You could go to your local library and dig up copies of local forms that have been used. With some cleverness on a computer you could remove people's names from the documents you find there and substitute blank spaces or (oooh!) variables that are substituted by some really spiffy software.
Then you would have what LegalZoom has done. Oh, you might want one lawyer that has looked over the whole mess and said it was OK. You didn't really think LegalZoom is more than a web site and a call center did you?
As a forms respository, it serves some purpose. If you have a problem, say needed a simple will, you can find a form that will allow you to present your will in the proper style to be recognized by people who know what a will is supposed to look like and what it is supposed to contain. And if all you need really is a simple will, then you got what you needed at a really cheap price.
On the other hand, there is nobody to tell you when you cross the line from needing a simple will to needing something more complex. So you have a simple will and think everything is fine. The same problem comes with every other sort of form they offer. If the form they cough up is all you really need it is a great and cheap service. But there is no judgement about what else might be needed. For that some sort of creative thought or at least more than just a passing familiarity with the local laws is needed.
Sure, lawyers cost money and you can hope until your dying day that you never need one. But as many people have found out, when you need a lawyer the first criteria should not be cheap. If you already know enough to be able to tell when you need a lawyer vs. a form repository then LegalZoom is a great service - but there are free form repositories so you don't need to use LegalZoom to get a standard lease form. What LegalZoom really has is advertising which your local library (another form respository) doesn't have. If you listen to much radio (ugh!) you will hear endless ads for LegalZoom - but you never hear an ad for the library. In that way LegalZoom is far more effective at gathering your support than the library is.
You can use the same argument about doctors, or virtually any "profession" that claims to have standards. Auto mechanics have to be certified in some jurisdictions and you can bet there are laws in place in those locations that make it a crime to pretend to be an auto mechanic without proper (legal) certification.
This goes back to guilds and unions. If you aren't a member of the guild then you can't do whatever it is the guild members do, whether it is weaving, being an apothecary or a wheelwright. We have preserved this today with lots of professional societies and groups taking the place of the guilds. You can't be a lawyer if you don't pass the state bar exam - and, coincidently, join the bar association for the state. You can't be a doctor unless you are certified as a doctor in that state. And there are plenty of places where you can't be an electrician if you aren't a member of the IBEW union. Plumbers are required to be union plumbers in some places as well.
The defense of this is that you are at least partially assured of competence when dealng with a guild member. You have a "standards body" to go complain to if you are cheated or are dealt with incompetently. If you choose to deal with non-guild members you are pretty much on your own. Today if you prefer to go to an alternative medical practitioner who chants over you will dosing you with dung balls and mouse ears it is your legally-protected choice. However, if you don't get better or your broken leg doesn't heal properly good luck with (a) finding your practiticioner and (b) getting a lawsuit to stick. You might - might - have better luck with a non-union electrician in a jurisdiction where such are not legal.
So sure, the laws are most definitely on the side of the guilds. It has been that way for around a thousand years or so. The guilds exist for a reason and certainly a thousand years ago it was a very good reason. Today there are still some good reasons for them but the volume of cultural, societal and legal inertia behind the guilds makes it very unlikely we are going to move away from this sort of system any time soon.
Danger? What "danger"? I plug a USB flash drive into my computer and it prompts me with a message asking if I want to run the some program named TrojanPasswordCapture.exe or if I want to see the files on the flash drive.
OK, I suppose there are a few idiots out there that would click on "Run TrojanPasswordCapture.exe" just to see what it would do. Unfortunately, there are no cures for that sort of problem except taking the computer away from them.
The first question that needs to be answers is why there might be a case where getting a warrant is a problem when they are willing to expend the resources to attach the tracking device in the first place. These things are expensive - on the order of $1000 plus fees for the cell phone connection. So they can't attach one just on a whim, there has to be some reason. So what reasons would there be where a warrant would be a problem? I would guess that the most logical would be one where someone is clearly involved in the drug trade but not carrying actionable amounts of any controlled substance. It is hard to get a warrant on a "conspiracy" charge and nothing more to go on that a good guess. Think "mob accountant" also for an example of this.
I could also see situations where it is next to impossible to charge a person with a crime for stuff they are clearly doing so what is needed is finding something else they are doing that is actionable. One example would be someone making child porn videos but neither the parents who are getting well paid nor the children themselves will file a complaint. The question then becomes what else is this person doing, can we catch them in the act, etc.
So now we have relatively high-profile cases that more information is needed about but that information isn't forthcoming. Sure, you could assign 2 people on three shifts to follow the person but that is going to get expensive fast. It also presupposes that the manpower is available and today in law enforcement it simply is not available - there are no "extra" six people. So some kind of tracking that doesn't require humans doing the tracking is needed. The "new law enforcement" is operating with fewer and fewer bodies and more and more technology. Not only is policing an unpopular job these days but at nearly every level the budget just keeps getting cut back further and further. Remember when two-person patrol cars where the norm? Most police cars today have a laptop bracket blocking the passenger seat making two-person patrols impossible. The manpower simply doesn't exist any longer.
Push hard enough against GPS tracking and we will have optical systems using either LEO satellites (lots of 'em) or solar-powered drones. The LEO satellites would be tough to coordinate and we might not have all the kinks worked out of that right now. The drones are clearly less than five years away and might be nearly as cost effective as GPS tracking is today.
Today a GPS tracker with a cell phone is pretty easy to find. A optical tracking drone flying around at 10,000 feet is impossible to find. The motivation is clearly present, so be careful what you wish for. If GPS isn't an option then something else will be used and it will likely be more intrusive and less detectable.
The problem we have in the US is no reprocessing and a general attitude that reprocessing is bad. It's bad because it is easy to get plutonium out of reprocessing which then gives you the gateway to weapons.
Anyway, there certainly is some waste after reprocessing. But the ratios are on the order of 1000lbs of fuel rods to 10lbs of waste output. The other 990lbs go into new fuel rods. The efficiency of fuel reprocessing is such that you can continue to run without adding new fissile materials for quite a while. I don't have all the math at my fingertips but a "spent" fuel rod is in actually anything but. It accumulates compounds which make continued use in a power reactor less than optimal. Removing these trace compounds and reforming the fuel pellets and packaging them up is really all that is necessary. Of course, one of the "trace compounds" that is necessary to remove is plutonium. My understanding is that under normal circumstances you don't get a lot from each fuel rod but you can accumulate enough for a bomb pretty easily. Given that nothing is easy with plutonium to begin with.
Why is the US even attempting to build a secure spent fuel rod storage facility? Well, that is the truth - we're not. There is no point to putting spent fuel rods into some kind of storage when they need to be reprocessed into new fuel rods. What we seem to be doing is storing them temporarily until the political climate reaches the point where fuel reprocessing is viable. Until then, everything sits in temporary storage locations.
Fukashima proves this is a silly strategy. The US or France or SOMEBODY should be doing large scale fuel reprocessing so this insane temporary storage situation ends soon.
You are missing the point. What this is supposed to do is educate the masses that you cannot "own" another life form and that every life form has inalienable rights. Trying to "own" a dog, cat, fish or snake is violating its rights as a life form and should not be allowed. It is a small but important extension of "equal rights" by not limiting the equality to just one type of life form but extending it to all life forms.
Gosh, when you put it that way maybe it doesn't sound so extreme.
Except clearly you can make the argument that selling insecticides is aiding and abetting mass murder and should be subject to the death penalty. Hiring an exterminator is pretty much the same as hiring a contract killer... wait, it is exactly the same.
Clearly we can extend this to the point that the killing of head lice is wanton mass killing that should not be permitted. Taking a shower is potentially flushing away to a certain death all sorts of single-cell animals, tiny insects and other things. Is that all humans know how to do is kill, kill, kill?
Obviously, I have heard this argument before and once you understand where these people are coming from it is clear there is no middle ground we can agree upon. This insanity cannot be allowed to take root.
Most publishers are using a copyright statement that prohibits scanning or any other conversion and storage in an "electronic data system". With this copyright statement I do not believe it would be permissible to scan the book or do anything else that results in the text in any digital form.
These copyright statements became pretty popular in the 1970s, so don't blame e-readers.
This is also simply a fact of consumer electronics. If you are going to make 100,000 of them then every $0.10 you spend additional costs $10,000 in reality. So if you can trim $0.10 from the cost there is a net gain of $10,000. And that is if there is only 100,000 boxes made while in reality it is far more likely we are talking about 10,000,000 boxes. That makes it even worse.
So anything that can be done to decrease unit costs will be done. If the poor little programmer has to work harder and longer - even if something costs $50,000 in programming but saves $1 per box of course it is going to be done.
Flash memory added? Ha. Not a chance. Enhanced power supplies with a standby option? Not going to happen. Adding the hardware so it would be possible to have the box "wake up" when really needed? No, sorry, not unless someone makes them.
The other problem is that the idea of waking up when needed is a non-trivial exercise. You have scheduled recordings, you have things that have to be tracked from the head-end - like shutdown orders and software updates. Obviously, you have the user trying to watch TV. All of these things have to be able to trigger a wake-up and the operator isn't going to like shutdown orders taking perhaps days to be recognized. Trying to have the box in a standby mode except when needed isn't all that simple - especially when the head-end "knows" that the boxes are continuously connected and running. Reconfiguring the entire system end-to-end to support power management in the home isn't something that the box makers are going to want to do.
Can it be done? Sure. Will it increase costs to the consumer? Of course. Whatever power savings there might be will be lost in the increased box costs. Just increasing the box rental from $5 a month to $6 would wipe it out. But some folks will feel better about it.
Personally, I'd like to think we are building an electric supply infrastructure that will be reliable on into the future. We do not have it today. In the US we are on the edge of rolling blackouts to manage the electric supply and no amount of conservation will change that fact.
I think the answer the previous poster was suggesting was "stop using electric power". It is OK in small quantities, like maybe rooftop solar on small houses so they can have a radio and maybe a couple of light bulbs. But no more large-scale power production.
I suppose then you can chalk up the people that die from environmental conditions (heat, cold, etc.) to being the fault of the power companies not having planned for the future. The truth is in the US we simply haven't kept up with demand - we are relying on the infrastructure built in the 1960s and 1970s to keep things going and because it was massively overbuilt then we have been able to. All that is coming to an end. Even if we started building coal plants today, nationwide, we wouldn't have them online for years. Years after we needed them. If we start building solar generating plants, wind farms or nuclear plants we will never see them come online. Once the power in the US starts being turned off on a regular basis the idea of electricity being reliable and constant is over - no new capacity will be needed.
It is going to be a tough problem for people that work with computers, because unless you are pedaling to keep yours running, it will be something that you can use sometimes but you can't count on being available.
Farm production? It will be far less reliant on petroleum products and far more reliant on human effort. Instead of Roundup we can have people pulling weeds. Today there are at least 8 million people in the US that don't have jobs and most of them will never work again. They could easily be working in farm fields weeding.
Ah, but the technology isn't there for everyone. Only a select few. Once IP TV gets beyond an early adopter stage it is doomed because the systems for delivering Internet content simply can't handle sending even 1 or 2 Mbps streams to every single house off the same DSLAM or neighborhood node.
I bought 3 Roku boxes for different locations and I figure they are good for a maximum of 2-3 years at which point the whole "streaming" thing is going to end. Because the network capacity simply isn't there.
Broadcast works because everyone gets the same stream. Individual streams would work if we didn't have a star configuration network and had every single house with its own fiber to the backbone. Since that isn't going to happen for maybe 10-15 years, you can consider streaming to be a blip that will be quickly forgotten.
The problem is, how many people? And, are they paying attention? On broadcast and cable TV there are systems and processes in place to track the viewership and stickiness of the ads - no such thing exists for Hulu or any of the other services. So if you are going to pony up $50,000 for a 30-second ad, you have a choice: you can show it on late-night cable TV where they can tell you 5376.327 people will pay attention to it (out of the 155,000 that will see it) and you can see this reflected in your marketing numbers, or you can punt and hope for the best on Hulu with no stats at all. Maybe they can tell you after the fact how many people viewed your ad.
It is all in the numbers. And marketing people are going to spend on things where they can get real feedback and up-front numbers about how effective their spending is going to be. The Internet doesn't really have that today and isn't going to for a long, long time. It is one reason why Internet advertising is as disorganized as it is. Google controlling 90% of it doesn't help either.
What you are likely seeing are all of the ads they have available. If more ad space sells, then they will have a larger variety of ads to play. Unfortunately, I don't think there is much in the way of precise valuation of the ad space as there is in other media. So probably the ads are very expensive, which limits the sales of the ad space.
This seems to be the same problem with other TV-with-ads on the Internet services. Not much depth in the ads, at least not yet.
If that was what this standard was about I might be in favor of it. Instead it involves a whole lot of handshaking between the power supply and the device connected to it which is going to require a lot more than two power connection pins. So we have a four, five or more pin connector that is mandated to be on every device and probably quite fragile. Very, very customized because it has two heavy-duty power pins and the rest can be wimpy data connections. And every power supply now needs to have a custom chip with a processor that can negotiate the power voltage and current with the device. The device needs a custom chip as well.
Do you see the costs going up and up here? And the reliability going down and down?
Look, it isn't as though Apple has gained nothing from their "innovation" (assuming they actually invented it) of this magnetic plug. But having this as yet another thing which only works on Macs, which everyone else is legally forbidden from adding with or without Apple's help...
Wrong. Other companies are not legally forbidden from using - they just have to pay a licensing fee.
So Apple came up with a good design and they can get paid by other companies looking to use their good design. Or, the other companies can figure out some other approach which might be better. This is a much better situation that other companies just copying what seems to be "good enough" which is what you seem to advocate. Good enough is fine for some things, but it doesn't lead to innovation. Why not have companies seeking a better solution?
I have heard of this standard and it requires a processor in the power supply and a substantial digital interface in the device it is powering. They handshake where the device says what kind of current and voltage is required and the power supply then responds with what is actually available. The device then must determine if that is suitable or not and if so tells the power supply to then supply power.
It is a hugely complicated mechanism that is open to all sorts of failures, any of which result in no power to the device. It adds some custom chips to both the power supply and powered device which have to be powered somehow before the full power capability is turned on. That means there really needs to be two power supplies, one for the initial handshake and one for the main power.
It does not mean that every power supply will work with every device, it just insures that when an incompatible power supply is connected that neither the device nor the power supply is damaged. It does absolutely open the door to a universal power connector with more than two connections. I'd expect there would have to be at least four (power, ground, data in, data out) but it could be even more than that. Of course these new multipin connectors are going to be fragile on both the supply and the device, leading to yet another point of failure.
I understand that some people might be frustrated with having custom connectors to ensure the wrong power supply isn't connected but what this does is mandate a standard connector and incompatible power supplies which is hardly the solution.
The truth of the matter is that as long as there is one organization that gets money from paid attendance, TV coverage and Internet delivery the Internet delivery is going to suffer. There is no money in it and it might tend to compete with the other two where big money is involved.
The solution is to have pirate broadcasts on the Internet that would absolutely compete with the TV coverage and paid attendance. Since one or two of the unofficial cameramen might tend to be thrown out of the venue, it is important to have a bunch of them. The assumption being that they can't throw all of them out. We are going to need to have some really small transmitter equipment with great bandwidth to at least get out to the truck in the parking lot for this to work.
Unfortunately, considering the personalities involved, it is unlikely you are going to be able to find 10 people of the "pirate" persuasion to work together on anything. So this will remain a fantasy. Again, piracy wins while losing.
That is a myth, based on some stuff that is pretty old these days.
The specifications for audio say that there only has to be addressing every 15 frames, but in reality most audio tracks have addressing in nearly every frame. It used to be (1988-1999) that CD drives would go by the addressing that was present and would pick a frame with an address every time, no matter what. If you provided an address to read that wasn't there you would get an earlier or later frame depending on the drive and its firmware.
Along around 2000 or so CD drives started using more buffer space and would read lots of sectors in. This allowed them to do "accurate" CD-DA positioning, meaning that if an address was missing from a frame it could be inferred by an earlier frame with an address. All it takes to do this is lots of buffer space which wasn't possible with drives that had less than 32K of buffer space. Throw a couple of megabytes in the drive as buffer space and many more things become possible.
So today there is no inaccuracy in positioning and all drives report the attribute of "Accurate CD-DA positioning". Dig out an old Mitumi from 1995 and it will not report that and it will do odd things with audio tracks, especially those with really sparse positioning information.
A "music CD" disc has an application code manufactured into it. It is otherwise identical to all other CD-R discs. You can't take a general purpose CD-R (application code 255) and decide to make it into a music CD-R with an application code of 1.
Most CD-R discs that you buy in a store were made in a factory with little or no quality control and the work was contracted by some company that simply sells CDs under their own brand. Most of them are junk because the dye isn't one of the expensive, patented dyes that have to be licensed - they are using cheaper, less stable dyes. If a few thousand discs come out bad, well... who is going to complain? Who are they going to complain to? Nobody is going to complain to anyone important in the process, so it can be ignored.
Quality control is expensive and the stable dyes are expensive. If you want cheap discs, skip both and you can have cheap discs. Just don't expect them to last a really long time.
Absolutely, ISPs will see that it is necessary to expand network capacity. They did this once from around 1995 to 2008. It took around 13 years for it to happen all over the country and now most cable systems can offer 20Mb/sec service. During this time the entire cable systems moved from RF distribution to digital distribution and neighborhood nodes. We also got "digital cable" service with these upgrades along the way to make room for more TV channels, HD TV and the 20Mb/sec Internet service.
It will likely take another 10-15 years to rebuild the systems to accomodate higher capacities. And who knows what else we will get with this.
Even if another private entity, outside of the cable/phone companies wanted to try and provide internet access, I imagine they will run in to the same road blocks. Also, you need to get local approval to be able to run your wires on the utility poles.
Usually the power company owns the poles and has sole discretion over what can be attached to them. The cable companies had a to pay for access, as did the phone companies. The new way is for each to run their own underground lines and not share anything. Of course, that only works for new construction, but it ensures there is no possible way into a community after underground service is established.
The problem is today if the government "operated" the Internet the way they operate other things we would have an Internet that was ruled by OSHA, EEOC, and dozens of other regulatory bodies. A blog posting that was viewed as violating any of these would have to be unviewable, certainly in the US and probably worldwide. I can't imagine a way you could have anything on the Internet that violated any protected group's rights.
Look at it this way - today's "pollution" (stuff dropped in the ocean) is recycled to become natural resources over time. Yes, it is geologic time but if you insist on thinking short-term you may as well view evaporation of water as polluting the atmosphere.
Think how much fresh water we could save every year if we covered the Great Lakes in a thin layer of plastic to keep the water from evaporating!
Your average cargo container is 30-40 tons. Being conservative, let's say 30 tons or 60,000 pounds. They aren't watertight, so they fill up with water quickly and remaining floatation is because of the lighter-than-water contents, like TV sets in styrofoam. Dragging one of these through water would be extremely difficult, bordering on the impossible - the loading on the tow line would be more than 60,000 pounds and it would be impossible to attach such a tow line. So you are going to have to lift it. With the water in it the load weight might be as much as 100,000 pounds.
You are going to need a ship with a displacement of over 200,000 pounds or 100 tons to even begin to think about salvaging one of these. I suppose you could have another container ship with a lot of ballast and a big (50 ton) crane that could lift such a thing. It would have enough displacement to handle the weight but might not handle the off-center load. Heck, I'm not sure you could put a big enough crane on a WWII aircraft carrier to lift such a thing without capsizing the ship.
Ships aren't made to lift such things. You might be able to custom-design something like a huge catamaran to sit over the container and lift it but nobody is that interested. It would have to be a huge ship and very expensive to build. Not to mention roaming the oceans looking for dropped containers. Just the fuel cost alone would zero out the salvage from one container, assuming it was salvagable anyway.
Just how much are waterlogged TV sets worth these days, anyway? Or iPads? Books? Magazines? Nope, I don't think anyone is all that interested in recovering this stuff. They just want it to sink out of sight.
You can't run a public transit system that caters to 1-2% of the population and only serves that number. It doesn't work without massive funding from the government, which people have consistently voted against.
When I was in Chicago in the 1960s the buses and electric trains there had plenty of riders and ran 24x7. Unfortunately, the result of a lot of government programs created the "inner city" mess that everyone should be familar with. It was no longer safe to ride public transit, so if you didn't absolutely have to, you did not. Ridership dropped. Fares increased because of this, so ridership dropped some more. They ended the 24x7 service because there were too few people to make it practical. The removed station attendents and got rid of every single person in the system they could do without. The trains became less and less safe to ride.
The end result of all of this is the train routes have been reconfigured, stations closed and buses cut way back. It is now something that is usable during rush hour and absolutely nobody goes anywhere near unless they have to. There have been attempts at bond issues for funding the CTA and every single one has failed. It is viewed that if it can't survive as an independent company, it shouldn't survive at all.
In other places rails that were used for trains have been torn up and the land used for something else. The rail lines aren't coming back - the land is tied up now. That decision was made in the 1950s and has just finally gotten around to being noticed.
End result is public transit is pretty much dead in the US. What was needed was massive government investment in the 1940s and 1950s to offset the investment in roads. It wasn't done, so public transit became less and less relevant to the people in the US. Sure there might be some people that it would be nice if public transit worked for, but they are far too few to support the system. It would now take the government spending billions of dollars each year in every major city to have a functional public transit system and for the most part it would be empty - except for the 1-2% that absolutely require it. It would still be a haven for crime and unsafe, but that is how we seemingly want to have inner cities.
You might be OK with that level of government spending, but apparently very few voters are. I suppose an alternative might be to tear up the highways that have been built over the last 60 years or so and force people to use the unsafe, crime-infested public transit system. It might get enough ridership to reduce the crime level then. But it would take that kind of thing to make it work. And that would cost hundreds of billions.
By the way, the US is broke and unless China wants to sponsor public transit in the US (maybe some nice Chinese buses?) we're not spending anything on public transit.
Slashdot Mirror
You could go to your local library and dig up copies of local forms that have been used. With some cleverness on a computer you could remove people's names from the documents you find there and substitute blank spaces or (oooh!) variables that are substituted by some really spiffy software.
Then you would have what LegalZoom has done. Oh, you might want one lawyer that has looked over the whole mess and said it was OK. You didn't really think LegalZoom is more than a web site and a call center did you?
As a forms respository, it serves some purpose. If you have a problem, say needed a simple will, you can find a form that will allow you to present your will in the proper style to be recognized by people who know what a will is supposed to look like and what it is supposed to contain. And if all you need really is a simple will, then you got what you needed at a really cheap price.
On the other hand, there is nobody to tell you when you cross the line from needing a simple will to needing something more complex. So you have a simple will and think everything is fine. The same problem comes with every other sort of form they offer. If the form they cough up is all you really need it is a great and cheap service. But there is no judgement about what else might be needed. For that some sort of creative thought or at least more than just a passing familiarity with the local laws is needed.
Sure, lawyers cost money and you can hope until your dying day that you never need one. But as many people have found out, when you need a lawyer the first criteria should not be cheap. If you already know enough to be able to tell when you need a lawyer vs. a form repository then LegalZoom is a great service - but there are free form repositories so you don't need to use LegalZoom to get a standard lease form. What LegalZoom really has is advertising which your local library (another form respository) doesn't have. If you listen to much radio (ugh!) you will hear endless ads for LegalZoom - but you never hear an ad for the library. In that way LegalZoom is far more effective at gathering your support than the library is.
Maybe libraries should start advertising?
You can use the same argument about doctors, or virtually any "profession" that claims to have standards. Auto mechanics have to be certified in some jurisdictions and you can bet there are laws in place in those locations that make it a crime to pretend to be an auto mechanic without proper (legal) certification.
This goes back to guilds and unions. If you aren't a member of the guild then you can't do whatever it is the guild members do, whether it is weaving, being an apothecary or a wheelwright. We have preserved this today with lots of professional societies and groups taking the place of the guilds. You can't be a lawyer if you don't pass the state bar exam - and, coincidently, join the bar association for the state. You can't be a doctor unless you are certified as a doctor in that state. And there are plenty of places where you can't be an electrician if you aren't a member of the IBEW union. Plumbers are required to be union plumbers in some places as well.
The defense of this is that you are at least partially assured of competence when dealng with a guild member. You have a "standards body" to go complain to if you are cheated or are dealt with incompetently. If you choose to deal with non-guild members you are pretty much on your own. Today if you prefer to go to an alternative medical practitioner who chants over you will dosing you with dung balls and mouse ears it is your legally-protected choice. However, if you don't get better or your broken leg doesn't heal properly good luck with (a) finding your practiticioner and (b) getting a lawsuit to stick. You might - might - have better luck with a non-union electrician in a jurisdiction where such are not legal.
So sure, the laws are most definitely on the side of the guilds. It has been that way for around a thousand years or so. The guilds exist for a reason and certainly a thousand years ago it was a very good reason. Today there are still some good reasons for them but the volume of cultural, societal and legal inertia behind the guilds makes it very unlikely we are going to move away from this sort of system any time soon.
Danger? What "danger"? I plug a USB flash drive into my computer and it prompts me with a message asking if I want to run the some program named TrojanPasswordCapture.exe or if I want to see the files on the flash drive.
OK, I suppose there are a few idiots out there that would click on "Run TrojanPasswordCapture.exe" just to see what it would do. Unfortunately, there are no cures for that sort of problem except taking the computer away from them.
The first question that needs to be answers is why there might be a case where getting a warrant is a problem when they are willing to expend the resources to attach the tracking device in the first place. These things are expensive - on the order of $1000 plus fees for the cell phone connection. So they can't attach one just on a whim, there has to be some reason. So what reasons would there be where a warrant would be a problem? I would guess that the most logical would be one where someone is clearly involved in the drug trade but not carrying actionable amounts of any controlled substance. It is hard to get a warrant on a "conspiracy" charge and nothing more to go on that a good guess. Think "mob accountant" also for an example of this.
I could also see situations where it is next to impossible to charge a person with a crime for stuff they are clearly doing so what is needed is finding something else they are doing that is actionable. One example would be someone making child porn videos but neither the parents who are getting well paid nor the children themselves will file a complaint. The question then becomes what else is this person doing, can we catch them in the act, etc.
So now we have relatively high-profile cases that more information is needed about but that information isn't forthcoming. Sure, you could assign 2 people on three shifts to follow the person but that is going to get expensive fast. It also presupposes that the manpower is available and today in law enforcement it simply is not available - there are no "extra" six people. So some kind of tracking that doesn't require humans doing the tracking is needed. The "new law enforcement" is operating with fewer and fewer bodies and more and more technology. Not only is policing an unpopular job these days but at nearly every level the budget just keeps getting cut back further and further. Remember when two-person patrol cars where the norm? Most police cars today have a laptop bracket blocking the passenger seat making two-person patrols impossible. The manpower simply doesn't exist any longer.
Push hard enough against GPS tracking and we will have optical systems using either LEO satellites (lots of 'em) or solar-powered drones. The LEO satellites would be tough to coordinate and we might not have all the kinks worked out of that right now. The drones are clearly less than five years away and might be nearly as cost effective as GPS tracking is today.
Today a GPS tracker with a cell phone is pretty easy to find. A optical tracking drone flying around at 10,000 feet is impossible to find. The motivation is clearly present, so be careful what you wish for. If GPS isn't an option then something else will be used and it will likely be more intrusive and less detectable.
The problem we have in the US is no reprocessing and a general attitude that reprocessing is bad. It's bad because it is easy to get plutonium out of reprocessing which then gives you the gateway to weapons.
Anyway, there certainly is some waste after reprocessing. But the ratios are on the order of 1000lbs of fuel rods to 10lbs of waste output. The other 990lbs go into new fuel rods. The efficiency of fuel reprocessing is such that you can continue to run without adding new fissile materials for quite a while. I don't have all the math at my fingertips but a "spent" fuel rod is in actually anything but. It accumulates compounds which make continued use in a power reactor less than optimal. Removing these trace compounds and reforming the fuel pellets and packaging them up is really all that is necessary. Of course, one of the "trace compounds" that is necessary to remove is plutonium. My understanding is that under normal circumstances you don't get a lot from each fuel rod but you can accumulate enough for a bomb pretty easily. Given that nothing is easy with plutonium to begin with.
Why is the US even attempting to build a secure spent fuel rod storage facility? Well, that is the truth - we're not. There is no point to putting spent fuel rods into some kind of storage when they need to be reprocessed into new fuel rods. What we seem to be doing is storing them temporarily until the political climate reaches the point where fuel reprocessing is viable. Until then, everything sits in temporary storage locations.
Fukashima proves this is a silly strategy. The US or France or SOMEBODY should be doing large scale fuel reprocessing so this insane temporary storage situation ends soon.
You are missing the point. What this is supposed to do is educate the masses that you cannot "own" another life form and that every life form has inalienable rights. Trying to "own" a dog, cat, fish or snake is violating its rights as a life form and should not be allowed. It is a small but important extension of "equal rights" by not limiting the equality to just one type of life form but extending it to all life forms.
Gosh, when you put it that way maybe it doesn't sound so extreme.
Except clearly you can make the argument that selling insecticides is aiding and abetting mass murder and should be subject to the death penalty. Hiring an exterminator is pretty much the same as hiring a contract killer... wait, it is exactly the same.
Clearly we can extend this to the point that the killing of head lice is wanton mass killing that should not be permitted. Taking a shower is potentially flushing away to a certain death all sorts of single-cell animals, tiny insects and other things. Is that all humans know how to do is kill, kill, kill?
Obviously, I have heard this argument before and once you understand where these people are coming from it is clear there is no middle ground we can agree upon. This insanity cannot be allowed to take root.
Most publishers are using a copyright statement that prohibits scanning or any other conversion and storage in an "electronic data system". With this copyright statement I do not believe it would be permissible to scan the book or do anything else that results in the text in any digital form.
These copyright statements became pretty popular in the 1970s, so don't blame e-readers.
This is also simply a fact of consumer electronics. If you are going to make 100,000 of them then every $0.10 you spend additional costs $10,000 in reality. So if you can trim $0.10 from the cost there is a net gain of $10,000. And that is if there is only 100,000 boxes made while in reality it is far more likely we are talking about 10,000,000 boxes. That makes it even worse.
So anything that can be done to decrease unit costs will be done. If the poor little programmer has to work harder and longer - even if something costs $50,000 in programming but saves $1 per box of course it is going to be done.
Flash memory added? Ha. Not a chance. Enhanced power supplies with a standby option? Not going to happen. Adding the hardware so it would be possible to have the box "wake up" when really needed? No, sorry, not unless someone makes them.
The other problem is that the idea of waking up when needed is a non-trivial exercise. You have scheduled recordings, you have things that have to be tracked from the head-end - like shutdown orders and software updates. Obviously, you have the user trying to watch TV. All of these things have to be able to trigger a wake-up and the operator isn't going to like shutdown orders taking perhaps days to be recognized. Trying to have the box in a standby mode except when needed isn't all that simple - especially when the head-end "knows" that the boxes are continuously connected and running. Reconfiguring the entire system end-to-end to support power management in the home isn't something that the box makers are going to want to do.
Can it be done? Sure. Will it increase costs to the consumer? Of course. Whatever power savings there might be will be lost in the increased box costs. Just increasing the box rental from $5 a month to $6 would wipe it out. But some folks will feel better about it.
Personally, I'd like to think we are building an electric supply infrastructure that will be reliable on into the future. We do not have it today. In the US we are on the edge of rolling blackouts to manage the electric supply and no amount of conservation will change that fact.
I think the answer the previous poster was suggesting was "stop using electric power". It is OK in small quantities, like maybe rooftop solar on small houses so they can have a radio and maybe a couple of light bulbs. But no more large-scale power production.
I suppose then you can chalk up the people that die from environmental conditions (heat, cold, etc.) to being the fault of the power companies not having planned for the future. The truth is in the US we simply haven't kept up with demand - we are relying on the infrastructure built in the 1960s and 1970s to keep things going and because it was massively overbuilt then we have been able to. All that is coming to an end. Even if we started building coal plants today, nationwide, we wouldn't have them online for years. Years after we needed them. If we start building solar generating plants, wind farms or nuclear plants we will never see them come online. Once the power in the US starts being turned off on a regular basis the idea of electricity being reliable and constant is over - no new capacity will be needed.
It is going to be a tough problem for people that work with computers, because unless you are pedaling to keep yours running, it will be something that you can use sometimes but you can't count on being available.
Farm production? It will be far less reliant on petroleum products and far more reliant on human effort. Instead of Roundup we can have people pulling weeds. Today there are at least 8 million people in the US that don't have jobs and most of them will never work again. They could easily be working in farm fields weeding.
Ah, but the technology isn't there for everyone. Only a select few. Once IP TV gets beyond an early adopter stage it is doomed because the systems for delivering Internet content simply can't handle sending even 1 or 2 Mbps streams to every single house off the same DSLAM or neighborhood node.
I bought 3 Roku boxes for different locations and I figure they are good for a maximum of 2-3 years at which point the whole "streaming" thing is going to end. Because the network capacity simply isn't there.
Broadcast works because everyone gets the same stream. Individual streams would work if we didn't have a star configuration network and had every single house with its own fiber to the backbone. Since that isn't going to happen for maybe 10-15 years, you can consider streaming to be a blip that will be quickly forgotten.
The problem is, how many people? And, are they paying attention? On broadcast and cable TV there are systems and processes in place to track the viewership and stickiness of the ads - no such thing exists for Hulu or any of the other services. So if you are going to pony up $50,000 for a 30-second ad, you have a choice: you can show it on late-night cable TV where they can tell you 5376.327 people will pay attention to it (out of the 155,000 that will see it) and you can see this reflected in your marketing numbers, or you can punt and hope for the best on Hulu with no stats at all. Maybe they can tell you after the fact how many people viewed your ad.
It is all in the numbers. And marketing people are going to spend on things where they can get real feedback and up-front numbers about how effective their spending is going to be. The Internet doesn't really have that today and isn't going to for a long, long time. It is one reason why Internet advertising is as disorganized as it is. Google controlling 90% of it doesn't help either.
What you are likely seeing are all of the ads they have available. If more ad space sells, then they will have a larger variety of ads to play. Unfortunately, I don't think there is much in the way of precise valuation of the ad space as there is in other media. So probably the ads are very expensive, which limits the sales of the ad space.
This seems to be the same problem with other TV-with-ads on the Internet services. Not much depth in the ads, at least not yet.
If that was what this standard was about I might be in favor of it. Instead it involves a whole lot of handshaking between the power supply and the device connected to it which is going to require a lot more than two power connection pins. So we have a four, five or more pin connector that is mandated to be on every device and probably quite fragile. Very, very customized because it has two heavy-duty power pins and the rest can be wimpy data connections. And every power supply now needs to have a custom chip with a processor that can negotiate the power voltage and current with the device. The device needs a custom chip as well.
Do you see the costs going up and up here? And the reliability going down and down?
Look, it isn't as though Apple has gained nothing from their "innovation" (assuming they actually invented it) of this magnetic plug. But having this as yet another thing which only works on Macs, which everyone else is legally forbidden from adding with or without Apple's help...
Wrong. Other companies are not legally forbidden from using - they just have to pay a licensing fee.
So Apple came up with a good design and they can get paid by other companies looking to use their good design. Or, the other companies can figure out some other approach which might be better. This is a much better situation that other companies just copying what seems to be "good enough" which is what you seem to advocate. Good enough is fine for some things, but it doesn't lead to innovation. Why not have companies seeking a better solution?
I have heard of this standard and it requires a processor in the power supply and a substantial digital interface in the device it is powering. They handshake where the device says what kind of current and voltage is required and the power supply then responds with what is actually available. The device then must determine if that is suitable or not and if so tells the power supply to then supply power.
It is a hugely complicated mechanism that is open to all sorts of failures, any of which result in no power to the device. It adds some custom chips to both the power supply and powered device which have to be powered somehow before the full power capability is turned on. That means there really needs to be two power supplies, one for the initial handshake and one for the main power.
It does not mean that every power supply will work with every device, it just insures that when an incompatible power supply is connected that neither the device nor the power supply is damaged. It does absolutely open the door to a universal power connector with more than two connections. I'd expect there would have to be at least four (power, ground, data in, data out) but it could be even more than that. Of course these new multipin connectors are going to be fragile on both the supply and the device, leading to yet another point of failure.
I understand that some people might be frustrated with having custom connectors to ensure the wrong power supply isn't connected but what this does is mandate a standard connector and incompatible power supplies which is hardly the solution.
The truth of the matter is that as long as there is one organization that gets money from paid attendance, TV coverage and Internet delivery the Internet delivery is going to suffer. There is no money in it and it might tend to compete with the other two where big money is involved.
The solution is to have pirate broadcasts on the Internet that would absolutely compete with the TV coverage and paid attendance. Since one or two of the unofficial cameramen might tend to be thrown out of the venue, it is important to have a bunch of them. The assumption being that they can't throw all of them out. We are going to need to have some really small transmitter equipment with great bandwidth to at least get out to the truck in the parking lot for this to work.
Unfortunately, considering the personalities involved, it is unlikely you are going to be able to find 10 people of the "pirate" persuasion to work together on anything. So this will remain a fantasy. Again, piracy wins while losing.
That is a myth, based on some stuff that is pretty old these days.
The specifications for audio say that there only has to be addressing every 15 frames, but in reality most audio tracks have addressing in nearly every frame. It used to be (1988-1999) that CD drives would go by the addressing that was present and would pick a frame with an address every time, no matter what. If you provided an address to read that wasn't there you would get an earlier or later frame depending on the drive and its firmware.
Along around 2000 or so CD drives started using more buffer space and would read lots of sectors in. This allowed them to do "accurate" CD-DA positioning, meaning that if an address was missing from a frame it could be inferred by an earlier frame with an address. All it takes to do this is lots of buffer space which wasn't possible with drives that had less than 32K of buffer space. Throw a couple of megabytes in the drive as buffer space and many more things become possible.
So today there is no inaccuracy in positioning and all drives report the attribute of "Accurate CD-DA positioning". Dig out an old Mitumi from 1995 and it will not report that and it will do odd things with audio tracks, especially those with really sparse positioning information.
A "music CD" disc has an application code manufactured into it. It is otherwise identical to all other CD-R discs. You can't take a general purpose CD-R (application code 255) and decide to make it into a music CD-R with an application code of 1.
Most CD-R discs that you buy in a store were made in a factory with little or no quality control and the work was contracted by some company that simply sells CDs under their own brand. Most of them are junk because the dye isn't one of the expensive, patented dyes that have to be licensed - they are using cheaper, less stable dyes. If a few thousand discs come out bad, well ... who is going to complain? Who are they going to complain to? Nobody is going to complain to anyone important in the process, so it can be ignored.
Quality control is expensive and the stable dyes are expensive. If you want cheap discs, skip both and you can have cheap discs. Just don't expect them to last a really long time.
Absolutely, ISPs will see that it is necessary to expand network capacity. They did this once from around 1995 to 2008. It took around 13 years for it to happen all over the country and now most cable systems can offer 20Mb/sec service. During this time the entire cable systems moved from RF distribution to digital distribution and neighborhood nodes. We also got "digital cable" service with these upgrades along the way to make room for more TV channels, HD TV and the 20Mb/sec Internet service.
It will likely take another 10-15 years to rebuild the systems to accomodate higher capacities. And who knows what else we will get with this.
Even if another private entity, outside of the cable/phone companies wanted to try and provide internet access, I imagine they will run in to the same road blocks. Also, you need to get local approval to be able to run your wires on the utility poles.
Usually the power company owns the poles and has sole discretion over what can be attached to them. The cable companies had a to pay for access, as did the phone companies. The new way is for each to run their own underground lines and not share anything. Of course, that only works for new construction, but it ensures there is no possible way into a community after underground service is established.
The problem is today if the government "operated" the Internet the way they operate other things we would have an Internet that was ruled by OSHA, EEOC, and dozens of other regulatory bodies. A blog posting that was viewed as violating any of these would have to be unviewable, certainly in the US and probably worldwide. I can't imagine a way you could have anything on the Internet that violated any protected group's rights.
Can't have government without regulation.
Eventually, it will be dragged into a subduction and mixed with a million tons of lava. New ores for someone to mine in a million years or so.
Look at it this way - today's "pollution" (stuff dropped in the ocean) is recycled to become natural resources over time. Yes, it is geologic time but if you insist on thinking short-term you may as well view evaporation of water as polluting the atmosphere.
Think how much fresh water we could save every year if we covered the Great Lakes in a thin layer of plastic to keep the water from evaporating!
Your average cargo container is 30-40 tons. Being conservative, let's say 30 tons or 60,000 pounds. They aren't watertight, so they fill up with water quickly and remaining floatation is because of the lighter-than-water contents, like TV sets in styrofoam. Dragging one of these through water would be extremely difficult, bordering on the impossible - the loading on the tow line would be more than 60,000 pounds and it would be impossible to attach such a tow line. So you are going to have to lift it. With the water in it the load weight might be as much as 100,000 pounds.
You are going to need a ship with a displacement of over 200,000 pounds or 100 tons to even begin to think about salvaging one of these. I suppose you could have another container ship with a lot of ballast and a big (50 ton) crane that could lift such a thing. It would have enough displacement to handle the weight but might not handle the off-center load. Heck, I'm not sure you could put a big enough crane on a WWII aircraft carrier to lift such a thing without capsizing the ship.
Ships aren't made to lift such things. You might be able to custom-design something like a huge catamaran to sit over the container and lift it but nobody is that interested. It would have to be a huge ship and very expensive to build. Not to mention roaming the oceans looking for dropped containers. Just the fuel cost alone would zero out the salvage from one container, assuming it was salvagable anyway.
Just how much are waterlogged TV sets worth these days, anyway? Or iPads? Books? Magazines? Nope, I don't think anyone is all that interested in recovering this stuff. They just want it to sink out of sight.
You can't run a public transit system that caters to 1-2% of the population and only serves that number. It doesn't work without massive funding from the government, which people have consistently voted against.
When I was in Chicago in the 1960s the buses and electric trains there had plenty of riders and ran 24x7. Unfortunately, the result of a lot of government programs created the "inner city" mess that everyone should be familar with. It was no longer safe to ride public transit, so if you didn't absolutely have to, you did not. Ridership dropped. Fares increased because of this, so ridership dropped some more. They ended the 24x7 service because there were too few people to make it practical. The removed station attendents and got rid of every single person in the system they could do without. The trains became less and less safe to ride.
The end result of all of this is the train routes have been reconfigured, stations closed and buses cut way back. It is now something that is usable during rush hour and absolutely nobody goes anywhere near unless they have to. There have been attempts at bond issues for funding the CTA and every single one has failed. It is viewed that if it can't survive as an independent company, it shouldn't survive at all.
In other places rails that were used for trains have been torn up and the land used for something else. The rail lines aren't coming back - the land is tied up now. That decision was made in the 1950s and has just finally gotten around to being noticed.
End result is public transit is pretty much dead in the US. What was needed was massive government investment in the 1940s and 1950s to offset the investment in roads. It wasn't done, so public transit became less and less relevant to the people in the US. Sure there might be some people that it would be nice if public transit worked for, but they are far too few to support the system. It would now take the government spending billions of dollars each year in every major city to have a functional public transit system and for the most part it would be empty - except for the 1-2% that absolutely require it. It would still be a haven for crime and unsafe, but that is how we seemingly want to have inner cities.
You might be OK with that level of government spending, but apparently very few voters are. I suppose an alternative might be to tear up the highways that have been built over the last 60 years or so and force people to use the unsafe, crime-infested public transit system. It might get enough ridership to reduce the crime level then. But it would take that kind of thing to make it work. And that would cost hundreds of billions.
By the way, the US is broke and unless China wants to sponsor public transit in the US (maybe some nice Chinese buses?) we're not spending anything on public transit.