Just like having an unsecured wifi network doesn't prove that YOU sent that threat to the president. Except juries don't find that very convincing. And even where it is true that someone is committing crimes through your wifi network, such as in a recent case, you still get to have all your computers seized and combed through. If you actually had been doing something illegal, even if it wasn't what the search warrant was for, you'd still be prosecuted. Because the police had reasonable cause to search your possessions.
Uh, that isn't exactly true. It depends on what they were looking for, what they found and where they found it.
Let's say your computer gets examined because the little boy next door says you showed him some nasty videos of other little boys. So they dig around in your computer and find not videos of little boys but videos of little girls. Not in an Internet Explorer cache folder but in a folder named Suzy. Yup, I think you are going down for it.
However, in the course of a full examination of the computer they find a file with 10,000 credit card numbers and the folder is buried seven levels down through hidden folders and such that nobody without a forensic tool would ever find it is probably meaningless. Not only would this be evidence of a completely different crime but it wasn't something that was in "plain sight" and was certainly clearly outside of the search warrant. Now if the file with 10,000 credit card numbers was on the desktop with a name like StolenCreditCards.txt that would be a different story entirely.
This comes up all the time and for the most part it is addressed through on-site previewing of the computers today. If they don't find anything obvious they aren't even going to collect the computers because of the backlog in the computer forensic lab. The lab folks are just going to make a report to the prosecutor anyway and the prosecutor is the one that got the warrant in the first place. They know the limits of what they can do based on the original search warrant. That doesn't mean you are going to get away with it because whatever is found can then be used to justify further investigation, but not as evidence at trial.
I'd say it is up to the receiving country. If China wanted to block all further building of factories, they certainly could. If Mexico wanted to make it illegal for poor farm workers to come to the US, they could block them. Instead, Mexico makes it illegal to enter their country without permission and only through authorized border crossings whereas the US by comparison has nearly a big sign saying WELCOME!
Absolutely, we would all be better off if China decided they didn't want the factories any longer and went back to an agrarian economy. I don't see that happening. Neither do I see Mexico deciding not to export their farm workers to the US.
Most of the real problems in rerouting around traffic jams is that there really isn't anything great in alternatives. Maybe there is an alternate expressway, but you need to know so far in advance that the traffic problem you were avoiding has disappeared by the time you get there. And getting off the expressway onto surface streets usually doesn't help. You may not be as frustrated sitting parked on the road, but you do not get where you are going any faster.
Then there is the traffic management problem. What happens if surface streets are a real alternative? What do you think happens if all the cars from the three or four lanes of the highway suddenly just get off and start driving on ordinary streets? This is in part why there are no real alternatives shown to the driver because if the systems did recommend surface streets state and local governments would either ban the devices or sue the makers out of existance. This isn't a huge problem in the US today because few cars have traffic-enabled navigation systems. But should they become more common, the idea of divirting highway traffic onto surface streets would be outlawed if anyone was silly enough to actually do it.
The problem is that China is funding $0.46 of every dollar the US spends. When that crosses the line to $0.51 China will have effective control over the US budget process and there will certainly have to be a Chinese banker in on the budget process to approve every line item.
So what does China think about the US having a space program that is in competition with their own? Probably not much unless there is a huge technology transfer with clear military use possibilities. If we are able to help them make missile guidance more accurate they will let us spend their money on putting up a pure-science telescope. If we help them with remote sensing to track down Chinese and US citizens that are openly critical of Chinese policies then they will let us spend money on other stuff that is non-threatening to them and we might find useful.
Otherwise? Well, we better start planning on what to do with a 50% budget cut across the board. There will be a choice between having a military or relying on a treaty with China to protect the US. There will be a choice between having Medicare and Medicaid or just shipping people off to Thailand for treatment.
I'm guessing Obama will sign the Chinese mutual defense treaty in 2013.
If Social Security was an investment/savings account today, it could be defended. Unfortunately, it isn't anything like that. 100% of the money brought in today is being paid out to existing retirees and others that are eligible. Your money isn't put away somewhere, it is going right back out the door.
The hope is that there will be enough workers working when you retire to do the same. Unfortunately what was reasonable to expect in 1940 is no longer reasonable to expect. There will be fewer and fewer workers working in the US as factory jobs continue to move elsewhere and other jobs are simply replaced by automation. Also, in large measure, a lot of labor intensive jobs are simply being phased out completely.
We are also seeing a general contraction of the working population. There simply is no need for 10,000 people to work in a large factory any longer when most of the work is being done by machines. So instead of 10,000 people working there (as it was in 1950) today maybe 1500 people at most work there. Where did those jobs go? Nowhere. In the last few years we have also seen the results of some office productivity increases. It was masked for quite a while by an expanding economy but what we see today is that it really doesn't take 10 people to staff some back office filing papers and making copies. When things got bad a few years ago they had to cut back to only five people and now, perhaps with some growth, the business is seeing that clearly all that is needed is the five people. Where did the other jobs go? Well, they were never needed in the first place and probably had been functionally replaced around 2000. The businesses are now seeing the productivity gains that were actually achieved before but only now are really visible.
Today in the US there are perhaps only 60% of the people that could be working fully employed. The rest are looking for jobs or, most commonly, know they are unemployable and will never work again. The massive number of workers that were expected to continue to support Social Security in 1940 simply are not there and will never be there again.
So how do we have a system that relies on continual expansion of the workforce in the face of a shrinking workforce? Well, the first think is you get a lot of politicians saying this cannot possibly happen or that they will not allow it. Sort of like the Indiana trying to pass a law declaring Pi to be 3. The truth of the matter is that without a growing workforce you cannot possibly have the Social Security system function the way it does. Since we aren't going to have a growing workforce again, ever, Social Security will have to change, hopefully to a system where it is simply a government-mandated savings account of some kind. To pay off the existing crop of retirees would take hundreds of billions of dollars but we would be done with it then and could continue to simply stash away the funds from working people.
Sadly, this sort of change is unlikely to happen until the system collapses and people wake up to the fact that there simply aren't enough workers to support the people expecting to get money. Assuming there isn't some huge resurgeance of mass labor being needed, like rebuilding the highway system without heavy equipment, I can't believe the current system will last beyond 2020.
The payoff time for a loan to buy solar panels, inverter, etc. today is around 20 years. This is including all of the available subsidies, rebates and tax incentives that pay for about half of a solar installation.
While people in the early part of the 20th century planned to buy a single house and live there all of their lives, most people are somewhat more mobile than that today. While a solar electric system has some benefits for selling a house, you aren't going to recoup 100% of the costs if you sell the house.
So right now, unless you are in a charitable mood, installing a solar electric system will never pay off in reasonable terms in most cases. There are some odd situations where the power company wants to charge you per foot to run electric to some incredibly remote rural location and in that case it may make sense to have a non-grid-tied solar system put in instead.
But for your average suburban home it isn't really practical on a cost basis yet. Maybe in another 10 years or so.
I believe regardless of the science and actual process for reprocessing it is simply an equivalence in many politician's minds of reprocessing == proliferation. I believe the truth is that you get plutonium out as a "waste product" from straight fuel rod reprocessing but with some new formulations of fuel rods you may end up putting the plutonium back in.
My understanding of fuel reprocessing today is that it is somewhere around 97% of a fuel rod is available for using in a new fuel rod. In other words, only 3% of the mass of a fuel rod is truely "waste" and ends up needing to be buried somewhere for a long time.
Of course it is idiotic to be storing fuel rods which require cooling and isolation when they could be reprocessed with 97% of them being reused. But the nuclear politics are filled with idiocy.
You sir don't understand the tariff situation with the telephone system.
The landline phone network is required - by state regulation and FCC - to have pretty much 100% uptime. If you aren't getting that, get on the phone! Maybe from somewhere with real phone service, I suppose. Your state regulators are required to get the problem fixed and they will put unlimited pressure on the phone company to fix the problem, even to the extent of replacing every piece of copper between your house and the CO. And Verizon will be happy to do so to avoid the fines that would result otherwise.
You are clearly talking to the wrong people about this problem. Verizon (or any landline carrier) will try to sidestep the problem but they are subject to such severe regulation that once the "right" people know about this problem it will be fixed. Fast, too.
The problem that this article is discussing is having the regulators authorize shutting down, which hasn't happened yet. And might never happen if people wake up and understand the difference in how cell phone service is tariffed and how landlines are. VOIP as far as I know is not subject to any regulation at all right now, or if so, certainly nothing relating to reliability.
The migration of individuals from landline service to cell only insures that at some point there just isn't going to be enough revenue to keep the infrastructure maintained. So the maintainers are going to want to pull the plug and will start lobbying for that... like it seems they have already.
First casuality will be DSL. It requires really good copper connections to the CO and they are going to degrade. Even if they don't pull the copper out and leave the CO as a unmaintained building the lines will degrade enough to doom any possibility of DSL in a short period of time. So if you don't have cable now, you might want to look into it REAL SOON.
Second thing is people will notice that cell phone service isn't tariffed like landlines are. The operating companies are required to have pretty much 100% up time, or so close as to not make any difference. Cell towers are not required to be up. Cell towers are not on large building-size battery banks and do not have backup generators like every CO is required to have. So when there is a power outage, the tower is down until power is restored. Yes, there are UPSs in place to hold the tower service up over short outages, but we are talking seconds or maybe at most minutes not hours or days. Might want to think about that and lobby for getting cell service upgraded from being a luxury to being tariffed like landline phone service is today.
It sounds really nice that the Australian government is taking over the last mile connections. It isn't going to happen in the US for a couple of reasons. The first one is can you imagine the response to spending 3-4 hundred billion on such a project today? No, sorry, it would not be approved as the money simply isn't there. Then there is the idea that the government would be actively supporting and facilitating child porn, porn of all sorts, etc. etc. etc. Someone would notice in a big way. You might be able to pass that off in some other places, but I don't think it would fly here. I can see it now where someone fights a child porn charge by having someone testify that the government provided their Internet connection and did not filter it to ensure that child porn could not be viewed. This then constitutes permission and facilitation.
The private companies that are today running fiber are in large part still supported by landline phone service. It may be a declining part of their revenue, but it is still there. Should that revenue disappear - as is seems certain to do so - why would they continue wiring the world when their remaining revenue is from wireless services almost exclusively? Verizon and Qwest (the two that I know of with fiber programs) could drop all landline services, get rid of the thousands of trucks and wireline-servicing employees and focus only on wireless pretty easily. It would be a consolidation and focusing of attention, both things that are good for businesses. They would likely benefit greatly from increased efficiency - translated as revenue per employee. Oh, did I say that if you didn't have cable you might want to think about it?
Nobody. The copper will be pulled out and sold for scrap. And if you aren't really careful, the roving gangs of copper thieves will beat you to it and sell your copper even before the service ends.
Goodbye DSL. It will not exist any longer. And no, the government isn't going to decide to spend billions on putting fiber in to every home. Verizon is already doing it and Qwest is getting started. Unfortunately, they might stop or really slow down if there is no more revenue from landline service.
Absolutely. Kill off all theater sales and movie theaters because they are old, dirty and outmoded. Why not just release the movie on DVD at the same time as in the theater?
You do understand the only thing keeping a lot of theaters going is the fact that if you want to see the movie this year you have to go to the theater? If you are willing to wait until next year, fine, it will be out on DVD.
Just like a losing strategy in Afganistan is telling the Taliban all they have to do is wait a little longer to take over, if people knew that one week after the main theater run was over they could get the DVD they would just wait patiently. Certainly in most places that would be the end of the movie theater.
When I watch a movie or a TV episode I might watch it again in a few years if it was extremely good and memorable, but I would consider it a complete waste of my time to even consider watching most things more than once. Ever.
I am pretty sure that most people that aren't glued to a TV set watching endless reruns of Judge Judy to feel that way. I do know there are some people that can pretty much watch the same 40-minute TV episode of something three times in a row (or more) without finding it repetitous, but I think they are in the minority. For this reason, above all others, try-before-you-buy is pointless.
It is like a restaurant offering you a complete meal for free so you can see if you like today's selection. If you do, you are free to pay for another. That is pretty much a proven money-loser in the restaurant business. As it is in the entertainment business - once consumed most people don't feel the need to consume it again within the span of years.
OK, there are some fools out there that insist they are "supporting the artist" when in fact they are supporting the distribution channel. Today, with a seemingly endless set of over-35 folks that don't understand downloading, BitTorrent or anything else about the Internet Economy there are plenty of people buying CDs and DVDs at WalMart. Maybe they just have dial-up Internet access or just use computers at the library. But in the not too distant future these people will be gone and the distribution channel and artists won't be supported by anyone anymore. Certainly there are not enough people pretending to try-before-buying to keep the distribution systems going. And without massive distribution nobody is going to spend tens of millions to make a movie.
We are seeing the final act of mass distribution of entertainment. It has been a defining part of Western Culture. It will be sad when it goes, but plenty of people around the world will not be sorry to see it go. But it is going to pass on because the Internet Economy (only porn pays) doesn't leave room for it anymore.
Google has one main interest: selling information. They have specific information that people pay them to push onto others (ads) and then they have other types of marketing information they can sell. Like if one day half the people in Northern Michigan are searching for electric heaters, maybe someone at an electric heater company might be interested in that fact.
Because of the nature of the information, most of this information isn't relevant to a specific person individually but applies to either non-specific people or big groups of people. So it really has very little impact on "privacy" in an individual sense.
Of course, the exceptions to this are legion. Maybe you find it deeply offensive in having web pages displaying ads to you about erectile disfunction treatments (you know, the extreme ones) when you are trying to show your boss or a client something on a web page. All because you did some searching the day before. You can act dumb and say "I wonder why that is diplayed?" but chances are, they already know. The fact that we are now seeing the interconnections between ads and searches should concern you - it clearly means your searches are on display to the world.
And of course youy can bet that as the 2012 election gets closer companies will be paying Google big bucks to see if searches for emergency food, guns, ammo and land in Montana are being searched for more than in previous months. We are giving all of this information to Google and they are making big bucks selling it to the highest bidder and doing really, really well at it.
Bandwidth? How about free calling? Unfortunately, T-Mobile dropped the UMA feature and free calling so you can't get it anymore unless you already have it. I wouldn't expect to see it as a feature on any phones any longer either. It was an obvious money-loser from the beginning.
Of course being able to go from lots and lots of minutes a month to almost nothing certainly was handy. And reduced the bills a lot. Of course now you can just get an unlimited plan for about twice as much. Funny how that works out and interestingly it never seems to save money for the consumer.
Land line telephone lines can be "sniffed" with the use of a pickup coil that you can get for $7.99 at Radio Shack. Wow, they used to be a lot cheaper. Anyway, this will enable the user to receive "broadcast" telephone conversations with just about anything that can be used as an amplifier. It does not require any sort of technical ability and the tools are commonly available.
So it would be legal in your opinion to listen to or record such conversations as long as it was done without actually connecting to the wires but just relying on the information that was being "transmitted"?
Is your telephone (land line) encrypted? No? Well then it would be perfectly alright with you to set up a small coil to receive the "broadcast" from the wire wouldn't it? This could easily be used by law enforcement to monitor any telephone conversation without actually involving a physical "tap" anywhere. Sure, the "tap" would be more efficient and less subject to interference but they could skip the warrant by just using the laws of physics and getting near the wire.
Maybe with the right equipment (not a $1.99 pickup coil) you wouldn't even need to get that close.
When you open the door to receiving stuff there is a lot more broadcast than you might think about.
If you don't have a problem with receviing information that is broadcast then of course Google did nothing wrong. They were just receiving what people were broadcasting. So can law enforcement or your neighbors extend this to recording telephone conversations.
The liquid limit is to prevent the now-well-known binary explosive/incendary problem. You have one water bottle filled with hydrogen peroxide and one water bottle filled with something else nasty - the choices are many and a lot of them are quite stable at room temperature. There is virtually no way to filter all of this stuff out by any scanning or even dipstick testing method.
Since the "formula" was disclosed a few years ago anyone with half a brain knows how to do it now. I am surprised it hasn't been used in a bank robbery or other totally home-grown effort.
There is no information about how good a job the TSA is doing.
They could be collecting thousands of pounds of explosives every day and we would never know about it. There could have been 20 major airline bomb incidents this year that were stopped and we would never know.
Or there could be nothing. With no information most people are assuming that there has been nothing. I have heard from "reliable sources" that the TSA has actually prevented some significant incidents but no information beyond that. If they think they can continue to spend billions of dollars and provide the current hassle to people they are with no justification whatsoever, I think they are wrong. Eventually the PR nightmare will catch up to them at a Congressional level. Either their funding will be cut or they will be forced to go public. If there is in truth nothing being being found by the TSA searches, it is likely the agency will cease to exist.
How damaging would it be to reveal what they have actually done last year or this year? Like an annual report? Nowhere near as damaging as not reporting anything to the public. I suppose there is some top-secret report that a few in Congress get to see, but that does nothing for the public distrust.
You do understand that unlike the rest of the First World countries the population of the US is growing by leaps and bounds? Also, understand that the growth is not home-grown but largely imported from third-world countries where the separation between "ordinary citizens" and what we would consider to be criminals is not so large. Meaning that we are getting l lot of folks that really don't give a crap about what laws there are, they are going to make their way in the world the way they want to and the rest of the world can screw off.
Immigration has turned into a revolving door where instead of imprisoning folks that came to the US recently we just send them back where they came from. Since that country isn't thrilled about having them, they put them on the bus going north again. Two weeks later, they are back in the USA. We see it as a never-ending cycle in Arizona with stories about the latest rapist being caught after being deported 13 times and being deported again.
So in some ways there being a bit of a rise in law enforcement activity shouldn't be surprising. What I hear about because of the job is law enforcement making do with less, sometimes a lot less, in the face of significant increases in workload. I don't get into the "tactical" end where wiretapping and surveillence comes in, but where there is more work in forensics, there is more tactical stuff going on which feeds into it.
Certain types of crimes are up and one solution to keeping the statistics down is not to prosecute but simply deport the criminals. Makes everything look like things are getting better all the time which is what the federal government wants to show off.
Coverage in the US cities is a function of being able to put up towers.
You can't put up a tower in a city without permission from the city. You can't put it on city land no matter what. To put a tower up on private land you have to not only negotiate with the landowner but the landowner's neighbors. When there is someone that believes cell phone radiation will cause cancer you aren't going to put a tower there no matter what. Ever, until that person moves. Trying to fight it out in court is a losing battle because half of the jury might just believe in cell phone radiation being hazardous even after you parade 12 experts saying differently. You aren't going to convince anyone.
So therefore no tower gets built on that location. Say it takes four months to figure out it isn't going to happen at that site. So you move on down the list to the next best candidate and spend another four months trying to determine if it is possible to build one there. Oh, and another nutjob is on TV being interviewed about how dangerous the cell tower in their neighborhood is - might have to relocate that tower now as well.
I seriously doubt that Japan has this kind of problem. Or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe Sydney or Melbourne but they probably have a different procedure where the nutjobs are required to live in fenced compounds with each little apartment being completely enclosed in a Faraday cage.
One of the biggest problems in the US is simply finding a spot to put a tower.
Can't put it anywhere within a city limits without permission from the city. Can't put it on any land the city owns, period. Can't put it on any private land without a permit from the city. Can't put it anywhere near people that complain about the radiation hazards, how the sight of the tower offends them or any other complaint unless you like spending millions in court.
This means in non-rural areas finding a spot for a tower is a huge challenge whereas I suspect most other countries the siting for a tower is easy - you get the government permission at a high level and nobody is allowed to argue with you. This is especially true when the telephone provider also happens to be state-owned.
Sure there are "regulators" involved but they aren't listening to the lunatic fringe. Here in the US between the environmentalists, the radical environmentalists (you know, all progress since 800 AD is cruel, inhumane and against nature) and the basic nutjobs (cell tower radiation hazards, power transmission line hazards, magnetic cure-all bracelets that are negatively affected by any other EMF fields in the area, etc.) have the ear of the government and the courts.
30? Sorry, but you are way, way off. I do not know how it is in California but it can't be much simpler than it is in Ohio. In Ohio there are taxing bodies at the state, country, township and city level. You have to figure out where an address is exactly in terms of city, county and township in order to properly calculate the tax. And then you have to submit the tax payments to the correct entities on a monthly basis. Altogether there are many, many different combinations with somewhere like 50 different townships and another 20 or so counties.
If all you are doing is calculating and paying taxes for a retail store it isn't that bad. You are generally required to pay just for your retail store's location. But if you are selling stuff by telephone you may in fact be required to calculate taxes based on where the customer is and that gets interesting. And that is for one state. What any sensible multi-state business does is pay one of the services for calculating taxes. Some of them submit the taxes to the right places as well.
Nobody is going to do this on their own. Well, Amazon might try if they get hit with having to deal with every state but it would be a new Department of Silly Tax Calculation in their own building. It is a huge amount of effort and the states "know" they are dealing with single-location retail stores only so they do not offer much in the way of automation. Lots of preprinted forms, not so much online.
When you cross the dividing line between needing a form to fill in the blanks and when you need an actual lawyer isn't clearly spelled out by anyone. It is up to you (or your lawyer) to recognize it. Fail to recognize it and you end up on the short end. Now how often does that happen with a lease? Never. How often does it happen with a will? Not too often. How often does it happen with the purchase of a business? Lots and lots and lots.
Second problem with the slip-and-fall lawyers. People get money from this. Lots of money. If you can "win the lottery" this way it is wonderful, but if you are standing around watching you are going to be left wondering why that guy got the big wad of cash and you got nothing. Believe me, you want to do something about liability lawsuits (slip-and-fall, malpractice of all sorts, etc.) and the people that got their big wad will come out of the woodwork to defend the process. "Tort reform" is an other name for doing something about liability lawsuits and it never seems to go anywhere because too many people have either won the lottery or are thinking they might someday real soon now.
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Just like having an unsecured wifi network doesn't prove that YOU sent that threat to the president. Except juries don't find that very convincing. And even where it is true that someone is committing crimes through your wifi network, such as in a recent case, you still get to have all your computers seized and combed through. If you actually had been doing something illegal, even if it wasn't what the search warrant was for, you'd still be prosecuted. Because the police had reasonable cause to search your possessions.
Uh, that isn't exactly true. It depends on what they were looking for, what they found and where they found it.
Let's say your computer gets examined because the little boy next door says you showed him some nasty videos of other little boys. So they dig around in your computer and find not videos of little boys but videos of little girls. Not in an Internet Explorer cache folder but in a folder named Suzy. Yup, I think you are going down for it.
However, in the course of a full examination of the computer they find a file with 10,000 credit card numbers and the folder is buried seven levels down through hidden folders and such that nobody without a forensic tool would ever find it is probably meaningless. Not only would this be evidence of a completely different crime but it wasn't something that was in "plain sight" and was certainly clearly outside of the search warrant. Now if the file with 10,000 credit card numbers was on the desktop with a name like StolenCreditCards.txt that would be a different story entirely.
This comes up all the time and for the most part it is addressed through on-site previewing of the computers today. If they don't find anything obvious they aren't even going to collect the computers because of the backlog in the computer forensic lab. The lab folks are just going to make a report to the prosecutor anyway and the prosecutor is the one that got the warrant in the first place. They know the limits of what they can do based on the original search warrant. That doesn't mean you are going to get away with it because whatever is found can then be used to justify further investigation, but not as evidence at trial.
I'd say it is up to the receiving country. If China wanted to block all further building of factories, they certainly could. If Mexico wanted to make it illegal for poor farm workers to come to the US, they could block them. Instead, Mexico makes it illegal to enter their country without permission and only through authorized border crossings whereas the US by comparison has nearly a big sign saying WELCOME!
Absolutely, we would all be better off if China decided they didn't want the factories any longer and went back to an agrarian economy. I don't see that happening. Neither do I see Mexico deciding not to export their farm workers to the US.
Most of the real problems in rerouting around traffic jams is that there really isn't anything great in alternatives. Maybe there is an alternate expressway, but you need to know so far in advance that the traffic problem you were avoiding has disappeared by the time you get there. And getting off the expressway onto surface streets usually doesn't help. You may not be as frustrated sitting parked on the road, but you do not get where you are going any faster.
Then there is the traffic management problem. What happens if surface streets are a real alternative? What do you think happens if all the cars from the three or four lanes of the highway suddenly just get off and start driving on ordinary streets? This is in part why there are no real alternatives shown to the driver because if the systems did recommend surface streets state and local governments would either ban the devices or sue the makers out of existance. This isn't a huge problem in the US today because few cars have traffic-enabled navigation systems. But should they become more common, the idea of divirting highway traffic onto surface streets would be outlawed if anyone was silly enough to actually do it.
The problem is that China is funding $0.46 of every dollar the US spends. When that crosses the line to $0.51 China will have effective control over the US budget process and there will certainly have to be a Chinese banker in on the budget process to approve every line item.
So what does China think about the US having a space program that is in competition with their own? Probably not much unless there is a huge technology transfer with clear military use possibilities. If we are able to help them make missile guidance more accurate they will let us spend their money on putting up a pure-science telescope. If we help them with remote sensing to track down Chinese and US citizens that are openly critical of Chinese policies then they will let us spend money on other stuff that is non-threatening to them and we might find useful.
Otherwise? Well, we better start planning on what to do with a 50% budget cut across the board. There will be a choice between having a military or relying on a treaty with China to protect the US. There will be a choice between having Medicare and Medicaid or just shipping people off to Thailand for treatment.
I'm guessing Obama will sign the Chinese mutual defense treaty in 2013.
If Social Security was an investment/savings account today, it could be defended. Unfortunately, it isn't anything like that. 100% of the money brought in today is being paid out to existing retirees and others that are eligible. Your money isn't put away somewhere, it is going right back out the door.
The hope is that there will be enough workers working when you retire to do the same. Unfortunately what was reasonable to expect in 1940 is no longer reasonable to expect. There will be fewer and fewer workers working in the US as factory jobs continue to move elsewhere and other jobs are simply replaced by automation. Also, in large measure, a lot of labor intensive jobs are simply being phased out completely.
We are also seeing a general contraction of the working population. There simply is no need for 10,000 people to work in a large factory any longer when most of the work is being done by machines. So instead of 10,000 people working there (as it was in 1950) today maybe 1500 people at most work there. Where did those jobs go? Nowhere. In the last few years we have also seen the results of some office productivity increases. It was masked for quite a while by an expanding economy but what we see today is that it really doesn't take 10 people to staff some back office filing papers and making copies. When things got bad a few years ago they had to cut back to only five people and now, perhaps with some growth, the business is seeing that clearly all that is needed is the five people. Where did the other jobs go? Well, they were never needed in the first place and probably had been functionally replaced around 2000. The businesses are now seeing the productivity gains that were actually achieved before but only now are really visible.
Today in the US there are perhaps only 60% of the people that could be working fully employed. The rest are looking for jobs or, most commonly, know they are unemployable and will never work again. The massive number of workers that were expected to continue to support Social Security in 1940 simply are not there and will never be there again.
So how do we have a system that relies on continual expansion of the workforce in the face of a shrinking workforce? Well, the first think is you get a lot of politicians saying this cannot possibly happen or that they will not allow it. Sort of like the Indiana trying to pass a law declaring Pi to be 3. The truth of the matter is that without a growing workforce you cannot possibly have the Social Security system function the way it does. Since we aren't going to have a growing workforce again, ever, Social Security will have to change, hopefully to a system where it is simply a government-mandated savings account of some kind. To pay off the existing crop of retirees would take hundreds of billions of dollars but we would be done with it then and could continue to simply stash away the funds from working people.
Sadly, this sort of change is unlikely to happen until the system collapses and people wake up to the fact that there simply aren't enough workers to support the people expecting to get money. Assuming there isn't some huge resurgeance of mass labor being needed, like rebuilding the highway system without heavy equipment, I can't believe the current system will last beyond 2020.
The payoff time for a loan to buy solar panels, inverter, etc. today is around 20 years. This is including all of the available subsidies, rebates and tax incentives that pay for about half of a solar installation.
While people in the early part of the 20th century planned to buy a single house and live there all of their lives, most people are somewhat more mobile than that today. While a solar electric system has some benefits for selling a house, you aren't going to recoup 100% of the costs if you sell the house.
So right now, unless you are in a charitable mood, installing a solar electric system will never pay off in reasonable terms in most cases. There are some odd situations where the power company wants to charge you per foot to run electric to some incredibly remote rural location and in that case it may make sense to have a non-grid-tied solar system put in instead.
But for your average suburban home it isn't really practical on a cost basis yet. Maybe in another 10 years or so.
I believe regardless of the science and actual process for reprocessing it is simply an equivalence in many politician's minds of reprocessing == proliferation. I believe the truth is that you get plutonium out as a "waste product" from straight fuel rod reprocessing but with some new formulations of fuel rods you may end up putting the plutonium back in.
My understanding of fuel reprocessing today is that it is somewhere around 97% of a fuel rod is available for using in a new fuel rod. In other words, only 3% of the mass of a fuel rod is truely "waste" and ends up needing to be buried somewhere for a long time.
Of course it is idiotic to be storing fuel rods which require cooling and isolation when they could be reprocessed with 97% of them being reused. But the nuclear politics are filled with idiocy.
Sorry, but DSL dies the moment the PSTN is no longer maintained. Better call the cable company this week.
You sir don't understand the tariff situation with the telephone system.
The landline phone network is required - by state regulation and FCC - to have pretty much 100% uptime. If you aren't getting that, get on the phone! Maybe from somewhere with real phone service, I suppose. Your state regulators are required to get the problem fixed and they will put unlimited pressure on the phone company to fix the problem, even to the extent of replacing every piece of copper between your house and the CO. And Verizon will be happy to do so to avoid the fines that would result otherwise.
You are clearly talking to the wrong people about this problem. Verizon (or any landline carrier) will try to sidestep the problem but they are subject to such severe regulation that once the "right" people know about this problem it will be fixed. Fast, too.
The problem that this article is discussing is having the regulators authorize shutting down, which hasn't happened yet. And might never happen if people wake up and understand the difference in how cell phone service is tariffed and how landlines are. VOIP as far as I know is not subject to any regulation at all right now, or if so, certainly nothing relating to reliability.
The migration of individuals from landline service to cell only insures that at some point there just isn't going to be enough revenue to keep the infrastructure maintained. So the maintainers are going to want to pull the plug and will start lobbying for that... like it seems they have already.
First casuality will be DSL. It requires really good copper connections to the CO and they are going to degrade. Even if they don't pull the copper out and leave the CO as a unmaintained building the lines will degrade enough to doom any possibility of DSL in a short period of time. So if you don't have cable now, you might want to look into it REAL SOON.
Second thing is people will notice that cell phone service isn't tariffed like landlines are. The operating companies are required to have pretty much 100% up time, or so close as to not make any difference. Cell towers are not required to be up. Cell towers are not on large building-size battery banks and do not have backup generators like every CO is required to have. So when there is a power outage, the tower is down until power is restored. Yes, there are UPSs in place to hold the tower service up over short outages, but we are talking seconds or maybe at most minutes not hours or days. Might want to think about that and lobby for getting cell service upgraded from being a luxury to being tariffed like landline phone service is today.
It sounds really nice that the Australian government is taking over the last mile connections. It isn't going to happen in the US for a couple of reasons. The first one is can you imagine the response to spending 3-4 hundred billion on such a project today? No, sorry, it would not be approved as the money simply isn't there. Then there is the idea that the government would be actively supporting and facilitating child porn, porn of all sorts, etc. etc. etc. Someone would notice in a big way. You might be able to pass that off in some other places, but I don't think it would fly here. I can see it now where someone fights a child porn charge by having someone testify that the government provided their Internet connection and did not filter it to ensure that child porn could not be viewed. This then constitutes permission and facilitation.
The private companies that are today running fiber are in large part still supported by landline phone service. It may be a declining part of their revenue, but it is still there. Should that revenue disappear - as is seems certain to do so - why would they continue wiring the world when their remaining revenue is from wireless services almost exclusively? Verizon and Qwest (the two that I know of with fiber programs) could drop all landline services, get rid of the thousands of trucks and wireline-servicing employees and focus only on wireless pretty easily. It would be a consolidation and focusing of attention, both things that are good for businesses. They would likely benefit greatly from increased efficiency - translated as revenue per employee. Oh, did I say that if you didn't have cable you might want to think about it?
Nobody. The copper will be pulled out and sold for scrap. And if you aren't really careful, the roving gangs of copper thieves will beat you to it and sell your copper even before the service ends.
Goodbye DSL. It will not exist any longer. And no, the government isn't going to decide to spend billions on putting fiber in to every home. Verizon is already doing it and Qwest is getting started. Unfortunately, they might stop or really slow down if there is no more revenue from landline service.
Absolutely. Kill off all theater sales and movie theaters because they are old, dirty and outmoded. Why not just release the movie on DVD at the same time as in the theater?
You do understand the only thing keeping a lot of theaters going is the fact that if you want to see the movie this year you have to go to the theater? If you are willing to wait until next year, fine, it will be out on DVD.
Just like a losing strategy in Afganistan is telling the Taliban all they have to do is wait a little longer to take over, if people knew that one week after the main theater run was over they could get the DVD they would just wait patiently. Certainly in most places that would be the end of the movie theater.
When I watch a movie or a TV episode I might watch it again in a few years if it was extremely good and memorable, but I would consider it a complete waste of my time to even consider watching most things more than once. Ever.
I am pretty sure that most people that aren't glued to a TV set watching endless reruns of Judge Judy to feel that way. I do know there are some people that can pretty much watch the same 40-minute TV episode of something three times in a row (or more) without finding it repetitous, but I think they are in the minority. For this reason, above all others, try-before-you-buy is pointless.
It is like a restaurant offering you a complete meal for free so you can see if you like today's selection. If you do, you are free to pay for another. That is pretty much a proven money-loser in the restaurant business. As it is in the entertainment business - once consumed most people don't feel the need to consume it again within the span of years.
OK, there are some fools out there that insist they are "supporting the artist" when in fact they are supporting the distribution channel. Today, with a seemingly endless set of over-35 folks that don't understand downloading, BitTorrent or anything else about the Internet Economy there are plenty of people buying CDs and DVDs at WalMart. Maybe they just have dial-up Internet access or just use computers at the library. But in the not too distant future these people will be gone and the distribution channel and artists won't be supported by anyone anymore. Certainly there are not enough people pretending to try-before-buying to keep the distribution systems going. And without massive distribution nobody is going to spend tens of millions to make a movie.
We are seeing the final act of mass distribution of entertainment. It has been a defining part of Western Culture. It will be sad when it goes, but plenty of people around the world will not be sorry to see it go. But it is going to pass on because the Internet Economy (only porn pays) doesn't leave room for it anymore.
Google has one main interest: selling information. They have specific information that people pay them to push onto others (ads) and then they have other types of marketing information they can sell. Like if one day half the people in Northern Michigan are searching for electric heaters, maybe someone at an electric heater company might be interested in that fact.
Because of the nature of the information, most of this information isn't relevant to a specific person individually but applies to either non-specific people or big groups of people. So it really has very little impact on "privacy" in an individual sense.
Of course, the exceptions to this are legion. Maybe you find it deeply offensive in having web pages displaying ads to you about erectile disfunction treatments (you know, the extreme ones) when you are trying to show your boss or a client something on a web page. All because you did some searching the day before. You can act dumb and say "I wonder why that is diplayed?" but chances are, they already know. The fact that we are now seeing the interconnections between ads and searches should concern you - it clearly means your searches are on display to the world.
And of course youy can bet that as the 2012 election gets closer companies will be paying Google big bucks to see if searches for emergency food, guns, ammo and land in Montana are being searched for more than in previous months. We are giving all of this information to Google and they are making big bucks selling it to the highest bidder and doing really, really well at it.
Bandwidth? How about free calling? Unfortunately, T-Mobile dropped the UMA feature and free calling so you can't get it anymore unless you already have it. I wouldn't expect to see it as a feature on any phones any longer either. It was an obvious money-loser from the beginning.
Of course being able to go from lots and lots of minutes a month to almost nothing certainly was handy. And reduced the bills a lot. Of course now you can just get an unlimited plan for about twice as much. Funny how that works out and interestingly it never seems to save money for the consumer.
In many jurisdictions it is not legal to point a telescope below a certain angle. I know New York City has such laws and they aren't the only ones.
Land line telephone lines can be "sniffed" with the use of a pickup coil that you can get for $7.99 at Radio Shack. Wow, they used to be a lot cheaper. Anyway, this will enable the user to receive "broadcast" telephone conversations with just about anything that can be used as an amplifier. It does not require any sort of technical ability and the tools are commonly available.
So it would be legal in your opinion to listen to or record such conversations as long as it was done without actually connecting to the wires but just relying on the information that was being "transmitted"?
Is your telephone (land line) encrypted? No? Well then it would be perfectly alright with you to set up a small coil to receive the "broadcast" from the wire wouldn't it? This could easily be used by law enforcement to monitor any telephone conversation without actually involving a physical "tap" anywhere. Sure, the "tap" would be more efficient and less subject to interference but they could skip the warrant by just using the laws of physics and getting near the wire.
Maybe with the right equipment (not a $1.99 pickup coil) you wouldn't even need to get that close.
When you open the door to receiving stuff there is a lot more broadcast than you might think about.
If you don't have a problem with receviing information that is broadcast then of course Google did nothing wrong. They were just receiving what people were broadcasting. So can law enforcement or your neighbors extend this to recording telephone conversations.
The liquid limit is to prevent the now-well-known binary explosive/incendary problem. You have one water bottle filled with hydrogen peroxide and one water bottle filled with something else nasty - the choices are many and a lot of them are quite stable at room temperature. There is virtually no way to filter all of this stuff out by any scanning or even dipstick testing method.
Since the "formula" was disclosed a few years ago anyone with half a brain knows how to do it now. I am surprised it hasn't been used in a bank robbery or other totally home-grown effort.
There is no information about how good a job the TSA is doing.
They could be collecting thousands of pounds of explosives every day and we would never know about it. There could have been 20 major airline bomb incidents this year that were stopped and we would never know.
Or there could be nothing. With no information most people are assuming that there has been nothing. I have heard from "reliable sources" that the TSA has actually prevented some significant incidents but no information beyond that. If they think they can continue to spend billions of dollars and provide the current hassle to people they are with no justification whatsoever, I think they are wrong. Eventually the PR nightmare will catch up to them at a Congressional level. Either their funding will be cut or they will be forced to go public. If there is in truth nothing being being found by the TSA searches, it is likely the agency will cease to exist.
How damaging would it be to reveal what they have actually done last year or this year? Like an annual report? Nowhere near as damaging as not reporting anything to the public. I suppose there is some top-secret report that a few in Congress get to see, but that does nothing for the public distrust.
You do understand that unlike the rest of the First World countries the population of the US is growing by leaps and bounds? Also, understand that the growth is not home-grown but largely imported from third-world countries where the separation between "ordinary citizens" and what we would consider to be criminals is not so large. Meaning that we are getting l lot of folks that really don't give a crap about what laws there are, they are going to make their way in the world the way they want to and the rest of the world can screw off.
Immigration has turned into a revolving door where instead of imprisoning folks that came to the US recently we just send them back where they came from. Since that country isn't thrilled about having them, they put them on the bus going north again. Two weeks later, they are back in the USA. We see it as a never-ending cycle in Arizona with stories about the latest rapist being caught after being deported 13 times and being deported again.
So in some ways there being a bit of a rise in law enforcement activity shouldn't be surprising. What I hear about because of the job is law enforcement making do with less, sometimes a lot less, in the face of significant increases in workload. I don't get into the "tactical" end where wiretapping and surveillence comes in, but where there is more work in forensics, there is more tactical stuff going on which feeds into it.
Certain types of crimes are up and one solution to keeping the statistics down is not to prosecute but simply deport the criminals. Makes everything look like things are getting better all the time which is what the federal government wants to show off.
Coverage in the US cities is a function of being able to put up towers.
You can't put up a tower in a city without permission from the city. You can't put it on city land no matter what. To put a tower up on private land you have to not only negotiate with the landowner but the landowner's neighbors. When there is someone that believes cell phone radiation will cause cancer you aren't going to put a tower there no matter what. Ever, until that person moves. Trying to fight it out in court is a losing battle because half of the jury might just believe in cell phone radiation being hazardous even after you parade 12 experts saying differently. You aren't going to convince anyone.
So therefore no tower gets built on that location. Say it takes four months to figure out it isn't going to happen at that site. So you move on down the list to the next best candidate and spend another four months trying to determine if it is possible to build one there. Oh, and another nutjob is on TV being interviewed about how dangerous the cell tower in their neighborhood is - might have to relocate that tower now as well.
I seriously doubt that Japan has this kind of problem. Or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe Sydney or Melbourne but they probably have a different procedure where the nutjobs are required to live in fenced compounds with each little apartment being completely enclosed in a Faraday cage.
One of the biggest problems in the US is simply finding a spot to put a tower.
Can't put it anywhere within a city limits without permission from the city. Can't put it on any land the city owns, period. Can't put it on any private land without a permit from the city. Can't put it anywhere near people that complain about the radiation hazards, how the sight of the tower offends them or any other complaint unless you like spending millions in court.
This means in non-rural areas finding a spot for a tower is a huge challenge whereas I suspect most other countries the siting for a tower is easy - you get the government permission at a high level and nobody is allowed to argue with you. This is especially true when the telephone provider also happens to be state-owned.
Sure there are "regulators" involved but they aren't listening to the lunatic fringe. Here in the US between the environmentalists, the radical environmentalists (you know, all progress since 800 AD is cruel, inhumane and against nature) and the basic nutjobs (cell tower radiation hazards, power transmission line hazards, magnetic cure-all bracelets that are negatively affected by any other EMF fields in the area, etc.) have the ear of the government and the courts.
30? Sorry, but you are way, way off. I do not know how it is in California but it can't be much simpler than it is in Ohio. In Ohio there are taxing bodies at the state, country, township and city level. You have to figure out where an address is exactly in terms of city, county and township in order to properly calculate the tax. And then you have to submit the tax payments to the correct entities on a monthly basis. Altogether there are many, many different combinations with somewhere like 50 different townships and another 20 or so counties.
If all you are doing is calculating and paying taxes for a retail store it isn't that bad. You are generally required to pay just for your retail store's location. But if you are selling stuff by telephone you may in fact be required to calculate taxes based on where the customer is and that gets interesting. And that is for one state. What any sensible multi-state business does is pay one of the services for calculating taxes. Some of them submit the taxes to the right places as well.
Nobody is going to do this on their own. Well, Amazon might try if they get hit with having to deal with every state but it would be a new Department of Silly Tax Calculation in their own building. It is a huge amount of effort and the states "know" they are dealing with single-location retail stores only so they do not offer much in the way of automation. Lots of preprinted forms, not so much online.
Two problems:
When you cross the dividing line between needing a form to fill in the blanks and when you need an actual lawyer isn't clearly spelled out by anyone. It is up to you (or your lawyer) to recognize it. Fail to recognize it and you end up on the short end. Now how often does that happen with a lease? Never. How often does it happen with a will? Not too often. How often does it happen with the purchase of a business? Lots and lots and lots.
Second problem with the slip-and-fall lawyers. People get money from this. Lots of money. If you can "win the lottery" this way it is wonderful, but if you are standing around watching you are going to be left wondering why that guy got the big wad of cash and you got nothing. Believe me, you want to do something about liability lawsuits (slip-and-fall, malpractice of all sorts, etc.) and the people that got their big wad will come out of the woodwork to defend the process. "Tort reform" is an other name for doing something about liability lawsuits and it never seems to go anywhere because too many people have either won the lottery or are thinking they might someday real soon now.