The "rising sea level" is a fantasy that has pretty much been completely debunked. The sea level isn't rising and isn't going to rise any appreciable amount in the near future. OK, it is really, really difficult to predict climate and sea level changes on the time scale of multiple centuries, so I guess you could say nobody really knows. But the idea that the Maldives are going to be underwater in 40 years just isn't happening.
However, if you want to see what coal plants do you need to look at the northeast US and Canada. The lakes and forests destroyed through acidification. A good deal of this has stopped with better scrubbers, but it certainly has not stopped completely.
Simple solution that has been rejected in the US is to reprocess spent fuel. The fuel rods are about 97% intact and can be reprocessed pretty easily, but doing so produces plutonium. So it has been viewed as much better to let the fuel rods accumulate so nobody can syphon off the plutonium and make a bomb.
Second-best solution is (of course) to simply turn off the nuclear power industry. And the coal plants as well. There is nothing like necessity to spur some innovation in the area of electric generation. Get rid of all the problems at once and force some real innovation. We might find out that Mankind existed for tens of thousands of years without electricity and it isn't as critical as we might think.
Probably somewhere around dead-last solution is to keep things limping along without building any new power plants at all - except for natural gas "peaker" plants - and hope that somehow we can figure out a way to make dispersed solar and wind integrate with the power grid. Without building any new transmission lines, because everyone that reads the Weekly World News knows that they are dangerous and cause cancer, impotence and autism. Or is it the National Enquirer?
Well, you started the escalation with ad blockers. And not clicking on ads. When the ad revenue dropped somewhere around 2000 everyone had to come up with a solution that didn't involve making people pay. Everyone over the age of 14 had already learned at home and school "all about the Internet" and how everything was free because it was ad supported.
So with the pretty much global crash of ad revenue what alternatives were there? Government support for web sites?
Google was built on the idea of collecting and selling marketing information along with a few ads here and there. The search engine is a false front that offers services that today consist of directing people to sites with ads - whos sponsors pay Google to put the ads up, whether they are clicked on or not. Also, Google gets to collect huge amounts of data that a lot of companies will pay large sums of money to have. Remember the whole Street View idea? Well, how much do you think DLink will pay to know what the market penetration of their routers vs. other companies' routers is in specific geographic areas? Do buyers in Beverly Hills prefer Belkin vs. South Central LA having more Netgear routers? What does that say about how DLink should change their marketing program? This information is incredibly valuable and is providing Google with a great income stream.
Now if you can think up a way to get money from people's wallets without them ever knowing it was there in the first place, great. Tell everyone and maybe we can have a new Internet. Until that happens, customer information will be packaged and sold because there isn't anything else of value involved.
Pay for something on the Internet? How quaint. Nonsense. People have grown up with the idea that the Internet is free and they aren't about to start paying now. No matter what.
We've spent the last 15 years figuring out ways to get money from people without their knowledge or consent. Google has become very, very good at it. There is no way we are going to return to a model where people willing pay money for services that were previously free. Not going to happen.
We have maybe 25% more houses than are needed right now, so bulldoze them. Anyone with an "underwater" mortgage is just a delayed disaster, so we might as well move those up the schedule a bit - tell the people to just walk away from their unsellable house and force the lenders to take the hit. This will push the economy over the edge, but it is coming anyway and nothing is going to be done about it.
Might as well happen this year instead of 2014... unless you believe the world is ending in 2012. But be assured, there is no market for houses with too big a mortgage on them now and nothing can be done because the bill is over 2 trillion dollars. So having the government start a program to rescue everyone with 20 billion is a joke.
Then take all the vacant houses and bulldoze them. Nobody would buy them anyway for maybe 20-30 years until immigration maxes out all available living space again. So no more suburbs. All done. Everyone can move into the inner cities and engage in the turf war. Because it will be a shooting war if that many people move into the cities.
All that works great when you have a bit of land to put the house on. While I won't say that when you are trying to fit a 1200 square foot home on a 1400 square foot lot only current construction techniques are possible, I will say that having walls two feet thick isn't going to work out all that well.
I think the first step is to empty out the cities and reduce the US population to around 10 million people. Then we can start talking about sustainable construction and green, environmentally friendly living. Trying to do this with city population density with 330 million people isn't going to work out so well.
Yes, it is pretty clear it is as simple as that. You want to have lots of people, build power plants and start building them soon because we haven't been and are going to run out of electricity. Or you can have conservation, sustainability and green living with a lot fewer people.
Understand that with 10 million people everyone could dig a hole and use it for an outhouse. When it filled up, dig another hole and move the outhouse. Natual processes and nothing more will take care of all of our farm, food, energy and human wastes. However, trying to do that with 330 million people will turn the entire country into a stinking cesspool. You have to understand what sustainability means and where the limits are. In India they are still practicing "open defecation" in rural areas, meaning taking a dump in a field which worked for them for thousands of years - only problem is they are still doing this with 100 times the population and it is in fact turning the country into a stinking cesspool.
Sorry, can't tax imports. That would be against WTO rules.
Some idiot thought it would be a good idea to put our collective futures into the hands of the WTO in the name of open and free trade. We have seen now how free trade works - it is neither open nor free when your trading partners simply have a complete block on importing most anything for various cultural and quality reasons. So we have this huge trade imbalance that can't ever be resolved.
And for some reason, we are still in the WTO. Until we get out there is no taxing or tariffing foreign or imported anything.
They couldn't do that because the deep suspicion would be that Osama would have been tipped off if anyone in the Pakistani government knew what was coming and when. Nobody really believed that at least some part of the military was aware who was living in that compound. So any warning to the Pakistani military would have blown the whole mission.
I would offer that using an image of a band or performer as promotion of LimeWire is almost equivalent to using a picture of Lacy Peterson to advertise a brand of rope or Ted Bundy to advertise knives. You know, make sure your victim dies with the first stroke, not the fifth. Or, how about "To kill like a pro you need a Slasher(tm) knife. Nothing else will do."
Not that I put the use of Mr. Bundy to advertise anything beyond the scope of advertising in the US. I suspect his likeness is not trademarked in a manner that would prevent it, although certain renderings might be trademarked by movie companies.
I seriously doubt there would be much question about Download.com's ads and promotional displays.
There is no "protection for service providers". What there is today is a safe harbor provision that applies only to hosted materials if and only if they are responsive to removal requests for infringing and offending materials. This means that if you put up some child porn on your ISP-hosted web site they are not held responsible as long as it is taken down upon discovery of it. If they don't take it down, they will be held liable under today's laws.
Absolutely, I agree with you that the right way to handle this is to start suing ISPs. The process would pretty much be like that when you get a photo traffic ticket in the mail with someone else's picture - you show the police that it wasn't you and they move on. They don't have to defend themselves in court other than to perhaps show their legally sound logs that says this customer was using that IP address at the given date and time. The action against them is dismissed and the lawsuit is refiled with a different defendent.
Same thing happens when the account holder shows logs that says their neighbor was using a NATed address for that port at that date and time. What? No logs? Well, I guess the account holder is responsible then.
I don't know what you might be smoking about the subscriber's privacy being retained. All of this would be in court records and the subscriber (or their attorney) would be required to show up in court with the appropriate logs and such. Sure, identities wouldn't be revealed to third parties beyond their identity being part of a public court record.
It might be messy the first time an ISP got sued like this but a process would be established that all ISPs would follow which would make it even a bit more streamlined than it is today. Absolutely, the right way to go about it is suing the ISP because there is utterly no proof that the IP address being used is that of a customer and not that of the ISP themselves.
Yes. Absolutely. But there are many links along the way. What we have is:
Action -> IP address -> MAC address -> Potential NAT translation -> Computer -> User
What is needed is to move along this chain one step at a time. At each point there can be information obtained which identifies the next link. What you would seem to like is:
Action -> User
Well that might be nice, but we don't have that. Saying that without that there is no possiblity of holding a user accountable means nothing done online has any consequences because you can't be traced. Today that argument falls flat because you can be traced down to the computer. Connecting the computer with an individual is done every day and only in a very few cases does it not hold up in court.
OK, great. Except how does anyone know the ISP account holder has an unsecured WiFi connection without finding out who it is first? The other, more common case is that they do not have an unsecured WiFi connection and the modem is directly connected to one and only one computer. In that case an IP address at a particular date and time does equal the identity of the computer. Then it is just a matter of establishing the identity of the specific user.
Blocking any and all attempts at finding the user means there is no responsibility for anything online. Do we really want to live in that world?
I believe the point was that an IP address assigned by DHCP within a corporate environment would most certainly point to the user (i.e., infringer) rather than some random third party "sharing the connection."
Whether or not there are DHCP logs which are legally sufficient to track down the individual user is irrelevent to the point being made in the article. The point being made was that in a corporate environment IP == Computer == User nearly 100% of the time whereas in a home environment you can't even get IP == Computer in many cases.
How many privately NATed connections do you see in a corporate office?
Exactly. The rental car company is a potential defendent because their equipment was being used. In the case of a hit-and-run accident all the police and/or plantiff might have is the license plate. So who ran down the little old lady? Well, you start with the rental car company and if they can provide convincing, legally sound information about someone else that might be responsible for the actual accident you refile your lawsuit or the police move on looking for a suspect.
Same thing with an ISP. Their equipment was being used and they are responsible in the first measure. They may be able to provide convincing, legally sound information about a different defendent - or not. It really doesn't matter. It would seem logical to start with the ISP in all cases and if they can't provide information that meets legal standards then the ISP is responsible.
After all, the IP address might be one that is used internally by the ISP itself as part of their operations.
This would quickly resolve itself within about 10 minutes the first time an ISP is named as a defendent and was called into court.
I suppose the agreement on the point of quick settlements is that with any lawsuit discovery can indeed compel the "right" sort of defendant into a settlement.
Just the thought of having it publicly declared that some company was mixing dead rats in with the baby food might be enough to make the company settle and seal the settlement so news of the dead rats never actually gets out. Absolutely. But it doesn't matter what sort of lawsuit it is or if it is about copyright infringement or mixing dead rats in with baby food - the threat of legal action and public exposure is always present.
I suppose you might say that a lawsuit about copyright infringement tends to target people with less resources because if they had more money they would just buy stuff instead of downloading for free. Except nearly everyone downloads for free, regardless of their financial position. Quick now, if you want something and can get it for free, which is better - free or spending some money? I'd say everyone up to Bill Gates is going to answer "free", and many people with more resources got that way because they didn't spend money frivously. So I don't believe the "less resources" argument at all.
So what is the point of saying that expediated discovery might be intimidating? Any discovery, expedited or not, is going to be intimidating to a lawsuit defendent in some manner. The mere fact of having the lawsuit filed is going to cause disruption to the defendent, whether the defendent is a college student or IBM.
Well, I suspect the "right" course of action is probably to start with suing the ISP.
What? Don't they have "common carrier" status or some other kind of immunity against prosecution for just carrying data? No, they don't. They have a limited amount of liability for hosted materials if, and only if, they are responsive in removing infringing and offending materials from their hosting service. That doesn't say anything about their providing data transfer services to customers.
So far nobody has bothered the ISPs because they have been pretty responsive about turning over customer information for an IP address at a given date and time. Maybe it is time this changed. OK, let's assume that there is no correlation implied between an IP address and a customer's identity - just the account holder, not necessarily anyone guilty of anything. How do you go about tracking down the person responsible for the lengthy post about killing the President given an IP address as the starting point? Simple - the burden can be easily pushed onto the ISP to make whatever association they want and failing to be able to make that association, they are responsible themselves. There is no "common carrier" status for data transfer and there is no real immunity.
My guess is that this problem gets solved in about 10 minutes the first time you actually hold an ISP responsible for activities on a bank of IP addresses assigned to them. Just like the rental car company in the judge's decision, the ISP can indeed be named as a defendant. They get out of it by coughing up information about who they consider to be the really responsible party and being in a position to legally defend their assignment.
The other alternative here is actually pretty simple. Anything you do on the Internet has no consequences whatsoever because we are assuming from the beginning that everyone is untraceable. I don't think that is going to fly in today's legal community.
The reason there aren't any jobs is because with the economy contracting there isn't any need for the jobs. So about the only thing the government could do is some kind of make-work program. They could start a new clean-parks program where they pay people $100 a day to pick up trash, only they would need some more people putting down trash so it would work out evenly. We could have millions of people digging holes and another millions filling them in. Or we can just give up and support people that are unemployed forever instead of trying to pretend that the jobs are coming back. Someday. Don't know when, but someday they have to, right? Only they don't have to, ever. You see, the economy changed and trying to change it back isn't going to work.
I don't think most people get this. I keep seeing how the Republicans don't like people because there is no jobs bill. Only what exactly should they do? Build some new fancy dam like Bolder Dam to keep people employed? But we don't need any more dams, in fact a lot of people are trying to have all the dams destroyed because they screw up the environment. Build power plants? No, I don't think so. Plow up the desert for solar cell farms? No, that would destroy the habitat of countless endangered wildlife and plants. Besides, without building some new transmission lines that nobody wants anywhere near them we can't get the electricity from the windmills and solar farms to the cities.
I suppose we could have people tearing down houses that aren't going to be bought because there is no way mortgages are going to be going out to people like they did a few years ago. Detroit has plenty of vacant homes. Phoenix could, if they would just make people face the fact that home prices aren't coming back and their underwater mortgage means they can't sell their house for 26 years.
There are no jobs because there isn't any need for the jobs anymore. There isn't any need for the vacant homes because the people aren't going to get loose mortgages anymore. The economy changed and left a lot of people behind.
The problem with the odometer is that it can't be read automatically. People will lie and there can't be enough inspectors to make people actually worry about lying.
An automated system would tend to eliminate people (very desirable - machines are cheaper than people) and eliminate the possibility of lying.
Face it, we aren't just going to have declining employment for a little while. The jobs aren't coming back. Get over it. If you are unemployed now you should start figuring ways to get your 8 million fellow unemployed people together so the government can support you permanently. Either that or the government will pay 4 million people to dig holes and 4 million people to fill them in again.
Can't really improve public transit because there is no place to put it. For some silly reason the idea of elevated monorails has been soundly rejected. So any rail-based public transit means taking up around a 50-foot wide swath through the middle of town. This means either through existing roads or through existing homes and businesses. Not very popular either.
Buses? There is no ridership left on buses for the most part. Buses are difficult to secure, so people are properly afraid of getting robbed and worse. Part of the "solution" to this is to eliminate all the bus routes except those that are heavily traveled and to eliminate service outside of peak periods. Which makes the buses utterly useless to most people - stay 10 minutes late at work and you miss the last bus.
Public transit has pretty much seen its day in the US. Until all the cities look like Detroit there is no place to put rail lines in. Buses aren't going to work without a cop or two on every bus and there just aren't enough cops to do that.
Can't build railroads (or even maintain them today) without lots of condemnation of private property. Lots and lots. So much so that it would be extremely unpopular. Not only unpopular, but they would be unable to pay any sort of market value for homes, even with today's cut-rate market.
OK, I guess you could build a new rail hub in Detroit without anyone noticing. But to put a new rail line into LA would require 100 miles of right of way that simply doesn't exist today. When they started tearing up the rails and building on the roadbed it was the end of rail in the US. And that was done before 1975, for the most part. It isn't coming back.
Why is everyone seeming to focus on damage to the roads? The problem they are trying to solve is that electric cars won't be paying any fuel taxes at all, and hybrid cars are paying far less. The result is that highway tax revenues are down in a period when the government would like to be able to put some construction workers back to work.
So how else do they solve the electric car problem?
This has nothing to do with repairing roads because of use and everything to do with tax revenues being down. The less people are driving the more expensive it is going to get because that is the only way they can keep repairing old bridges. The real solution is probably eliminating the bridges entirely. This would force a lot of trucking to move to railroads and would push people towards alternatives other than driving to work.
I used to work for a company that built the absolute #1 MVS security product. It was great because through it and its very flexible rules specification you could ensure that users only had access to files and resources they were actually supposed to have access to. Sounds wonderful, right?
Except for one little problem. It was incredibly difficult to set up. Let's take your average medium-size company. How many individual files do you think there might be on on-line media? Millions is probably not an exaggeration. Can you imagine crafting a rule for each file? How about imagining crafting a generic set of rules for files in specific places in a heirarchy but having to deal with exceptions that nobody thinks of until the user is blocked?
Just to get that MVS security system up and running at all generally took a year for most users. I would expect nothing less for what is being described here because it is pretty much the same thing. The result is that this is the sort of project that never gets finished and keeps getting put on the back burner.
It has nothing to with the complexity of the software but everything to do with the complexity of what is needed. Trying to define roles of users and the access to resources they should have after the fact is very, very time consuming and will result in a lot of failures. A failure means disruption and can mean failure to comply with some regulation which results in a fine. Can you imagine that this isn't something real popular with upper management, even when they mandate the implementation?
In order to enact tariffs, the US would have to pull out of the WTO. If the US tried to block Chinese imports with high tariffs China would be forced to exhert their control over the US economy. You see, China owns the US. Way more than 50% of the country is indirectly owned by the Chinese because of their loans.
If the US insisted and told China their loans were worthless nobody would trade with the US anymore because they couldn't be trusted.
If we insisted on tariffs on Chinese goods the result would likely be a shooting war, one that right now the US would lose badly in.
Nope, sorry. We are stuck with the way things are for a very, very long time.
Mostly, people that I run into are looking for an easy way to get what they want. If someone comes up to them and offers them $10,000 for doing something illegal more often than not they are going to be thinking "Gosh, $10,000... what can I buy with that?" rather than "How many years might I be in prison if I get caught?"
Further, in the US the actual conviction rate is pretty low for just about everything. So unless you are a complete idiot and brag to random people in a bar (one of whom might be a cop) about your exploits, you stand a pretty good chance of getting away with anything. A couple of times. See, the fact that it may only be a 20% conviction rate means that if you rob five stores your chances are not 0.20 / 5 (0.04) but 0.20 * 5 (1.00) - sooner or later a life of crime will catch up with you. Problem is, the fact you are almost certainly going to get away the first few times makes it look like easy money. And people certainly believe the odds are in their favor and only the unlucky get caught.
The same goes for just about any sort of crime, not just armed robbery. Dealing drugs? Sure. Stealing from the cash register at work? Easy. And it is addicting coming home with a pocket full of money that used to belong to someone else.
We also have this odd policy in the US that says children that commit crimes are treated as if it was a simple mistake in their education - nobody told them that crime was wrong. So they often get away with whatever they did or just get some very mild punishment so as to not warp their little psyche. The problem is, like all humans, these children learn that crime indeed does pay even when you get caught. Because in their experience crime does pay far far better than anything else they have ever experienced.
The government reinforces this kind of thinking because punishment of crime seems random to most people involved in crime. And the government overall seems capricious and incomprehensible to people whos only interaction with it is the police and courts. The news media doesn't help either. The latest bit about only 45% of people paying taxes - they mean only 45% of people pay in extra in April but it sounds like everyone is getting a good deal except you because you know you are paying - they take them out every week.
Keep in mind that the average Chinese person is perfectly happy with awful working conditions because these conditions are 1000 times better than the farm they escaped from.
And when this person trudges to their stool for their day's work right there behind them outside the gate there are 2500 people waiting to be allowed in when someone dies and a position becomes available. Since they left the farm and there are no other jobs all they can do is wait outside the factories hoping there will be an opening and they will get it. After all, the odds of 1 in 2500 aren't that bad, are they?
This has little to do with capitalism and a lot to do with a country that is incapable of managing any sort of growth.
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The "rising sea level" is a fantasy that has pretty much been completely debunked. The sea level isn't rising and isn't going to rise any appreciable amount in the near future. OK, it is really, really difficult to predict climate and sea level changes on the time scale of multiple centuries, so I guess you could say nobody really knows. But the idea that the Maldives are going to be underwater in 40 years just isn't happening.
However, if you want to see what coal plants do you need to look at the northeast US and Canada. The lakes and forests destroyed through acidification. A good deal of this has stopped with better scrubbers, but it certainly has not stopped completely.
Simple solution that has been rejected in the US is to reprocess spent fuel. The fuel rods are about 97% intact and can be reprocessed pretty easily, but doing so produces plutonium. So it has been viewed as much better to let the fuel rods accumulate so nobody can syphon off the plutonium and make a bomb.
Second-best solution is (of course) to simply turn off the nuclear power industry. And the coal plants as well. There is nothing like necessity to spur some innovation in the area of electric generation. Get rid of all the problems at once and force some real innovation. We might find out that Mankind existed for tens of thousands of years without electricity and it isn't as critical as we might think.
Probably somewhere around dead-last solution is to keep things limping along without building any new power plants at all - except for natural gas "peaker" plants - and hope that somehow we can figure out a way to make dispersed solar and wind integrate with the power grid. Without building any new transmission lines, because everyone that reads the Weekly World News knows that they are dangerous and cause cancer, impotence and autism. Or is it the National Enquirer?
Well, you started the escalation with ad blockers. And not clicking on ads. When the ad revenue dropped somewhere around 2000 everyone had to come up with a solution that didn't involve making people pay. Everyone over the age of 14 had already learned at home and school "all about the Internet" and how everything was free because it was ad supported.
So with the pretty much global crash of ad revenue what alternatives were there? Government support for web sites?
Google was built on the idea of collecting and selling marketing information along with a few ads here and there. The search engine is a false front that offers services that today consist of directing people to sites with ads - whos sponsors pay Google to put the ads up, whether they are clicked on or not. Also, Google gets to collect huge amounts of data that a lot of companies will pay large sums of money to have. Remember the whole Street View idea? Well, how much do you think DLink will pay to know what the market penetration of their routers vs. other companies' routers is in specific geographic areas? Do buyers in Beverly Hills prefer Belkin vs. South Central LA having more Netgear routers? What does that say about how DLink should change their marketing program? This information is incredibly valuable and is providing Google with a great income stream.
Now if you can think up a way to get money from people's wallets without them ever knowing it was there in the first place, great. Tell everyone and maybe we can have a new Internet. Until that happens, customer information will be packaged and sold because there isn't anything else of value involved.
Pay for something on the Internet? How quaint. Nonsense. People have grown up with the idea that the Internet is free and they aren't about to start paying now. No matter what.
We've spent the last 15 years figuring out ways to get money from people without their knowledge or consent. Google has become very, very good at it. There is no way we are going to return to a model where people willing pay money for services that were previously free. Not going to happen.
We have maybe 25% more houses than are needed right now, so bulldoze them. Anyone with an "underwater" mortgage is just a delayed disaster, so we might as well move those up the schedule a bit - tell the people to just walk away from their unsellable house and force the lenders to take the hit. This will push the economy over the edge, but it is coming anyway and nothing is going to be done about it.
Might as well happen this year instead of 2014... unless you believe the world is ending in 2012. But be assured, there is no market for houses with too big a mortgage on them now and nothing can be done because the bill is over 2 trillion dollars. So having the government start a program to rescue everyone with 20 billion is a joke.
Then take all the vacant houses and bulldoze them. Nobody would buy them anyway for maybe 20-30 years until immigration maxes out all available living space again. So no more suburbs. All done. Everyone can move into the inner cities and engage in the turf war. Because it will be a shooting war if that many people move into the cities.
All that works great when you have a bit of land to put the house on. While I won't say that when you are trying to fit a 1200 square foot home on a 1400 square foot lot only current construction techniques are possible, I will say that having walls two feet thick isn't going to work out all that well.
I think the first step is to empty out the cities and reduce the US population to around 10 million people. Then we can start talking about sustainable construction and green, environmentally friendly living. Trying to do this with city population density with 330 million people isn't going to work out so well.
Yes, it is pretty clear it is as simple as that. You want to have lots of people, build power plants and start building them soon because we haven't been and are going to run out of electricity. Or you can have conservation, sustainability and green living with a lot fewer people.
Understand that with 10 million people everyone could dig a hole and use it for an outhouse. When it filled up, dig another hole and move the outhouse. Natual processes and nothing more will take care of all of our farm, food, energy and human wastes. However, trying to do that with 330 million people will turn the entire country into a stinking cesspool. You have to understand what sustainability means and where the limits are. In India they are still practicing "open defecation" in rural areas, meaning taking a dump in a field which worked for them for thousands of years - only problem is they are still doing this with 100 times the population and it is in fact turning the country into a stinking cesspool.
Sorry, can't tax imports. That would be against WTO rules.
Some idiot thought it would be a good idea to put our collective futures into the hands of the WTO in the name of open and free trade. We have seen now how free trade works - it is neither open nor free when your trading partners simply have a complete block on importing most anything for various cultural and quality reasons. So we have this huge trade imbalance that can't ever be resolved.
And for some reason, we are still in the WTO. Until we get out there is no taxing or tariffing foreign or imported anything.
They couldn't do that because the deep suspicion would be that Osama would have been tipped off if anyone in the Pakistani government knew what was coming and when. Nobody really believed that at least some part of the military was aware who was living in that compound. So any warning to the Pakistani military would have blown the whole mission.
I would offer that using an image of a band or performer as promotion of LimeWire is almost equivalent to using a picture of Lacy Peterson to advertise a brand of rope or Ted Bundy to advertise knives. You know, make sure your victim dies with the first stroke, not the fifth. Or, how about "To kill like a pro you need a Slasher(tm) knife. Nothing else will do."
Not that I put the use of Mr. Bundy to advertise anything beyond the scope of advertising in the US. I suspect his likeness is not trademarked in a manner that would prevent it, although certain renderings might be trademarked by movie companies.
I seriously doubt there would be much question about Download.com's ads and promotional displays.
There is no "protection for service providers". What there is today is a safe harbor provision that applies only to hosted materials if and only if they are responsive to removal requests for infringing and offending materials. This means that if you put up some child porn on your ISP-hosted web site they are not held responsible as long as it is taken down upon discovery of it. If they don't take it down, they will be held liable under today's laws.
Absolutely, I agree with you that the right way to handle this is to start suing ISPs. The process would pretty much be like that when you get a photo traffic ticket in the mail with someone else's picture - you show the police that it wasn't you and they move on. They don't have to defend themselves in court other than to perhaps show their legally sound logs that says this customer was using that IP address at the given date and time. The action against them is dismissed and the lawsuit is refiled with a different defendent.
Same thing happens when the account holder shows logs that says their neighbor was using a NATed address for that port at that date and time. What? No logs? Well, I guess the account holder is responsible then.
I don't know what you might be smoking about the subscriber's privacy being retained. All of this would be in court records and the subscriber (or their attorney) would be required to show up in court with the appropriate logs and such. Sure, identities wouldn't be revealed to third parties beyond their identity being part of a public court record.
It might be messy the first time an ISP got sued like this but a process would be established that all ISPs would follow which would make it even a bit more streamlined than it is today. Absolutely, the right way to go about it is suing the ISP because there is utterly no proof that the IP address being used is that of a customer and not that of the ISP themselves.
Yes. Absolutely. But there are many links along the way. What we have is:
Action -> IP address -> MAC address -> Potential NAT translation -> Computer -> User
What is needed is to move along this chain one step at a time. At each point there can be information obtained which identifies the next link. What you would seem to like is:
Action -> User
Well that might be nice, but we don't have that. Saying that without that there is no possiblity of holding a user accountable means nothing done online has any consequences because you can't be traced. Today that argument falls flat because you can be traced down to the computer. Connecting the computer with an individual is done every day and only in a very few cases does it not hold up in court.
OK, great. Except how does anyone know the ISP account holder has an unsecured WiFi connection without finding out who it is first? The other, more common case is that they do not have an unsecured WiFi connection and the modem is directly connected to one and only one computer. In that case an IP address at a particular date and time does equal the identity of the computer. Then it is just a matter of establishing the identity of the specific user.
Blocking any and all attempts at finding the user means there is no responsibility for anything online. Do we really want to live in that world?
I believe the point was that an IP address assigned by DHCP within a corporate environment would most certainly point to the user (i.e., infringer) rather than some random third party "sharing the connection."
Whether or not there are DHCP logs which are legally sufficient to track down the individual user is irrelevent to the point being made in the article. The point being made was that in a corporate environment IP == Computer == User nearly 100% of
the time whereas in a home environment you can't even get IP == Computer in many cases.
How many privately NATed connections do you see in a corporate office?
Exactly. The rental car company is a potential defendent because their equipment was being used. In the case of a hit-and-run accident all the police and/or plantiff might have is the license plate. So who ran down the little old lady? Well, you start with the rental car company and if they can provide convincing, legally sound information about someone else that might be responsible for the actual accident you refile your lawsuit or the police move on looking for a suspect.
Same thing with an ISP. Their equipment was being used and they are responsible in the first measure. They may be able to provide convincing, legally sound information about a different defendent - or not. It really doesn't matter. It would seem logical to start with the ISP in all cases and if they can't provide information that meets legal standards then the ISP is responsible.
After all, the IP address might be one that is used internally by the ISP itself as part of their operations.
This would quickly resolve itself within about 10 minutes the first time an ISP is named as a defendent and was called into court.
I suppose the agreement on the point of quick settlements is that with any lawsuit discovery can indeed compel the "right" sort of defendant into a settlement.
Just the thought of having it publicly declared that some company was mixing dead rats in with the baby food might be enough to make the company settle and seal the settlement so news of the dead rats never actually gets out. Absolutely. But it doesn't matter what sort of lawsuit it is or if it is about copyright infringement or mixing dead rats in with baby food - the threat of legal action and public exposure is always present.
I suppose you might say that a lawsuit about copyright infringement tends to target people with less resources because if they had more money they would just buy stuff instead of downloading for free. Except nearly everyone downloads for free, regardless of their financial position. Quick now, if you want something and can get it for free, which is better - free or spending some money? I'd say everyone up to Bill Gates is going to answer "free", and many people with more resources got that way because they didn't spend money frivously. So I don't believe the "less resources" argument at all.
So what is the point of saying that expediated discovery might be intimidating? Any discovery, expedited or not, is going to be intimidating to a lawsuit defendent in some manner. The mere fact of having the lawsuit filed is going to cause disruption to the defendent, whether the defendent is a college student or IBM.
Well, I suspect the "right" course of action is probably to start with suing the ISP.
What? Don't they have "common carrier" status or some other kind of immunity against prosecution for just carrying data? No, they don't. They have a limited amount of liability for hosted materials if, and only if, they are responsive in removing infringing and offending materials from their hosting service. That doesn't say anything about their providing data transfer services to customers.
So far nobody has bothered the ISPs because they have been pretty responsive about turning over customer information for an IP address at a given date and time. Maybe it is time this changed. OK, let's assume that there is no correlation implied between an IP address and a customer's identity - just the account holder, not necessarily anyone guilty of anything. How do you go about tracking down the person responsible for the lengthy post about killing the President given an IP address as the starting point? Simple - the burden can be easily pushed onto the ISP to make whatever association they want and failing to be able to make that association, they are responsible themselves. There is no "common carrier" status for data transfer and there is no real immunity.
My guess is that this problem gets solved in about 10 minutes the first time you actually hold an ISP responsible for activities on a bank of IP addresses assigned to them. Just like the rental car company in the judge's decision, the ISP can indeed be named as a defendant. They get out of it by coughing up information about who they consider to be the really responsible party and being in a position to legally defend their assignment.
The other alternative here is actually pretty simple. Anything you do on the Internet has no consequences whatsoever because we are assuming from the beginning that everyone is untraceable. I don't think that is going to fly in today's legal community.
What sort of "jobs" bill would you like to see?
The reason there aren't any jobs is because with the economy contracting there isn't any need for the jobs. So about the only thing the government could do is some kind of make-work program. They could start a new clean-parks program where they pay people $100 a day to pick up trash, only they would need some more people putting down trash so it would work out evenly. We could have millions of people digging holes and another millions filling them in. Or we can just give up and support people that are unemployed forever instead of trying to pretend that the jobs are coming back. Someday. Don't know when, but someday they have to, right? Only they don't have to, ever. You see, the economy changed and trying to change it back isn't going to work.
I don't think most people get this. I keep seeing how the Republicans don't like people because there is no jobs bill. Only what exactly should they do? Build some new fancy dam like Bolder Dam to keep people employed? But we don't need any more dams, in fact a lot of people are trying to have all the dams destroyed because they screw up the environment. Build power plants? No, I don't think so. Plow up the desert for solar cell farms? No, that would destroy the habitat of countless endangered wildlife and plants. Besides, without building some new transmission lines that nobody wants anywhere near them we can't get the electricity from the windmills and solar farms to the cities.
I suppose we could have people tearing down houses that aren't going to be bought because there is no way mortgages are going to be going out to people like they did a few years ago. Detroit has plenty of vacant homes. Phoenix could, if they would just make people face the fact that home prices aren't coming back and their underwater mortgage means they can't sell their house for 26 years.
There are no jobs because there isn't any need for the jobs anymore. There isn't any need for the vacant homes because the people aren't going to get loose mortgages anymore. The economy changed and left a lot of people behind.
The problem with the odometer is that it can't be read automatically. People will lie and there can't be enough inspectors to make people actually worry about lying.
An automated system would tend to eliminate people (very desirable - machines are cheaper than people) and eliminate the possibility of lying.
Face it, we aren't just going to have declining employment for a little while. The jobs aren't coming back. Get over it. If you are unemployed now you should start figuring ways to get your 8 million fellow unemployed people together so the government can support you permanently. Either that or the government will pay 4 million people to dig holes and 4 million people to fill them in again.
Can't really improve public transit because there is no place to put it. For some silly reason the idea of elevated monorails has been soundly rejected. So any rail-based public transit means taking up around a 50-foot wide swath through the middle of town. This means either through existing roads or through existing homes and businesses. Not very popular either.
Buses? There is no ridership left on buses for the most part. Buses are difficult to secure, so people are properly afraid of getting robbed and worse. Part of the "solution" to this is to eliminate all the bus routes except those that are heavily traveled and to eliminate service outside of peak periods. Which makes the buses utterly useless to most people - stay 10 minutes late at work and you miss the last bus.
Public transit has pretty much seen its day in the US. Until all the cities look like Detroit there is no place to put rail lines in. Buses aren't going to work without a cop or two on every bus and there just aren't enough cops to do that.
Can't build railroads (or even maintain them today) without lots of condemnation of private property. Lots and lots. So much so that it would be extremely unpopular. Not only unpopular, but they would be unable to pay any sort of market value for homes, even with today's cut-rate market.
OK, I guess you could build a new rail hub in Detroit without anyone noticing. But to put a new rail line into LA would require 100 miles of right of way that simply doesn't exist today. When they started tearing up the rails and building on the roadbed it was the end of rail in the US. And that was done before 1975, for the most part. It isn't coming back.
Why is everyone seeming to focus on damage to the roads? The problem they are trying to solve is that electric cars won't be paying any fuel taxes at all, and hybrid cars are paying far less. The result is that highway tax revenues are down in a period when the government would like to be able to put some construction workers back to work.
So how else do they solve the electric car problem?
This has nothing to do with repairing roads because of use and everything to do with tax revenues being down. The less people are driving the more expensive it is going to get because that is the only way they can keep repairing old bridges. The real solution is probably eliminating the bridges entirely. This would force a lot of trucking to move to railroads and would push people towards alternatives other than driving to work.
I used to work for a company that built the absolute #1 MVS security product. It was great because through it and its very flexible rules specification you could ensure that users only had access to files and resources they were actually supposed to have access to. Sounds wonderful, right?
Except for one little problem. It was incredibly difficult to set up. Let's take your average medium-size company. How many individual files do you think there might be on on-line media? Millions is probably not an exaggeration. Can you imagine crafting a rule for each file? How about imagining crafting a generic set of rules for files in specific places in a heirarchy but having to deal with exceptions that nobody thinks of until the user is blocked?
Just to get that MVS security system up and running at all generally took a year for most users. I would expect nothing less for what is being described here because it is pretty much the same thing. The result is that this is the sort of project that never gets finished and keeps getting put on the back burner.
It has nothing to with the complexity of the software but everything to do with the complexity of what is needed. Trying to define roles of users and the access to resources they should have after the fact is very, very time consuming and will result in a lot of failures. A failure means disruption and can mean failure to comply with some regulation which results in a fine. Can you imagine that this isn't something real popular with upper management, even when they mandate the implementation?
In order to enact tariffs, the US would have to pull out of the WTO. If the US tried to block Chinese imports with high tariffs China would be forced to exhert their control over the US economy. You see, China owns the US. Way more than 50% of the country is indirectly owned by the Chinese because of their loans.
If the US insisted and told China their loans were worthless nobody would trade with the US anymore because they couldn't be trusted.
If we insisted on tariffs on Chinese goods the result would likely be a shooting war, one that right now the US would lose badly in.
Nope, sorry. We are stuck with the way things are for a very, very long time.
Mostly, people that I run into are looking for an easy way to get what they want. If someone comes up to them and offers them $10,000 for doing something illegal more often than not they are going to be thinking "Gosh, $10,000... what can I buy with that?" rather than "How many years might I be in prison if I get caught?"
Further, in the US the actual conviction rate is pretty low for just about everything. So unless you are a complete idiot and brag to random people in a bar (one of whom might be a cop) about your exploits, you stand a pretty good chance of getting away with anything. A couple of times. See, the fact that it may only be a 20% conviction rate means that if you rob five stores your chances are not 0.20 / 5 (0.04) but 0.20 * 5 (1.00) - sooner or later a life of crime will catch up with you. Problem is, the fact you are almost certainly going to get away the first few times makes it look like easy money. And people certainly believe the odds are in their favor and only the unlucky get caught.
The same goes for just about any sort of crime, not just armed robbery. Dealing drugs? Sure. Stealing from the cash register at work? Easy. And it is addicting coming home with a pocket full of money that used to belong to someone else.
We also have this odd policy in the US that says children that commit crimes are treated as if it was a simple mistake in their education - nobody told them that crime was wrong. So they often get away with whatever they did or just get some very mild punishment so as to not warp their little psyche. The problem is, like all humans, these children learn that crime indeed does pay even when you get caught. Because in their experience crime does pay far far better than anything else they have ever experienced.
The government reinforces this kind of thinking because punishment of crime seems random to most people involved in crime. And the government overall seems capricious and incomprehensible to people whos only interaction with it is the police and courts. The news media doesn't help either. The latest bit about only 45% of people paying taxes - they mean only 45% of people pay in extra in April but it sounds like everyone is getting a good deal except you because you know you are paying - they take them out every week.
Keep in mind that the average Chinese person is perfectly happy with awful working conditions because these conditions are 1000 times better than the farm they escaped from.
And when this person trudges to their stool for their day's work right there behind them outside the gate there are 2500 people waiting to be allowed in when someone dies and a position becomes available. Since they left the farm and there are no other jobs all they can do is wait outside the factories hoping there will be an opening and they will get it. After all, the odds of 1 in 2500 aren't that bad, are they?
This has little to do with capitalism and a lot to do with a country that is incapable of managing any sort of growth.