No, it probably is not illegal. Let's see, what country has the most Windows machines? Probably the US is #1 there. So anything that negatively affects Windows machines will have a predominately bad effect on US computer users.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a specific (unwritten) law in Estonia that says "If you screw with Americans, hat's off to ya." There certainly is such a law in Romainia and Bulgaria.
It may also be the case that in Estonia anything that is done "online" gets a free pass because it did not happen in the physical world. If you steal from someone "online" it is very difficult for them to pick you out of a lineup. Similarly, if you haven't left the country and the victim never came to Estonia, then how could you possibly have stolen anything from them? Next case!
Many countries do not have laws dealing with Internet crimes in any way whatsoever and their legal system considers the whole idea of "virtual" crime to be nonsense. If you stick a gun in someone's face and demand their wallet, yes, that is illegal. If you get their bank account information and transfer yourself everything they have, well, that's different - they gave you that information, didn't they? Oh, they thought they were giving it to someone else... too complicated and sounds "virtual" anyway. Next case!
Unfortunately, the threshold for international enforcement is very, very high. Way too high for 419 scammers to get prosecuted. As far as Western Union is concerned, everyone should know by now that only criminals use Western Union for anything at all. If you aren't a criminal, there are other ways of sending money around that do not involve Western Union in any way. Western Union has consistently refused to do anything that would prevent criminal use of their money laundering... er, I mean money transferring... and the result is every single time I see anything about Western Union is it for criminal enterprises. This by itself should doom Western Union but there seems to be enough folks thinking they are going to get paid for transferring money around that they can keep going.
I have never heard of being asked for a passport on the 2nd leg of an international flight - the flight really leaving the country. Every time I have had the passport checked before getting on the first flight and once that is done it is flagged as being checked.
Now, if you switch airlines this might happen I suppose, especially if the first airline isn't international. Like Southwest to AA or UAL.
I believe it is against government regulations for an airline or cruise ship to allow you to board without a passport. Doesn't have to be a US passport, obviously, but you have to have one to get on the plane.
Substantial fines are probably imposed if an airline lets someone on without a passport. It appears that it is up to the individual airline staff to figure out if what you have constitutes a passport or does not. There is probably no recouse against this decision other than trying a different airline.
So if you haul out some beat-to-hell passport and they say "Nope, we are not letting you on board" there is nothing you can do about it.
Yes, but the fine is ridiculously small compared to what the health care insurance costs. Therefore, any business will clearly elect to pay the fine and dump all health care coverage costs onto the government. This is one small detail that was missed in the whole discussion in Congress and completely missed as far as figuring out what is going to cost.
Employers are out of the health insurance game as of 2014 unless the whole thing gets repealed. I've been to employer insurance meetings where this has been discussed and nobody is going to offer insurance any longer. They will just pay the fines. If I remember correctly the fine is like $2500 maximum whereas any sort of good coverage is more like $10,000 a year. So, instant savings of $7500 by just electing to pay the fine.
Now, if they made the fine $100,000 we might have a chance of the government not being buried in the costs, but that isn't going to happen.
So the whole contraception thing is somewhat of a joke and a short-term problem. It goes away in 2014 because nobody in their right mind is not going to just pay the fine. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what else is buried in the health care law.
The final solution over all is force insurance companies to be insurance companies and end the heal management regime.
You misunderstand what "insurance" is. Insurance is risk management. What we have done in the US is tried to remove the risk management from health insurance which turns it into a revolving credit account instead of insurance.
A risk management based insurance system would absolutely charge someone with diabetes more than someone that didn't have it. An older person would be riskier than a young person as would a woman of childbearing age vs. a male of the same age.
Fundamentally, insurance is gambling with the insurance company having more knowledge (actuaries) than their customers do. For example, if you knew you were going to die in March 2019 and not before then you would not buy life insurance until just before the big event. What the insurance company has going for them is they know if they sell insurance to 100 25-year-old males only a small number of them will die before March 2019 so they can figure out how much to charge to cover this and make a profit. Health insurance works exactly the same way - the insurance company is betting you aren't going to get sick and has enough statistics and other information to know how much to charge to cover the folks that do get sick and still come out ahead. Unfortunately, what we have been trying to do in the US is remove the risk management part of health insurance - so what is left to the insurance companies is things like recission to manage their risk. Because be assured, they have to manage the amount of money they are paying out vs. the amount of money they are bringing in. Looking at profits is not really all that useful because without the risk management (or cost management, really today) whatever billions in profits they have will evaporate overnight. Remember, a week-long hospital stay is going to cost $50,000. If last year the insurance company made 5 billion in profit all it takes is 100,000 people in the hospital to completely wipe that out. And a large insurance company certainly has 100,000 customers.
What everyone wants is you pay some minimal fixed amount and the big health care fund in the sky just rains cash down on the health care system to make everyone well again. OK, the only organization that can do that without any sort of risk management is the government. They have no limit on what they can collect in taxes and have no need for profit. But today the difference in taxation is in the US we are paying 50% in taxes and in Canada they are paying more like 75% but getting health care taken care of by the government. But it is a different sort of health care in Canada than in the US. In the US if you have insurance and decide you want to get a gastric bypass because you weigh too much you basically just go and get it done. In Canada they have a limit of (some number?) gastric bypass operations they do each year in that province. If they have already done that number you get on the list and wait until your name comes up - which might be in five years. It is the difference between on-demand health care and waiting-on-a-list health care.
Also in Canada the government health care operation is a lot more concerned with the overall health of the people there. This means that government intrusion into businesses and people's lives is necessary to ensure the health of the people there. Want to open a restaurant that serves really great deep fried cheese? You may get denied a permit because of health considerations. I do not know of personal examples of this, but I am sure they exist.
The other fact of US health care is that we spend 90% of the health care money on people in their last year of life and nobody else on the planet is doing that. This means that if Grandma is 90 years old and it is going to cost $300,000 to give her a new knee or hip that it just happens in the US whereas in just about every other place in the world someone from the government
Unfortunately your company might have rules about pirated software. I have worked places where the message from the CTO was "we aren't paying for that - find a different way and don't tell me about it". There are no "piracy inspectors" coming around checking to see if your papers are in order. Sometimes the BSA will audit a big company - but only after they have been tipped off.
For most big companies it is simply a matter of containing the knowledge of piracy within a small circle. Then the user's have no idea what is going on and they can't rat out the company. Oh, and BSA only cares about their members, not piracy in general.
Most companies are also interested in the minimum cost, and if piracy is an option it is certainly cheaper. They aren't going to spend a year trying to crack some dongle-protected piece of software but if they can download it, it will happen. Once it is available on the Internet the paying customers are going to start dropping off.
How do you know "potential" customers are pirating? Simple - it is out there for them to use. Let's see - there is a choice between spending $10K on some piece of software or just letting Fred do something off in the corner for free. Who cares what Fred is doing as long as the job gets done and we don't have to spend $10K. These days if you can put on your resume that you know how to install MatLab for free it is far more likely to get you a job than just knowing MatLab and expecting them to pay for it.
If a company can't manage to have a server stay up, they deserve to be out of business. That is what fallover redundency is for. Multi-homed network connections. Data center UPS systems. OK, you might have an exposure if nuclear weapons went off in the 25 largest cities of the world and that might be an excuse.
But anything short of that can be managed and is managed every day. So why do you think the server would ever be unavailable?
You clearly have no idea how things work in the professional field.
There is video enhancement software - not editing - for dealing with surveilance video that the starting price is $50,000.
There is quality testing software for CDs and DVDs which require specialized hardware to use and starts around $80,000 with basic hardware. You can easily spend $250K on it but if it keeps you from sending a bad batch of DVDs to your customer it is worth it.
These are just two areas I am familiar with. You can bet a lot of medical diagnostic software is really, really pricey as well. And people are paying for it every day - unless they can pirate it.
There are a lot of people that believe this is impossible and that all software has problems requiring support.
OK, then ask them how long it has been since they called Microsoft about a problem with Word or Windows. The answer is never. Nobody calls, they just put up with it. If it truely got bad enough, they would use something else - but it never really gets that bad for most of the world. While there may be companies offering training classes for Word this isn't a big business opportunity for anyone. It just isn't needed.
Let's see, I bet there is nobody that has ever called or even searched online for "support" for Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Probably 90%+ of the software that is sold in the Apple iTunes store is completely unsupported in any manner whatsoever. If someone finds a bug, they delete the program. If there was an option to get support, nobody would use it.
People have been conditioned - mostly by Microsoft and others complete mishandling of support and ignoring users - that software is something you just put up with. If the pain isn't that bad, no big deal. Once the pain gets to a certain point, you drop that program like a hot potato and find something else. Sure in some niche cases you can get a user to pay for support, but if they need it they will hate the fact they need it. They will look for alternatives if at all possible and stop paying for support as soon as they can. Even if this means they have to put up with bugs.
There are simple dongles that do nothing more than identify themselves and the software checks for the presences. Those are easy to get around.
There are others that decrypt for an incredibly short period of time blocks of code in the program itself. Immediately upon exiting from that block of code it is re-encrypted. All of the encryption and decryption is done by code running in a processor on the dongle itself. If you don't start with a copy of the program with a dongle it is pretty much hopeless. As most dongle cracking is done by people that never had a legit copy of the software to start with, this is very secure. Unless your customers want to destroy the publisher's business - that means you have other problems.
Such dongles are somewhat pricey and can cost as much as $100 each in small quantities. Combined with the effort to integrate the code into the product this can be a substantial committment but for a product that is worth over $1000 to a customer it may be worth it. Remember, in most cases the customer will choose the cheapest option available and when piracy is viable, it is certainly the cheaper option. Morals, ethics and law have very little to do with it. There are no "piracy inspectors" that stop by to see if your papers are in order which means pretty much anything goes.
As far as customer relations are concerned, of course it is important to have customers that want to be your customer. However, if you do this with software that needs continual support and hand-holding you are failing. If customers can choose "no support" because they don't need it this is clearly a preferred model for both the customer and the publisher. If they are calling or emailing every week for some new issue it may be wonderful because they are paying for support but awful because they will come to hate the fact that level of support is needed.
Software piracy is all about destroying the revenue model for software completely. It is supposed to bring us one step closer to the mythical Star Trek universe where money is obsolete. The thinking goes that if we can make money obsolete for software this week maybe we can make it obsolete for groceries next week. Talk to some committed people in the pirate community and you will see. Then try to explain to your employees they aren't getting paid this week because the last 10 customers decided not to pay.
Nasty problem with direct democracy is clearly what we are seeing in the US today - if you can stir up the mob they will start to act without thinking much in what they believe is their own interest. Unfortunately, it isn't really their own interest in the long term but the passions of the mob aren't really tuned to anything long term.
Greed is actually good when you can focus it on long term results. If you start with the objective of controlling vast amounts of wealth in 100 years but not really caring about short term losses this can be almost equal to "the benefit of society". Unfortunately what we have today is a lot of greed focused on short term, very unstable gain. That is almost guaranteed to bring about long term losses. But right now we have a financial structure that can't seem to do anything except lock down short term results with no thought given to long term results.
So for example, you have a company that is 100% focused on then next 30 days and maintaining stablity over that period. This by definition means no investment in the future because that might take away from short term stability. Failure to acheive short term stability today means complete failure and the management will simply be replaced. A lot of this comes from the stock being owned by entities that aren't interested in anything long term but needing absolute short term stability to survive.
Which, dating from the beginning of stockholder owned entities, is a really bad way to finance a business of any sort. You need capital to finance risk-taking because that is the only way you get long term survival - growth and longevity. Instead we have investors in the stock market that really want government bonds rather than stock in say GE or IBM. What we end up with is GE being run in a manner that assures short term stability for these stockholders - which means outsourcing all the manufacturing and hollowing out the company. Great for short term stability, really bad for long term survival.
The problem is government control of finance and production has been tried and it doesn't work either. Anything that takes more than about three people to make a really important decision is doomed to fail and that has been proven over and over again. It is pretty easy to pick out situations where the wrong decision was made (clearly obvious in hindsight) but still the fact "a decision" was made - even being the wrong one - was better than not making any decision at all.
Virtually all the governments on the planet are now suffering from the debating society problem and decisions simply aren't getting made at all. Note that the US hasn't had a formal, approved budget for years.
Yes, you can question the direction of things today and the focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term goals. This is indeed a problem, but the solution would not be to dump everything on the US Congress debating society and watch as gridlock, political gamesmanship and point scoring prevented anything at all from getting done.
Probably the most productive way to do things would be to have one person be an absolute ruler and decide everything. Problem is, we've tried that and even at a smaller scale it doesn't work - today's world would result in instant overload and the guy would probably commit suicide after a couple of days. So that isn't a solution. Also, the chances of getting a really good ruler are balanced by the equal chances of getting some wacko that really, really wants all that power.
We have tried all sorts of centrally-controlled economies and none of them have worked, ever. I guess you might say that some mideval kings had functioning economies that were centrally controlled, but once you look deeper you find (a) they didn't have that much control, and (b) things weren't really working out all that well either.
Probably the best organization is to have a political arrangement that syphons off all of the folks that want power and puts them into an endless debating society that is structured to prevent anything from ever getting done. Like the US Congress. Then, while those people are engaging in a massive circle-jerk, you have a few people actually doing things and those things get done. The problem right now is that what is getting done is all short-term stuff because we have pretty much mortgaged everything to folks that are counting on small growth and really large, firm stability. Why? Because a huge percentage of stock is now owned by pension funds that demand stability and predictable results. When a company's stock is owned in large measure by pension funds they can't take big risks even for big rewards and the board that tries to will be replaced by people that will not.
I think the pension fund ownership of huge swaths of stock has generated this situation and about the only way out is the way we are going - eliminate pension funds entirely. The end result will be companies that can take big risks and think longer term even with short term losses, but it will take another 50 years or so to get there. I hope things can be held together that long.
Freight by train is pretty much left to huge quantities of stuff that is being moved to a single location - coal, for example. Cars for another.
Pretty much everything else goes by truck today with huge volumes of trucks operating on the highways.
Also, the regulations for trains, especially involving grade level crossings, make trains an extremely difficult way to move anything that doesn't absolutely require a train.
Between this and the fact all the right-of-way is owned by freight companies is the reason the idea of high speed rail in the US is such a joke. We would pretty much have to carve out a swath of homes, offices, schools, etc. to lay entirely new tracks for such projects - as they are finding out. Sure, we could have had a rail system, but it would have required thinking about it in 1970 and keeping the passenger rails rather than ripping them up and selling off the land. It's gone now and the only way to get it back is to condemm vast areas of the US to lay new tracks.
This is the fate of the US phone system. Once there are fewer than a basic minimum number of subscribers it will become extremely unprofitable to even maintain the wires that have connected the country for 80+ years. You can assume that the wires will not be maintained out of charity.
Best be getting a cell phone is what that means. Oh, your rural area is underserved by cell towers? Too bad, that. Better move to the city where service is better.
Did you not think flight from landline service would have consequences? It sure does, and it is really going to suck for some people. Aren't you glad you dropped your land line ages ago?
There is no way the government can somehow force the telephone companies to maintain service at a huge loss. They aren't going to do it. And that means the end of the universal nature of the US phone system. This is a direct outgrowth of people dropping land line (regulated) service for an unregulated cell phone service.
Europeans evidently don't have enough rappers. Everyone knows that good grades or the ability to add means you are a nerd. Want to be popular? A C average is a good starting point.
Sorry, in the US the merchants would always be rounding up. If it was illegal to round up and they had millions of government employees coming around to inspect cash registers and such, the merchants would simply change the prices so that it worked out to the same effect.
One strong lesson to learn is that you are never going to get businesses to accept a loss of revenue without a huge fight. So it would literally require millions of inspectors to visit every location to check what their point-of-sale system was doing. If it was known there were not such inspectors - and the penalties were severe and immediate - then everyone would simply cheat knowing that if you buy 25 items you aren't going to be in a position to argue about a couple of cents.
There would also be the "fact" that people paying with debit cards would receive favorable treatment - lower costs. That would elicit marches on government buildings with people holding up signs saying "MARK OF THE BEAST!!!!" Even people that didn't believe would be inspired to join in the protest of unfair treatment of cash payments.
It would be a mess in the US and it wouldn't work.
You somehow misunderstand that this is a state-level issue. It isn't.
Counties, townships and municipalities are all independent taxing bodies in some states. Ohio, for example, has a taxing arrangement like this and I believe a lot of Eastern states do as well. Arizona is just by city. Illinois is by county, not city.
What this means for Ohio is there are over 1,000 different tax rates for the state depending on the mix of county, township and city. Illinois has 102 counties and I suspect there are cities with their own taxes on top of the county standard - so likely there are nearly 1,000 different tax rates there as well. Oh, and it doesn't just depend on where the store is located. In many places it depends on the home address of the customer, not the store. Which means they have to ask where their customer is located so they can figure out the correct tax.
Any business which is multi-state and has to pay sales taxes in multiple locations subscribes to a tax service which handles all of this for them. The point-of-sale system has to be updated on at least a monthly basis because failure to keep up with the tax rate changes results in penalties and fines.
You wonder why Amazon is fighting so hard to keep from paying taxes everywhere? Well, this is the reason. It doesn't just mean collecting the taxes from each sale and paying them - it means paying for expensive services to supply you with the proper tax rate based upon an address or zip code. It also means submitting taxes to thousands of different taxing bodies each with their own forms and own rules. So nobody does this - they pay a service to compute it and file it for them.
Sorry, but the majority of the US now pays a lot more than 7%. I believe, for example, that New York City has something like 10.5% sales tax. Chicago is 8.5% in the city, at least. Heck, Chandler, AZ which isn't exactly a huge metropolis has 8.5% sales tax.
I suspect there are a few hamlets out there with a 5% tax rate, but it is probably a secret. They would be overwhelmed with people if it was generally known how cheap it was there.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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Ah, but if you make it unattractive enough to live in the US people with means and mobile assets will simply move.
This is the one fact that a lot of people miss. The US is not the only place on the planet for someone with billions of dollars to live. Yes, right now much of Mexico is really, really unattractive because of security concerns - but if you can afford $1 a day for each private soldier, it might not be so bad. Same goes for plenty of places where the local wage scale is very low.
So implement the most obnoxious tax plan you can imagine in the US to afford a really nice cushy welfare state and social safety net - but don't be surprised when the people you were counting on paying for it all leave.
Everything you do on the Internet is available for inspection and analysis. Sooner or later, someone will come up with a methodology for analyzing photographs on Facebook and Picasa that indicate a person's personality type. And this will be used to filter job applicants.
If you post it online, it will be used to rate you in some fashion. It may be just an HR tool for sorting resumes, or it may be something that is used to select between candidates.
Someone I know just went through about four months of a job working its way through a large company where the job changed from a contractor job (that he was approved for) to a employee position. There were four candidates and four different managers each rated a different person as the top contender. HR took this as an indication that there was no "outstanding" candidate and nobody got the job. The hiring manager was pissed but there was nothing that could be done about it. This is how hiring works in large companies with unions. The actual hiring manager has zero control over the process.
But if you haven't been paying attention, everything you do online will be collected, collated, inspected, analyzed and reported on. There will be services (probably are already) for researching job candidates, prospective spouses, potential roommates, etc. that will use this information to build up a profile that will be useful to some. Is it all BS? Maybe, but people will pay money for it and therefore it is going to happen.
Plenty of people would like to make it a crime to adhere to conservative beliefs and/or "Republicanism" under the idea that they believe it to be hateful and against their morality.
I actually think it would be fun to see Mr. Obama declare war on the Republican party and all people that vote Republican. Toss them all in jail until they sign a Democratic loyalty oath and promise to never vote anything other than Democratic for the rest of their lives.
Sure would make a lot of people happy over at DailyKos.
And get paid for their efforts how? The key is that FaceBook gets money from selling information and virtually no other source of revenue exists for them. Advertising simply isn't lucrative enough to support more than a couple of hobbists.
No, the services will simply not be available to EU citizens, or anywhere else that blocks the sale of information.
Google and FaceBook exist solely because it is legal in the US to collect this information and sell it. If it wasn't legal to begin with, the services would not exist. There is no comparable source of revenue for a "free" service - ten years ago it was clear advertising wasn't the way to make lots of money.
Now the EU wants to change the rules. It will be interesting to see what happens. My guess it that these services will simply be unavailable to anyone that lives in a country that denies the company the right to gather and sell information.
Having done server moves on the cheap, I would say it is just an unwillingness to duplicate the hardware in the new location. If you don't do it, then you have to tear everything down, move it, and reassemble everything. Can easily take a couple of days.
Since these servers aren't doing anything to contribute to revenue I can certainly understand an unwillingness to spend lots of money on the move. Probably the reason for the move in the first place is to cut costs, so buying all new hardware would certainly change the perspective on that.
It isn't nice to their customers and that is a factor that probably got trumped by costs.
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Is what they did not illegal in Estonia?
No, it probably is not illegal. Let's see, what country has the most Windows machines? Probably the US is #1 there. So anything that negatively affects Windows machines will have a predominately bad effect on US computer users.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a specific (unwritten) law in Estonia that says "If you screw with Americans, hat's off to ya." There certainly is such a law in Romainia and Bulgaria.
It may also be the case that in Estonia anything that is done "online" gets a free pass because it did not happen in the physical world. If you steal from someone "online" it is very difficult for them to pick you out of a lineup. Similarly, if you haven't left the country and the victim never came to Estonia, then how could you possibly have stolen anything from them? Next case!
Many countries do not have laws dealing with Internet crimes in any way whatsoever and their legal system considers the whole idea of "virtual" crime to be nonsense. If you stick a gun in someone's face and demand their wallet, yes, that is illegal. If you get their bank account information and transfer yourself everything they have, well, that's different - they gave you that information, didn't they? Oh, they thought they were giving it to someone else... too complicated and sounds "virtual" anyway. Next case!
Unfortunately, the threshold for international enforcement is very, very high. Way too high for 419 scammers to get prosecuted. As far as Western Union is concerned, everyone should know by now that only criminals use Western Union for anything at all. If you aren't a criminal, there are other ways of sending money around that do not involve Western Union in any way. Western Union has consistently refused to do anything that would prevent criminal use of their money laundering ... er, I mean money transferring ... and the result is every single time I see anything about Western Union is it for criminal enterprises. This by itself should doom Western Union but there seems to be enough folks thinking they are going to get paid for transferring money around that they can keep going.
I have never heard of being asked for a passport on the 2nd leg of an international flight - the flight really leaving the country. Every time I have had the passport checked before getting on the first flight and once that is done it is flagged as being checked.
Now, if you switch airlines this might happen I suppose, especially if the first airline isn't international. Like Southwest to AA or UAL.
I believe it is against government regulations for an airline or cruise ship to allow you to board without a passport. Doesn't have to be a US passport, obviously, but you have to have one to get on the plane.
Substantial fines are probably imposed if an airline lets someone on without a passport. It appears that it is up to the individual airline staff to figure out if what you have constitutes a passport or does not. There is probably no recouse against this decision other than trying a different airline.
So if you haul out some beat-to-hell passport and they say "Nope, we are not letting you on board" there is nothing you can do about it.
Ones outside the US. Just about all of them.
Yes, but the fine is ridiculously small compared to what the health care insurance costs. Therefore, any business will clearly elect to pay the fine and dump all health care coverage costs onto the government. This is one small detail that was missed in the whole discussion in Congress and completely missed as far as figuring out what is going to cost.
Employers are out of the health insurance game as of 2014 unless the whole thing gets repealed. I've been to employer insurance meetings where this has been discussed and nobody is going to offer insurance any longer. They will just pay the fines. If I remember correctly the fine is like $2500 maximum whereas any sort of good coverage is more like $10,000 a year. So, instant savings of $7500 by just electing to pay the fine.
Now, if they made the fine $100,000 we might have a chance of the government not being buried in the costs, but that isn't going to happen.
So the whole contraception thing is somewhat of a joke and a short-term problem. It goes away in 2014 because nobody in their right mind is not going to just pay the fine. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what else is buried in the health care law.
The final solution over all is force insurance companies to be insurance companies and end the heal management regime.
You misunderstand what "insurance" is. Insurance is risk management. What we have done in the US is tried to remove the risk management from health insurance which turns it into a revolving credit account instead of insurance.
A risk management based insurance system would absolutely charge someone with diabetes more than someone that didn't have it. An older person would be riskier than a young person as would a woman of childbearing age vs. a male of the same age.
Fundamentally, insurance is gambling with the insurance company having more knowledge (actuaries) than their customers do. For example, if you knew you were going to die in March 2019 and not before then you would not buy life insurance until just before the big event. What the insurance company has going for them is they know if they sell insurance to 100 25-year-old males only a small number of them will die before March 2019 so they can figure out how much to charge to cover this and make a profit. Health insurance works exactly the same way - the insurance company is betting you aren't going to get sick and has enough statistics and other information to know how much to charge to cover the folks that do get sick and still come out ahead. Unfortunately, what we have been trying to do in the US is remove the risk management part of health insurance - so what is left to the insurance companies is things like recission to manage their risk. Because be assured, they have to manage the amount of money they are paying out vs. the amount of money they are bringing in. Looking at profits is not really all that useful because without the risk management (or cost management, really today) whatever billions in profits they have will evaporate overnight. Remember, a week-long hospital stay is going to cost $50,000. If last year the insurance company made 5 billion in profit all it takes is 100,000 people in the hospital to completely wipe that out. And a large insurance company certainly has 100,000 customers.
What everyone wants is you pay some minimal fixed amount and the big health care fund in the sky just rains cash down on the health care system to make everyone well again. OK, the only organization that can do that without any sort of risk management is the government. They have no limit on what they can collect in taxes and have no need for profit. But today the difference in taxation is in the US we are paying 50% in taxes and in Canada they are paying more like 75% but getting health care taken care of by the government. But it is a different sort of health care in Canada than in the US. In the US if you have insurance and decide you want to get a gastric bypass because you weigh too much you basically just go and get it done. In Canada they have a limit of (some number?) gastric bypass operations they do each year in that province. If they have already done that number you get on the list and wait until your name comes up - which might be in five years. It is the difference between on-demand health care and waiting-on-a-list health care.
Also in Canada the government health care operation is a lot more concerned with the overall health of the people there. This means that government intrusion into businesses and people's lives is necessary to ensure the health of the people there. Want to open a restaurant that serves really great deep fried cheese? You may get denied a permit because of health considerations. I do not know of personal examples of this, but I am sure they exist.
The other fact of US health care is that we spend 90% of the health care money on people in their last year of life and nobody else on the planet is doing that. This means that if Grandma is 90 years old and it is going to cost $300,000 to give her a new knee or hip that it just happens in the US whereas in just about every other place in the world someone from the government
Unfortunately your company might have rules about pirated software. I have worked places where the message from the CTO was "we aren't paying for that - find a different way and don't tell me about it". There are no "piracy inspectors" coming around checking to see if your papers are in order. Sometimes the BSA will audit a big company - but only after they have been tipped off.
For most big companies it is simply a matter of containing the knowledge of piracy within a small circle. Then the user's have no idea what is going on and they can't rat out the company. Oh, and BSA only cares about their members, not piracy in general.
Most companies are also interested in the minimum cost, and if piracy is an option it is certainly cheaper. They aren't going to spend a year trying to crack some dongle-protected piece of software but if they can download it, it will happen. Once it is available on the Internet the paying customers are going to start dropping off.
How do you know "potential" customers are pirating? Simple - it is out there for them to use. Let's see - there is a choice between spending $10K on some piece of software or just letting Fred do something off in the corner for free. Who cares what Fred is doing as long as the job gets done and we don't have to spend $10K. These days if you can put on your resume that you know how to install MatLab for free it is far more likely to get you a job than just knowing MatLab and expecting them to pay for it.
If a company can't manage to have a server stay up, they deserve to be out of business. That is what fallover redundency is for. Multi-homed network connections. Data center UPS systems. OK, you might have an exposure if nuclear weapons went off in the 25 largest cities of the world and that might be an excuse.
But anything short of that can be managed and is managed every day. So why do you think the server would ever be unavailable?
You clearly have no idea how things work in the professional field.
There is video enhancement software - not editing - for dealing with surveilance video that the starting price is $50,000.
There is quality testing software for CDs and DVDs which require specialized hardware to use and starts around $80,000 with basic hardware. You can easily spend $250K on it but if it keeps you from sending a bad batch of DVDs to your customer it is worth it.
These are just two areas I am familiar with. You can bet a lot of medical diagnostic software is really, really pricey as well. And people are paying for it every day - unless they can pirate it.
There are a lot of people that believe this is impossible and that all software has problems requiring support.
OK, then ask them how long it has been since they called Microsoft about a problem with Word or Windows. The answer is never. Nobody calls, they just put up with it. If it truely got bad enough, they would use something else - but it never really gets that bad for most of the world. While there may be companies offering training classes for Word this isn't a big business opportunity for anyone. It just isn't needed.
Let's see, I bet there is nobody that has ever called or even searched online for "support" for Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Probably 90%+ of the software that is sold in the Apple iTunes store is completely unsupported in any manner whatsoever. If someone finds a bug, they delete the program. If there was an option to get support, nobody would use it.
People have been conditioned - mostly by Microsoft and others complete mishandling of support and ignoring users - that software is something you just put up with. If the pain isn't that bad, no big deal. Once the pain gets to a certain point, you drop that program like a hot potato and find something else. Sure in some niche cases you can get a user to pay for support, but if they need it they will hate the fact they need it. They will look for alternatives if at all possible and stop paying for support as soon as they can. Even if this means they have to put up with bugs.
There are simple dongles that do nothing more than identify themselves and the software checks for the presences. Those are easy to get around.
There are others that decrypt for an incredibly short period of time blocks of code in the program itself. Immediately upon exiting from that block of code it is re-encrypted. All of the encryption and decryption is done by code running in a processor on the dongle itself. If you don't start with a copy of the program with a dongle it is pretty much hopeless. As most dongle cracking is done by people that never had a legit copy of the software to start with, this is very secure. Unless your customers want to destroy the publisher's business - that means you have other problems.
Such dongles are somewhat pricey and can cost as much as $100 each in small quantities. Combined with the effort to integrate the code into the product this can be a substantial committment but for a product that is worth over $1000 to a customer it may be worth it. Remember, in most cases the customer will choose the cheapest option available and when piracy is viable, it is certainly the cheaper option. Morals, ethics and law have very little to do with it. There are no "piracy inspectors" that stop by to see if your papers are in order which means pretty much anything goes.
As far as customer relations are concerned, of course it is important to have customers that want to be your customer. However, if you do this with software that needs continual support and hand-holding you are failing. If customers can choose "no support" because they don't need it this is clearly a preferred model for both the customer and the publisher. If they are calling or emailing every week for some new issue it may be wonderful because they are paying for support but awful because they will come to hate the fact that level of support is needed.
Software piracy is all about destroying the revenue model for software completely. It is supposed to bring us one step closer to the mythical Star Trek universe where money is obsolete. The thinking goes that if we can make money obsolete for software this week maybe we can make it obsolete for groceries next week. Talk to some committed people in the pirate community and you will see. Then try to explain to your employees they aren't getting paid this week because the last 10 customers decided not to pay.
Nasty problem with direct democracy is clearly what we are seeing in the US today - if you can stir up the mob they will start to act without thinking much in what they believe is their own interest. Unfortunately, it isn't really their own interest in the long term but the passions of the mob aren't really tuned to anything long term.
Greed is actually good when you can focus it on long term results. If you start with the objective of controlling vast amounts of wealth in 100 years but not really caring about short term losses this can be almost equal to "the benefit of society". Unfortunately what we have today is a lot of greed focused on short term, very unstable gain. That is almost guaranteed to bring about long term losses. But right now we have a financial structure that can't seem to do anything except lock down short term results with no thought given to long term results.
So for example, you have a company that is 100% focused on then next 30 days and maintaining stablity over that period. This by definition means no investment in the future because that might take away from short term stability. Failure to acheive short term stability today means complete failure and the management will simply be replaced. A lot of this comes from the stock being owned by entities that aren't interested in anything long term but needing absolute short term stability to survive.
Which, dating from the beginning of stockholder owned entities, is a really bad way to finance a business of any sort. You need capital to finance risk-taking because that is the only way you get long term survival - growth and longevity. Instead we have investors in the stock market that really want government bonds rather than stock in say GE or IBM. What we end up with is GE being run in a manner that assures short term stability for these stockholders - which means outsourcing all the manufacturing and hollowing out the company. Great for short term stability, really bad for long term survival.
The problem is government control of finance and production has been tried and it doesn't work either. Anything that takes more than about three people to make a really important decision is doomed to fail and that has been proven over and over again. It is pretty easy to pick out situations where the wrong decision was made (clearly obvious in hindsight) but still the fact "a decision" was made - even being the wrong one - was better than not making any decision at all.
Virtually all the governments on the planet are now suffering from the debating society problem and decisions simply aren't getting made at all. Note that the US hasn't had a formal, approved budget for years.
Yes, you can question the direction of things today and the focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term goals. This is indeed a problem, but the solution would not be to dump everything on the US Congress debating society and watch as gridlock, political gamesmanship and point scoring prevented anything at all from getting done.
Probably the most productive way to do things would be to have one person be an absolute ruler and decide everything. Problem is, we've tried that and even at a smaller scale it doesn't work - today's world would result in instant overload and the guy would probably commit suicide after a couple of days. So that isn't a solution. Also, the chances of getting a really good ruler are balanced by the equal chances of getting some wacko that really, really wants all that power.
We have tried all sorts of centrally-controlled economies and none of them have worked, ever. I guess you might say that some mideval kings had functioning economies that were centrally controlled, but once you look deeper you find (a) they didn't have that much control, and (b) things weren't really working out all that well either.
Probably the best organization is to have a political arrangement that syphons off all of the folks that want power and puts them into an endless debating society that is structured to prevent anything from ever getting done. Like the US Congress. Then, while those people are engaging in a massive circle-jerk, you have a few people actually doing things and those things get done. The problem right now is that what is getting done is all short-term stuff because we have pretty much mortgaged everything to folks that are counting on small growth and really large, firm stability. Why? Because a huge percentage of stock is now owned by pension funds that demand stability and predictable results. When a company's stock is owned in large measure by pension funds they can't take big risks even for big rewards and the board that tries to will be replaced by people that will not.
I think the pension fund ownership of huge swaths of stock has generated this situation and about the only way out is the way we are going - eliminate pension funds entirely. The end result will be companies that can take big risks and think longer term even with short term losses, but it will take another 50 years or so to get there. I hope things can be held together that long.
Freight by train is pretty much left to huge quantities of stuff that is being moved to a single location - coal, for example. Cars for another.
Pretty much everything else goes by truck today with huge volumes of trucks operating on the highways.
Also, the regulations for trains, especially involving grade level crossings, make trains an extremely difficult way to move anything that doesn't absolutely require a train.
Between this and the fact all the right-of-way is owned by freight companies is the reason the idea of high speed rail in the US is such a joke. We would pretty much have to carve out a swath of homes, offices, schools, etc. to lay entirely new tracks for such projects - as they are finding out. Sure, we could have had a rail system, but it would have required thinking about it in 1970 and keeping the passenger rails rather than ripping them up and selling off the land. It's gone now and the only way to get it back is to condemm vast areas of the US to lay new tracks.
Not going to happen anywhere there are people.
This is the fate of the US phone system. Once there are fewer than a basic minimum number of subscribers it will become extremely unprofitable to even maintain the wires that have connected the country for 80+ years. You can assume that the wires will not be maintained out of charity.
Best be getting a cell phone is what that means. Oh, your rural area is underserved by cell towers? Too bad, that. Better move to the city where service is better.
Did you not think flight from landline service would have consequences? It sure does, and it is really going to suck for some people. Aren't you glad you dropped your land line ages ago?
There is no way the government can somehow force the telephone companies to maintain service at a huge loss. They aren't going to do it. And that means the end of the universal nature of the US phone system. This is a direct outgrowth of people dropping land line (regulated) service for an unregulated cell phone service.
Europeans evidently don't have enough rappers. Everyone knows that good grades or the ability to add means you are a nerd. Want to be popular? A C average is a good starting point.
Sorry, in the US the merchants would always be rounding up. If it was illegal to round up and they had millions of government employees coming around to inspect cash registers and such, the merchants would simply change the prices so that it worked out to the same effect.
One strong lesson to learn is that you are never going to get businesses to accept a loss of revenue without a huge fight. So it would literally require millions of inspectors to visit every location to check what their point-of-sale system was doing. If it was known there were not such inspectors - and the penalties were severe and immediate - then everyone would simply cheat knowing that if you buy 25 items you aren't going to be in a position to argue about a couple of cents.
There would also be the "fact" that people paying with debit cards would receive favorable treatment - lower costs. That would elicit marches on government buildings with people holding up signs saying "MARK OF THE BEAST!!!!" Even people that didn't believe would be inspired to join in the protest of unfair treatment of cash payments.
It would be a mess in the US and it wouldn't work.
You somehow misunderstand that this is a state-level issue. It isn't.
Counties, townships and municipalities are all independent taxing bodies in some states. Ohio, for example, has a taxing arrangement like this and I believe a lot of Eastern states do as well. Arizona is just by city. Illinois is by county, not city.
What this means for Ohio is there are over 1,000 different tax rates for the state depending on the mix of county, township and city. Illinois has 102 counties and I suspect there are cities with their own taxes on top of the county standard - so likely there are nearly 1,000 different tax rates there as well. Oh, and it doesn't just depend on where the store is located. In many places it depends on the home address of the customer, not the store. Which means they have to ask where their customer is located so they can figure out the correct tax.
Any business which is multi-state and has to pay sales taxes in multiple locations subscribes to a tax service which handles all of this for them. The point-of-sale system has to be updated on at least a monthly basis because failure to keep up with the tax rate changes results in penalties and fines.
You wonder why Amazon is fighting so hard to keep from paying taxes everywhere? Well, this is the reason. It doesn't just mean collecting the taxes from each sale and paying them - it means paying for expensive services to supply you with the proper tax rate based upon an address or zip code. It also means submitting taxes to thousands of different taxing bodies each with their own forms and own rules. So nobody does this - they pay a service to compute it and file it for them.
Sorry, but the majority of the US now pays a lot more than 7%. I believe, for example, that New York City has something like 10.5% sales tax. Chicago is 8.5% in the city, at least. Heck, Chandler, AZ which isn't exactly a huge metropolis has 8.5% sales tax.
I suspect there are a few hamlets out there with a 5% tax rate, but it is probably a secret. They would be overwhelmed with people if it was generally known how cheap it was there.
Ah, but if you make it unattractive enough to live in the US people with means and mobile assets will simply move.
This is the one fact that a lot of people miss. The US is not the only place on the planet for someone with billions of dollars to live. Yes, right now much of Mexico is really, really unattractive because of security concerns - but if you can afford $1 a day for each private soldier, it might not be so bad. Same goes for plenty of places where the local wage scale is very low.
So implement the most obnoxious tax plan you can imagine in the US to afford a really nice cushy welfare state and social safety net - but don't be surprised when the people you were counting on paying for it all leave.
Everything you do on the Internet is available for inspection and analysis. Sooner or later, someone will come up with a methodology for analyzing photographs on Facebook and Picasa that indicate a person's personality type. And this will be used to filter job applicants.
If you post it online, it will be used to rate you in some fashion. It may be just an HR tool for sorting resumes, or it may be something that is used to select between candidates.
Someone I know just went through about four months of a job working its way through a large company where the job changed from a contractor job (that he was approved for) to a employee position. There were four candidates and four different managers each rated a different person as the top contender. HR took this as an indication that there was no "outstanding" candidate and nobody got the job. The hiring manager was pissed but there was nothing that could be done about it. This is how hiring works in large companies with unions. The actual hiring manager has zero control over the process.
But if you haven't been paying attention, everything you do online will be collected, collated, inspected, analyzed and reported on. There will be services (probably are already) for researching job candidates, prospective spouses, potential roommates, etc. that will use this information to build up a profile that will be useful to some. Is it all BS? Maybe, but people will pay money for it and therefore it is going to happen.
Plenty of people would like to make it a crime to adhere to conservative beliefs and/or "Republicanism" under the idea that they believe it to be hateful and against their morality.
I actually think it would be fun to see Mr. Obama declare war on the Republican party and all people that vote Republican. Toss them all in jail until they sign a Democratic loyalty oath and promise to never vote anything other than Democratic for the rest of their lives.
Sure would make a lot of people happy over at DailyKos.
Someone else will fill the gap
And get paid for their efforts how? The key is that FaceBook gets money from selling information and virtually no other source of revenue exists for them. Advertising simply isn't lucrative enough to support more than a couple of hobbists.
No, the services will simply not be available to EU citizens, or anywhere else that blocks the sale of information.
Google and FaceBook exist solely because it is legal in the US to collect this information and sell it. If it wasn't legal to begin with, the services would not exist. There is no comparable source of revenue for a "free" service - ten years ago it was clear advertising wasn't the way to make lots of money.
Now the EU wants to change the rules. It will be interesting to see what happens. My guess it that these services will simply be unavailable to anyone that lives in a country that denies the company the right to gather and sell information.
Having done server moves on the cheap, I would say it is just an unwillingness to duplicate the hardware in the new location. If you don't do it, then you have to tear everything down, move it, and reassemble everything. Can easily take a couple of days.
Since these servers aren't doing anything to contribute to revenue I can certainly understand an unwillingness to spend lots of money on the move. Probably the reason for the move in the first place is to cut costs, so buying all new hardware would certainly change the perspective on that.
It isn't nice to their customers and that is a factor that probably got trumped by costs.