This tax is that if you, the consumer, are living in California and buy anything, anywhere the retailer has to collect California sales tax and submit it. A business located in California that you, a California resident, buy from already has to collect California sales tax and submit it.
The problem with this idea is that any operation much smaller than Amazon now has to (a) register to collect California sales taxes and (b) start collecting them. Step A is relatively painless but it means that if you sell one item once in California you now have to submit a report every month regardless of any sales activity in California. Failure to submit a report means you are subject to fines.
Simple solution for small and medium size retailers on the Internet is to simply change their process a little bit so that when you pick CA as the state you get a message that says "Sorry, we don't sell to California" and redirects you to Amazon. Longer term, this is probably going to happen everywhere so the small retailer is just going to have to hire some outside processing company to handle it. Dealing with sales tax nationwide is a pain and very compilcated because of state, county, municipal, township, city and village taxes. It means you need a complicated system that is kept up to date which has all of the tax information nearly by zip code - worse, I'm not sure zip codes do not cross taxing authority boundaries. There are such companies now that provide this service, so they are just going to (eventually) get a lot more customers.
For the short term, I am going to guess that it gets a lot harder to buy certain things over the Internet in California.
The problem is that today low cost is going to rule. Not security, not responsiveness to issues. Just low cost. If a provider cannot handle "low cost", then they aren't going to be in the running for anything else.
This model has been tried before and it has consistently failed over time. Sure, Company A can save 50% of their IT costs by moving everything over to Cloud Provider X, and the numbers look really, really good. Until Company B comes in and notices they can see all of Company A's data using some trick that occurred to them. They can report it to someone responsible, they can post it on Fark or maybe they can exploit it. Obviously, to get the low, low costs Provider X didn't do a great job on security other than a really pretty facade.
The same thing happened with whole-IT-department outsourcing. To make it attractive the costs had to be low. To get the low costs some (often hidden) shortcuts were taken. People found out about the shortcuts way, way later - sometimes after they were completely committed to the outsourcing deal.
So what is the difference between whole-IT-department outsourcing and "the Cloud" today? Basically nothing. Will it work any better for the folks that go that route? Probably not, but if you don't understand how the outsourcing model worked for people you will be doomed to repeat that history.
A huge problem is that in computing today (at all levels, from management to low-level coding) there is insufficient respect for history and older people that have actually lived through that history. The end result is things like file systems being created which have no hope of dealing with media errors - exactly the same mistake that was in the first UNIX and VM/370 implementations. Same thing with a lot of security - people have been living with fine-grained and course-grained access controls for years and can easily recite the problems with each. But some new college graduate comes along and tells people they have a great new way of handling security much better than what is in Windows or Linux. End result? Rediscovery of the same problems that people knew all about in 1985 when said college grad was in diapers. But to much of management today they look at someone over 40 and will openly say that old people are useless and they have to have a young, energetic staff.
If they did nothing illegal, keeping them out of medical school is clearly discrimination.
You can call it discrimination between qualified and unqualified people, but it is still discrimination and they can probably sue to gain entry. I'd say with some juries they might stand a pretty good chance of winning a lawsuit.
The creators and maintainers of HTML and XHTML have said over and over that the language is a description of content and absolutely not in any manner a design for presentation. Presentation was to be left to the browser and the user.
Well, that lasted all of about five minutes. The first thing that came along was the use of white-space spacing graphics and tables to push things around so they looked consistent across varying screen widths - so that the 800x600 screen looked like the 1024x768 screen. To make the presentation customized as designed by the web developer (and whoever is paying them) and to have a consistent user experience. Not at all what the design of HTML is for.
So today we have web sites developed with the specific intent of circumventing the design of HTML and XHTML. Amazingly, these design hacks are not something that anyone really tests for in browser development - they are interested in developing something that meets the criteria of the design of HTML, not the intent of the web developer. In a few cases there are actually things that have been adopted into the browser design to make the web developer's life easier. Since these things are clearly non-standard and unique to a particular browser they make the web developer's life hell.
So where there were maybe 4 or 5 specific platforms to test against before, now there are far more. 15? 20? More?
The real solution is to have a web presentation language that does define presentation, which is what just about everyone really wants. Except for the maintainers of the HTML standard. Not only is the problem not going to get any better, by definition we have two groups moving in different directions. It is going to get a lot worse and probably at an expotential rate.
Could it be a Canadian settlement has something to do with this? After all, the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the US dollar, so some adjustment to your figures is required.
It isn't like the US dollar is some kind of international standard any more.
Besides, US music is probably worth less in Canada anyway.
The problem is that outside of Richard Stallman's world there are two very different groups of people. The first group RHS is familiar with and it includes people that can program computers and pick up just about any piece of code in any language and instantly be able to adapt and modify this piece of code. Why would this group of people pay anything for something from open source?
The second group of people, which RHS claims (implicitly) does not exist, is actually in reality a far larger group. It consists of people that cannot program a computer, couldn't write a "hello world" program in any language at all, including LOGO or BASIC. It also includes people that are being paid lots of money to write programs for a particular platform and a particular environment and really don't have the time, energy or inclination to get involved with some other environment.
Now this large group might just pay someone for a port of some open source thing to a different platform. Heck, they might pay someone for a cleanly complied binary with all of the dependencies taken care of wrapped up in a neat installer for whatever platform they wanted it for. Sure, they could do it, but how long would it take? If you are being paid $100 an hour to write stuff for Windows and would really like a rsync implementation for Windows but don't have one how much would you pay? (Hint: rsync has some really major dependencies and is available or free... just not installable neatly on Windows.)
Gosh, they might actually pay quite a bit. So this guy was catering to the non-programmers of the world and people were paying him. Imagine that.
In Richard Stallman's world apparently there are programmers and there are pampered cats. If you aren't a programmer, well, you are incapable of exercising the sort of "rights" that he envisions as being really important. Obviously, non-programmers are at best second-class citizens because they can't exercise their rights. More like a pampered cat because while they can imagine they are battling fierce prey they are in reality batting at a stuffed mouse toy held by their owner - someone that can program.
Much like landowners and serfs, only landowners (programmers) have rights. The serfs are utterly dependent on their landowners.
Well, there is some currency to the idea of anthropomorphising everything.
So, how would you view it from the potato's perspective? Death, wouldn't you say? Probably pretty terrorising, wouldn't you say? So from the potato's perspective these people are clearly terrorists. Genocidal mass-murderers.
Just because your worldview doesn't encompass the viewpoint of the potato doesn't mean theirs isn't valid.
Yes, you can do that with a potato. You cannot do that with just about any other current food crop in the Western hemisphere. They are all hybrids and have been since around 1960 or so. In the 70s we spread this around the world so today it is doubtful that you can grow corn anywhere and use it as seed the next year. All of the corn you can buy in seed form today is hybridized and doesn't produce viable seeds.
Excuse me, but have you driven through the US anytime since 1950?
Nobody has been planting seeds harvested from the same farm since then, because nearly all of the crops have been grown from hybrid seeds - which do not reproduce.
In the 1970s we shipped the hybridizing technology overseas and it significantly changed how crops were grown in places like India. Yes, they were using traditional methods and getting fairly low yields by comparison with the West. New crops (hybrids) changed that and increased the yields significantly. Everyone was getting more food and the farmers were getting more out of the same ground. No, they couldn't plant seeds from their crop anymore.
Now people are saying that with GMO it is somehow different. I don't see the difference. Nobody in the US, Canada or probably anywhere in the EU has been planting anything except hybrid crops for the last 50 years or so.
Because in the Western world, if not the entire world, we had this thing called the "green revolution" back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s which resulted in the propogation of hybrid crops everywhere.
So don't farmers have to buy seeds every year anyway?
I was under the impression that nearly all crop plants where hybrids since the beginning of the "green revolution" worldwide. Meaning, the wheat, beans, peas and corn that is grown today is sterile. Nothing to do with GM, just hybridizing the crops for better yields and resistance.
Don't forget that while renting a 12-year-old girl (or boy) (or even younger) in Thailand seems to be perfectly legal, you can be arrested for it when you return to the US under the "sex tourism" laws.
Just because raping 12-year-old girls (or boys) is illegal in the US, the act is committed in Thailand. Thailand seems to not ever arrest people for this sort of crime.
The difference is that in the US it would be civil suit which would go forward. Criminal charges would certainly never stick.
Depending on the court, I don't think I would like to be a defendant in a civil case in the US. Scientists are held in especially low regard by most of the population and anything that can be done to "get 'em" or to serve up a (supposedly) well-deserved cumuppance would certainly be favored by many, many people. Certainly you wouldn't want a jury to get anywhere near this.
All I can hope is that people in Italy are all uniformily well-educated, never listen to rap music and think getting a high grade point average is a goal for everyone to strive for. Ha ha ha ha. If it goes to a jury, these folks are cooked.
You must have done something to piss someone off. While it sounds like this was an ATM card where limits don't apply - or at least didn't until recently - I have never heard of anyone losing out on lost or stolen cards.
Of course, mostly that is dealing with credit cards, not debit/ATM cards where it is in the bank's interest to push as much liability onto you as possible. With credit cards it is always the merchant that loses out.
This is something to keep in mind. With a credit card there are four agents involved - the card holder, the person using the number to steal, the merchant and the credit card company. Nobody ever loses except the merchant. With a debit card there are only three agents: the bank, the cardholder and the thief. Of course the thief never loses but it is absolutely in the bank's interest to put all of the problems onto the cardholder. Which they do as much as possible every time.
So if you buy a meal in a resturant with a credit card and the number is sold (which it will, sooner or later) the merchant that takes it loses. It is a minor inconvenience to you the cardholder. But if you use a debit card they can get every time in your account, overdraft it and keep on taking. The bank will push it all back on you saying you were careless or somehow else at fault.
So remind me again why anyone would ever use a debit card?
The stores already sell the data to aggregators. The raw scan data plus loyalty card information. Every single item that is scanned at a checkout station.
The stores make some money from this, but the aggregators make a lot more for analysis and packaging it all up. No manufacturer in their right mind isn't buying this information because they have to know who is buying what. It guides product development decisions and what to do with current products.
Google would be in the unique position of being both the collector (ding!) and aggregator (ding! ding! ding!). They would be making money from all phases of it.
Right. Google doesn't give away this information - it has value. They sell it.
For example, how much do you think their recent survey of all the wireless routers in the world is worth to wireless router manufacturers? To know what routers are being used in more affluent zip codes as opposed to poorer districts? Also, based on signal strength the Google data probably has an 80-90% correlation of router MAC address to street address, and you can get all sorts of demographic data from a street address. I have no idea what Google is selling this data for, but you better believe that it is worth a lot.
If this became a common payment method - which I doubt - it would give Google a huge marketing data revenue stream, probably worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
I don't see it happening anytime soon, because it depends on the NFC communication chip being in the phone. Not there is just about any phone today and unlikely to just pop in so Google can make even more money.
Ah, but you miss the opportunity for folks to install the "New Unblocking DNS Mod" which grants you access to all sorts of pirated content. For only $10 you open up your computer and let some pirate application do whatever and you get access restored to the pirate sites you were being blocked from.
Of course, you also just installed some software which returns your passwords to somewhere else. But that is why the software that changes the DNS servers is so cheap.
Tell me, how does a online review site that is ad-supported find the resources to "take down all of the bogus reviews?" There is no way to distinguish between a "real" review and a "bogus" review unless the bogus one is stupid and obvious upon its face.
A review that simply saws in calm language using good English and correct spelling that says its' a nice restaurant but the cooks keep sneezing while cooking and that you only got a little sick isn't obviously bogus. Maybe the IP address being from a different state might be a clue to such a site, but they probably don't keep that sort of information around. Alternatively, one that talks about the mouldy food, uncleaned restrooms and Grays abducting other patrons might be just a bit too much over the top to be real.
The answer to this is pretty simply. Anyone that believes an online review is simply being a tool. Someone with an agenda wrote the review - maybe the business being reviewed, maybe just an irate customer that didn't get as good a BJ in the parking lot as they thought they should have. You can't tell, there is no way to tell and because it is all anonymous or semi-anonymous it should all be treated as bogus.
We have recently seen a transition for cable systems in the US to to neighborhood nodes connected by fiber to the head end also known as FTTN. This has allowed a huge expansion in the bandwidth allowed to the home - and similarly a huge expansion in the bandwidth being consumed. DSL has gotten somewhat better as well, although with most of the US still having quite a bit of very old copper lines there is a very distinct limit as to how far DSL can go.
The problem is that the bandwidth increase took maybe 10 years to propate to the homes. It took nearly that long for the connections to finally reach every home. And the neighborhood node connection is maxed out. What is the next step? Well, any configuration that involves a neighborhood node will fail to deliver significantly greater bandwidth, and that certainly include FIOS and FTTH. These implementations involve a feed to a node and fiber distribution from that node to the homes being served.
Sure, when there is 1Gb being served to the node it means that the 10 early adopters in the neighborhood can get 100Mb/sec service 24x7. But what happens when there are 1000 homes connected and every single one of them has been sold on some IPTV solution? 1Gb/1000 = 1Mb/sec which is too slow for even the best HD compression techniques today.
Can they make the connection to the node 100Gb instead of 1Gb? I believe it is possible but it will involve a similiar investment that the changeover to FTTN required and likely take another 10 years or so.
I have two Roku boxes served off a Cox connection. I figure they are good for 2-3 years absolute maximum at which point there will be no more live streaming. You will have to make a selection and download the content to the box to play later. This will keep Netflix serving media online cheaply but means Roku has to have lots of local storage to become a media server. Sure, go ahead an buy an expensive solution and it will be obsolete in 2-3 years. The Roku has the benefit of being $100 for the 1080i HD 802.11N version and $79 for the 720p 802.11g versionm cheap enough to throw away in 2-3 years when it stops working. The same fate awaits everything but the game consoles which might have enough local storage to buffer content.
Spammers aren't paid by people that buy. Spammers are paid by the number of messages sent or messages opened. So if they can fool you into opening it, you just got them paid.
You might think that spammers wouldn't get customers any longer. The problem with that is... it does work! Send out 10 million emails and you get 10 customers you didn't have before. Assuming it is your standard sort of uncancellable subscription credit card purchase (free - just pay shipping and handling!!!) they probably get $100 for each customer. So they only need a few customers to pay for spamming.
There is no solution to this problem, other than rejecting all email. Maybe allow SPF-validated email but that isn't absolute as I am sure there are SPF records that allow sending from any IP address. Face-to-face communication is pretty much the only way to avoid the problem. Insist on it. Email is unreliable and insecure. Telephones are monitored, recorded, tracked and can be easily spoofed so you think it is your friend Fred when it is a telemarketer. Face to face, it is the only way to be sure.
You miss the point. There are clearly and identifiably two classes of users: knowledgable and those that are using an appliance.
For the appliance users, taking away the URL entry capability is good. Taking away the ability to install random malware is good. Administering the computer remotely (when needed at all) is good. In short, anything that can be done to make it so people that aren't interested in learning "about" computers only how to basically used one do not have to is good.
For the minority that is really interested, they can use something else.
OK, but what do you think should be done about architectural firms that design US prisons? Clearly these buildings were not designed to be safe or else there wouldn't be such problems in prisons.
How about cell phone manufacturers? Any idiot could have foreseen that if "texting" is possible in a moving vehicle there will be drivers that recklessly endanger others by driving while distracted. The cell phone manufacturers didn't listen to their idiots and released phones that enabled this kind of behavior without any warnings whatsoever. Even gun manuacturers sell things like trigger locks and provide copious instructions about how NOT to kill people accidently.
What about chemical companies that continue to make lead-based paint, thus allowing its use on children's toys?
Once you start holding people and companies responsible for secondary effects of their products there is no end to the list of wrondoers you can find.
The problem with this sort of thing is the fact that laws are actually different in different places.
See, Falun Gong is an illegal organization in China. The members are breaking the law by simply being members. After that, the punishment for being a member is perhaps severe, but nonetheless, it is punishment for being a member of an outlawed group.
Similarly, it is illegal in modern-day Germany to belong to the Nazi party. This group is outlawed and membership in it is illegal. While you might not rate much torture or death, such membership is going to be frowned upon severely by the German government. Up to and including imprisonment.
In the US it is difficult to point to an organization that is illegal to belong to, but I suspect openly disclosing that you are a member of Hamas or Hizbollah could rate you at least a swift deportation and might cause problems in gaining entry to the US if you went about it in the conventional manner. Currently in the US it is not illegal to belong to a group that is exclusively formed for the purposes of committing crimes, such as street gangs, motorcycle gangs, or the Mafia.
While it might be all noble and such to say that China should just let groups that violently disagree with their government exist in peace, it isn't happening. China seems to be highly motivated to make the lives of people that want to change (forcibly, if not violently) the government a living hell. Sort of discourages revolution when the potential leaders are imprisoned. While we may disagree with this policy, they are being nothing if not consistent in their treatment of members of illegal organizations. Cisco has very little to do with the policy and its implementation. Had they simply refused to be part of the implementation someone else would have stepped up. When we make individuals and companies liable for such downstream actions I am all for going after Cisco but first I think we better start thinking about architectural firms that design prisons. Then we can talk about cell phone manufacturers making driving-while-distracted possible.
Maybe in 50 years or so after we deal with all of the other problems, we can get around to Cisco.
Samonella isn't present inside eggs, it is present almost uniformly on the outside of the egg. In egg factories where the hens are in small cages the even mixture of chicken poo in and around the cages makes it a virtual certanty that you will get some on the eggs. At least in the US if you aren't washing off your eggs before breaking them you are likely mixing some chicken poo with the insides of the egg. Hence, contamination.
If we had 1/10th the supply of eggs we might be able to go back to the situation where you go out to the hen house and pick up the eggs from a nest where the chicken sits to lay and brood. The chickens aren't contained in any way and spend lots of time off the nest, hence lots less chicken poo coating the eggs. But we don't have 1/10th the demand for eggs today so this doesn't really work unless you want to have $10 eggs.
I guess another solution is 1/10 the population but we don't seem to have many volunteers for that either.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but that isn't what this tax is about.
This tax is that if you, the consumer, are living in California and buy anything, anywhere the retailer has to collect California sales tax and submit it. A business located in California that you, a California resident, buy from already has to collect California sales tax and submit it.
The problem with this idea is that any operation much smaller than Amazon now has to (a) register to collect California sales taxes and (b) start collecting them. Step A is relatively painless but it means that if you sell one item once in California you now have to submit a report every month regardless of any sales activity in California. Failure to submit a report means you are subject to fines.
Simple solution for small and medium size retailers on the Internet is to simply change their process a little bit so that when you pick CA as the state you get a message that says "Sorry, we don't sell to California" and redirects you to Amazon. Longer term, this is probably going to happen everywhere so the small retailer is just going to have to hire some outside processing company to handle it. Dealing with sales tax nationwide is a pain and very compilcated because of state, county, municipal, township, city and village taxes. It means you need a complicated system that is kept up to date which has all of the tax information nearly by zip code - worse, I'm not sure zip codes do not cross taxing authority boundaries. There are such companies now that provide this service, so they are just going to (eventually) get a lot more customers.
For the short term, I am going to guess that it gets a lot harder to buy certain things over the Internet in California.
The problem is that today low cost is going to rule. Not security, not responsiveness to issues. Just low cost. If a provider cannot handle "low cost", then they aren't going to be in the running for anything else.
This model has been tried before and it has consistently failed over time. Sure, Company A can save 50% of their IT costs by moving everything over to Cloud Provider X, and the numbers look really, really good. Until Company B comes in and notices they can see all of Company A's data using some trick that occurred to them. They can report it to someone responsible, they can post it on Fark or maybe they can exploit it. Obviously, to get the low, low costs Provider X didn't do a great job on security other than a really pretty facade.
The same thing happened with whole-IT-department outsourcing. To make it attractive the costs had to be low. To get the low costs some (often hidden) shortcuts were taken. People found out about the shortcuts way, way later - sometimes after they were completely committed to the outsourcing deal.
So what is the difference between whole-IT-department outsourcing and "the Cloud" today? Basically nothing. Will it work any better for the folks that go that route? Probably not, but if you don't understand how the outsourcing model worked for people you will be doomed to repeat that history.
A huge problem is that in computing today (at all levels, from management to low-level coding) there is insufficient respect for history and older people that have actually lived through that history. The end result is things like file systems being created which have no hope of dealing with media errors - exactly the same mistake that was in the first UNIX and VM/370 implementations. Same thing with a lot of security - people have been living with fine-grained and course-grained access controls for years and can easily recite the problems with each. But some new college graduate comes along and tells people they have a great new way of handling security much better than what is in Windows or Linux. End result? Rediscovery of the same problems that people knew all about in 1985 when said college grad was in diapers. But to much of management today they look at someone over 40 and will openly say that old people are useless and they have to have a young, energetic staff.
If they did nothing illegal, keeping them out of medical school is clearly discrimination.
You can call it discrimination between qualified and unqualified people, but it is still discrimination and they can probably sue to gain entry. I'd say with some juries they might stand a pretty good chance of winning a lawsuit.
Then where are we?
The creators and maintainers of HTML and XHTML have said over and over that the language is a description of content and absolutely not in any manner a design for presentation. Presentation was to be left to the browser and the user.
Well, that lasted all of about five minutes. The first thing that came along was the use of white-space spacing graphics and tables to push things around so they looked consistent across varying screen widths - so that the 800x600 screen looked like the 1024x768 screen. To make the presentation customized as designed by the web developer (and whoever is paying them) and to have a consistent user experience. Not at all what the design of HTML is for.
So today we have web sites developed with the specific intent of circumventing the design of HTML and XHTML. Amazingly, these design hacks are not something that anyone really tests for in browser development - they are interested in developing something that meets the criteria of the design of HTML, not the intent of the web developer. In a few cases there are actually things that have been adopted into the browser design to make the web developer's life easier. Since these things are clearly non-standard and unique to a particular browser they make the web developer's life hell.
So where there were maybe 4 or 5 specific platforms to test against before, now there are far more. 15? 20? More?
The real solution is to have a web presentation language that does define presentation, which is what just about everyone really wants. Except for the maintainers of the HTML standard. Not only is the problem not going to get any better, by definition we have two groups moving in different directions. It is going to get a lot worse and probably at an expotential rate.
Could it be a Canadian settlement has something to do with this? After all, the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the US dollar, so some adjustment to your figures is required.
It isn't like the US dollar is some kind of international standard any more.
Besides, US music is probably worth less in Canada anyway.
The problem is that outside of Richard Stallman's world there are two very different groups of people. The first group RHS is familiar with and it includes people that can program computers and pick up just about any piece of code in any language and instantly be able to adapt and modify this piece of code. Why would this group of people pay anything for something from open source?
The second group of people, which RHS claims (implicitly) does not exist, is actually in reality a far larger group. It consists of people that cannot program a computer, couldn't write a "hello world" program in any language at all, including LOGO or BASIC. It also includes people that are being paid lots of money to write programs for a particular platform and a particular environment and really don't have the time, energy or inclination to get involved with some other environment.
Now this large group might just pay someone for a port of some open source thing to a different platform. Heck, they might pay someone for a cleanly complied binary with all of the dependencies taken care of wrapped up in a neat installer for whatever platform they wanted it for. Sure, they could do it, but how long would it take? If you are being paid $100 an hour to write stuff for Windows and would really like a rsync implementation for Windows but don't have one how much would you pay? (Hint: rsync has some really major dependencies and is available or free ... just not installable neatly on Windows.)
Gosh, they might actually pay quite a bit. So this guy was catering to the non-programmers of the world and people were paying him. Imagine that.
In Richard Stallman's world apparently there are programmers and there are pampered cats. If you aren't a programmer, well, you are incapable of exercising the sort of "rights" that he envisions as being really important. Obviously, non-programmers are at best second-class citizens because they can't exercise their rights. More like a pampered cat because while they can imagine they are battling fierce prey they are in reality batting at a stuffed mouse toy held by their owner - someone that can program.
Much like landowners and serfs, only landowners (programmers) have rights. The serfs are utterly dependent on their landowners.
Well, there is some currency to the idea of anthropomorphising everything.
So, how would you view it from the potato's perspective? Death, wouldn't you say? Probably pretty terrorising, wouldn't you say? So from the potato's perspective these people are clearly terrorists. Genocidal mass-murderers.
Just because your worldview doesn't encompass the viewpoint of the potato doesn't mean theirs isn't valid.
Yes, you can do that with a potato. You cannot do that with just about any other current food crop in the Western hemisphere. They are all hybrids and have been since around 1960 or so. In the 70s we spread this around the world so today it is doubtful that you can grow corn anywhere and use it as seed the next year. All of the corn you can buy in seed form today is hybridized and doesn't produce viable seeds.
Excuse me, but have you driven through the US anytime since 1950?
Nobody has been planting seeds harvested from the same farm since then, because nearly all of the crops have been grown from hybrid seeds - which do not reproduce.
In the 1970s we shipped the hybridizing technology overseas and it significantly changed how crops were grown in places like India. Yes, they were using traditional methods and getting fairly low yields by comparison with the West. New crops (hybrids) changed that and increased the yields significantly. Everyone was getting more food and the farmers were getting more out of the same ground. No, they couldn't plant seeds from their crop anymore.
Now people are saying that with GMO it is somehow different. I don't see the difference. Nobody in the US, Canada or probably anywhere in the EU has been planting anything except hybrid crops for the last 50 years or so.
Because in the Western world, if not the entire world, we had this thing called the "green revolution" back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s which resulted in the propogation of hybrid crops everywhere.
So don't farmers have to buy seeds every year anyway?
How about hybrid varieties of corn and wheat, which has been standard since at least the 1950s?
These hybrids do not produce viable seeds because they are hybrids. So haven't farmers been buying seed every year anyway?
I was under the impression that nearly all crop plants where hybrids since the beginning of the "green revolution" worldwide. Meaning, the wheat, beans, peas and corn that is grown today is sterile. Nothing to do with GM, just hybridizing the crops for better yields and resistance.
Don't forget that while renting a 12-year-old girl (or boy) (or even younger) in Thailand seems to be perfectly legal, you can be arrested for it when you return to the US under the "sex tourism" laws.
Just because raping 12-year-old girls (or boys) is illegal in the US, the act is committed in Thailand. Thailand seems to not ever arrest people for this sort of crime.
The difference is that in the US it would be civil suit which would go forward. Criminal charges would certainly never stick.
Depending on the court, I don't think I would like to be a defendant in a civil case in the US. Scientists are held in especially low regard by most of the population and anything that can be done to "get 'em" or to serve up a (supposedly) well-deserved cumuppance would certainly be favored by many, many people. Certainly you wouldn't want a jury to get anywhere near this.
All I can hope is that people in Italy are all uniformily well-educated, never listen to rap music and think getting a high grade point average is a goal for everyone to strive for. Ha ha ha ha. If it goes to a jury, these folks are cooked.
You must have done something to piss someone off. While it sounds like this was an ATM card where limits don't apply - or at least didn't until recently - I have never heard of anyone losing out on lost or stolen cards.
Of course, mostly that is dealing with credit cards, not debit/ATM cards where it is in the bank's interest to push as much liability onto you as possible. With credit cards it is always the merchant that loses out.
This is something to keep in mind. With a credit card there are four agents involved - the card holder, the person using the number to steal, the merchant and the credit card company. Nobody ever loses except the merchant. With a debit card there are only three agents: the bank, the cardholder and the thief. Of course the thief never loses but it is absolutely in the bank's interest to put all of the problems onto the cardholder. Which they do as much as possible every time.
So if you buy a meal in a resturant with a credit card and the number is sold (which it will, sooner or later) the merchant that takes it loses. It is a minor inconvenience to you the cardholder. But if you use a debit card they can get every time in your account, overdraft it and keep on taking. The bank will push it all back on you saying you were careless or somehow else at fault.
So remind me again why anyone would ever use a debit card?
The stores already sell the data to aggregators. The raw scan data plus loyalty card information. Every single item that is scanned at a checkout station.
The stores make some money from this, but the aggregators make a lot more for analysis and packaging it all up. No manufacturer in their right mind isn't buying this information because they have to know who is buying what. It guides product development decisions and what to do with current products.
Google would be in the unique position of being both the collector (ding!) and aggregator (ding! ding! ding!). They would be making money from all phases of it.
Right. Google doesn't give away this information - it has value. They sell it.
For example, how much do you think their recent survey of all the wireless routers in the world is worth to wireless router manufacturers? To know what routers are being used in more affluent zip codes as opposed to poorer districts? Also, based on signal strength the Google data probably has an 80-90% correlation of router MAC address to street address, and you can get all sorts of demographic data from a street address. I have no idea what Google is selling this data for, but you better believe that it is worth a lot.
If this became a common payment method - which I doubt - it would give Google a huge marketing data revenue stream, probably worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
I don't see it happening anytime soon, because it depends on the NFC communication chip being in the phone. Not there is just about any phone today and unlikely to just pop in so Google can make even more money.
Ah, but you miss the opportunity for folks to install the "New Unblocking DNS Mod" which grants you access to all sorts of pirated content. For only $10 you open up your computer and let some pirate application do whatever and you get access restored to the pirate sites you were being blocked from.
Of course, you also just installed some software which returns your passwords to somewhere else. But that is why the software that changes the DNS servers is so cheap.
Tell me, how does a online review site that is ad-supported find the resources to "take down all of the bogus reviews?" There is no way to distinguish between a "real" review and a "bogus" review unless the bogus one is stupid and obvious upon its face.
A review that simply saws in calm language using good English and correct spelling that says its' a nice restaurant but the cooks keep sneezing while cooking and that you only got a little sick isn't obviously bogus. Maybe the IP address being from a different state might be a clue to such a site, but they probably don't keep that sort of information around. Alternatively, one that talks about the mouldy food, uncleaned restrooms and Grays abducting other patrons might be just a bit too much over the top to be real.
The answer to this is pretty simply. Anyone that believes an online review is simply being a tool. Someone with an agenda wrote the review - maybe the business being reviewed, maybe just an irate customer that didn't get as good a BJ in the parking lot as they thought they should have. You can't tell, there is no way to tell and because it is all anonymous or semi-anonymous it should all be treated as bogus.
We have recently seen a transition for cable systems in the US to to neighborhood nodes connected by fiber to the head end also known as FTTN. This has allowed a huge expansion in the bandwidth allowed to the home - and similarly a huge expansion in the bandwidth being consumed. DSL has gotten somewhat better as well, although with most of the US still having quite a bit of very old copper lines there is a very distinct limit as to how far DSL can go.
The problem is that the bandwidth increase took maybe 10 years to propate to the homes. It took nearly that long for the connections to finally reach every home. And the neighborhood node connection is maxed out. What is the next step? Well, any configuration that involves a neighborhood node will fail to deliver significantly greater bandwidth, and that certainly include FIOS and FTTH. These implementations involve a feed to a node and fiber distribution from that node to the homes being served.
Sure, when there is 1Gb being served to the node it means that the 10 early adopters in the neighborhood can get 100Mb/sec service 24x7. But what happens when there are 1000 homes connected and every single one of them has been sold on some IPTV solution? 1Gb/1000 = 1Mb/sec which is too slow for even the best HD compression techniques today.
Can they make the connection to the node 100Gb instead of 1Gb? I believe it is possible but it will involve a similiar investment that the changeover to FTTN required and likely take another 10 years or so.
I have two Roku boxes served off a Cox connection. I figure they are good for 2-3 years absolute maximum at which point there will be no more live streaming. You will have to make a selection and download the content to the box to play later. This will keep Netflix serving media online cheaply but means Roku has to have lots of local storage to become a media server. Sure, go ahead an buy an expensive solution and it will be obsolete in 2-3 years. The Roku has the benefit of being $100 for the 1080i HD 802.11N version and $79 for the 720p 802.11g versionm cheap enough to throw away in 2-3 years when it stops working. The same fate awaits everything but the game consoles which might have enough local storage to buffer content.
Spammers aren't paid by people that buy. Spammers are paid by the number of messages sent or messages opened. So if they can fool you into opening it, you just got them paid.
You might think that spammers wouldn't get customers any longer. The problem with that is ... it does work! Send out 10 million emails and you get 10 customers you didn't have before. Assuming it is your standard sort of uncancellable subscription credit card purchase (free - just pay shipping and handling!!!) they probably get $100 for each customer. So they only need a few customers to pay for spamming.
There is no solution to this problem, other than rejecting all email. Maybe allow SPF-validated email but that isn't absolute as I am sure there are SPF records that allow sending from any IP address. Face-to-face communication is pretty much the only way to avoid the problem. Insist on it. Email is unreliable and insecure. Telephones are monitored, recorded, tracked and can be easily spoofed so you think it is your friend Fred when it is a telemarketer. Face to face, it is the only way to be sure.
You miss the point. There are clearly and identifiably two classes of users: knowledgable and those that are using an appliance.
For the appliance users, taking away the URL entry capability is good. Taking away the ability to install random malware is good. Administering the computer remotely (when needed at all) is good. In short, anything that can be done to make it so people that aren't interested in learning "about" computers only how to basically used one do not have to is good.
For the minority that is really interested, they can use something else.
OK, but what do you think should be done about architectural firms that design US prisons? Clearly these buildings were not designed to be safe or else there wouldn't be such problems in prisons.
How about cell phone manufacturers? Any idiot could have foreseen that if "texting" is possible in a moving vehicle there will be drivers that recklessly endanger others by driving while distracted. The cell phone manufacturers didn't listen to their idiots and released phones that enabled this kind of behavior without any warnings whatsoever. Even gun manuacturers sell things like trigger locks and provide copious instructions about how NOT to kill people accidently.
What about chemical companies that continue to make lead-based paint, thus allowing its use on children's toys?
Once you start holding people and companies responsible for secondary effects of their products there is no end to the list of wrondoers you can find.
The problem with this sort of thing is the fact that laws are actually different in different places.
See, Falun Gong is an illegal organization in China. The members are breaking the law by simply being members. After that, the punishment for being a member is perhaps severe, but nonetheless, it is punishment for being a member of an outlawed group.
Similarly, it is illegal in modern-day Germany to belong to the Nazi party. This group is outlawed and membership in it is illegal. While you might not rate much torture or death, such membership is going to be frowned upon severely by the German government. Up to and including imprisonment.
In the US it is difficult to point to an organization that is illegal to belong to, but I suspect openly disclosing that you are a member of Hamas or Hizbollah could rate you at least a swift deportation and might cause problems in gaining entry to the US if you went about it in the conventional manner. Currently in the US it is not illegal to belong to a group that is exclusively formed for the purposes of committing crimes, such as street gangs, motorcycle gangs, or the Mafia.
While it might be all noble and such to say that China should just let groups that violently disagree with their government exist in peace, it isn't happening. China seems to be highly motivated to make the lives of people that want to change (forcibly, if not violently) the government a living hell. Sort of discourages revolution when the potential leaders are imprisoned. While we may disagree with this policy, they are being nothing if not consistent in their treatment of members of illegal organizations. Cisco has very little to do with the policy and its implementation. Had they simply refused to be part of the implementation someone else would have stepped up. When we make individuals and companies liable for such downstream actions I am all for going after Cisco but first I think we better start thinking about architectural firms that design prisons. Then we can talk about cell phone manufacturers making driving-while-distracted possible.
Maybe in 50 years or so after we deal with all of the other problems, we can get around to Cisco.
Samonella isn't present inside eggs, it is present almost uniformly on the outside of the egg. In egg factories where the hens are in small cages the even mixture of chicken poo in and around the cages makes it a virtual certanty that you will get some on the eggs. At least in the US if you aren't washing off your eggs before breaking them you are likely mixing some chicken poo with the insides of the egg. Hence, contamination.
If we had 1/10th the supply of eggs we might be able to go back to the situation where you go out to the hen house and pick up the eggs from a nest where the chicken sits to lay and brood. The chickens aren't contained in any way and spend lots of time off the nest, hence lots less chicken poo coating the eggs. But we don't have 1/10th the demand for eggs today so this doesn't really work unless you want to have $10 eggs.
I guess another solution is 1/10 the population but we don't seem to have many volunteers for that either.