have expected the move to make abortion more palatable has indeed advanced the acceptance of euthanasia in other venues as well. When you can sit down with your doctor and decide that a human life isn't worth continuing this is troubling on many fronts, whether it is an unborn baby, a elderly person with health issues or a mentally retarted person. Enabling the decision to terminate life affects all of these equally - you cannot isolate this to simply abortion and leave it at that. I am somewhat supportive of abortion as a birth control measure of last resort, but it really does need to be the last resort. Unfortunately, it has been used as a substitute for other methods all too often and this certainly has an effect on people around the issue. But no matter where you come down on the issue of abortion it needs to be made perfectly clear that if you can easily justify the termination of a pregnancy that you can also easily justify the termination of someone with a "reduced quality of life" no matter the age of the person. I do not wish to be part of a society that can, through legal or medical decision making, enable even the idea that there is a threshold of "quality of life" that must be exceeded to allow the person to continue to live. We have had recent periods where this has been the case and it didn't work out all that well. We have likely all read stories about possible futures where continued life must be justified simply to be continued. I don't think that is a good idea - and making abortion easy, conflict-free and readily available brings us closer and closer to that sort of environment.
Far closer to the idea that he has 100 customers but needs 10,000 to fund the operations. Can something like this ever get enough customers to operate? Not if they charge a penny more than a non-privacy protecting ISP - it simply isn't a priority for most people. A few, yes, and that is all the customers something like this would ever have.
Far too few to make a go of it. No reason for anyone to attack it - it will die of lack of interest.
You could have an agreement with who you sold it to, but they would be under no obligation to have a similar agreement with whomever they in turn sold it to. I am not a lawyer, but I highly doubt there is any way to enforce something like that on down the line of future sales.
A clause in a sales contract that said all future sales had to include the following terms ... would be unlikely to be enforceable. So sure, you could put it in, but then what? If it isn't enforcible and auditable leave it out and make the agreement simpler. That rule goes for just about everything.
Will people pay for supposed "privacy"? Sure, a few would but absolutely not everyone. Or even a majority of people.
The fact that the local police or FBI can subpoena records held by your ISP to find out what you have been doing online and that Google will disclose that you have been researching poisons if your spouse suddenly dies of some rare and obscure poison is irrelevent to most people. Most people more or less figure that if you have been researching poisons and your spouse dies from one that you probably did it and deserve what is coming.
The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them.
If you are downloading movies, music, software, ebooks and whatever else you can grab off BitTorrent today and after a huge legal effort you get caught, well, most people's attitude is (a) I wish I knew how to do that... and (b) sucks to be you. Again, the offender is 99% of the time the person getting nailed and while there is a possiblity of the wrong person getting stuck with the bill we have seen through history that it is rare enough that most people discount it ever possibly happening to them. So it isn't important.
So this can be planned and might attract a few geeky investors. But it is extremely unlikely to survive even one year and probably won't ever be launched. The reality is that almost nobody cares will sink in and doom the project.
Nice idea. Too bad nobody cares. I do not see it affecting mainstream cable companies in the slightest little bit.
First off, the publisher doesn't have any of the issues that you are talking about - printing and shipping books is really cheap. Maybe $2 for most soft-cover books and maybe $0.25 to ship it (with others in a box) anywhere in the US. After it gets there, it is the book store's problem which does not affect the price the publisher is charging. Same thing with getting stolen - not the publisher's problem.
Most of the book's cost is the editing and promotion. No editing has been tried and it sucks. You can find many self-edited books for the Kindle on Amazon and almost universally they aren't worth the $0.99 they are charging for them. Authors are not editors. Promotion isn't optional either - if you don't get the book noticed, nobody will buy it. Promotion isn't all advertising to the consumer, either. There is a lot of promotion that goes on just to get a book store to put it on the shelf or a reviewer to bother to read it instead of the hundred other books they got that week. So the reviewer reads it, writes about it and the book store puts it on the shelf because money was spent promoting it. End result is people hear about it and buy it.
Want to guess how many books are produced each week that nobody knows anything about? Promotion is the only way out of that trap.
If you can figure out how to replace editing and promotion (which is what the publisher does and nearly all of what they do) and get rid of the publisher, great. But not doing those things is not an option.
By the way, I'll bet you didn't know that publishers do not print books - that is done by a book printing company which is usually far, far away from the publisher. Again the publisher provides editing and promotion and that is about all they do.
Traffic laws in Germany are perhaps the most draconian I have ever heard of. Speeding three times is enough to get your license revoked forever. Driving in any manner that could be considered to be reckless - such as an illegal lane change - can get your license revoked forever for one occurrance.
OK, maybe it is better elsewhere in Europe but do not make the mistake of thinking German traffic laws are lax in any way or that there is the possibility of getting a warning or getting asked not to do it again.
Of course one side effect of this is German city streets are pretty easy to drive on.
Absolutely. It is much, much harder to fire people or "downsize" in Europe compared to the US. This means that if you are starting a business and think you need 15 people in the US you bring in 15 and if after 8 or 9 months you discover you can't really afford to pay all 15 you dismiss some. In Europe in exactly the same situation you hire 5 people because you are really, really sure you can pay them and utilize them fully. After two years maybe you hire five more. Because of this you may not be able to bid on all the work you would have if you had more people but you cannot withstand the problems created by having to dismiss people.
This is one of the huge differences in unemployment between the US and Europe. Most of the time the US unemployment rate is far less than that of Europe because it is much less of a long term risk to hire someone. It does mean that people in the US tend to have shorter term jobs at many different companies compared to nearly lifetime employment at a single company in Europe.
Another thing this creates is if you are going to start a company in Europe you need to have a huge amount of financing in place to do so. You are potentially making a lifetime committment to employees. In the US you can start a company on a shoestring and if things go bad you don't lose your entire life savings, home, car and every other possession. In Europe a partnership starting a company and failing will pretty much wipe out the entire lives of the partners. Makes it a huge risk and one that not a lot of people are willing to take. Comparatively in the US it is easy to start a business and if it fails you can move on and build up some cash to try again. In no way it is a life-ending stigma that the government chases you around for the rest of your life.
Most of my experience with this is from Germany and a lot of it from the 1990s. I don't think things have changed there all that much and I do believe most of Europe operates similarly to Germany.
I would offer that you are pretty much correct about the TSA. It would be wildly unpopular to actually perform the task that the TSA is assigned. The security forces for El Al actually perform their mission, and I assure you it is very unpopular. You need to arrive at the airport at least 4 hours before your flight and you may not be on the plane you scheduled even so. However, they haven't had an incident in a very, very long time. So clearly in the face of huge opposition they are doing their job.
This is not a job that could easily be done in the US, nor would the airlines find it reasonable. So the job isn't getting done. However, if the government didn't put up a front to make it seem like there was something being done insurance companies would simply refuse to insure the airlines unless something - pretty much anything - was done. WIth a single incident having the power to bankrupt an airline there would be no more passenger flights without insurance. So it is simple - we either have the TSA with their flaws or we have no air travel.
The government taking over insuring the airlines would have pretty much the same parameters as the TSA does today. Might be better, might be worse but the differences would be minor.
Clearly the government and the airlines do not want this sort of understanding rubbed in people's faces. The fact that the TSA cannot do the job the way that Mossad does mean that the job is likely not getting done effectively. OK, anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes and knows anything about what the security problems are understands this. But it isn't on the nightly news and never will be. A TSA employee that doesn't understand how the system works isn't doing anyone a favor by trying to explain it - especially when that message is taken public.
Another aspect of this is the usual chain of command problem. If you see a problem and report it up through the chain of command nobody really has an issue with the person reporting the problem. Trying to jump around the chain of command or bring outsiders in is never appreciated and usually has nasty consequences for the person doing so. This applies to any organization - be it the military, a commercial enterprise or something as mundain as a hospital. If you take this one item away from this it will be a valuable lesson.