Most of the Interstate system is already maintained at a county or township level. At best, it is maintained by the states. You should see what happens when there is freezing rain in Ohio and one township doesn't salt the road. Yes, I am talking about the 270 ring around the city.
We are there already. Interstate highways and bridges are funded by the states with federal grants and matching funds. If the state doesn't have the money to start with, there is no maintenance because the federal government matches their zero with another zero.
Sure, the federal government could take over the Interstate highway system and just push the states out of the way. Except for a little thing like the 10th Amendment and the whole concept of sovereignty of the states. So unless all that changes, what we have today is going to stand. And that does mean the counties are maintaining the highways in their county and hiring the contractors to do the work.
The problem is that it is coming to a choice: medical care for the poor or USGS. Housing for the poor or USGS. Investigation into the mating habits of obscure owls or USGS.
We cannot convince China to continue to finance the US spending forever. Sooner or later they are either going to say no or start having a hand in what gets funded and what does not. That will mean the US President starts needing to ask China's permission to do anything that spends money.
Maybe we need to trim some stuff before that happens, huh? I guess the other choice is the one a lot of other countries have made: 70% taxes on anyone with money, 0% taxes on anyone without a job. So far, we haven't seen that proposal, but you can be sure it is coming. Sure, we can tax the "rich" except in the world we are looking at anyone with a job is "rich" and everyone else is "poor".
The problem is, once you open up copyright infringement to the planet on the Internet, it is always on a "commercial" scale. We stopped talking about friends swapping floppies 20 years ago. Now you post something on the Internet and everyone on the planet gets to take advantage of it.
Now, if the objective is to destroy the revenue model for any and all digital goods it is working fine. When I can grab a book, movie, music or software for free because "I want it" without any worries about getting tracked down and prosecuted because the scale is just too large it is pretty clear the system is broken. Today the major concern for anything that is done for money is "How easy will it be for people to grab this and not pay?" I don't care if it is software, music or books - the overwhelming concern is how many free copies will get out there?
For some things the idea that only 5% of the people will pay is OK because you are going to make up for it in volume. Or, it isn't a creative work at all but just an advertisement for something else, bigger and more expensive. But in both cases the authors are treating the people like shills - some pay, most won't. If you pay, you are a shill. If you didn't you might think you got something over on someone but in reality you are just part of the plan.
Sadly, the government hasn't done anything to stop any abuses of late.
There are only a few ways to deal with the problem if you are made into a victim:
- You can decide to be a victim and hope someone else fixes things for you. - You can get a rifle and stop being a victim.
There are no other alternatives available today. The government is not going to tell an insurance company they have to cover you. They may create a rule that says in order for the insurance company to not cover you they must do A, B and C, which they will cheerfully do. Your recourse is, what? Sue the government? Sorry, the company followed all the rules laid down for such companies.
So far we have had way too much of alternative A and way, way too little of alternative B. In the early 1800s if someone was cheated the cheater usually ended up dead. In the early 1900s the cheater and cheated both hired lawyers and the lawyers got rich, while the cheated ended up still cheated. Today, only the cheater can afford a real lawyer but still the lawyer gets rich and the cheated stays cheated.
The problem is, the guy admits to accessing their system and obtaining documents that he should not have been able to get. He says "Here are 500 samples".
What is the first thing that should occur to someone? Well, how about if he accessed 1000 and is planning on ransoming off the information of the 500 he didn't tell anyone about? Why do you think they want to see his computer? Unfortunately, anyone clever enough to do this would have moved the other 500 somewhere isolated that they would have to tear his house apart to get. Like on a microSD card sewn into a stuffed animal.
See, he has zero credibility here. He can say "But I only took 500! I swear it!" and it does no good. Even searching his house doesn't generate any credibility, it only says they didn't find what they were looking for. Checking his computer only proves that if he has criminal intent that he isn't stupid about it. Since many (most?) criminals are stupid, not finding something on the computer actually does say something... just not much.
The real question is how much would other records be worth to the subject of those records and how much would it be worth on the open market? If you could take a record and turn it into some cash - presumably by drawing on the assets of the subject of the record - then you have a pretty clear idea of the worth. Even if the value was only privacy there might be some monetary value that you could get from the records. Then you have to either make the records irrelevant or you have to watch this guy for the rest of his life to see if he suddenly comes into a lot of money.
The problem with trying to make laws to fine-tune the "consumer experience" is that they forget some minor little item. This time they forgot to include that the banks shouldn't be passing their costs for debit card processing onto customers rather than merchants.
I guess the Congressfolks never dreamed that this revenue was going to come from somewhere else if they blocked banks getting it from the merchants.
The space program was killed off because of (a) Senators not seeing the point and (b) public apathy.
If there were five Senators in the 1970s that thought Mars was a useful trip to make, we would have had boots on Mars in the 1980s. We did not have those five Senators and we had a public that was utterly indifferent to the whole idea. My girlfriend at the time - not any great thinker, mind you - used to say that the only reason the US was interested in space travel at all was to find someone else to start a war with. That sort of idiocy was and still is rampant.
Today we are suffering from the graduates of the hip-hop academy that is public school. They actively teach the students that being too smart is going to make them unpopular, good grades are for dummies and science and math are something only unpopular nerds do well in. The choice is clear: popularity with the opposite sex or good grades in science and math. When you phrase it that way, students know to trust their hormones and somehow manage to get through high school with a minimum of learning. College isn't what you would call much better these days unless you are in a Ivy League school. Most of the state schools are there to process people through and give them diplomas which will then show an employer they are hiring a qualified person.
Still, if you are very serious about it, someone can get through high school and college with an education. It just is very difficult because nobody else around you has that as a goal. Asian students manage it for the most part because they know if they bring home a girlfriend instead of good grades their parents will beat them. Corporal punishment, threats of being left homeless on the streets of Pittsburg and not paying for toys but only books and food can work, but not if the student has already been listening to too much hip-hop music.
First off, yes, we should all get pitchforks and ax handles to storm the Illinois Toll Authority over this. It is obscene that they think they can collect money for driving on roads, and roads that were promised to have the tolls removed from after they were paid for... in like 1970. Here we are 41 years later and nobody is talking about discontinuing the tolls any longer.
The whole iPass thing is a criminal enterprise to begin with. The idea of untraceably collecting money from people as they drive. Where is my receipt? And everyone was assured that no records were kept - until a stubborn divorce lawyer subpoenaed the Toll Authority for the records and... imagine that, they were able to produce the records. It is now common knowledge that the records exist.
But as far as a camera on the transponder is concerned, just exactly what do you think could happen with such a thing? The unit has an extremely short range so even if they could transmit a picture it could only be done at the point where the toll collection transceivers are. At 60Mph (a conservative speed for the 294 I would say) the total time the unit is in range to communicate with transceiver is less than a second, so the amount of data that could be transferred has to be very small. I can't see there being any ability to send even a 360x240 frame much less any saved frames. What do you think the minimum size for a crappy JPEG might be? 10K? The data rate available through this system can't be that high, so what do you think, maybe they could transfer 2K? Not going to be much of a picture, is it?
So thinking about this reasonably, what possible use would a camera attached to one of these things be? You aren't going to be able to get the pictures off it. I suppose you might be able to capture the driver's face - assuming the camera is pointed correctly - and only the driver's face at a fairly low resolution to document who was driving the car at the time. Why this might be interesting from a toll collection standpoint I can't imagine and the infrastructure to enable such a high speed burst of data being transferred has to be significant. And you are going to have significant collision negotiation problems which can be resolved today pretty easily but extending the data transfer time makes these problems much, much worse.
I don't see any practical application for such a camera, nor do I see it being possible to get any meaningful amount of data from the camera through such a system.
Consider that there are police cars that transfer their in-car video data wirelessly, but it takes quite a few minutes to do that with the car parked. Now if we were talking about toll collection consisting of parking the car for five minutes I would say that everyone has a reason to be concerned about what might be getting recorded. The way things work today, I can't see there being a problem. Not only is this a solution without a problem behind it, but it is hopelessly constrained by the physics of the system such that there is no possibility of it actually doing anything meaningful.
So we're back to the immorality and criminality of toll collection. We all know about toll collection from children's stories of ogres, trolls and the like. Where do these stories come from - history and myth. We should expect therefore to find the Illinois Toll Authority staffed by ogres and trolls, right?
War as we know it with bombs and bullets might not happen, but the alternative for the US is total domination by China. China today has pretty much all the tools it needs to turn the US into a colony. We owe China more than we can ever pay back, and with their trade policies it isn't ever going to get any better. The US has no way out of this subordinate position other than to repudiate the debt.
Sure, if the US were to tell China there will be no more payments, no more trade, no more nothing things would be "interesting" for a while. What ever would WalMart do? But the result would likely be that factories making consumer products would spring up in the US and after a year or two the US economy would be pretty darn healthy again. Unfortunately, no leader in the US would ever consider doing something like that.
The end game then is some kind of long drawn out stalemate where China keeps their demands very limited and we sit by and watch China manipulate their currency such that trade with the US is always a one-sided game. The US isn't obviously relegated to colony status, but should anyone try to break free of China the threat is made apparent.
This is also why you will never see the tax code changed to favor US based production of goods and services. Such a thing would be an immediate slap in the face of the Chinese masters who would not take long to make the US government understand that they are simply not permitted to do any such thing.
The really interesting part comes if China decides to annex Taiwan. Sure, the US has pledged its military to Taiwan should something like that happen, but how much you want to bet that never happens?
The problem is the only way to rescue homeowners is to hand the banks a big bill. These are the folks that pretty much financed 70-80% of Mr. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He is going to need another billion dollars in 2012 in order to get his second term, so he can't do anything to the people picking up the tab.
A much bigger problem today is that over the last couple of years the lower levels of sales and production have pretty much become structural. The folks that were laid off might get jobs again - if somehow levels of sales increased significantly. But we have proven that everything can function at this new lower level. So things are very likely to just stay they way they are. This means that the 20% unemployed that are out there are just going to stay unemployed. We can either decide to put these people on some kind of government program, like resurrecting Welfare but at a federal level or we can just keep extending state unemployment benefits forever with the federal government picking up the tab. Neither are going to be very popular right now because it is going to be very expensive - 60 million people getting $10,000 a year is 600 billion dollars a year, every year, from now on.
So what can we expect? First off, unless Obama is defeated there will be nothing done for homeowners because he can't afford to do that to the banks. Secondly, we can expect the resurrection of a permanent welfare class that are paid to sit at home and not cause trouble. Will there be a new WPA? Probably not, because many people (somewhat correctly) associate that with turning these people into government slaves. But what about the deficit? As long as China is content to not use the control they are being given, we are likely to just keep running up the tab and getting more and more support from them. What happens if they pull the plug and let most, if not all, the bathwater out? The US will be left high and dry with a lot of commitments and absolutely no way to meet them. That by itself would be justification for a war. Which would handily turn the economy around.
You have to understand that the attraction of the idea of "income redistribution" is that I should be able to get stuff because I want it.
If there are evil rich people that are oppressing the downtrodden majority, then we should simply rise up and take everything from them. It is simple - if you are rich your fair share is 100%. If you aren't rich, then your fair share is 0%. Of course, the definition of "rich" changes as needs change.
There is a little problem with this idea. Once you have enough assets you are no longer tied to a day-to-day existence at the behest of a boss. Not only can you quit your day job, but you can move to a comfortable shack in Rio for the rest of your life. We're not talking about people with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars here, but people with not much more than a couple of million. What exactly is the cost of living in Rio today? Costa Rica? A nice quite corner of Mexico on the coast?
Make things uncomfortable enough for the "rich" and the rich will be looking elsewhere.
So it is going to take a fine balancing act to maintain the idea of the evil rich not adequately supporting the underachievers and making sure things do not go too far. Absolutely some on the left would be fine with a pogram as has happened many times in history - three prime examples are the French Revolution, the Chinese revolution and the Khmer Rouge. In all of these cases the "rich" were killed in mass numbers simply because the less fortunate thought this was their ticket to advancement.
We are certainly approaching that sort of mindset in the US today. There are those in the government that know enough to not let it get that far, but there is a huge groundswell of public opinion that would really, really like to make having lots of money be a capital offence.
Streaming works fine until the total aggregate bandwidth for your neighborhood is exceeded. The absolutely most forward looking cable companies are running less than 1,000 homes per node and provisioning the nodes at up to 3Gb/sec. Which might give you as much as 6 Mb/sec to every one of the homes.
The less forward looking folks are stuck behind a node with 1000 or more homes and 1Gb/sec or less feeding them.
Streaming SD video is 1-2Mb/sec and HD requires at least 4Mb/sec. Have two streaming boxes in your house? Consider the bandwidth consumption doubled.
In either case, if streaming becomes popular with the masses it isn't going to last very long. The last time we upgraded the cable plant in the US to go from less than 100Mb/sec to a node with analog video delivery to the current digital delivery took around 15 years. Nobody is building out for streaming today, so it is going to be a good long while to supply that kind of bandwidth to every single home. The current infrastructure is built around burst use of the bandwidth - download a web page, grab a file, etc. Streaming is continuous demand and there just isn't the infrastructure to provide that to very many homes.
Yes, I have three Roku boxes and I figure they are going to last through maybe 2013 at best. After that they will be pretty useless.
The problem is that there is a decision point coming. Today, and for the foreseeable future, the US Internet connection system is a star configuration whereby a "neighborhood" is served by a node. This node is connected to the Internet at large. The pipe to the node is as big as practically possible at this point given the surrounding infrastructure.
Unfortunately, that node serves as many as 1,000 homes and has a capacity between 1 and 3 GB/sec. This works fine when out of 1,000 homes most are surfing the web, reading email, or downloading music. It work fine when 50 people are using some kind of streaming video service.
It doesn't work at all when all 1,000 homes are using some kind of streaming video service. It doesn't work if multiple terminals in homes are using streaming video services.
DOCSIS 3.0 isn't going to fix this problem - if anything it will make it worse. Either drastically reducing the number of homes connected to a node or drastically changing the nature of each node will work. The last time we did this it took the US about 15 years to do it. I would expect the same sort of implementation time.
Netflix has a lifespan of maybe 3 years. Two years is probably more realistic.
Understand that Netflix as the service exists today has an absolute maximum lifespan of maybe three years.
The problem is that the cable and DSL systems in the US have homes connected to a central point for a neighborhood. That node is then in turn connected to the office which connects to the Internet. The link to the neighborhood node is a maximum of about 3GB and for cable supports anywhere from 500 to 1000 homes.
3GB / 1000 = 3Mb/sec maximum data rate to all homes. 3GB / 500 = 6Mb/sec maximum data rate to all homes.
Some cable systems have less capacity than this and may only have 1GB (or even less) to the neighborhood node. The minimum data rate for HD TV is around 3-5Mb/sec so you can see where this is going. If everyone is watching some kind of IP TV streaming then nobody is watching it - there isn't enough bandwidth in the system.
Can this be fixed? Sure. It took around 15 years to change over from analog delivery to digital and replace all the hardware in the cable system. It is going to take about that long again to redo everything and increase the bandwidth to the neighborhood nodes by at least an order of magnitude, probably more. Sure, one house can get 100Mb/sec bursts but if everyone is trying for 3Mb/sec the pipe is full - adding one more streaming player in one more home pushes the whole thing over.
The short-term solution would be buffering. Lots and lots of buffering. But that is unlikely to fly with the current contents licensing. The whole point is not to allow anyone to hold onto it but just stream it in a fashion that securely does not allow for capture. My guess is that streaming is a brief flash in the pan that is unlikely to last very long because of these constraints.
An unenforced law is still something to be ridiculed and laughed at.
Every day just about everyone with any sort of server experiences "intrusions" which, if successfull, would result in significant harm to the server. Every day the administrators for these servers shrug it off and say it is just part of the Internet today. What this means is that we have people trying to do harm but in one way or another being blocked from doing it.
Every once in a while some server fails to block one of these and we have a real intrusion. Everyone complains but unless there are at least $25,000 in damages (in the US) nothing is going to be done. Oh, but should the damages reach $25,000 the FBI will get involved and bring everything to bear on the misguided child that did this. They and their parents are likely to spend thousands of dollars and a few years of their lives defending against this, probably unsuccessfully.
What this leads to is an entire culture of getting away with stuff and the feeling that anything that can be reached on the Internet is the personal playground for such folks. These aren't mighty hackers, these are misguided children being led down a path by laws that are not being enforced.
Right now, nobody is going to do anything until something major happens. This is like ignoring your child committing minor acts of vandalism and then, when they break more than a couple of windows sending them to jail for life. This is the wrong way to deal with this and will lead to nothing but bigger and bigger problems later on.
As his sexual escapades fade from the public's attention, he needs something new to keep his name on everyone's mind. It would appear that he has found a way to do just that.
This may not make him very popular with a lot of people, though. I would say that if a close relative were to be dragged out into the street and killed because of his covert association with the US or other government I might be inspired to do Mr. Assange some real damage. So how many chances has he now exposed for some pissed-off relative to decide to make him pay?
While discrediting him might have had a role in the sex charges against him, losing credibility is a small thing compared to losing his life. Many of the countries where covert operations have been going on do not bother much with legal niceities - a spy for the US would just be killed out of hand with a cheering crowd standing by. The relations of such a person aren't going to be constrained by the legal system anywhere either.
For perspective on this, I suggest the movie "Next of Kin" for an example of how a less legalistic culture deals with transgressors against their family.
We got into the WTO and I seriously doubt we are going to get out anytime soon. It absolutely forbids such "national tariffs" and the last time we tried it with steel the WTO sanctioned retaliation against the US if we didn't stop it.
Of course for some reason China, Japan and a whole bunch of other places are permitted to block US imports with rules that exclude the introduction of US goods. There is no balance with this "free trade" nonsense, but it certainly appears we are stuck with it.
I suspect a move to back out of the WTO by the US would result in Europe slapping tariffs on everything coming from the US. Other places might follow suit as well and if anyone in the US government had half a brain it might lead to blocking imports from everywhere until a saner policy could be established. That would mean the WalMart with their Spanish-only signage would pretty much have to close down and throw hundreds of people out of their jobs. We would hear nothing except how many American retail workers were losing their jobs, not how many more American factories were now employing workers here. So any attempt to back out of the WTO will be met with general condemnation with the public (based on news reports) demanding that it be immediately rejoined and "free trade" resumed. Or else all those retail workers will be out of a job.
I think we're stuck with the way things are until the global "slave wage" compensation level reaches $28 an hour or so. Then we might see someone successfully start a manufacturing company in the US.
There are varying claims as to how big the rock was that made the Barringer Crater, from about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle to 150 feet long. Certainly what impacted the Earth wasn't anywhere near 150 feet in any dimension.
Quite a lot of it probably did burn off, ablate or fragment, so starting out with something only 10 meters in diameter might not get you quite a big a crater as Barringer. But, as a result of that impact it was a bad day in the entire Southwest. Nobody really knows, but I would imagine ejecta landing in the area of San Francisco.
Easily a 10 meter rock hitting the Earth would destroy any city if it fell near it. Entirely. I suspect you would be picking up rocks that fell in Nashville should a 5 meter rock hit Chicago. With a 10 meter rock unless it fragmented or burned up you might be picking up stuff in Orlando after you put out all the fires - that ejecta would be pretty hot.
Ha. The Black Death seems to have mutated somewhat or humans have become more resistant in the last thousand years or so. It is clearly much less of a threat than it was in 1350.
However, today we have far less isolation than we did in 1350. It was possible for a community to simply close itself off from the world for a period of time. It was also possible that in some parts of Europe there just weren't any infected visitors coming to call. Not so today.
I recently read a book where there were three outbreaks of an infectious disease in three widely separated parts of the US. Given air travel today should that really happen with anything as communicative as the Black Death we would be looking at a global catastrophe. Read The Stand by Stephen King? Yes, it is a novel and a fantasy but it clearly outlines what could happen with a flu-like virus that kills and is in no way out of the question. It could happen.
If "bird flu" turns into a deadly pandemic we are unlikely to fare as well as 1918. Between the increased travel spreading an infection widely before it is even recognized and the interdependence of communities it is very unlikely that there will be any spot on Earth that isn't touched by such a pandemic. There simply are no places where nobody goes any longer - they are going to get deliveries because they are not independent any longer. Should something get loose (and the odds are it will happen sooner or later) we better hope for better management than anyone has so far predicted either as a government study or in fiction.
Few cents? Hardly. The Leaf, for example, has a 24 KWh battery. To charge it at 100% efficiency is going to require 24KWh which is going to run around $2.88 in most electricity markets today. How efficient is the charging? My guess is a 24KWh battery is really going to take more like 30-40 KWh to charge fully which puts the cost at more like $4.80.
Yes, it is cheaper than filling up with gasoline today, but like gasoline, it is going to get a lot more expensive pretty quickly. We do not have much extra capacity for electricity in the US today and with the way the population is growing through immigration we are going to be soon hitting the wall. There will likely be enough capacity to charge car batteries overnight for quite a while yet but it is going to get pretty pricey.
But compared to a $100 for 10 gallons of gas in a year or two, the electric car will still be a lot cheaper to operate, if you can afford the initial price tag.
Don't worry. There will be only factories that make food with 100% robotic tenders. Some of it might still be grown in the ground, but still there will be nothing but robots tending to it.
People are too expensive and too unreliable. As soon as the free supply of Mexicans dries up the idea of using humans in agriculture will disappear.
One minor little point is that batteries are rather difficult to get to discharge in a huge blinding flash, whereas a capacitor will easily do so.
Yes, you can overload a notebook battery and have it catch fire, but even at fire-causing discharge rates it will discharge for minutes if not tens of minutes. A capacitor, on the other hand, has far less internal resistance and will certainly discharge in a fraction of a second.
Can you say "Pinto"?
Imagine a car with 10Kw of ultracapacitor storage discharging through a section of metal frame of the car after an accident. Yes, just like with gasoline tanks, there are ways to make that unlikely but we have ample examples of cars being manufactured in ways where it was not unlikely enough.
The advantage of an ultracapacitor is the reduced internal resistance and ability to charge it to capacity at extremely high currents. This also leads to the ability of it to discharge at extremely high currents, probably far higher than the highest possible charging current.
You need to understand that getting your credit card number "borrowed" has virtually zero risk associated with it. If you use it at all, you are going to get it copied down by someone sooner or later. You can sell them in bunches if you have enough - something like $50 for 100 good, fresh numbers with expiration date, CVV2 and sometimes the billing zip code.
I get a credit card borrowed in this fashion at least once a year and it has never cost me a dime. Most people I know either do not use credit cards at all (mostly religious reasons) or have had some sort of fraudulent transaction. It is extremely common, it is not prosecuted to any extent and all of the liability ends up on the merchant, or more commonly, the merchant's insurance.
We are living in quite a different time than 15-20 years ago. When I when to high school there was little talk of teacher-student affairs but in a large school (5000+) students, I am sure it happened. You take a 20-something teacher and a 16-year-old student and put them in close contact and things can happen even back then.
Today, every message given to young people is pushing them to be more sexual in bolder ways. You also have a social climate that is quite a bit more fearsome to young people than it was in the 1950s. The end result is that a supportive and open teacher is going to have interactions with students that can easily turn into something more intimate. And that is discounting the idea that a teacher might openly desire something with a student.
So they try to pass a law banning private communication with students. OK, how you would you feel if you found a child's phone with the cell phone number of a teacher in the phone book. How about a history of phone calls both ways between the child and the teacher? A lot of parents would be concerned that they were out of the loop and take this record to the principal to get some answers. Well, private messaging on social networking sites isn't like email - there often is no record of it anywhere. So both sides can be very free to say anything without it coming back to bite them.
Personally, I would be happy to have all communication between a student and a teacher to be recorded and archived for the protection of both parties.
Note that I don't believe it matters what the gender of the teacher and student might be, nor does it matter who the "aggressor" might be. The fact is that it happens and any sort of private channel between teachers and students without any record is an open invitation for someone to carry the conversation into a direction that is going to be trouble.
Finally, the fact that this happens and can happen just as easily face-to-face as online is no reason not to ban online private messaging. Sure, it can happen in a classroom after school - but someone might come along and both parties know it. Online nobody is going to interrupt. We have no end of examples showing that people are less inhibited online than they are face to face. The motivation for this kind of law is obvious and it serves to protect both teachers and students. Private communications between teachers and students should not take place in an uninhibited manner - it just leads to trouble.
When a product fails because "consumers don't know it exists", it simply means it wasn't launched properly. You can't make money without spending money, and today's marketplace is very expensive to get into. That means you need to buy TV ads, billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, web ads, and more and more ads to properly launch a product. You also have to line up the "spokesman" type of folks that will represent the product to the public - they aren't going to talk about it on G4 TV unless you (a) give them one and (b) probably pay for placement somehow. Then you need to get it into retail, which is more pay-for-placement. If you don't want your new product hidden in the back of the store you need to have a nice display stand that the store people can put together and pay for the floor space that it will be taking up.
Not doing all of these things mean you are going to have something that people do not know about. It will not make it into the popular culture mindset, so nobody will talk about it. Should anyone actually mention they heard about it or (gasp!) bought one they will be ridiculed, shouted down or ignored. Because you didn't make it into the popular culture by paying the toll. It is incredible to see the number of product failures that are caused by this simple omission - they didn't understand how to launch a product.
Obviously, this applies to products that are to be mass-marketed to the consumer. If you have a product that is used only by architects designing office buildings you are going to have a whole different kind of product launch. But while it is different, there are still steps you have to go through and tolls to be paid. Failure to do all of the steps or pay all of the tolls means you will likely have a failure.
Also understand that in today's world your investors are going to pretty much demand a product that doesn't sit on the shelf for a long period of time. They are forking out the money for the product to be a success and failing to present it as a success to the consumer will do nothing but piss off the investors. The only way out of that is a complete by-your-bootstraps company where there are no investors. Then I suppose you can take as long as it takes for a product to catch on.
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Most of the Interstate system is already maintained at a county or township level. At best, it is maintained by the states. You should see what happens when there is freezing rain in Ohio and one township doesn't salt the road. Yes, I am talking about the 270 ring around the city.
We are there already. Interstate highways and bridges are funded by the states with federal grants and matching funds. If the state doesn't have the money to start with, there is no maintenance because the federal government matches their zero with another zero.
Sure, the federal government could take over the Interstate highway system and just push the states out of the way. Except for a little thing like the 10th Amendment and the whole concept of sovereignty of the states. So unless all that changes, what we have today is going to stand. And that does mean the counties are maintaining the highways in their county and hiring the contractors to do the work.
The problem is that it is coming to a choice: medical care for the poor or USGS. Housing for the poor or USGS. Investigation into the mating habits of obscure owls or USGS.
We cannot convince China to continue to finance the US spending forever. Sooner or later they are either going to say no or start having a hand in what gets funded and what does not. That will mean the US President starts needing to ask China's permission to do anything that spends money.
Maybe we need to trim some stuff before that happens, huh? I guess the other choice is the one a lot of other countries have made: 70% taxes on anyone with money, 0% taxes on anyone without a job. So far, we haven't seen that proposal, but you can be sure it is coming. Sure, we can tax the "rich" except in the world we are looking at anyone with a job is "rich" and everyone else is "poor".
The problem is, once you open up copyright infringement to the planet on the Internet, it is always on a "commercial" scale. We stopped talking about friends swapping floppies 20 years ago. Now you post something on the Internet and everyone on the planet gets to take advantage of it.
Now, if the objective is to destroy the revenue model for any and all digital goods it is working fine. When I can grab a book, movie, music or software for free because "I want it" without any worries about getting tracked down and prosecuted because the scale is just too large it is pretty clear the system is broken. Today the major concern for anything that is done for money is "How easy will it be for people to grab this and not pay?" I don't care if it is software, music or books - the overwhelming concern is how many free copies will get out there?
For some things the idea that only 5% of the people will pay is OK because you are going to make up for it in volume. Or, it isn't a creative work at all but just an advertisement for something else, bigger and more expensive. But in both cases the authors are treating the people like shills - some pay, most won't. If you pay, you are a shill. If you didn't you might think you got something over on someone but in reality you are just part of the plan.
Sadly, the government hasn't done anything to stop any abuses of late.
There are only a few ways to deal with the problem if you are made into a victim:
- You can decide to be a victim and hope someone else fixes things for you.
- You can get a rifle and stop being a victim.
There are no other alternatives available today. The government is not going to tell an insurance company they have to cover you. They may create a rule that says in order for the insurance company to not cover you they must do A, B and C, which they will cheerfully do. Your recourse is, what? Sue the government? Sorry, the company followed all the rules laid down for such companies.
So far we have had way too much of alternative A and way, way too little of alternative B. In the early 1800s if someone was cheated the cheater usually ended up dead. In the early 1900s the cheater and cheated both hired lawyers and the lawyers got rich, while the cheated ended up still cheated. Today, only the cheater can afford a real lawyer but still the lawyer gets rich and the cheated stays cheated.
The problem is, the guy admits to accessing their system and obtaining documents that he should not have been able to get. He says "Here are 500 samples".
What is the first thing that should occur to someone? Well, how about if he accessed 1000 and is planning on ransoming off the information of the 500 he didn't tell anyone about? Why do you think they want to see his computer? Unfortunately, anyone clever enough to do this would have moved the other 500 somewhere isolated that they would have to tear his house apart to get. Like on a microSD card sewn into a stuffed animal.
See, he has zero credibility here. He can say "But I only took 500! I swear it!" and it does no good. Even searching his house doesn't generate any credibility, it only says they didn't find what they were looking for. Checking his computer only proves that if he has criminal intent that he isn't stupid about it. Since many (most?) criminals are stupid, not finding something on the computer actually does say something ... just not much.
The real question is how much would other records be worth to the subject of those records and how much would it be worth on the open market? If you could take a record and turn it into some cash - presumably by drawing on the assets of the subject of the record - then you have a pretty clear idea of the worth. Even if the value was only privacy there might be some monetary value that you could get from the records. Then you have to either make the records irrelevant or you have to watch this guy for the rest of his life to see if he suddenly comes into a lot of money.
The problem with trying to make laws to fine-tune the "consumer experience" is that they forget some minor little item. This time they forgot to include that the banks shouldn't be passing their costs for debit card processing onto customers rather than merchants.
I guess the Congressfolks never dreamed that this revenue was going to come from somewhere else if they blocked banks getting it from the merchants.
The space program was killed off because of (a) Senators not seeing the point and (b) public apathy.
If there were five Senators in the 1970s that thought Mars was a useful trip to make, we would have had boots on Mars in the 1980s. We did not have those five Senators and we had a public that was utterly indifferent to the whole idea. My girlfriend at the time - not any great thinker, mind you - used to say that the only reason the US was interested in space travel at all was to find someone else to start a war with. That sort of idiocy was and still is rampant.
Today we are suffering from the graduates of the hip-hop academy that is public school. They actively teach the students that being too smart is going to make them unpopular, good grades are for dummies and science and math are something only unpopular nerds do well in. The choice is clear: popularity with the opposite sex or good grades in science and math. When you phrase it that way, students know to trust their hormones and somehow manage to get through high school with a minimum of learning. College isn't what you would call much better these days unless you are in a Ivy League school. Most of the state schools are there to process people through and give them diplomas which will then show an employer they are hiring a qualified person.
Still, if you are very serious about it, someone can get through high school and college with an education. It just is very difficult because nobody else around you has that as a goal. Asian students manage it for the most part because they know if they bring home a girlfriend instead of good grades their parents will beat them. Corporal punishment, threats of being left homeless on the streets of Pittsburg and not paying for toys but only books and food can work, but not if the student has already been listening to too much hip-hop music.
First off, yes, we should all get pitchforks and ax handles to storm the Illinois Toll Authority over this. It is obscene that they think they can collect money for driving on roads, and roads that were promised to have the tolls removed from after they were paid for ... in like 1970. Here we are 41 years later and nobody is talking about discontinuing the tolls any longer.
The whole iPass thing is a criminal enterprise to begin with. The idea of untraceably collecting money from people as they drive. Where is my receipt? And everyone was assured that no records were kept - until a stubborn divorce lawyer subpoenaed the Toll Authority for the records and ... imagine that, they were able to produce the records. It is now common knowledge that the records exist.
But as far as a camera on the transponder is concerned, just exactly what do you think could happen with such a thing? The unit has an extremely short range so even if they could transmit a picture it could only be done at the point where the toll collection transceivers are. At 60Mph (a conservative speed for the 294 I would say) the total time the unit is in range to communicate with transceiver is less than a second, so the amount of data that could be transferred has to be very small. I can't see there being any ability to send even a 360x240 frame much less any saved frames. What do you think the minimum size for a crappy JPEG might be? 10K? The data rate available through this system can't be that high, so what do you think, maybe they could transfer 2K? Not going to be much of a picture, is it?
So thinking about this reasonably, what possible use would a camera attached to one of these things be? You aren't going to be able to get the pictures off it. I suppose you might be able to capture the driver's face - assuming the camera is pointed correctly - and only the driver's face at a fairly low resolution to document who was driving the car at the time. Why this might be interesting from a toll collection standpoint I can't imagine and the infrastructure to enable such a high speed burst of data being transferred has to be significant. And you are going to have significant collision negotiation problems which can be resolved today pretty easily but extending the data transfer time makes these problems much, much worse.
I don't see any practical application for such a camera, nor do I see it being possible to get any meaningful amount of data from the camera through such a system.
Consider that there are police cars that transfer their in-car video data wirelessly, but it takes quite a few minutes to do that with the car parked. Now if we were talking about toll collection consisting of parking the car for five minutes I would say that everyone has a reason to be concerned about what might be getting recorded. The way things work today, I can't see there being a problem. Not only is this a solution without a problem behind it, but it is hopelessly constrained by the physics of the system such that there is no possibility of it actually doing anything meaningful.
So we're back to the immorality and criminality of toll collection. We all know about toll collection from children's stories of ogres, trolls and the like. Where do these stories come from - history and myth. We should expect therefore to find the Illinois Toll Authority staffed by ogres and trolls, right?
War as we know it with bombs and bullets might not happen, but the alternative for the US is total domination by China. China today has pretty much all the tools it needs to turn the US into a colony. We owe China more than we can ever pay back, and with their trade policies it isn't ever going to get any better. The US has no way out of this subordinate position other than to repudiate the debt.
Sure, if the US were to tell China there will be no more payments, no more trade, no more nothing things would be "interesting" for a while. What ever would WalMart do? But the result would likely be that factories making consumer products would spring up in the US and after a year or two the US economy would be pretty darn healthy again. Unfortunately, no leader in the US would ever consider doing something like that.
The end game then is some kind of long drawn out stalemate where China keeps their demands very limited and we sit by and watch China manipulate their currency such that trade with the US is always a one-sided game. The US isn't obviously relegated to colony status, but should anyone try to break free of China the threat is made apparent.
This is also why you will never see the tax code changed to favor US based production of goods and services. Such a thing would be an immediate slap in the face of the Chinese masters who would not take long to make the US government understand that they are simply not permitted to do any such thing.
The really interesting part comes if China decides to annex Taiwan. Sure, the US has pledged its military to Taiwan should something like that happen, but how much you want to bet that never happens?
The problem is the only way to rescue homeowners is to hand the banks a big bill. These are the folks that pretty much financed 70-80% of Mr. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He is going to need another billion dollars in 2012 in order to get his second term, so he can't do anything to the people picking up the tab.
A much bigger problem today is that over the last couple of years the lower levels of sales and production have pretty much become structural. The folks that were laid off might get jobs again - if somehow levels of sales increased significantly. But we have proven that everything can function at this new lower level. So things are very likely to just stay they way they are. This means that the 20% unemployed that are out there are just going to stay unemployed. We can either decide to put these people on some kind of government program, like resurrecting Welfare but at a federal level or we can just keep extending state unemployment benefits forever with the federal government picking up the tab. Neither are going to be very popular right now because it is going to be very expensive - 60 million people getting $10,000 a year is 600 billion dollars a year, every year, from now on.
So what can we expect? First off, unless Obama is defeated there will be nothing done for homeowners because he can't afford to do that to the banks. Secondly, we can expect the resurrection of a permanent welfare class that are paid to sit at home and not cause trouble. Will there be a new WPA? Probably not, because many people (somewhat correctly) associate that with turning these people into government slaves. But what about the deficit? As long as China is content to not use the control they are being given, we are likely to just keep running up the tab and getting more and more support from them. What happens if they pull the plug and let most, if not all, the bathwater out? The US will be left high and dry with a lot of commitments and absolutely no way to meet them. That by itself would be justification for a war. Which would handily turn the economy around.
You have to understand that the attraction of the idea of "income redistribution" is that I should be able to get stuff because I want it.
If there are evil rich people that are oppressing the downtrodden majority, then we should simply rise up and take everything from them. It is simple - if you are rich your fair share is 100%. If you aren't rich, then your fair share is 0%. Of course, the definition of "rich" changes as needs change.
There is a little problem with this idea. Once you have enough assets you are no longer tied to a day-to-day existence at the behest of a boss. Not only can you quit your day job, but you can move to a comfortable shack in Rio for the rest of your life. We're not talking about people with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars here, but people with not much more than a couple of million. What exactly is the cost of living in Rio today? Costa Rica? A nice quite corner of Mexico on the coast?
Make things uncomfortable enough for the "rich" and the rich will be looking elsewhere.
So it is going to take a fine balancing act to maintain the idea of the evil rich not adequately supporting the underachievers and making sure things do not go too far. Absolutely some on the left would be fine with a pogram as has happened many times in history - three prime examples are the French Revolution, the Chinese revolution and the Khmer Rouge. In all of these cases the "rich" were killed in mass numbers simply because the less fortunate thought this was their ticket to advancement.
We are certainly approaching that sort of mindset in the US today. There are those in the government that know enough to not let it get that far, but there is a huge groundswell of public opinion that would really, really like to make having lots of money be a capital offence.
Streaming works fine until the total aggregate bandwidth for your neighborhood is exceeded. The absolutely most forward looking cable companies are running less than 1,000 homes per node and provisioning the nodes at up to 3Gb/sec. Which might give you as much as 6 Mb/sec to every one of the homes.
The less forward looking folks are stuck behind a node with 1000 or more homes and 1Gb/sec or less feeding them.
Streaming SD video is 1-2Mb/sec and HD requires at least 4Mb/sec. Have two streaming boxes in your house? Consider the bandwidth consumption doubled.
In either case, if streaming becomes popular with the masses it isn't going to last very long. The last time we upgraded the cable plant in the US to go from less than 100Mb/sec to a node with analog video delivery to the current digital delivery took around 15 years. Nobody is building out for streaming today, so it is going to be a good long while to supply that kind of bandwidth to every single home. The current infrastructure is built around burst use of the bandwidth - download a web page, grab a file, etc. Streaming is continuous demand and there just isn't the infrastructure to provide that to very many homes.
Yes, I have three Roku boxes and I figure they are going to last through maybe 2013 at best. After that they will be pretty useless.
The problem is that there is a decision point coming. Today, and for the foreseeable future, the US Internet connection system is a star configuration whereby a "neighborhood" is served by a node. This node is connected to the Internet at large. The pipe to the node is as big as practically possible at this point given the surrounding infrastructure.
Unfortunately, that node serves as many as 1,000 homes and has a capacity between 1 and 3 GB/sec. This works fine when out of 1,000 homes most are surfing the web, reading email, or downloading music. It work fine when 50 people are using some kind of streaming video service.
It doesn't work at all when all 1,000 homes are using some kind of streaming video service. It doesn't work if multiple terminals in homes are using streaming video services.
DOCSIS 3.0 isn't going to fix this problem - if anything it will make it worse. Either drastically reducing the number of homes connected to a node or drastically changing the nature of each node will work. The last time we did this it took the US about 15 years to do it. I would expect the same sort of implementation time.
Netflix has a lifespan of maybe 3 years. Two years is probably more realistic.
Understand that Netflix as the service exists today has an absolute maximum lifespan of maybe three years.
The problem is that the cable and DSL systems in the US have homes connected to a central point for a neighborhood. That node is then in turn connected to the office which connects to the Internet. The link to the neighborhood node is a maximum of about 3GB and for cable supports anywhere from 500 to 1000 homes.
3GB / 1000 = 3Mb/sec maximum data rate to all homes.
3GB / 500 = 6Mb/sec maximum data rate to all homes.
Some cable systems have less capacity than this and may only have 1GB (or even less) to the neighborhood node. The minimum data rate for HD TV is around 3-5Mb/sec so you can see where this is going. If everyone is watching some kind of IP TV streaming then nobody is watching it - there isn't enough bandwidth in the system.
Can this be fixed? Sure. It took around 15 years to change over from analog delivery to digital and replace all the hardware in the cable system. It is going to take about that long again to redo everything and increase the bandwidth to the neighborhood nodes by at least an order of magnitude, probably more. Sure, one house can get 100Mb/sec bursts but if everyone is trying for 3Mb/sec the pipe is full - adding one more streaming player in one more home pushes the whole thing over.
The short-term solution would be buffering. Lots and lots of buffering. But that is unlikely to fly with the current contents licensing. The whole point is not to allow anyone to hold onto it but just stream it in a fashion that securely does not allow for capture. My guess is that streaming is a brief flash in the pan that is unlikely to last very long because of these constraints.
An unenforced law is still something to be ridiculed and laughed at.
Every day just about everyone with any sort of server experiences "intrusions" which, if successfull, would result in significant harm to the server. Every day the administrators for these servers shrug it off and say it is just part of the Internet today. What this means is that we have people trying to do harm but in one way or another being blocked from doing it.
Every once in a while some server fails to block one of these and we have a real intrusion. Everyone complains but unless there are at least $25,000 in damages (in the US) nothing is going to be done. Oh, but should the damages reach $25,000 the FBI will get involved and bring everything to bear on the misguided child that did this. They and their parents are likely to spend thousands of dollars and a few years of their lives defending against this, probably unsuccessfully.
What this leads to is an entire culture of getting away with stuff and the feeling that anything that can be reached on the Internet is the personal playground for such folks. These aren't mighty hackers, these are misguided children being led down a path by laws that are not being enforced.
Right now, nobody is going to do anything until something major happens. This is like ignoring your child committing minor acts of vandalism and then, when they break more than a couple of windows sending them to jail for life. This is the wrong way to deal with this and will lead to nothing but bigger and bigger problems later on.
As his sexual escapades fade from the public's attention, he needs something new to keep his name on everyone's mind. It would appear that he has found a way to do just that.
This may not make him very popular with a lot of people, though. I would say that if a close relative were to be dragged out into the street and killed because of his covert association with the US or other government I might be inspired to do Mr. Assange some real damage. So how many chances has he now exposed for some pissed-off relative to decide to make him pay?
While discrediting him might have had a role in the sex charges against him, losing credibility is a small thing compared to losing his life. Many of the countries where covert operations have been going on do not bother much with legal niceities - a spy for the US would just be killed out of hand with a cheering crowd standing by. The relations of such a person aren't going to be constrained by the legal system anywhere either.
For perspective on this, I suggest the movie "Next of Kin" for an example of how a less legalistic culture deals with transgressors against their family.
We got into the WTO and I seriously doubt we are going to get out anytime soon. It absolutely forbids such "national tariffs" and the last time we tried it with steel the WTO sanctioned retaliation against the US if we didn't stop it.
Of course for some reason China, Japan and a whole bunch of other places are permitted to block US imports with rules that exclude the introduction of US goods. There is no balance with this "free trade" nonsense, but it certainly appears we are stuck with it.
I suspect a move to back out of the WTO by the US would result in Europe slapping tariffs on everything coming from the US. Other places might follow suit as well and if anyone in the US government had half a brain it might lead to blocking imports from everywhere until a saner policy could be established. That would mean the WalMart with their Spanish-only signage would pretty much have to close down and throw hundreds of people out of their jobs. We would hear nothing except how many American retail workers were losing their jobs, not how many more American factories were now employing workers here. So any attempt to back out of the WTO will be met with general condemnation with the public (based on news reports) demanding that it be immediately rejoined and "free trade" resumed. Or else all those retail workers will be out of a job.
I think we're stuck with the way things are until the global "slave wage" compensation level reaches $28 an hour or so. Then we might see someone successfully start a manufacturing company in the US.
10 meters? Wow.
There are varying claims as to how big the rock was that made the Barringer Crater, from about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle to 150 feet long. Certainly what impacted the Earth wasn't anywhere near 150 feet in any dimension.
Quite a lot of it probably did burn off, ablate or fragment, so starting out with something only 10 meters in diameter might not get you quite a big a crater as Barringer. But, as a result of that impact it was a bad day in the entire Southwest. Nobody really knows, but I would imagine ejecta landing in the area of San Francisco.
Easily a 10 meter rock hitting the Earth would destroy any city if it fell near it. Entirely. I suspect you would be picking up rocks that fell in Nashville should a 5 meter rock hit Chicago. With a 10 meter rock unless it fragmented or burned up you might be picking up stuff in Orlando after you put out all the fires - that ejecta would be pretty hot.
Ha. The Black Death seems to have mutated somewhat or humans have become more resistant in the last thousand years or so. It is clearly much less of a threat than it was in 1350.
However, today we have far less isolation than we did in 1350. It was possible for a community to simply close itself off from the world for a period of time. It was also possible that in some parts of Europe there just weren't any infected visitors coming to call. Not so today.
I recently read a book where there were three outbreaks of an infectious disease in three widely separated parts of the US. Given air travel today should that really happen with anything as communicative as the Black Death we would be looking at a global catastrophe. Read The Stand by Stephen King? Yes, it is a novel and a fantasy but it clearly outlines what could happen with a flu-like virus that kills and is in no way out of the question. It could happen.
If "bird flu" turns into a deadly pandemic we are unlikely to fare as well as 1918. Between the increased travel spreading an infection widely before it is even recognized and the interdependence of communities it is very unlikely that there will be any spot on Earth that isn't touched by such a pandemic. There simply are no places where nobody goes any longer - they are going to get deliveries because they are not independent any longer. Should something get loose (and the odds are it will happen sooner or later) we better hope for better management than anyone has so far predicted either as a government study or in fiction.
I'm laying odds on huge mismanagement myself.
Overnight? Yes.
Few cents? Hardly. The Leaf, for example, has a 24 KWh battery. To charge it at 100% efficiency is going to require 24KWh which is going to run around $2.88 in most electricity markets today. How efficient is the charging? My guess is a 24KWh battery is really going to take more like 30-40 KWh to charge fully which puts the cost at more like $4.80.
Yes, it is cheaper than filling up with gasoline today, but like gasoline, it is going to get a lot more expensive pretty quickly. We do not have much extra capacity for electricity in the US today and with the way the population is growing through immigration we are going to be soon hitting the wall. There will likely be enough capacity to charge car batteries overnight for quite a while yet but it is going to get pretty pricey.
But compared to a $100 for 10 gallons of gas in a year or two, the electric car will still be a lot cheaper to operate, if you can afford the initial price tag.
Don't worry. There will be only factories that make food with 100% robotic tenders. Some of it might still be grown in the ground, but still there will be nothing but robots tending to it.
People are too expensive and too unreliable. As soon as the free supply of Mexicans dries up the idea of using humans in agriculture will disappear.
One minor little point is that batteries are rather difficult to get to discharge in a huge blinding flash, whereas a capacitor will easily do so.
Yes, you can overload a notebook battery and have it catch fire, but even at fire-causing discharge rates it will discharge for minutes if not tens of minutes. A capacitor, on the other hand, has far less internal resistance and will certainly discharge in a fraction of a second.
Can you say "Pinto"?
Imagine a car with 10Kw of ultracapacitor storage discharging through a section of metal frame of the car after an accident. Yes, just like with gasoline tanks, there are ways to make that unlikely but we have ample examples of cars being manufactured in ways where it was not unlikely enough.
The advantage of an ultracapacitor is the reduced internal resistance and ability to charge it to capacity at extremely high currents. This also leads to the ability of it to discharge at extremely high currents, probably far higher than the highest possible charging current.
You need to understand that getting your credit card number "borrowed" has virtually zero risk associated with it. If you use it at all, you are going to get it copied down by someone sooner or later. You can sell them in bunches if you have enough - something like $50 for 100 good, fresh numbers with expiration date, CVV2 and sometimes the billing zip code.
I get a credit card borrowed in this fashion at least once a year and it has never cost me a dime. Most people I know either do not use credit cards at all (mostly religious reasons) or have had some sort of fraudulent transaction. It is extremely common, it is not prosecuted to any extent and all of the liability ends up on the merchant, or more commonly, the merchant's insurance.
We are living in quite a different time than 15-20 years ago. When I when to high school there was little talk of teacher-student affairs but in a large school (5000+) students, I am sure it happened. You take a 20-something teacher and a 16-year-old student and put them in close contact and things can happen even back then.
Today, every message given to young people is pushing them to be more sexual in bolder ways. You also have a social climate that is quite a bit more fearsome to young people than it was in the 1950s. The end result is that a supportive and open teacher is going to have interactions with students that can easily turn into something more intimate. And that is discounting the idea that a teacher might openly desire something with a student.
So they try to pass a law banning private communication with students. OK, how you would you feel if you found a child's phone with the cell phone number of a teacher in the phone book. How about a history of phone calls both ways between the child and the teacher? A lot of parents would be concerned that they were out of the loop and take this record to the principal to get some answers. Well, private messaging on social networking sites isn't like email - there often is no record of it anywhere. So both sides can be very free to say anything without it coming back to bite them.
Personally, I would be happy to have all communication between a student and a teacher to be recorded and archived for the protection of both parties.
Note that I don't believe it matters what the gender of the teacher and student might be, nor does it matter who the "aggressor" might be. The fact is that it happens and any sort of private channel between teachers and students without any record is an open invitation for someone to carry the conversation into a direction that is going to be trouble.
Finally, the fact that this happens and can happen just as easily face-to-face as online is no reason not to ban online private messaging. Sure, it can happen in a classroom after school - but someone might come along and both parties know it. Online nobody is going to interrupt. We have no end of examples showing that people are less inhibited online than they are face to face. The motivation for this kind of law is obvious and it serves to protect both teachers and students. Private communications between teachers and students should not take place in an uninhibited manner - it just leads to trouble.
When a product fails because "consumers don't know it exists", it simply means it wasn't launched properly. You can't make money without spending money, and today's marketplace is very expensive to get into. That means you need to buy TV ads, billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, web ads, and more and more ads to properly launch a product. You also have to line up the "spokesman" type of folks that will represent the product to the public - they aren't going to talk about it on G4 TV unless you (a) give them one and (b) probably pay for placement somehow. Then you need to get it into retail, which is more pay-for-placement. If you don't want your new product hidden in the back of the store you need to have a nice display stand that the store people can put together and pay for the floor space that it will be taking up.
Not doing all of these things mean you are going to have something that people do not know about. It will not make it into the popular culture mindset, so nobody will talk about it. Should anyone actually mention they heard about it or (gasp!) bought one they will be ridiculed, shouted down or ignored. Because you didn't make it into the popular culture by paying the toll. It is incredible to see the number of product failures that are caused by this simple omission - they didn't understand how to launch a product.
Obviously, this applies to products that are to be mass-marketed to the consumer. If you have a product that is used only by architects designing office buildings you are going to have a whole different kind of product launch. But while it is different, there are still steps you have to go through and tolls to be paid. Failure to do all of the steps or pay all of the tolls means you will likely have a failure.
Also understand that in today's world your investors are going to pretty much demand a product that doesn't sit on the shelf for a long period of time. They are forking out the money for the product to be a success and failing to present it as a success to the consumer will do nothing but piss off the investors. The only way out of that is a complete by-your-bootstraps company where there are no investors. Then I suppose you can take as long as it takes for a product to catch on.