There are a few problems with that. It's not just television time that needs to be handed out - what about printing up mail pieces, travel to various places, etc. All that needs to be paid for by taxpayers as well. And, you can't restrict it to just the "top" candidates or you have the same two-party lock-in that there is today.
That means that if I want to run for president or senator you - being a taxpayer - need to finance me to whatever level is deemed necessary.
Tell me how this doesn't end up leading to 10-year campaigns for president? How does this not result in massive scams where it looks like I'm spending money on a campaign and just siphoning the money off? It leads to a permanent class of campaigners that live very well off on the proceeds of something purporting to be an election campaign. And, you can't make the rules more restrictive to prevent this because that eliminates minor third-party candidates from ever getting a chance.
Any campaign finance reform that ends up just being a public welfare system for campaigners is going to fall victim to this sort of thing. Why doesn't it happen that way in other countries? Because they aren't Americans.
If everyone would abide by the "rules", the digital world would work exactly as you propose. However, nobody wants to accept there are any rules, much less follow them.
Therefore, when you make a song available for downloading, it will be distributed net-wide and the people downloading it will assume it is theirs to keep forever and redistribute to their friends.
Similarly, the expectation is that if there is a CD, you are going to rip it and distribute the files to everyone on the planet - at least everyone with a broadband connection.
The fact that you would like to follow "the rules" is meaningless - the entire discussion has been corrupted by the folks ignoring the existance of those "rules". So we get into arguments about the right of artists to get paid and the rights of people to foil attempts by artists (and their agents) to get paid.
Yes, adding water to an internal combustion engine will make it burn gas more efficiently and increase fuel economy. This is a well-known fact.
Of course, it has nothing whatsoever to do with hydrogen, other than water contains hydrogen. What is happening is the water makes the air more compressable (increased humidity) and the engine works better. This was far more true in the 1950's where such water add-ons were more popular.
Now, with the addition of the keyword HYDROGEN we have an entirely new set of rubes which will certainly pay $7500 for this without batting an eye. See, if it uses hydrogen, it must be more environmentally friendly.
Rubes. Marks. Suckers.
Unfortunately, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. And pay for it.
If price is the only thing that is going to keep the customer in the store - and with this kind of device there is a great motivation to shop by price only, then any store is going to lose to Wal-Mart or other no-frills, low-labor-cost outfit.
So, kicking the shopper (not customer) out of the store is fine - they were not going to buy anything anyway. Not when they find out that the same article is 20% less down the street at Wal-Mart. More information does not equal an empowered consumer. It just pushes the decisions the way that benefit some merchants.
How do we farm the grain? Tractors and combines need fuel. It turns out they need more fuel than is produced by fermenting the grain. So, even if you could run the tractors and combines on alcohol, you wouldn't have any left over to use elsewhere. And, you would still need other fuel just for the farm equipment.
It seems nobody understands the biggest reason for region coding. Sure, in theory, you could go to Brazil and buy 10,000 DVDs for $2 each. And then get stopped at the border because you don't have an export license to remove them from Brazil. And then get stopped at the US border because you don't have an import license.
Now it turns out that the US does not have a very restrictive policy on media, so you could likely get an import license without too much trouble. I am unaware of any regulation where a movie has to be reviewed. However, lots of other countries will not let you import an movie without it being reviewed by some government-sanctioned body and them telling you what you have to cut out for their country.
This is one of the big problems with DVD movies - what is legal in the US is not legal in the UK. Stuff that is legal in Japan would get you arrested for distributing child porn in the US. Every country wants to control what their people can view and movies have to meet their standards. While you can probably get away with carring one DVD into such countries, you cannot import movies in bulk quantities without getting it licensed and approved. And that is one of the biggest problems with region coding.
Did you think MPAA just decided to make six or seven different versions of each movie for laughs or because it kept the editors working overtime?
Mr. Lee must be the hottest thing in the world - literally, as valuable as Jesus to the Pope. Because if Google knew in advance there was even the merest possibility of a lawsuit, why would they persue such a person?
This happens all the time - you interview someplace and they, usually way out of site of the interviewee, find out about possible non-compete complications. If there are any, and I do mean any at all, there is no offer. Period.
Why would it work any other way? Is someone at Google just trying to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove a point? Companies don't do this sort of thing unless there is a real reason behind it.
And no matter how good Lee is, he isn't worth this. There is another agenda here - and that is what the real story should be.
Global warming, or perhaps more accurately, climate change, is certainly something that we are going to have to contend with. However, how much mankind can affect this is the important question.
As with just about everything, there are three distinct possibilities:
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere and waste heat emitted by energy use could be providing just enough heat to keep the temperature rising in spite of considerable evidence that it should be getting colder. Much, much colder.
Whatever we're doing - CO2, waste heat, mercury, depleted uranium in the atmosphere could be having no measurable effect, apart from natural processes that we are just beginning to understand.
Natural processes are having no input into climate change - we're going to cook because of increased CO2 and there may not be any way of shutting this off in time.
The big problem is the things that make the most sense - ending air travel, for instance, which would have the most effect on CO2 with the least harm to humans are going to have a pretty drastic effect on the standard of living in most Western nations. And, it would doom second- and third- world nations to being stuck and not opening any further development for them.
Now, we could all drive 5 MPH slower, turn our themostats down a couple of degrees and plan on building some nuclear power plants to come on line in about 20 years. Unfortunately, if we are in a position where human-added CO2 is the root cause of all of this, we cannot afford the luxury of these kinds of measures. Sure, they might have some effect and that might help. But if we're the cause of climate change, far, far more drastic measures need to be taken right now.
Of course, there are some problems with this. First off, we just don't understand what is happening or why. There are a lot of problems with making any sort of predictions based on the knowledge we have about the climate. Nobody is going to vote for drastic measures with what we know today. And nobody is saying that if we do not take drastic measures today the world is going to end. Of course, that may be exactly what the situation is.
Secondly, the third-world countries would bitterly oppose anything that cuts them off from the developed world or limits their exploitation of fossil fuel energy.
Finally, the economic change - read as depression - that would come from doing "drastic" things stands a good chance of killing as many people as climate change might. Who's to say which could be worse - we are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of deaths no matter which way things go.
Oh, and Katrina might be as bad as Camille was - but the only way it might be worse is because of increased coastal building. Constructing buildings in areas that have a history of hurricanes and not building them to resist these hurricanes is folly. Some folks in New Orleans are about to find out about that folly.
It is free for the taking out there, so don't be a chump. The "new way" is there is absolutely no way for them to make money from this stuff - it is distributed for free. Period. Other people grab it and make it available to you. You have little or no risk, so take it while the taking is good.
There is no point in "being a customer" while it is free - you are being a chump. Therefore, they are not "suing customers" - they are trying desperately to squeeze out the last dime from a revenueless business.
Yeah, but this flies in the face of people thinking we need "open and transparent" government.
There is a difference between the citizens of a country knowing every detail of the government's actions and a country that is actively against many of those actions knowing. The problem is that most of the people I hear from seem to think that if everyone just would calm down, smoke some weed together and such that we would all be friends. No more adversaries... Right.
The US government has always been operating about 40-50% out of sight. Lately, as in the past 10 years or less, this has started to both become obvious and of a concern to some people that believe they should know what the government is doing and why. What they don't get is "what" is sometimes less important than "why" and "why" can be critically important. Often, very, very important to the people in other parts of the world where these actions are taking place.
Obviously, Al Queda would just love to get a "press briefing" about counter-terrorist actions in the US. Do you think that would be a good idea? At a more local level, how about if the police published a schedule of vacation days for officers? Then you could know when getting nailed for speeding was less likely because of a manpower shortage. This could also help coordinate bank robberies so there was less likelyhood of someone being injured in a chase.
Yes, absolutely I would agree that we are starting to see the effects of information being freely available and being compiled by organizations that do not have our best interested at heart. This is always going to be a problem at some level - in WWII Japan and Germany had spies doing nothing more than reading US newspapers. The US has done this with Russia and China for years as well. But there was a general understanding that disclosing too much was a bad idea. So, announcements of high-level officials movements were often reported after the fact or vaguely. Same thing with other information that could be coordinated. Today, we have no such restraint in the news organizations and you better believe there are people watching the news, reading newspapers and magazines as well as reading stuff on the Internet.
Can they put valuable information together? Absolutely. Would "open and transparent" be a lot more valuable to adversaries than to the people it was intended for? Maybe. That is going to be a very tough idea for most people to get their heads around.
We'll stop spouting hate when the schools that infiltrators have actually gotten in to stop teaching the benefits and honor of martyrdom.
You are correct - I have no idea what the average Palestinian thinks. I do know they elected a thug that refuses to force armed gangs roaming the streets to surrender their weapons. I do know the average Palestinian supports the current leaders that want to kill every last Israeli, and perhaps every last Jew.
I suppose it can be argued that we have no business interfering in that genocide, since we did not interfer in others.
Wikipedia has the potential to become the ultimate authority on groupthink and popular attitudes on human knowledge. Try posting something unpopular. Not gonna stand for long.
Japan moved from one-telephone-per-block to people having more-or-less ubiquitous service recently - within the last 10 years or so. This should be a clue. Canada had wide spread telephone service, but there again wasn't that much of it.
Replacing the copper going to every neighborhood is happening in the US, but there are some obstacles in the way. One of them is DSL.
I live a in a fiber-supplied neighborhood. There is an underground vault that has a fiber link (ATM, I believe) and copper to every house in the area from there. Where I used to live there was copper to the CO. The difference is twofold:
Copper from the home to the CO is extremely expensive to replace, and to replace a neighborhood is almost impossible. You can't replace such a neighborhood with the setup I have where I live now because of point 2.
You can't have DSL with a fiber-to-the-vault system. Sure, you might be able to squeeze one DSLAM in there, but not anywhere near what they have in the CO to support multiple CLECs.
The end result is when we can get rid of DSL (a horrid attempt to use RF over 1950s copper), we can start upgrading the phone system.
It's easy. You can use eGold or PayPal or some other "anonymous" payment facility. PayPal is great because they absolutely disclaim any liability or responsibility for the transaction. So, you pay that way.
Why would anyone need to give out bank information, anyway? Have them send a check to a PO box at some non-post office place where they rent mail boxes. No id needed there and no tracability.
Western Union is another great way to send money without much id being required. They have money for "Elmer Fudd" and you show up with a business card that says you are Elmer Fudd. They give you "your" money. Far as I am concerned, it is way too easy to do this. If it was next to impossible to pay someone anonymously, a lot of this extortion and similar things - eBay fraud, for example - would be a lot harder.
Well, those minimum-wage clerks in stores are getting harder and harder to come by. What you would like it a motivated, English-speaking person that is nice to the customers. What they have settled for in the past as a unmotivated, English-as-an-afterthought, person that feels they just aren't paid enough to be nice.
Increasing wages doesn't help - often the only people that seem to be hired are immigrant labor that aren't all that interested in higher wages - they will do the same low-quality work for minimum wage or below.
The idea of the "working mom" being there is long gone - for one reason or another that labor pool has dried up. High school and college kids aren't motivated enough for the most part. I don't understand why people still (after welfare "reform") still seem to feel it is better to be on welfare or unemployment than working somewhere, but that seems to be the case.
So, if the choice is someone that is nasty to the customers, unmotivated and barely speaks English or a machine... the supermarket manager chooses wisely for the machine.
a) can't make as much money as you would LIKE to make - dream on. The real world isn't like that, or
b) aren't providing anything that people are willing to pay for.
Well, (b) is irrelevant - people are sharing it, so it must be worth something to them. If it was worth nothing then there wouldn't be a problem. Maybe it is priced above the point at which it is valued, but that is a market problem.
I think the real issue is (a). Who the heck are consumers to say how much money someone makes? Can I walk into a car dealer and say "this car is worth $10 to me, so here's your ten bucks - give me the keys." What you are talking about is pretty much forcing a market on someone unwillingly. What you are suggesting is that some outside third party, apart from the buyer or seller gets to interfer in the transaction and say "Naa, that's too much money to spend, I'll offer the same to you for nothing."
Yes, this is undoubtably doomed to fail. There can be no "information economy" where there is "sharing" like this. It is going to take some time for folks to realize this, but I believe it is going to happen. When it does, there will be no more software for sale, no more music or movies in stores because the only production there is will be private individuals doing it because they want to. And it will be free - all of it. Because with the Internet you can't sell something digital in China and give it away in UK. Or vice-versa. Will we be "richer" when the "information economy" collapses? Maybe, maybe not. It will just be different, probably not better or worse.
You should have. The US will be shortly on its way with this kind of law as well. It is a matter of survival for an "information economy" - if you can't make money because someone is "sharing" it out from under you, there can't be an "information economy".
I would equate this level action similar to what police do in inner city areas. You live there for years and there is a murder here and there, a few robberies a day and every once in a while some grandmotherly-type is raped and beaten. The police generally do nothing and it seems this is all just happening and nobody can do anything about it. Does this not sound like the level of copyright enforcement today?
Well, one day (actually more likely a dark night) the police come. Not just your usual two officers assigned to the neighborhood patrol car, but tens or even hundreds of cops in vests carrying all kinds of heavy weapons. Anything that gets in their way gets thrown into the paddy wagon and hauled off. Some people get shot, some by accident and some because they thought they would stand up against this invasion. Like what happened in Philly, maybe a building gets burned down as well.
Three weeks later, everything is back to normal. The drug dealers are back on the corner, the neighborhood liquor store got robbed last night and somebody gets shot and might live. The police came, put up a show of force, and left. They won't be back for a year or so.
We can expect a show of force soon over copyright. China gave up and has ceased all commercial music production. We can expect that in a few years here as well. It is almost the identical situation to the inner city - if the people don't give a hoot about it, the police (and RIAA, courts, government, etc.) can do nothing except put up a show of force. It is all just a show and it will be over soon.
If there were no imbalance, there would be no need for privacy. If anyone actually used information in a way the majority considered immoral, then everyone would know about it an could stop the abuse. There would be no need for privacy in financial transactions because everyone would know if you stole.
You assume the presence of a societal pressure that would keep people from doing wrong if it was generally known. This is almost completely absent from today's society, at least in the Western world.
The drug dealer is standing on the corner. He knows that the families living on the street know he is there and they would turn him into the police if the police cared. If he gets arrested - because some cop has nothing better to do than fill out the requisite paperwork, he goes away for a long time in a really nasty place. Everyone except his customers knows he is doing something wrong that they disagree with. Does he care? Heck no, he is out there making 10x whatever he could at any other job, possibly 100x. Disclosure without enforcement - swift, severe enforcement - is meaningless today.
Contrast this with 100 years ago in the US where you have people that would not steal because it would bring shame upon their family even if they were never prosecuted for it. Societal pressure worked very well then.
I don't see it having any effect whatsoever now. So, you are free to lead publically immoral life that everyone else sees. And, in most cases, nothing bad happens to the immoral person. Nothing at all.
You folks complain about the US government sticking its nose into the business of other countries. Now you want US corporations to try to dictate internal policy to other countries as well? Why? Who made Cisco into World Policemen, Jr.?
How can that be? Because the Internet is anonymous. You collect lots of money from some poor sap and have it sent somewhere where law doesn't mean quite as much. They can stop the flow of cash when they find it, but that doesn't necessarily stop the billing.
Yes, they take the charges off. But the first day the guy gets a couple of million in his Cayman Island account. Or in Romaina. Or somewhere else where banking regulations are different than in the US.
So how would you go about finding someone that wrote a dialer program and got people to install it? Sounds like a worm, doesn't it - how sucessful have we been in prosecuting people that release viruses and worms?
It's just the anonymous Internet at work. And with a little help of globalization and international banking.
Today's stem cell research pretty much points to one extremely distasteful fact - one baby = one cure. Now, it is possible that at some future point it might be one clone = one cure, but that is a ways off.
Let's say you suffer some spina cord injury and would be helped by this kind of thing. They take you into a room full of pregnant women and you get to choose who's baby will become your cure. That is pretty much the scenario we are looking at today. There is extreme promise, but also extreme social and moral consequences.
Maybe, in a decade or two of pursuing such treatments we can improve upon it, but it is going to take that long. Are you willing to sponsor with your tax dollars research and active treatments that will benefit people that can buy embryos on demand? And, I have to add, only people that can and are willing to buy embryos.
Easy - low-end Internet retailers ship PCs without a valid copy of Windows all the time. Yes, I got one and the sales receipt says I was charged for Windows XP. The product code that was pre-set when it was loaded on the machine had already been registered with Microsoft and no COA or anything else came with the machine.
It was not a valid copy of Windows.
I turned them in to Microsoft after they were completely unresponsive to email and a phone call. What do you know - a few days later I got a package from UPS that they shipped out the day I called Microsoft.
Windows is not so cheap to the OEM that they aren't above sneaking one past Microsoft every chance they get. Illegal and immoral? Sure, but it is Microsoft they are ripping off, so most people aren't going to care.
It is one that the creator of it doesn't want to admit to creating. It therefore has little credibility. Certainly an "anonymous" document should never be accepted for any sort of business or commercial transaction. If it is possible to imbed identification information into a printed page, they should all have it to act as a sort of "signature" that the document was in fact printed by a given individual. It is then possible to compare the "signature" created by printing a test document against another and know that the document was produced on that printer.
As to any argument that you want to print stuff out and have it untracable back to you - why? Do you want to print money? Why would you want to print anything and be able to disavow the action of printing it? Sounds foolish.
Here is a real-life example... You disagree with the direction a company is taking. After discovering your boss seems unlikely to recommend your preferred course of action, you write a scathing, slanderous "newsletter" announcing to the world that you think your boss is an idiot, his boss is a drooling retard and everyone that disagrees with you is misguided at best. I assure you, if the originator of that document could have been traced to an individual's printer they would have been fired that day. AND SO WHAT?
Similarly, it has gotten to the point where you can print money on a sub-$1000 color printer and with the "right" paper it will be accepted some places. Think about it - if you knew you could get away with it because it was untracable, wouldn't you try it? Why not? What harm would a couple of $5 bills do, right? Yes, this thought has already occurred to hundreds of people and about the only thing holding them back is the sure knowledge that IT IS TRACEABLE.
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That means that if I want to run for president or senator you - being a taxpayer - need to finance me to whatever level is deemed necessary.
Tell me how this doesn't end up leading to 10-year campaigns for president? How does this not result in massive scams where it looks like I'm spending money on a campaign and just siphoning the money off? It leads to a permanent class of campaigners that live very well off on the proceeds of something purporting to be an election campaign. And, you can't make the rules more restrictive to prevent this because that eliminates minor third-party candidates from ever getting a chance.
Any campaign finance reform that ends up just being a public welfare system for campaigners is going to fall victim to this sort of thing. Why doesn't it happen that way in other countries? Because they aren't Americans.
You miss the point. If you can do it, then WalMart will do it. Especially if they can make money at it.
Therefore, when you make a song available for downloading, it will be distributed net-wide and the people downloading it will assume it is theirs to keep forever and redistribute to their friends.
Similarly, the expectation is that if there is a CD, you are going to rip it and distribute the files to everyone on the planet - at least everyone with a broadband connection.
The fact that you would like to follow "the rules" is meaningless - the entire discussion has been corrupted by the folks ignoring the existance of those "rules". So we get into arguments about the right of artists to get paid and the rights of people to foil attempts by artists (and their agents) to get paid.
Of course, it has nothing whatsoever to do with hydrogen, other than water contains hydrogen. What is happening is the water makes the air more compressable (increased humidity) and the engine works better. This was far more true in the 1950's where such water add-ons were more popular.
Now, with the addition of the keyword HYDROGEN we have an entirely new set of rubes which will certainly pay $7500 for this without batting an eye. See, if it uses hydrogen, it must be more environmentally friendly.
Rubes. Marks. Suckers.
Unfortunately, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. And pay for it.
So, kicking the shopper (not customer) out of the store is fine - they were not going to buy anything anyway. Not when they find out that the same article is 20% less down the street at Wal-Mart. More information does not equal an empowered consumer. It just pushes the decisions the way that benefit some merchants.
How do we farm the grain? Tractors and combines need fuel. It turns out they need more fuel than is produced by fermenting the grain. So, even if you could run the tractors and combines on alcohol, you wouldn't have any left over to use elsewhere. And, you would still need other fuel just for the farm equipment.
Now it turns out that the US does not have a very restrictive policy on media, so you could likely get an import license without too much trouble. I am unaware of any regulation where a movie has to be reviewed. However, lots of other countries will not let you import an movie without it being reviewed by some government-sanctioned body and them telling you what you have to cut out for their country.
This is one of the big problems with DVD movies - what is legal in the US is not legal in the UK. Stuff that is legal in Japan would get you arrested for distributing child porn in the US. Every country wants to control what their people can view and movies have to meet their standards. While you can probably get away with carring one DVD into such countries, you cannot import movies in bulk quantities without getting it licensed and approved. And that is one of the biggest problems with region coding.
Did you think MPAA just decided to make six or seven different versions of each movie for laughs or because it kept the editors working overtime?
This happens all the time - you interview someplace and they, usually way out of site of the interviewee, find out about possible non-compete complications. If there are any, and I do mean any at all, there is no offer. Period.
Why would it work any other way? Is someone at Google just trying to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove a point? Companies don't do this sort of thing unless there is a real reason behind it.
And no matter how good Lee is, he isn't worth this. There is another agenda here - and that is what the real story should be.
As with just about everything, there are three distinct possibilities:
The big problem is the things that make the most sense - ending air travel, for instance, which would have the most effect on CO2 with the least harm to humans are going to have a pretty drastic effect on the standard of living in most Western nations. And, it would doom second- and third- world nations to being stuck and not opening any further development for them.
Now, we could all drive 5 MPH slower, turn our themostats down a couple of degrees and plan on building some nuclear power plants to come on line in about 20 years. Unfortunately, if we are in a position where human-added CO2 is the root cause of all of this, we cannot afford the luxury of these kinds of measures. Sure, they might have some effect and that might help. But if we're the cause of climate change, far, far more drastic measures need to be taken right now.
Of course, there are some problems with this. First off, we just don't understand what is happening or why. There are a lot of problems with making any sort of predictions based on the knowledge we have about the climate. Nobody is going to vote for drastic measures with what we know today. And nobody is saying that if we do not take drastic measures today the world is going to end. Of course, that may be exactly what the situation is.
Secondly, the third-world countries would bitterly oppose anything that cuts them off from the developed world or limits their exploitation of fossil fuel energy.
Finally, the economic change - read as depression - that would come from doing "drastic" things stands a good chance of killing as many people as climate change might. Who's to say which could be worse - we are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of deaths no matter which way things go.
Oh, and Katrina might be as bad as Camille was - but the only way it might be worse is because of increased coastal building. Constructing buildings in areas that have a history of hurricanes and not building them to resist these hurricanes is folly. Some folks in New Orleans are about to find out about that folly.
Why are you a customer???
It is free for the taking out there, so don't be a chump. The "new way" is there is absolutely no way for them to make money from this stuff - it is distributed for free. Period. Other people grab it and make it available to you. You have little or no risk, so take it while the taking is good.
There is no point in "being a customer" while it is free - you are being a chump. Therefore, they are not "suing customers" - they are trying desperately to squeeze out the last dime from a revenueless business.
There is a difference between the citizens of a country knowing every detail of the government's actions and a country that is actively against many of those actions knowing. The problem is that most of the people I hear from seem to think that if everyone just would calm down, smoke some weed together and such that we would all be friends. No more adversaries... Right.
The US government has always been operating about 40-50% out of sight. Lately, as in the past 10 years or less, this has started to both become obvious and of a concern to some people that believe they should know what the government is doing and why. What they don't get is "what" is sometimes less important than "why" and "why" can be critically important. Often, very, very important to the people in other parts of the world where these actions are taking place.
Obviously, Al Queda would just love to get a "press briefing" about counter-terrorist actions in the US. Do you think that would be a good idea? At a more local level, how about if the police published a schedule of vacation days for officers? Then you could know when getting nailed for speeding was less likely because of a manpower shortage. This could also help coordinate bank robberies so there was less likelyhood of someone being injured in a chase.
Yes, absolutely I would agree that we are starting to see the effects of information being freely available and being compiled by organizations that do not have our best interested at heart. This is always going to be a problem at some level - in WWII Japan and Germany had spies doing nothing more than reading US newspapers. The US has done this with Russia and China for years as well. But there was a general understanding that disclosing too much was a bad idea. So, announcements of high-level officials movements were often reported after the fact or vaguely. Same thing with other information that could be coordinated. Today, we have no such restraint in the news organizations and you better believe there are people watching the news, reading newspapers and magazines as well as reading stuff on the Internet.
Can they put valuable information together? Absolutely. Would "open and transparent" be a lot more valuable to adversaries than to the people it was intended for? Maybe. That is going to be a very tough idea for most people to get their heads around.
You are correct - I have no idea what the average Palestinian thinks. I do know they elected a thug that refuses to force armed gangs roaming the streets to surrender their weapons. I do know the average Palestinian supports the current leaders that want to kill every last Israeli, and perhaps every last Jew.
I suppose it can be argued that we have no business interfering in that genocide, since we did not interfer in others.
Wikipedia has the potential to become the ultimate authority on groupthink and popular attitudes on human knowledge. Try posting something unpopular. Not gonna stand for long.
Replacing the copper going to every neighborhood is happening in the US, but there are some obstacles in the way. One of them is DSL.
I live a in a fiber-supplied neighborhood. There is an underground vault that has a fiber link (ATM, I believe) and copper to every house in the area from there. Where I used to live there was copper to the CO. The difference is twofold:
- Copper from the home to the CO is extremely expensive to replace, and to replace a neighborhood is almost impossible. You can't replace such a neighborhood with the setup I have where I live now because of point 2.
- You can't have DSL with a fiber-to-the-vault system. Sure, you might be able to squeeze one DSLAM in there, but not anywhere near what they have in the CO to support multiple CLECs.
The end result is when we can get rid of DSL (a horrid attempt to use RF over 1950s copper), we can start upgrading the phone system.Why would anyone need to give out bank information, anyway? Have them send a check to a PO box at some non-post office place where they rent mail boxes. No id needed there and no tracability.
Western Union is another great way to send money without much id being required. They have money for "Elmer Fudd" and you show up with a business card that says you are Elmer Fudd. They give you "your" money. Far as I am concerned, it is way too easy to do this. If it was next to impossible to pay someone anonymously, a lot of this extortion and similar things - eBay fraud, for example - would be a lot harder.
Increasing wages doesn't help - often the only people that seem to be hired are immigrant labor that aren't all that interested in higher wages - they will do the same low-quality work for minimum wage or below.
The idea of the "working mom" being there is long gone - for one reason or another that labor pool has dried up. High school and college kids aren't motivated enough for the most part. I don't understand why people still (after welfare "reform") still seem to feel it is better to be on welfare or unemployment than working somewhere, but that seems to be the case.
So, if the choice is someone that is nasty to the customers, unmotivated and barely speaks English or a machine ... the supermarket manager chooses wisely for the machine.
a) can't make as much money as you would LIKE to make - dream on. The real world isn't like that, or
b) aren't providing anything that people are willing to pay for.
Well, (b) is irrelevant - people are sharing it, so it must be worth something to them. If it was worth nothing then there wouldn't be a problem. Maybe it is priced above the point at which it is valued, but that is a market problem.
I think the real issue is (a). Who the heck are consumers to say how much money someone makes? Can I walk into a car dealer and say "this car is worth $10 to me, so here's your ten bucks - give me the keys." What you are talking about is pretty much forcing a market on someone unwillingly. What you are suggesting is that some outside third party, apart from the buyer or seller gets to interfer in the transaction and say "Naa, that's too much money to spend, I'll offer the same to you for nothing."
Yes, this is undoubtably doomed to fail. There can be no "information economy" where there is "sharing" like this. It is going to take some time for folks to realize this, but I believe it is going to happen. When it does, there will be no more software for sale, no more music or movies in stores because the only production there is will be private individuals doing it because they want to. And it will be free - all of it. Because with the Internet you can't sell something digital in China and give it away in UK. Or vice-versa. Will we be "richer" when the "information economy" collapses? Maybe, maybe not. It will just be different, probably not better or worse.
And yes, when "disorder" reaches a certain tipping point the police are certainly a "den of murderers".
It is our own fault for letting that tipping point get reached.
I would equate this level action similar to what police do in inner city areas. You live there for years and there is a murder here and there, a few robberies a day and every once in a while some grandmotherly-type is raped and beaten. The police generally do nothing and it seems this is all just happening and nobody can do anything about it. Does this not sound like the level of copyright enforcement today?
Well, one day (actually more likely a dark night) the police come. Not just your usual two officers assigned to the neighborhood patrol car, but tens or even hundreds of cops in vests carrying all kinds of heavy weapons. Anything that gets in their way gets thrown into the paddy wagon and hauled off. Some people get shot, some by accident and some because they thought they would stand up against this invasion. Like what happened in Philly, maybe a building gets burned down as well.
Three weeks later, everything is back to normal. The drug dealers are back on the corner, the neighborhood liquor store got robbed last night and somebody gets shot and might live. The police came, put up a show of force, and left. They won't be back for a year or so.
We can expect a show of force soon over copyright. China gave up and has ceased all commercial music production. We can expect that in a few years here as well. It is almost the identical situation to the inner city - if the people don't give a hoot about it, the police (and RIAA, courts, government, etc.) can do nothing except put up a show of force. It is all just a show and it will be over soon.
You assume the presence of a societal pressure that would keep people from doing wrong if it was generally known. This is almost completely absent from today's society, at least in the Western world.
The drug dealer is standing on the corner. He knows that the families living on the street know he is there and they would turn him into the police if the police cared. If he gets arrested - because some cop has nothing better to do than fill out the requisite paperwork, he goes away for a long time in a really nasty place. Everyone except his customers knows he is doing something wrong that they disagree with. Does he care? Heck no, he is out there making 10x whatever he could at any other job, possibly 100x. Disclosure without enforcement - swift, severe enforcement - is meaningless today.
Contrast this with 100 years ago in the US where you have people that would not steal because it would bring shame upon their family even if they were never prosecuted for it. Societal pressure worked very well then.
I don't see it having any effect whatsoever now. So, you are free to lead publically immoral life that everyone else sees. And, in most cases, nothing bad happens to the immoral person. Nothing at all.
You folks complain about the US government sticking its nose into the business of other countries. Now you want US corporations to try to dictate internal policy to other countries as well? Why? Who made Cisco into World Policemen, Jr.?
Yes, they take the charges off. But the first day the guy gets a couple of million in his Cayman Island account. Or in Romaina. Or somewhere else where banking regulations are different than in the US.
So how would you go about finding someone that wrote a dialer program and got people to install it? Sounds like a worm, doesn't it - how sucessful have we been in prosecuting people that release viruses and worms?
It's just the anonymous Internet at work. And with a little help of globalization and international banking.
Let's say you suffer some spina cord injury and would be helped by this kind of thing. They take you into a room full of pregnant women and you get to choose who's baby will become your cure. That is pretty much the scenario we are looking at today. There is extreme promise, but also extreme social and moral consequences.
Maybe, in a decade or two of pursuing such treatments we can improve upon it, but it is going to take that long. Are you willing to sponsor with your tax dollars research and active treatments that will benefit people that can buy embryos on demand? And, I have to add, only people that can and are willing to buy embryos.
It was not a valid copy of Windows.
I turned them in to Microsoft after they were completely unresponsive to email and a phone call. What do you know - a few days later I got a package from UPS that they shipped out the day I called Microsoft.
Windows is not so cheap to the OEM that they aren't above sneaking one past Microsoft every chance they get. Illegal and immoral? Sure, but it is Microsoft they are ripping off, so most people aren't going to care.
As to any argument that you want to print stuff out and have it untracable back to you - why? Do you want to print money? Why would you want to print anything and be able to disavow the action of printing it? Sounds foolish.
Here is a real-life example... You disagree with the direction a company is taking. After discovering your boss seems unlikely to recommend your preferred course of action, you write a scathing, slanderous "newsletter" announcing to the world that you think your boss is an idiot, his boss is a drooling retard and everyone that disagrees with you is misguided at best. I assure you, if the originator of that document could have been traced to an individual's printer they would have been fired that day. AND SO WHAT?
Similarly, it has gotten to the point where you can print money on a sub-$1000 color printer and with the "right" paper it will be accepted some places. Think about it - if you knew you could get away with it because it was untracable, wouldn't you try it? Why not? What harm would a couple of $5 bills do, right? Yes, this thought has already occurred to hundreds of people and about the only thing holding them back is the sure knowledge that IT IS TRACEABLE.