Sadly, this kind of thinking is what ensures that nobody is going to take FOSS solutions more seriously than they do now. Oh, sure they are going to use whatever is out there. But the idea of dedicating a staff to improving and releasing to the world those improvements - forget it. There is no ROI and it would be a substantial investment. There are people that are willing to personally make that investment, but I think that is a different topic. The argument that IBM and others are making this investment today is somewhat misleading. They are making the investment into an open source solution to sell other closed-source products and hardware. Just like Red Hat in many ways. Open source is the sales-enabling tool which allows other non-open stuff to be sold. I think this goes completely against most people's feelings about open source.
Last time I looked, the only Red Hat product that they actually supported cost $1300. Now, that may be for "support" after you get the product, but still you do not get the product until you fork out the $1300.
I do not see anything free or open about this at all. They have a product, you buy it, you get to use it. You don't buy it, you don't get to use it.
That is what banking privacy laws are for. You have a Swiss bank account that people send the money to and the Swiss will never disclose who you are. Same process can be done in the Cayman Islands where they have strong banking privacy.
The problem isn't that a business gets hit with one of these guys and then has hard decisions to make. The real problem - like many others - is deciding that offering an online business makes sense when there is the possibility of getting hung out to dry by this kind of thing.
Assume you are as careful as you can be, but obviously there is always the possibility of something being overlooked and that exposure being exploited. If that happens, what is the maximum downside? If paying the extortion isn't an option and paying some outside service for a "rescue" isn't practical either, what do you do? Since it is known that law enforcement isn't going to be all that much help, where do you turn?
Unfortunately for the advancement of use of the Internet, the simple solution is to find some other way of doing business that isn't open to this kind of attack. This isn't all that difficult, but it may preclude using the Internet for much.
Now the more geeky folks may argue that there is a way of preventing these sorts of attacks. However, what needs to be understood is that the geek doesn't usually get a say in these decisions. They are made by lawyers, CEOs and maybe CIOs. The technical prowess of these folks is seriously lacking and the decision isn't make on technical merits.
You were taken in by that? Ha ha ha. Let's see here, most "biodiesel" is made from used cooking oil. Which required about three times the energy to produce than it is worth when burned. The other sources for biodiesel also involve negative energy transfers, such as the farm equipment requiring more energy than is derived from the crop. This is also true for methanol and ethanol.
There is no such thing as a renewable energy source that is burned - specifically burned in a way that releases carbon. It is all a trick. None of it works long term - for more than about 25 years. Should anyone implement this on a large scale this would become obvious fairly soon.
Then just answer one question: are there any GI's in North Korea?
Easy - China. We attack North Korea and China declares war on the Western World. Perhaps not end of civilization as we know it, but things get a lot more complicated for the 20-30% of the people in the USA that depend on Wal-Mart for their life in one way or another.
China has stated this as their policy over and over again. We would like it to go away and believe China is our friend and if we trade with them they will improve their human rights record, but this is extremely unlikley. China operates on a completely different level than the West and we are likely to find out just how different if we attack North Korea.
Distribution is not changing. At least not yet for the majority of the world. OK, you, the uber-geek Slashdot reader can go out and download whatever you want and faithfully are ready and waiting with credit card in hand to purchase music online.
What about the rest of the world?
Broadband is up to around 60% penetration in the US, up from 53% recently. What about the rest of the world? It varies. The US isn't necessarily the highest penetration, but other large-population countries I believe are significantly behind. Like India, China and Russia. I think Norway is probably ahead. Still, downloading music on dial-up really, really sucks.
Europe and Japan have perhaps 25% of the credit-card penetration that exists in the US. How would these people pay at iTunes? There may be a solution coming for a Euro-iTunes, but I don't know of it.
Online purchases are still lagging way, way behind brick-and-mortar sales. Many people (almost most) do not trust online sales. They are afraid of being ripped off or spammed to death.
Once these problems are solved, then you can talk about the existing distribution being replaced utterly. Until then, remember the rest of the world isn't like you and will take years to catch up. So, it is likely that RIAA and Sam Goody (a music store) will be with us for a while to come.
From their block. That means that they are your upstream provider. If someone complains about your behaviour, they will complain to your upstream provider who will then cut you off (or not).
Not. Not ever. We went through a long period where some folks at SpamCop decided we were spammers because of a subscribe-to newsletter that they didn't remember or appreciate. So, we were spammers. Lots of complaints were received here. Lots of complaints were sent to McLeod USA (who we had a T1 from at the time). Some news:
McLeod USA does not take abuse email about T1 customers. This bit-bucket it.
We never received any contact from McLeod USA. We were copied on some emails to "abuse@mcleodusa.com" and tried to follow up on them with McLeod USA. They denied ever receiving the email.
We are now with a different T1 provider. No service agreement, no TOS, nothing.
Spammers that use dial-up connections and cable modems can have problems with their ISP. You can complain to an upstream provider all you want and it is extremely unlikely to get anywhere. I suppose you might try complaining to Level3 about a spammer saying that SBC or McLeodUSA was unresponsive, but I don't think that is going to get anywhere either. Our current T1 cannot be terminated for any "TOS violation" - there is no TOS. This might not be true in all cases, but it is true in enough that spammers can operate with impunity over the network.
Until there is a clear definition that spam is illegal - which today there is not - spam will continue and network services will contine to be provided to spammers. If spam were somehow declared to be illegal - such as defining any email with a commercial message to be illegal - then network providers would be forced to do something. As it is today, there is really nothing that can be done about the origins of most spam.
Can you turn off the guy that decides to buy a list of 28 million email addresses and send email from their cable modem? Absolutely! Does this change the amount of spam that you can I get each day? No way.
I don't understand why all the focus on ISPs. You call the phone company (any phone company) and say you want a data T1 connection. They give it to you and give you some IP addresses. They do not process email for you, they do not give you web space and they do not respond to complaints about what you are doing with your T1. If you are on a "burstable" plan, you need to hold your aggregate usage within those limits, but if you have a "full T1" and are paying for non-burstable service you can send 1.5Mb a second every second. Period. No service agreement, no TOS, no "abuse department", nothing.
Now, I suppose it is possible to get a T1 from Earthlink or some other ISP. Then, they may provide some services aside from just the data connection. And then there would be some TOS, some kind of service agreement and so on. But if you buy your service from the phone company I have never seen such a service agreement.
I expect this holds true for any sort of data connection from a telecommunications provider that is not providing any additional services, which means if you call SBC to get an OC48 they aren't going to ask you what you plan to do with it.
You forgot the absolutely most common open source project category:
5. New software currently being developed by one programmer without backing from anyone.
This is by far the largest category. Often this one programmer has rather interesting ideas about user interface and the requirements of the user community toward which he is targeting the project. And, yes, "interesting" is meant in exactly the same way as the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times."
The Equatable Wage Party has a solid platform that everyone, yes everyone, should have a $50,000 income. It is nice round number and is easily attainable. The government taxes at 0% all wages below $50,000 and at 100% all wages above $50,000. Everyone receives tax credits and refunds if their wages are less than $50,000 to bring them up to the standard.
This eliminates rich CEOs making 240 times what their employees make. This eliminates all need for further reform of the tax code and simplifies it greatly. This also eliminates the USA as the desired stopping point for greedy folks that just want to come here and become millionaires.
Any negative side effects from this policy can be attributed to people that long for the Bush economy and other discredited politicians. Since they won't be relevent anymore and everyone will have an equitable wage, we can ignore any dissent.
The best - and possibly the only - way to stop the current population from "shitting all over the biosphere" is to immediately begin a draconian population reduction. There are way too many people on earth for it to be a self-sustaining, pollution-free paradise. This threshold was finally crossed somewhere between 1950 and today. Pushing the population level back to around 1850 (about 1/4th of current levels, maybe 1/10th if you are really pessimistic) and keeping it there would insure the kind of "sustainable" environment that the environmentalist wackos would like to have.
If you aren't prepared to deal with the kind of decision-making that such population reduction would entail - up to and including selecting people to be part of the population reduction - go away and live on an island. You aren't helping, and you are getting in the way.
The only resources worth expending at this point are towards getting more resources - and last time I looked, the moon, Mars, asteroids and everywhere else in space is where they are. Not under your pillow. Nowhere that can be found by "reuse, reduce recycle".
Online non-prescription drugs (asprin, Claritin OC, etc.) are perfectly legal to be sold on the Internet or anywhere else.
Prescription drugs offered on the Internet where you never have to show a prescription (they just tell you to have one) is completely illegal. Unfortunately, with our friendly spam-friendly registry services (godaddy.com, for instance), you can have a web site that offers this and is nearly untracable. At least without getting law enforcement involved in a big way. Sometimes the FTC or FDA is suitably motivated. Most of the time they are not, so these sites can operate with impunity.
I suppose if they are registered outside the US it is almost impossible to shut down. Some get nailed because a shipment gets inspected, but that is pretty rare.
Oh, and by the way, I've not done a lot of illegal drug shopping, but I've never seen a site where they actually require you to have a prescription. Maybe they get someone to give you one online, but that is the really top-of-the-line sites. Most just say "you really should have a prescription for this." and leave it at that.
PayPal is a lot more traceable than these sites, so they become the obvious target for getting shut down if they are "facilitating" the sale of drugs illegally.
The "defense" isn't to have an army of lawyers, but to have a portfolio of patents that the other guys are equally infringing upon. That is how it works today - you patent "dynamic memory allocation" (malloc) and they patent "storing moving pictures as a stream of bytes". And so forth. Eventually, everybody has patented everything possible to patent (probably 10,000,000 more patents over the next 10 years) and then the game is over 20 years later.
The point that nobody seems to understand is this game stops in 20 years when the patents run out. After that, nothing counts anymore. So all we have to do is take a tiny bit longer view than current corporate culture suggests is reasonable.
Well, the problem with the open system approach is this. If it is a flop, it is yours. You get to deal with whatever problems a small number of customers can come up with. If it is a success, you own nothing. Since you released it, every Chinese manufacturer will make their own and out-distribute you. Wal-Mart will buy it from them, not you, and whatever effort you put into it will benefit the folks in China and at Wal-Mart.
That is the problem with the "open system" approach. You can't sell your idea - you gave it away. You don't own a distribution network or a customer base, so you have the nothing.
It isn't a matter of making billions - it is a matter of keeping yourself fed. 20 or 30 years ago if you manufactured something, this was worth a great deal. You had the knowledge and you had the physical plant. Now, the physical plant is a movable thing and it is probably contracted out. So all you have is the knowledge. Sadly, this is easily lost, stolen, or copied. So all you really ever have is a marketing strategy, a distribution channel and relationships with retailers. This doesn't make much sense for your proposal.
What is needed is for the RIAA, record companies and music producers in general to go out of business. Fold up. Stop making CDs. Bands can make their own CDs and sell them on streetcorners, because the entire retail network that is fed by RIAA members will collapse.
OK, then maybe we can get some sanity into this discussion.
The problem is if we just ignore copyright completely - and it becomes legal for large corporations to do so - the biggest distributor wins. Who might that be? Maybe Wal-Mart, maybe Sony. No way is this going to help anyone.
How does this happen? Very simple. If there is no rule against republishing any work, then someone is going to grab everything there is to grab and start selling it. Cheap, because it cost them nothing to produce. Which would you rather do, download a movie and make your own DVD or buy one at Wal-Mart for $2? How about music - if you could buy anything for $1 at Wal-Mart instead of downloading chopped-off, sometimes shoddy stuff, which would you do? What if you don't have broadband Internet access or you already used up your bandwidth allocation this month? There is still a place for physical distribution, but without copyright the big distributors are going to absolutely take over. That wouldn't do the artists any good, but it sure would help Wal-Mart's bottom line. It might help Sony's, too. It would not help the artists, and probably wouldn't help the average consumer.
Please think how eliminating copyright laws would really affect everyone before proposing silliness like that.
iTunes is a money-losing loss-leader to provide content for the iPod. If there was no iPod, there would be no iTunes.
Check back in a few months and see how the new Roxio... er, I mean Napster... is doing since they dumped the CD/DVD business and decided to go with just selling music subscriptions. If they can make universities force every student to pay for a subscription, they just might have something. Otherwise, look for that name to be on the auction block along with some office furniture real soon.
There is no money in selling music online. The pirates have pretty much won that round. The artists are *never* going to be compensated.
There. You've identified the problem. If we are going to look at things from the perspective of "Earth is all there is, we must use it wisely for our decendents." you have narrowed the possible solutions to one.
Eliminate population growth. Shrink the population by at least 50%. 75% would be better.
Unfortunately, people are difficult to convince that in order to save the planet they have to die. However, that is the situation, do not doubt it for a minute. That is all it would take for pollution and gobal warming to be solved overnight. Bring the population down to about the 1850 level.
Come on, face it. The "real" solution to both all our environmental problems and global warming is to simply scale our use of resources back to the point at which it wasn't a problem.
I believe if the Earth's population was at the level it was in 1850, there would be no environmental problems and no global warming.
It might be difficult to convince the rest of the world that this was the solution, however. It seems like the "solution" proposed by most is that "those guys" are using too many resources and need to be "scaled back", sometimes drastically. Sort of how Dresden was "scaled back" in WW II. We need to take the initiative and show the rest of the world that we are forward looking enough to address the problem unilaterally.
Of course, this means we need 75% of the US population to report to euthanasia centers, but what the heck, we are talking about the survival of the planet here.
Yes, if Hitler had been slightly less psychotic, most of Western Europe would be speaking German now. If he hadn't attached the Soviet Union, Stalin certainly wouldn't have started anything. We all have much to be thankful for that Hitler was as crazy as he was.
How would "giving" food and other support to other countries generate good will? Would their leaders feel indebted to the helping hand, or would they resent the US? Would people on the street watching warlords and petty dictators stealing the food that was meant for them feel the US was helping things? I don't think so.
You look at the situation in Africa where a lot of aid has gone in the past, quite a bit from the US. Has it helped? Not really. If anything, it encouraged the people there to have more children and be more dependent on aid than anything else. The result of this was needier people and more of them. That is when the aid actually reached the people. Mostly, the aid was just enriching some local warlord and reinforcing his power base.
What would it take to effectively distribute aid to people in places like Africa and Asia? It would take a lot of military support to fight off the warlords and convince them that they can't steal. The country's own police and army are incapable of this and often are either bribed or actively taking part in the corruption and theft. Do we need to go into Sudan with a large military force to take over and enforce laws? Who's laws? Wouldn't that just be seen as more "imperialism" on the part of the US?
I think you can forget expanding aid programs. They do not help the people they are intended to, at least not long term. At best the people get more dependent on ourside help. At worst, we are supporting people that will someday attack their neighbors and cause more trouble.
I think you also have to consider that helping starving people that cannot be fed from local resources isn't necessarily the best idea. These people are starving because of a lack of local resources. Until that situation changes, they can never be self-supporting. With that, are you prepared to commit to supporting these people forever? Because that is what it would require. Not only the people that are their today, but the children that come into the world because they aren't starving anymore. Let's assume these people are modern and well-educated so only have three children per family that survive to adulthood. That means a 50% population increase per generation. So, if there are 100,000 starving people there today, there will be 150,000 utterly dependent people there in 30 years. Since these people are hardly well-educated, this is but a small sample of what is going to happen. This isn't a resource problem as such, but it is a local issue. While fat Americans and somewhat less fat Europeans have no problems with starvation, just moving the food over to Africa doesn't solve many problems. It just creates more, and it encourages people to live in areas where food cannot be grown to support the population.
I suppose one "solution" to the problem is to take all of the people in, say Sudan, and move them to another country that doesn't have that kind of a problem. That would take quite an effort, since the whole point would be to move everyone out - not just the people that can't be supported comfortably. Why? Because 100 years ago the land could support the much smaller population that was there and it outgrew the local resources. So, unless you want to do this again n 50 or 100 years you have to take all of the people out.
The fundamental problem is that that there are just places where the population has grown all out of proportion to the ability of the local area to support. This isn't a problem for Inuit or South Seas Islanders - they had (have?) rather brutal ways of dealing with population issues. So, they can survive and do very well in a limited resource environment. Most of the places where people are starving today have not had to deal with these issues and do not have such simplistic, brutal ways of addressing them. So, the population grows and becomes even more dependent on ourside support. Would the US be doing anyone a favor by trying to feed the world? I don't think so. We might reduce some short-term suffering, but the result in the long term would be more suffering on a larger scale.
Why? Because they have a very large distribution channel. The minute you remove copyright protection, software, music and just about anything else ends up in the hands of the biggest distributor. If Wal-Mart can out-distribute Microsoft, then Wal-Mart wins.
And by "wins" I don't just mean is successful. No, the winner in that game would end up with all the marbles. What we are finding out is that there really isn't room in the US for two massive retailers - Wal-Mart is pushing everybody else out. How? By winning the race to the bottom where the suppliers get almost nothing and the employees get a job. Not much of a job, but at least they have a job. There is no barrier against Wal-Mart selling the same kind of cheap Chinese-made junk that K-Mart was selling, and so there is no barrier to Wal-Mart utterly owning that market.
This is exactly what would happen without any barriers - like copyright - to music, movies and software. Wal-Mart (or their logical successor in that field) would dominate the market so completely you would have to hunt to find another way to purchase that stuff. Think the Internet is the answer? Yeah, so did Petsmart. People still buy things in stores and not everyone has a broadband connection.
Exactly. Properly-written end-user software doesn't need any support at all. It works, it doesn't do unexpected things and the user interface is clear enough that the user doesn't have to have a 3-inch binder of documents in order to use it.
Contrast this with what I would consider "improperly-written" end-user software where it does not function as it is supposed to, it does unexpected things and you absolutely do need a huge amount of documentation to figure out what it did when you thought you knew how to use it.
Most of the open-source "solutions" I have seen aren't quite as bad as completely falling into the 2nd category, but the first is a lofty goal that might one day happen. Writing software with the goal that people will pay for necessary support dooms the software to requiring that support. And, in my opinion, this makes it third-rate or worse.
Re: Gang warfare This is essentially a problem of territory and power, not drugs. Before there was crack, there was beer. The problems haven't really changed, just the tools and the prices. How to stop gang warfare? How about just making sure everyone has enough money for whatever they want? Do you think that would do it?
Re: Eliminate terrorism Choose one: make terrorism unprofitable for anyone, or eliminate anything that the terrorists consider a problem. Terrorists consider Israel's existance a stain on the face of the earth, so they have to go. Where? Other terrorists consider the export of "Western culture" to be an insult and corrupting. Other terrorists consider the British Empire to be a problem and want their own government back, so we better rein in those imperialists too. I don't claim that terrorists are a unified body, so there are probably some demands I am missing. But, if you believe that simply turning the US into an isolationist country that doesn't trade with, defend or support anyone else would solve the problems you need to understand the problems better.
As for making terrorism unprofitable, this is a hard problem and one that the current US policy is trying to implement - not very successfully I might add. It is extremely difficult to implement this when other countries (e.g. France) insist that "terrorists" are good to trade with. Responding to terrorist threats with capitulation is another way to insure that terrorism is very profitable, in both achieving goals and international prestige. I don't agree with much of what has been done lately with the goal of stamping out terrorists, but to give in to their demands isn't a solution unless you are prepared to go all the way. I don't think anyone can really propose that with a straight face.
There are few simple solutions.
Oh, and "Israel's unreasonable stockpile" starts to sound a lot more reasonable when (a) all their neighbors want to kill them and (b) have nearly succeeded in the past.
The issue isn't whether one user downloading one movie or song decimates the revenue of a large corporation.
The issue is we are in danger of reaching a point like we did around 1982 where virtually nobody purchased software for the Apple ][ any longer - they just copied it. It was commonly believed by people in the software industry that any new game would sell two copies - one on the east coast and one on the west coast and everyone would then get copies from the myriad BBS systems. Needless to say, nobody was much interested in producing new games (or anything else) for the Apple ][. Console games (cartridges - much harder to copy) were the thing then, until the PC Jr. failed and triggered another mini-crash.
Downloading software from a BBS in 1982 was difficult and time consuming. Downloading a song on the Internet is quick and painless. Downloading a movie is still not quick and painless for most of the Internet users, but it could get to be there.
Where are we when the artists and music producers reach the conclusion that making a CD just isn't worthwhile anymore and that $100 concert tickets are the only way to go. Paid appearances. Sponsorships like Brittny Spears with Pepsi?. Make the music "scarce" again and keep it out of the hands of the "common people" so it is worth something again.
That is already happening in China with like a 98% piracy rate. How long until it happens here if things continue as they are?
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, this kind of thinking is what ensures that nobody is going to take FOSS solutions more seriously than they do now. Oh, sure they are going to use whatever is out there. But the idea of dedicating a staff to improving and releasing to the world those improvements - forget it. There is no ROI and it would be a substantial investment. There are people that are willing to personally make that investment, but I think that is a different topic. The argument that IBM and others are making this investment today is somewhat misleading. They are making the investment into an open source solution to sell other closed-source products and hardware. Just like Red Hat in many ways. Open source is the sales-enabling tool which allows other non-open stuff to be sold. I think this goes completely against most people's feelings about open source.
I do not see anything free or open about this at all. They have a product, you buy it, you get to use it. You don't buy it, you don't get to use it.
That is what banking privacy laws are for. You have a Swiss bank account that people send the money to and the Swiss will never disclose who you are. Same process can be done in the Cayman Islands where they have strong banking privacy.
Assume you are as careful as you can be, but obviously there is always the possibility of something being overlooked and that exposure being exploited. If that happens, what is the maximum downside? If paying the extortion isn't an option and paying some outside service for a "rescue" isn't practical either, what do you do? Since it is known that law enforcement isn't going to be all that much help, where do you turn?
Unfortunately for the advancement of use of the Internet, the simple solution is to find some other way of doing business that isn't open to this kind of attack. This isn't all that difficult, but it may preclude using the Internet for much.
Now the more geeky folks may argue that there is a way of preventing these sorts of attacks. However, what needs to be understood is that the geek doesn't usually get a say in these decisions. They are made by lawyers, CEOs and maybe CIOs. The technical prowess of these folks is seriously lacking and the decision isn't make on technical merits.
There is no such thing as a renewable energy source that is burned - specifically burned in a way that releases carbon. It is all a trick. None of it works long term - for more than about 25 years. Should anyone implement this on a large scale this would become obvious fairly soon.
Easy - China. We attack North Korea and China declares war on the Western World. Perhaps not end of civilization as we know it, but things get a lot more complicated for the 20-30% of the people in the USA that depend on Wal-Mart for their life in one way or another.
China has stated this as their policy over and over again. We would like it to go away and believe China is our friend and if we trade with them they will improve their human rights record, but this is extremely unlikley. China operates on a completely different level than the West and we are likely to find out just how different if we attack North Korea.
What about the rest of the world?
Once these problems are solved, then you can talk about the existing distribution being replaced utterly. Until then, remember the rest of the world isn't like you and will take years to catch up. So, it is likely that RIAA and Sam Goody (a music store) will be with us for a while to come.
Not. Not ever. We went through a long period where some folks at SpamCop decided we were spammers because of a subscribe-to newsletter that they didn't remember or appreciate. So, we were spammers. Lots of complaints were received here. Lots of complaints were sent to McLeod USA (who we had a T1 from at the time). Some news:
Spammers that use dial-up connections and cable modems can have problems with their ISP. You can complain to an upstream provider all you want and it is extremely unlikely to get anywhere. I suppose you might try complaining to Level3 about a spammer saying that SBC or McLeodUSA was unresponsive, but I don't think that is going to get anywhere either. Our current T1 cannot be terminated for any "TOS violation" - there is no TOS. This might not be true in all cases, but it is true in enough that spammers can operate with impunity over the network.
Until there is a clear definition that spam is illegal - which today there is not - spam will continue and network services will contine to be provided to spammers. If spam were somehow declared to be illegal - such as defining any email with a commercial message to be illegal - then network providers would be forced to do something. As it is today, there is really nothing that can be done about the origins of most spam.
Can you turn off the guy that decides to buy a list of 28 million email addresses and send email from their cable modem? Absolutely! Does this change the amount of spam that you can I get each day? No way.
Now, I suppose it is possible to get a T1 from Earthlink or some other ISP. Then, they may provide some services aside from just the data connection. And then there would be some TOS, some kind of service agreement and so on. But if you buy your service from the phone company I have never seen such a service agreement.
I expect this holds true for any sort of data connection from a telecommunications provider that is not providing any additional services, which means if you call SBC to get an OC48 they aren't going to ask you what you plan to do with it.
You forgot the absolutely most common open source project category:
5. New software currently being developed by one programmer without backing from anyone.
This is by far the largest category. Often this one programmer has rather interesting ideas about user interface and the requirements of the user community toward which he is targeting the project. And, yes, "interesting" is meant in exactly the same way as the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times."
This eliminates rich CEOs making 240 times what their employees make. This eliminates all need for further reform of the tax code and simplifies it greatly. This also eliminates the USA as the desired stopping point for greedy folks that just want to come here and become millionaires.
Any negative side effects from this policy can be attributed to people that long for the Bush economy and other discredited politicians. Since they won't be relevent anymore and everyone will have an equitable wage, we can ignore any dissent.
If you aren't prepared to deal with the kind of decision-making that such population reduction would entail - up to and including selecting people to be part of the population reduction - go away and live on an island. You aren't helping, and you are getting in the way.
The only resources worth expending at this point are towards getting more resources - and last time I looked, the moon, Mars, asteroids and everywhere else in space is where they are. Not under your pillow. Nowhere that can be found by "reuse, reduce recycle".
Prescription drugs offered on the Internet where you never have to show a prescription (they just tell you to have one) is completely illegal. Unfortunately, with our friendly spam-friendly registry services (godaddy.com, for instance), you can have a web site that offers this and is nearly untracable. At least without getting law enforcement involved in a big way. Sometimes the FTC or FDA is suitably motivated. Most of the time they are not, so these sites can operate with impunity.
I suppose if they are registered outside the US it is almost impossible to shut down. Some get nailed because a shipment gets inspected, but that is pretty rare.
Oh, and by the way, I've not done a lot of illegal drug shopping, but I've never seen a site where they actually require you to have a prescription. Maybe they get someone to give you one online, but that is the really top-of-the-line sites. Most just say "you really should have a prescription for this." and leave it at that.
PayPal is a lot more traceable than these sites, so they become the obvious target for getting shut down if they are "facilitating" the sale of drugs illegally.
The point that nobody seems to understand is this game stops in 20 years when the patents run out. After that, nothing counts anymore. So all we have to do is take a tiny bit longer view than current corporate culture suggests is reasonable.
That is the problem with the "open system" approach. You can't sell your idea - you gave it away. You don't own a distribution network or a customer base, so you have the nothing.
It isn't a matter of making billions - it is a matter of keeping yourself fed. 20 or 30 years ago if you manufactured something, this was worth a great deal. You had the knowledge and you had the physical plant. Now, the physical plant is a movable thing and it is probably contracted out. So all you have is the knowledge. Sadly, this is easily lost, stolen, or copied. So all you really ever have is a marketing strategy, a distribution channel and relationships with retailers. This doesn't make much sense for your proposal.
OK, then maybe we can get some sanity into this discussion.
The problem is if we just ignore copyright completely - and it becomes legal for large corporations to do so - the biggest distributor wins. Who might that be? Maybe Wal-Mart, maybe Sony. No way is this going to help anyone.
How does this happen? Very simple. If there is no rule against republishing any work, then someone is going to grab everything there is to grab and start selling it. Cheap, because it cost them nothing to produce. Which would you rather do, download a movie and make your own DVD or buy one at Wal-Mart for $2? How about music - if you could buy anything for $1 at Wal-Mart instead of downloading chopped-off, sometimes shoddy stuff, which would you do? What if you don't have broadband Internet access or you already used up your bandwidth allocation this month? There is still a place for physical distribution, but without copyright the big distributors are going to absolutely take over. That wouldn't do the artists any good, but it sure would help Wal-Mart's bottom line. It might help Sony's, too. It would not help the artists, and probably wouldn't help the average consumer.
Please think how eliminating copyright laws would really affect everyone before proposing silliness like that.
Check back in a few months and see how the new Roxio ... er, I mean Napster ... is doing since they dumped the CD/DVD business and decided to go with just selling music subscriptions. If they can make universities force every student to pay for a subscription, they just might have something. Otherwise, look for that name to be on the auction block along with some office furniture real soon.
There is no money in selling music online. The pirates have pretty much won that round. The artists are *never* going to be compensated.
Eliminate population growth. Shrink the population by at least 50%. 75% would be better.
Unfortunately, people are difficult to convince that in order to save the planet they have to die. However, that is the situation, do not doubt it for a minute. That is all it would take for pollution and gobal warming to be solved overnight. Bring the population down to about the 1850 level.
I believe if the Earth's population was at the level it was in 1850, there would be no environmental problems and no global warming.
It might be difficult to convince the rest of the world that this was the solution, however. It seems like the "solution" proposed by most is that "those guys" are using too many resources and need to be "scaled back", sometimes drastically. Sort of how Dresden was "scaled back" in WW II. We need to take the initiative and show the rest of the world that we are forward looking enough to address the problem unilaterally.
Of course, this means we need 75% of the US population to report to euthanasia centers, but what the heck, we are talking about the survival of the planet here.
The alternative would have been disasterous.
You look at the situation in Africa where a lot of aid has gone in the past, quite a bit from the US. Has it helped? Not really. If anything, it encouraged the people there to have more children and be more dependent on aid than anything else. The result of this was needier people and more of them. That is when the aid actually reached the people. Mostly, the aid was just enriching some local warlord and reinforcing his power base.
What would it take to effectively distribute aid to people in places like Africa and Asia? It would take a lot of military support to fight off the warlords and convince them that they can't steal. The country's own police and army are incapable of this and often are either bribed or actively taking part in the corruption and theft. Do we need to go into Sudan with a large military force to take over and enforce laws? Who's laws? Wouldn't that just be seen as more "imperialism" on the part of the US?
I think you can forget expanding aid programs. They do not help the people they are intended to, at least not long term. At best the people get more dependent on ourside help. At worst, we are supporting people that will someday attack their neighbors and cause more trouble.
I think you also have to consider that helping starving people that cannot be fed from local resources isn't necessarily the best idea. These people are starving because of a lack of local resources. Until that situation changes, they can never be self-supporting. With that, are you prepared to commit to supporting these people forever? Because that is what it would require. Not only the people that are their today, but the children that come into the world because they aren't starving anymore. Let's assume these people are modern and well-educated so only have three children per family that survive to adulthood. That means a 50% population increase per generation. So, if there are 100,000 starving people there today, there will be 150,000 utterly dependent people there in 30 years. Since these people are hardly well-educated, this is but a small sample of what is going to happen. This isn't a resource problem as such, but it is a local issue. While fat Americans and somewhat less fat Europeans have no problems with starvation, just moving the food over to Africa doesn't solve many problems. It just creates more, and it encourages people to live in areas where food cannot be grown to support the population.
I suppose one "solution" to the problem is to take all of the people in, say Sudan, and move them to another country that doesn't have that kind of a problem. That would take quite an effort, since the whole point would be to move everyone out - not just the people that can't be supported comfortably. Why? Because 100 years ago the land could support the much smaller population that was there and it outgrew the local resources. So, unless you want to do this again n 50 or 100 years you have to take all of the people out.
The fundamental problem is that that there are just places where the population has grown all out of proportion to the ability of the local area to support. This isn't a problem for Inuit or South Seas Islanders - they had (have?) rather brutal ways of dealing with population issues. So, they can survive and do very well in a limited resource environment. Most of the places where people are starving today have not had to deal with these issues and do not have such simplistic, brutal ways of addressing them. So, the population grows and becomes even more dependent on ourside support. Would the US be doing anyone a favor by trying to feed the world? I don't think so. We might reduce some short-term suffering, but the result in the long term would be more suffering on a larger scale.
And by "wins" I don't just mean is successful. No, the winner in that game would end up with all the marbles. What we are finding out is that there really isn't room in the US for two massive retailers - Wal-Mart is pushing everybody else out. How? By winning the race to the bottom where the suppliers get almost nothing and the employees get a job. Not much of a job, but at least they have a job. There is no barrier against Wal-Mart selling the same kind of cheap Chinese-made junk that K-Mart was selling, and so there is no barrier to Wal-Mart utterly owning that market.
This is exactly what would happen without any barriers - like copyright - to music, movies and software. Wal-Mart (or their logical successor in that field) would dominate the market so completely you would have to hunt to find another way to purchase that stuff. Think the Internet is the answer? Yeah, so did Petsmart. People still buy things in stores and not everyone has a broadband connection.
Contrast this with what I would consider "improperly-written" end-user software where it does not function as it is supposed to, it does unexpected things and you absolutely do need a huge amount of documentation to figure out what it did when you thought you knew how to use it.
Most of the open-source "solutions" I have seen aren't quite as bad as completely falling into the 2nd category, but the first is a lofty goal that might one day happen. Writing software with the goal that people will pay for necessary support dooms the software to requiring that support. And, in my opinion, this makes it third-rate or worse.
This is essentially a problem of territory and power, not drugs. Before there was crack, there was beer. The problems haven't really changed, just the tools and the prices. How to stop gang warfare? How about just making sure everyone has enough money for whatever they want? Do you think that would do it?
Re: Eliminate terrorism
Choose one: make terrorism unprofitable for anyone, or eliminate anything that the terrorists consider a problem. Terrorists consider Israel's existance a stain on the face of the earth, so they have to go. Where? Other terrorists consider the export of "Western culture" to be an insult and corrupting. Other terrorists consider the British Empire to be a problem and want their own government back, so we better rein in those imperialists too. I don't claim that terrorists are a unified body, so there are probably some demands I am missing. But, if you believe that simply turning the US into an isolationist country that doesn't trade with, defend or support anyone else would solve the problems you need to understand the problems better.
As for making terrorism unprofitable, this is a hard problem and one that the current US policy is trying to implement - not very successfully I might add. It is extremely difficult to implement this when other countries (e.g. France) insist that "terrorists" are good to trade with. Responding to terrorist threats with capitulation is another way to insure that terrorism is very profitable, in both achieving goals and international prestige. I don't agree with much of what has been done lately with the goal of stamping out terrorists, but to give in to their demands isn't a solution unless you are prepared to go all the way. I don't think anyone can really propose that with a straight face.
There are few simple solutions.
Oh, and "Israel's unreasonable stockpile" starts to sound a lot more reasonable when (a) all their neighbors want to kill them and (b) have nearly succeeded in the past.
The issue is we are in danger of reaching a point like we did around 1982 where virtually nobody purchased software for the Apple ][ any longer - they just copied it. It was commonly believed by people in the software industry that any new game would sell two copies - one on the east coast and one on the west coast and everyone would then get copies from the myriad BBS systems. Needless to say, nobody was much interested in producing new games (or anything else) for the Apple ][. Console games (cartridges - much harder to copy) were the thing then, until the PC Jr. failed and triggered another mini-crash.
Downloading software from a BBS in 1982 was difficult and time consuming. Downloading a song on the Internet is quick and painless. Downloading a movie is still not quick and painless for most of the Internet users, but it could get to be there.
Where are we when the artists and music producers reach the conclusion that making a CD just isn't worthwhile anymore and that $100 concert tickets are the only way to go. Paid appearances. Sponsorships like Brittny Spears with Pepsi?. Make the music "scarce" again and keep it out of the hands of the "common people" so it is worth something again.
That is already happening in China with like a 98% piracy rate. How long until it happens here if things continue as they are?