In a single room or even perhaps a floor of an office building I guess I could see DC distribution. It would tend to reduce the power supply losses. Laptops are already doing total DC-DC conversion for the different voltages they need and there probably isn't much of a reason you couldn't run 12 volts to each computer and have it convert it over to 5 and 3.3. I would think your benefits would be significantly less if you were running 100 volts DC and requiring it all to be downconverted as DC-DC conversion isn't anywhere near as efficient as AC-DC conversion.
The big question is when do the wiring costs exceed the power supply losses. If nothing else you need to have a completely different parallel distribution network run with very, very incompatible outlets. You would NOT want to plug just anything into a DC supply, even if it was 12V. DC at 100V would destroy a lot of things and the load something like a shredder or even a desk lamp would be damaging.
Another factor I would think is redundancy. Today if you blow a power supply (one of the most common computer failures) you lose one computer. If you blow the power supply for the office floor you might lose 100 or 200 computers.
Cell service is like PC software... if you need to call for support you are screwed. There is no support.
Customer service is a fantasy. The only possible good they can do you is fixing a screwed up bill. And after the third or fourth time screwing up the billing aren't you getting the message?
Likely they simply tell you that on some date your phone will stop working and you really, really need to come down to the store and pick out a new one. Or select on online and they will ship it to you.
So we have a lot of obsolete televisions and people that have no choice but to migrate from OTA to cable because of the reduced distance the higher frequency digital signals travel. Sure, in urban areas and close-in suburbs you can get by with some kind of amplified antenna. But rural areas are pretty much SOL.
We went from an antenna + rotator where we could get 5 channels good and a sixth one not so good to one. The range on the others fell short. Adding amplification might have gotten us back one or two of the channels, but it was easier to move to cable for TV and Internet than keep fussing with the antenna.
There might be some valid, public-serving use for the analog TV spectrum, but I tend to doubt it. If anything, it will simply make Verizon and AT&T lots of money.
There was once a story about a guy named Shorty that came up with the idea that you could build a tube that would extend from near to the ground to, oh, say 30,000 feet. The idea was that all the pollution and particulates would be sucked up that stack into the lower pressure very high up, thus virtually eliminating the sort of inversion layer pollution that exists in bowls like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver.
The gizmo was called (in the story) a "shortstack". As opposed to a smoke stack.
Probably this is one of the best reasons why we're not building really tall buildings anymore. Also, nobody needs that much office space in the US any longer - companies that used to employ 10,000 people are making do with just 1,000 or so now with the others being in India or China. There might be some interest in really tall buildings elsewhere if the land wasn't so darned cheap.
Japan, where the land is anything but cheap, doesn't build them because of earthquakes like the one they just had.
I think the day of the "skyscraper" is pretty much over. I think the Willis tower is about 2/3rds empty as it is. Nobody knows what to do with all that really expensive office space anymore.
Utilities have the same problems wireless companies have - NIMBY. Virtually everyone with less than a college-level education knows absolutely that power lines cause cancer, impotence, autism and a host of other maladies. The result is that it is virtually impossible to build a transmission line in the US today. All those "smart grid" proposals are really nice and all, but unless the government were to come out and condem rights-of-way for the lines it isn't going to happen.
I think it might be more practical to propose running the lines through Canada and Mexico.
The real problem from what I have read is the bond rating agencies. Someone, say Goldman, would package a bunch of questionable home mortgages together to sell bonds in support of. All anyone knew about these mortgages was the average credit score of the borrowers - that was all the information they had. Moody's (and the other two whose names escape me now) would then "rate" these bonds.
Well, the idiotic thing was that Moody's would rate 80 percent of the bonds as AAA, or investment grade. The other 20% would be kicked back. So, Goldman would then recycle that 20% with another batch of mortgages and Moody's would then rate them in the same way: 80% as AAA the rest as junk. It became a well-known fact that 80% of anything could be expected to be rated AAA.
Other banks, notably Deutche Bank, would then sell insurance (aka CDS) on these AAA bonds. Because they were rated AAA, the insurance was dirt cheap because there is pretty much zero chance of AAA bonds defaulting. Some folks made out very well on this already but not all of the bonds have actually defaulted.
Now we come to the real problem. Pension funds, insurance companies and the like are required by law to only invest in AAA (investment grade) bonds. Anything else is a serious lapse of their fiduciary duty. So now we have in the system a whole lot of almost-certain-to-default AAA bonds that will likely bankrupt pension funds, insurance companies and the like that invested in them and are left unprotected.
This was not caused by anyone at the folks packaging the bonds or selling CDS on these bonds. It was caused by a complete lack of competence on the part of the bond rating agencies that clearly labelled junk bonds as AAA. This would be like the USDA stamping "US PRIME" on a sack of cow manure - when it gets to the restaurant exactly who's fault is it? The farmer? The restaurant? How about the agency that labeled it as a prime steak? Because everyone has focused on the fact that Goldman (and everyone else in the financial business) jumped on the bandwagon when the rating agencies stopped doing anything except rubber-stamping 80% of everything with AAA, nothing has been done about the bond rating agencies. Nothing at all. They are likely continuing to do business the same way.
So where are we today? Well, credit is a whole lot harder to get for a number of reasons. Packaging of any sort of financial instrument up and selling bonds based on it has pretty much ended - and with it much of the available credit for home buyers and businesses. Because at least half of the value of homes is dependent on people being willing to pay, home prices have dropped and nearly everyone that bought a home owes more than the home is worth. This has nothing to do with the buyers overextending themselves - plenty of people are still paying on these underwater mortgages because they can. It just makes no sense to do so. The government has decided not to foot the bill for this, and perhaps rightly so. It isn't their bill and nothing they did caused it. The regulating agencies like SEC had no control over bond ratings to begin with and Moody's and their ilk have always functioned on a level of trust that their ratings were true and accurate because without their being accurate pension funds would have literally nowhere to put their money. The lenders are somewhat reluctant to pick up the tab - on the tune of over two trillion dollars, and why should they? They did nothing wrong except in some cases take advantage of the fact that Moody's wasn't doing their job.
Likely as not, all the mortgages in the country will default. Why keep paying when there is zero hope of ever getting out from under? See, you will never have any meaningful equity in your home as things stand today if you bought it after around 2000. Maybe 1995. It has nothing to do with a "housing bubble" and everything to do with a collapse of faith that you can sell a house for what it was worth six months ago. With little or no credit in the system, peopl
The problem is that with digital goods there is no "sale" that doesn't include redistribution rights.
If I sell you a license for a software product I can put all kinds of terms into it. However, if I sell you "software" itself there are many things that will prevent any additional terms on the sale. There certainly would be no restriction on your selling your "possession" and/or redistributing it. Similarly, most software is sold under terms that disallow certain types of usage, such as reverse engineering or use in life-critical situations. In a simple sale these conditions could generally not be imposed.
Now it might be better for everyone if some type of sale could be constructed and agreed upon by all of the various legal entities that regulate commerce - but that isn't how things grew. Sometime around 1955 or so some folks noticed that selling commercial software to companies had to follow certain rules and doing other things would really mess things up. This led to an entire generation of business managers, accountants and lawyers that heard about this and pretty much followed what others had done. Hence what we have today.
There has been very little change in the selling of digital goods since then. The basic forms were set down a long time ago, far earlier than the first PC or cell phone. And what we have today came in a pretty straight line.
So, in all likelyhood unless a publisher wants to sell you redistribution rights all they can sell you is a license for a book. Regular paper books come with redistribution rights, after all - you are free to pass the book around to friends and sell it. The difference is that redistribution means something different with digital goods.
That works for "collections" and is echoed by what I see on Amazon a lot lately. Instead of publishing a self-contained book of novel length, you get something broken into as many as 10 parts each being about being a short novel. The first book is free with the remaining 3, 6 or 9 being $10.
I think this comes partly from an author just not being able to get it done in novel-length and going on and on. And on and on and on. No publisher was going to publish a 2,000 page paperback no matter what and in 1990 it would have been edited down to a single novel. Instead today it is split into 10 volumes.
The good news for the rather verbose author is that what might have sold for $7 in 1990 as a single book now nets more like $40 from the sale of four books and one free one - assuming most people don't buy all 10 volumes but give up somewhere along the line. The publisher probably likes this a lot better as well. But I don't think it is any measure of quality. In general, an author that can't trim it down is not spewing quality just quantity.
You want cheap and you want to be able to identify each vote with a specific person?
Certainly doing something with computers is going to be expensive in some way. It is also going to take a long time because not everyone would have their own computer.
I'd suggest colored pieces of paper that are preprinted with a number. Red for no, green for yes, blue for abstention. Something simple like that. The pieces of paper could also be tagged for "Question 1", "Question 2", etc. Counting them wouldn't be that hard and they would be traceable - names could be written on the slips but even without that you would have the preprinted numbers. This would fall apart for blind students but would work for multiple languages.
Sure, you could have some fancy system but it is going to cost money. Potentially lots of money. Anything that would require queuing up would likely get unmanageable quickly with 200 students.
Banks are starting to change but until recently no bank offered any security on debit cards. If your number gets copied at the coffee shop (very likely), you would then be liable for 100% of the charges until your account ran dry.
Some banks are now offering protection against debit card fraud. But still, it may take days before the money gets back into your account. Weeks sometimes I am sure. If you have so much in your checking account that you can handle that, great.
I wouldn't use a debit card for any sort of purchase, anywhere. People taking down the numbers are everywhere. The numbers are worth something (not much, but with enough of them it is real money) and it is a way for people to supplement their income. But when they get a debit card it can really hurt people.
Merchants pay for insurance against fraud because the credit card companies push it back onto them.
As a consumer, there is really nothing you can do about fraud. You hand your card to a waiter in a restaurant and he takes the number down. With 99 others he can get maybe $50 for his efforts. If you only used your card once that month and could remember the waiter you might be able to make enough noise with the restaurant manager to get the guy fired. Maybe. Maybe the restaurant thinks you are a nut and ignores you completely. The police won't do anything - you didn't lose anything, did you? The restaurant didn't lose anything. The credit card company didn't lose anything either. Nobody is complaining, so no charges can be brought.
Magnify this by 330 million people in the US with at least that many credit cards. Probably more of them that people because the people that have one often have four others to keep them company.
Credit card fraud is pretty much an equal-opportunity sort of thing. You get card grabbers that get maybe $0.50 for a valid number. This is an obvious way to get some more money in the service business where wages are low. Then you have the buyers that go out and buy stuff with the stolen numbers. They get a cut (or they wouldn't do it) and this is all the employment there is for a lot of people. They can use the numbers online or get real-looking cards made up that can even be signed and everything. Did you really think anyone wanted to steal your card with your name on it and try to forge your signature? Why? Making a nice clean fresh card costs maybe $1 if you have the right equipment. And there are places turning out 1000s of cards a day for this purpose.
From the buyers you get all sorts of people turning the goods into more cash. Ebay - unregulated. Pawn shops - regulated but loosely. Street corner vendors. Whatever it takes. So you think you got a good deal on some electronics? No, it wasn't "hot" but it did come from a credit card buyer.
We aren't talking about a lot of organization but it is at the grass-roots level. People make enough money off doing this to survive, and nobody is really getting hurt all that badly. So credit card fraud is going to continue and some people are making out very well with running the operation.
Next time, try to find someone in law enforcement that is interested in doing something about it. You could be holding the guy with your credit card number by the collar and the police will tell you to let him go. No charges. Nothing. In this environment do you really think there will be an end to this?
The US has been subjected to this for a very long time. Having a "open" society certainly allows propaganda of all sorts to florish.
The KGB had long running programs to "introduce the brighter side of the USSR to Americans". Before that, the NKVD has that program.
I would certainly call anything published by NAMBLA and the Church of Scientology to be "propaganda". Anything at all. Both of these organizations are US-based. And the people that are suckered into believing their message are probably harmed for life. And sometimes imprisoned.
And these are really simple public examples. Why would you think that certain magazines subscriber lists aren't used by foreign governments for their own purposes? That was something that could be easily done since the term "magazine" meant something besides where the powder and shot were stored.
Now, not all governments engage in this sort of thing. Certainly after WW I the US did not. Probably the US is going to enter into a severe isolationist stance in the next few years. Between not having the budget for it and not having the balls for it, I'd say it is a virtual certainity that we tell China to shove their imaginary "debt" and the rest of the world along with it. Might bring back some manufacturing to the US, but probably not much. And I don't see much need for a big fence on the border - unless it is to keep people in.
But heck, you get what you can pay for, and today with the US that isn't much.
If all or even most of the US currency was in control of US citizens, the gold standard might be workable. Unfortunately we have two very negative aspects to currency in the world today.
The bulk of US currency is not in the US but held in foreign hands. I forget what the ratio is but it is something like 4 or 5 to 1. What a return to the gold standard would do is instantly put the currency in the US at a disadvatage because of this. Either that, or a new currency would be issed to replace the fiat one and this would create a worldwide headache.
The second problem is counterfeiting. The US $100 bill is (still) one of the most commonly produced counterfeit items. It is a huge problem and one that is not adquately addressed with marking pens and UV lights. This shadow currency is mostly in foreign hands as well and from what I recall is at least 10% of all US currency in circulation. Nobody likes to talk about it, least of all the US Treasury. Taking the current currency to the gold standard would bankrupt the US because nobody is in control of the counterfeit currency circulation. Switching currency would create a huge headache probably 100x worse than switching to the Euro did in Europe.
Sorry, the gold standard doesn't work if we're not in control of our currency, and we're not. Not likely to be in the future, either, because it really doesn't do anyone any good if we were. The US likes the fact that most of the US currency is out of circulation sitting in safe deposit boxes and the like.
When the "mission" for many hard-core pirates is to eliminate the revenue from digital goods allowing anyone to make $1 on it is too much. These are the folks that will use stolen credit card info to buy 50 DVDs, rip them and post them during one marathon 36-hour period.
The average Joe isn't going to be given the option of paying $1 for something - there is enough pirated free stuff for everyone to never, ever have to pay again and it is becoming more and more obvious to people. OK, I don't think the over-40 set will ever catch on and they will be paying until the day they die. But anyone in public school these days is getting an education in the 4th grade about how to pirate. They see the teacher download software from the Internet because the budget doesn't allow for buying it. They hear about their friends with 10,000 songs on their MP3 player. They listen as kids talk about the movie their brother or sister downloaded.
The result from the industry will be clear - advertising, embedded and pervasive. Someone will be paying for the music and movies and it isn't going to be the public at large, not directly anyway. Sure, it will be all free to download just like Google search results are free to see - except Google is selling your clicks, your eyeballs and your habits to the highest bidder. Same thing with movies soon. Between the paid product placements and the brief pause from our sponsor it won't be easy to evade them.
Of course, the new "piracy" will be editing out the commercials and blacking out the product names.
If you want to manufacture 10,000 DVDs you will find that it costs about $0.50 to make them all. Maybe a little bit more if they are dual layer... so say $0.65. This might even include the manufacturer packaging the discs up in DVD cases with slip-ins and bulk-packing them in boxes of 25. You are going to have some shipping costs from where they are made in Asia over to the US, but even that is negligible.
Put them in a box of 25 and ship it UPS Ground for $2. You get that rate because you ship a LOT of boxes with UPS. Total cost per disc is $0.73. If the disc is sold wholesale for $8 you have better than 90% markup on per-unit cost. WalMart takes them and sells them for $10 in a discount bin only getting 20% on the deal, which for them isn't all that bad.
If you think they will sell, you might make 100,000 discs at an even lower cost per-disc. Manufacturing discs in the Far East is really, really cheap and shipping costs are really incredibly low when you put a bunch of discs together in a box.
The problem for the US is rather simple - transmission lines. It may be that in other countries the government-owned electric company can simply have great swaths of land condemmed so that transmission lines can be put up, but it doesn't work that way in the US. Instead we have years-long processes whereby a route is proposed, the environmental impact is studied and then the people that would be displaced get to complain. Loudly.
Nobody wants to be near a transmission line, partly because it is common knowledge amoung uneducated people that electricity is dangerous. They watched little Timmy stick a screwdriver in an outlet when he was five and never got over the reaction that little Timmy had. So they know electricity is dangerous. Also, with a transmission line you can hear the electricity flowing through it - that is a clear indication of what sorts of stuff is going on there. There have also been "studies" that show electric transmission lines cause cancer, retardation, autism, impotence and just about every other sort of malady you can imagine.
Recently a company proposed running a transmission line through a lake (underwater) so that nobody would see it and complain. Because the middle of the lake probably doesn't belong to anyone there would be no need to negotiate access, thus eliminating most of the problems. I think it was abandoned because of cost, but it shows how much of a problem this is. Nobody is going to rewire the US with a "smart grid" and add the sort of capacity that would be required to efficiently transfer electric power across the country.
The ecological impact of running new transmission lines would be incredible - it would disrupt game trails, migrations and all sorts of things like that. The end result of all of this is that it simply isn't going to happen.
If it is so great there, why are people in almost a continuous stream, trying to get to the US in ways that will almost certainly kill them?
Most of the boats available do not make it anywhere near the US but sink within miles of Cuba. Still, people try.
The question would be why, if it is such a nice place. Or are there just a huge number of people that can't see the paradise for what it is? I know nothing about the conditions in Cuba but I have to wonder about anyplace that people are so desperate to leave that dying doesn't sound so bad.
The problem was identified a long time ago with the phrase that the American democracy would last until the people figured out they could vote themselves benefits. When that happens, it is pretty much over.
I would say that the beginning of the end was probably Social Security, although it was a relatively minor form of the problem. Welfare programs could have been the nail in the coffin, but somehow they were repealed. The current argument about things like a living wage, minimum guaranteed income and, yes, government-paid health care is pretty much going to doom any real democracy forever. I don't think these programs can be repealed once they are enacted.
So really it is that people are acting in their own interest - exclusively. The "mob" can't understand that there are only a few ways to equitably split up resources and putting all of them in the government's hands and trusting them to be given out fairly is the wrong answer. The majority will always vote for more benefits and more taxes because they aren't paying them. Right now we have around 30% of the people not contributing either through unemployment or other reasons. Once they stop looking for a job they aren't counted any longer by official numbers, so this doesn't count disabled, discouraged or impaired people all of which are vying for government support in one form or another.
Part of the problem is that the majority doesn't understand that the wealthy (not necessarily rich, just with more than the majority has) are mobile whereas the majority are not. If Bill Gates wants to move to Brazil, Greece or Australia who's going to stop him? If the Bush family moves to South America, who is going to stop them? Yes, right now the US is a pretty stable low-tax country but that is likely to change very, very soon. When Michael Moore writes about how America is not broke - the rich have money, just take it from them - it is clearly not something that takes a genius to figure out. Well, the rich are unlikely to sit still for it. Close the borders and keep them here? Unlikely, as we can't even keep people we do not want out today.
The problem with "investing in the network" is that over the last 15 years or so they have invested in the network - they ran fiber from the head end to neighborhood nodes. These boxes then take the fiber and break it out to as many as 1000 homes. The fiber link has a finite capacity and while we're not really there 100% of the time, things are getting close in some areas.
So, what happens? Well, they can re-dig trenches all over the city and spend another 15 years running more fiber to more nodes. Well, they probably are in fact doing a lot of that, but it is going to take 10-15 years until it is done. What do we do in the meantime?
I guess one possibility would be to instill in the customers a healthy respect for the limits of that fiber link to their neighborhood node. Failing that, well everyone just gets crappy service during peak times.
In large measure, the money was loaned out to unqualified people because the banks could package the loans up and sell bonds backed by the rather risky mortgages. If the bonds had been rated as junk bonds with high interest rates (commesurate with the risk) we wouldn't have the current problems. No, the bonds were rated AAA - investment grade.
The real problem today and into the future is all the folks like pension funds that invested their money in these investment grade bonds that are in fact junk and are going to default. So where does that leave the Small Town, OK Teacher's Pension Fund? Bankrupt. The second wave of the bond defaults hasn't really hit yet. When it does things are likely to get a lot worse.
The board of directors of most corporations do not have any real responsibility for line-execution of anything. They are there as an advisory capacity only. Let's say you have a badly-run corporation and the stock price plummets. The shareholders aren't able to sue the board of directors as they really only advised. The CEO and COO are the ones with line-execution responsibility for either following the advice of the board of directors or for doing whatever the heck is needed, perhaps in direct contravention to some really bad advice from the board.
So the CEO and/or COO get sued and probably other C-level executives because they weren't doing their job.
If the board of directors had any actual responsibility you would find it a very difficult position to fill. Most smaller corporations have an uncompensated board. Even a lot of large corporations have uncompensated board members that are there because it is a prestigious role. If there was any actual responsibility the board wouldn't be there uncompensated and it would be a whole lot different job than it is.
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In a single room or even perhaps a floor of an office building I guess I could see DC distribution. It would tend to reduce the power supply losses. Laptops are already doing total DC-DC conversion for the different voltages they need and there probably isn't much of a reason you couldn't run 12 volts to each computer and have it convert it over to 5 and 3.3. I would think your benefits would be significantly less if you were running 100 volts DC and requiring it all to be downconverted as DC-DC conversion isn't anywhere near as efficient as AC-DC conversion.
The big question is when do the wiring costs exceed the power supply losses. If nothing else you need to have a completely different parallel distribution network run with very, very incompatible outlets. You would NOT want to plug just anything into a DC supply, even if it was 12V. DC at 100V would destroy a lot of things and the load something like a shredder or even a desk lamp would be damaging.
Another factor I would think is redundancy. Today if you blow a power supply (one of the most common computer failures) you lose one computer. If you blow the power supply for the office floor you might lose 100 or 200 computers.
Cell service is like PC software... if you need to call for support you are screwed. There is no support.
Customer service is a fantasy. The only possible good they can do you is fixing a screwed up bill. And after the third or fourth time screwing up the billing aren't you getting the message?
Likely they simply tell you that on some date your phone will stop working and you really, really need to come down to the store and pick out a new one. Or select on online and they will ship it to you.
Give you a phone? Sure.
So we have a lot of obsolete televisions and people that have no choice but to migrate from OTA to cable because of the reduced distance the higher frequency digital signals travel. Sure, in urban areas and close-in suburbs you can get by with some kind of amplified antenna. But rural areas are pretty much SOL.
We went from an antenna + rotator where we could get 5 channels good and a sixth one not so good to one. The range on the others fell short. Adding amplification might have gotten us back one or two of the channels, but it was easier to move to cable for TV and Internet than keep fussing with the antenna.
There might be some valid, public-serving use for the analog TV spectrum, but I tend to doubt it. If anything, it will simply make Verizon and AT&T lots of money.
There was once a story about a guy named Shorty that came up with the idea that you could build a tube that would extend from near to the ground to, oh, say 30,000 feet. The idea was that all the pollution and particulates would be sucked up that stack into the lower pressure very high up, thus virtually eliminating the sort of inversion layer pollution that exists in bowls like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver.
The gizmo was called (in the story) a "shortstack". As opposed to a smoke stack.
Probably this is one of the best reasons why we're not building really tall buildings anymore. Also, nobody needs that much office space in the US any longer - companies that used to employ 10,000 people are making do with just 1,000 or so now with the others being in India or China. There might be some interest in really tall buildings elsewhere if the land wasn't so darned cheap.
Japan, where the land is anything but cheap, doesn't build them because of earthquakes like the one they just had.
I think the day of the "skyscraper" is pretty much over. I think the Willis tower is about 2/3rds empty as it is. Nobody knows what to do with all that really expensive office space anymore.
Utilities have the same problems wireless companies have - NIMBY. Virtually everyone with less than a college-level education knows absolutely that power lines cause cancer, impotence, autism and a host of other maladies. The result is that it is virtually impossible to build a transmission line in the US today. All those "smart grid" proposals are really nice and all, but unless the government were to come out and condem rights-of-way for the lines it isn't going to happen.
I think it might be more practical to propose running the lines through Canada and Mexico.
The real problem from what I have read is the bond rating agencies. Someone, say Goldman, would package a bunch of questionable home mortgages together to sell bonds in support of. All anyone knew about these mortgages was the average credit score of the borrowers - that was all the information they had. Moody's (and the other two whose names escape me now) would then "rate" these bonds.
Well, the idiotic thing was that Moody's would rate 80 percent of the bonds as AAA, or investment grade. The other 20% would be kicked back. So, Goldman would then recycle that 20% with another batch of mortgages and Moody's would then rate them in the same way: 80% as AAA the rest as junk. It became a well-known fact that 80% of anything could be expected to be rated AAA.
Other banks, notably Deutche Bank, would then sell insurance (aka CDS) on these AAA bonds. Because they were rated AAA, the insurance was dirt cheap because there is pretty much zero chance of AAA bonds defaulting. Some folks made out very well on this already but not all of the bonds have actually defaulted.
Now we come to the real problem. Pension funds, insurance companies and the like are required by law to only invest in AAA (investment grade) bonds. Anything else is a serious lapse of their fiduciary duty. So now we have in the system a whole lot of almost-certain-to-default AAA bonds that will likely bankrupt pension funds, insurance companies and the like that invested in them and are left unprotected.
This was not caused by anyone at the folks packaging the bonds or selling CDS on these bonds. It was caused by a complete lack of competence on the part of the bond rating agencies that clearly labelled junk bonds as AAA. This would be like the USDA stamping "US PRIME" on a sack of cow manure - when it gets to the restaurant exactly who's fault is it? The farmer? The restaurant? How about the agency that labeled it as a prime steak? Because everyone has focused on the fact that Goldman (and everyone else in the financial business) jumped on the bandwagon when the rating agencies stopped doing anything except rubber-stamping 80% of everything with AAA, nothing has been done about the bond rating agencies. Nothing at all. They are likely continuing to do business the same way.
So where are we today? Well, credit is a whole lot harder to get for a number of reasons. Packaging of any sort of financial instrument up and selling bonds based on it has pretty much ended - and with it much of the available credit for home buyers and businesses. Because at least half of the value of homes is dependent on people being willing to pay, home prices have dropped and nearly everyone that bought a home owes more than the home is worth. This has nothing to do with the buyers overextending themselves - plenty of people are still paying on these underwater mortgages because they can. It just makes no sense to do so. The government has decided not to foot the bill for this, and perhaps rightly so. It isn't their bill and nothing they did caused it. The regulating agencies like SEC had no control over bond ratings to begin with and Moody's and their ilk have always functioned on a level of trust that their ratings were true and accurate because without their being accurate pension funds would have literally nowhere to put their money. The lenders are somewhat reluctant to pick up the tab - on the tune of over two trillion dollars, and why should they? They did nothing wrong except in some cases take advantage of the fact that Moody's wasn't doing their job.
Likely as not, all the mortgages in the country will default. Why keep paying when there is zero hope of ever getting out from under? See, you will never have any meaningful equity in your home as things stand today if you bought it after around 2000. Maybe 1995. It has nothing to do with a "housing bubble" and everything to do with a collapse of faith that you can sell a house for what it was worth six months ago. With little or no credit in the system, peopl
Why do you separate people into groups by skin color? Can't you think of something more constructive?
The problem is that with digital goods there is no "sale" that doesn't include redistribution rights.
If I sell you a license for a software product I can put all kinds of terms into it. However, if I sell you "software" itself there are many things that will prevent any additional terms on the sale. There certainly would be no restriction on your selling your "possession" and/or redistributing it. Similarly, most software is sold under terms that disallow certain types of usage, such as reverse engineering or use in life-critical situations. In a simple sale these conditions could generally not be imposed.
Now it might be better for everyone if some type of sale could be constructed and agreed upon by all of the various legal entities that regulate commerce - but that isn't how things grew. Sometime around 1955 or so some folks noticed that selling commercial software to companies had to follow certain rules and doing other things would really mess things up. This led to an entire generation of business managers, accountants and lawyers that heard about this and pretty much followed what others had done. Hence what we have today.
There has been very little change in the selling of digital goods since then. The basic forms were set down a long time ago, far earlier than the first PC or cell phone. And what we have today came in a pretty straight line.
So, in all likelyhood unless a publisher wants to sell you redistribution rights all they can sell you is a license for a book. Regular paper books come with redistribution rights, after all - you are free to pass the book around to friends and sell it. The difference is that redistribution means something different with digital goods.
That works for "collections" and is echoed by what I see on Amazon a lot lately. Instead of publishing a self-contained book of novel length, you get something broken into as many as 10 parts each being about being a short novel. The first book is free with the remaining 3, 6 or 9 being $10.
I think this comes partly from an author just not being able to get it done in novel-length and going on and on. And on and on and on. No publisher was going to publish a 2,000 page paperback no matter what and in 1990 it would have been edited down to a single novel. Instead today it is split into 10 volumes.
The good news for the rather verbose author is that what might have sold for $7 in 1990 as a single book now nets more like $40 from the sale of four books and one free one - assuming most people don't buy all 10 volumes but give up somewhere along the line. The publisher probably likes this a lot better as well. But I don't think it is any measure of quality. In general, an author that can't trim it down is not spewing quality just quantity.
You want cheap and you want to be able to identify each vote with a specific person?
Certainly doing something with computers is going to be expensive in some way. It is also going to take a long time because not everyone would have their own computer.
I'd suggest colored pieces of paper that are preprinted with a number. Red for no, green for yes, blue for abstention. Something simple like that. The pieces of paper could also be tagged for "Question 1", "Question 2", etc. Counting them wouldn't be that hard and they would be traceable - names could be written on the slips but even without that you would have the preprinted numbers. This would fall apart for blind students but would work for multiple languages.
Sure, you could have some fancy system but it is going to cost money. Potentially lots of money. Anything that would require queuing up would likely get unmanageable quickly with 200 students.
Banks are starting to change but until recently no bank offered any security on debit cards. If your number gets copied at the coffee shop (very likely), you would then be liable for 100% of the charges until your account ran dry.
Some banks are now offering protection against debit card fraud. But still, it may take days before the money gets back into your account. Weeks sometimes I am sure. If you have so much in your checking account that you can handle that, great.
I wouldn't use a debit card for any sort of purchase, anywhere. People taking down the numbers are everywhere. The numbers are worth something (not much, but with enough of them it is real money) and it is a way for people to supplement their income. But when they get a debit card it can really hurt people.
Any merchant that does a significant amount of credit card sales needs insurance. Anyone will tell you that - even the police.
If the company didn't make that clear to someone setting up a POS system they did the guy a serious disservice.
Credit card fraud is just a fact of life like rain. Sometimes you get wet and as a merchant you need to have your umbrella.
Merchants pay for insurance against fraud because the credit card companies push it back onto them.
As a consumer, there is really nothing you can do about fraud. You hand your card to a waiter in a restaurant and he takes the number down. With 99 others he can get maybe $50 for his efforts. If you only used your card once that month and could remember the waiter you might be able to make enough noise with the restaurant manager to get the guy fired. Maybe. Maybe the restaurant thinks you are a nut and ignores you completely. The police won't do anything - you didn't lose anything, did you? The restaurant didn't lose anything. The credit card company didn't lose anything either. Nobody is complaining, so no charges can be brought.
Magnify this by 330 million people in the US with at least that many credit cards. Probably more of them that people because the people that have one often have four others to keep them company.
Credit card fraud is pretty much an equal-opportunity sort of thing. You get card grabbers that get maybe $0.50 for a valid number. This is an obvious way to get some more money in the service business where wages are low. Then you have the buyers that go out and buy stuff with the stolen numbers. They get a cut (or they wouldn't do it) and this is all the employment there is for a lot of people. They can use the numbers online or get real-looking cards made up that can even be signed and everything. Did you really think anyone wanted to steal your card with your name on it and try to forge your signature? Why? Making a nice clean fresh card costs maybe $1 if you have the right equipment. And there are places turning out 1000s of cards a day for this purpose.
From the buyers you get all sorts of people turning the goods into more cash. Ebay - unregulated. Pawn shops - regulated but loosely. Street corner vendors. Whatever it takes. So you think you got a good deal on some electronics? No, it wasn't "hot" but it did come from a credit card buyer.
We aren't talking about a lot of organization but it is at the grass-roots level. People make enough money off doing this to survive, and nobody is really getting hurt all that badly. So credit card fraud is going to continue and some people are making out very well with running the operation.
Next time, try to find someone in law enforcement that is interested in doing something about it. You could be holding the guy with your credit card number by the collar and the police will tell you to let him go. No charges. Nothing. In this environment do you really think there will be an end to this?
The US has been subjected to this for a very long time. Having a "open" society certainly allows propaganda of all sorts to florish.
The KGB had long running programs to "introduce the brighter side of the USSR to Americans". Before that, the NKVD has that program.
I would certainly call anything published by NAMBLA and the Church of Scientology to be "propaganda". Anything at all. Both of these organizations are US-based. And the people that are suckered into believing their message are probably harmed for life. And sometimes imprisoned.
And these are really simple public examples. Why would you think that certain magazines subscriber lists aren't used by foreign governments for their own purposes? That was something that could be easily done since the term "magazine" meant something besides where the powder and shot were stored.
Now, not all governments engage in this sort of thing. Certainly after WW I the US did not. Probably the US is going to enter into a severe isolationist stance in the next few years. Between not having the budget for it and not having the balls for it, I'd say it is a virtual certainity that we tell China to shove their imaginary "debt" and the rest of the world along with it. Might bring back some manufacturing to the US, but probably not much. And I don't see much need for a big fence on the border - unless it is to keep people in.
But heck, you get what you can pay for, and today with the US that isn't much.
Then there shouldn't be any problem in doing whatever the heck Google is doing. If some folks want to interpret that as subverting GPL, well too bad.
Clearly copyright has little meaning to most young people.
So is the answer to just ignore copyright, GPL and all other manifestations of it?
If all or even most of the US currency was in control of US citizens, the gold standard might be workable. Unfortunately we have two very negative aspects to currency in the world today.
The bulk of US currency is not in the US but held in foreign hands. I forget what the ratio is but it is something like 4 or 5 to 1. What a return to the gold standard would do is instantly put the currency in the US at a disadvatage because of this. Either that, or a new currency would be issed to replace the fiat one and this would create a worldwide headache.
The second problem is counterfeiting. The US $100 bill is (still) one of the most commonly produced counterfeit items. It is a huge problem and one that is not adquately addressed with marking pens and UV lights. This shadow currency is mostly in foreign hands as well and from what I recall is at least 10% of all US currency in circulation. Nobody likes to talk about it, least of all the US Treasury. Taking the current currency to the gold standard would bankrupt the US because nobody is in control of the counterfeit currency circulation. Switching currency would create a huge headache probably 100x worse than switching to the Euro did in Europe.
Sorry, the gold standard doesn't work if we're not in control of our currency, and we're not. Not likely to be in the future, either, because it really doesn't do anyone any good if we were. The US likes the fact that most of the US currency is out of circulation sitting in safe deposit boxes and the like.
When the "mission" for many hard-core pirates is to eliminate the revenue from digital goods allowing anyone to make $1 on it is too much. These are the folks that will use stolen credit card info to buy 50 DVDs, rip them and post them during one marathon 36-hour period.
The average Joe isn't going to be given the option of paying $1 for something - there is enough pirated free stuff for everyone to never, ever have to pay again and it is becoming more and more obvious to people. OK, I don't think the over-40 set will ever catch on and they will be paying until the day they die. But anyone in public school these days is getting an education in the 4th grade about how to pirate. They see the teacher download software from the Internet because the budget doesn't allow for buying it. They hear about their friends with 10,000 songs on their MP3 player. They listen as kids talk about the movie their brother or sister downloaded.
The result from the industry will be clear - advertising, embedded and pervasive. Someone will be paying for the music and movies and it isn't going to be the public at large, not directly anyway. Sure, it will be all free to download just like Google search results are free to see - except Google is selling your clicks, your eyeballs and your habits to the highest bidder. Same thing with movies soon. Between the paid product placements and the brief pause from our sponsor it won't be easy to evade them.
Of course, the new "piracy" will be editing out the commercials and blacking out the product names.
How much to you think that really costs them?
If you want to manufacture 10,000 DVDs you will find that it costs about $0.50 to make them all. Maybe a little bit more if they are dual layer... so say $0.65. This might even include the manufacturer packaging the discs up in DVD cases with slip-ins and bulk-packing them in boxes of 25. You are going to have some shipping costs from where they are made in Asia over to the US, but even that is negligible.
Put them in a box of 25 and ship it UPS Ground for $2. You get that rate because you ship a LOT of boxes with UPS. Total cost per disc is $0.73. If the disc is sold wholesale for $8 you have better than 90% markup on per-unit cost. WalMart takes them and sells them for $10 in a discount bin only getting 20% on the deal, which for them isn't all that bad.
If you think they will sell, you might make 100,000 discs at an even lower cost per-disc. Manufacturing discs in the Far East is really, really cheap and shipping costs are really incredibly low when you put a bunch of discs together in a box.
The problem for the US is rather simple - transmission lines. It may be that in other countries the government-owned electric company can simply have great swaths of land condemmed so that transmission lines can be put up, but it doesn't work that way in the US. Instead we have years-long processes whereby a route is proposed, the environmental impact is studied and then the people that would be displaced get to complain. Loudly.
Nobody wants to be near a transmission line, partly because it is common knowledge amoung uneducated people that electricity is dangerous. They watched little Timmy stick a screwdriver in an outlet when he was five and never got over the reaction that little Timmy had. So they know electricity is dangerous. Also, with a transmission line you can hear the electricity flowing through it - that is a clear indication of what sorts of stuff is going on there. There have also been "studies" that show electric transmission lines cause cancer, retardation, autism, impotence and just about every other sort of malady you can imagine.
Recently a company proposed running a transmission line through a lake (underwater) so that nobody would see it and complain. Because the middle of the lake probably doesn't belong to anyone there would be no need to negotiate access, thus eliminating most of the problems. I think it was abandoned because of cost, but it shows how much of a problem this is. Nobody is going to rewire the US with a "smart grid" and add the sort of capacity that would be required to efficiently transfer electric power across the country.
The ecological impact of running new transmission lines would be incredible - it would disrupt game trails, migrations and all sorts of things like that. The end result of all of this is that it simply isn't going to happen.
If it is so great there, why are people in almost a continuous stream, trying to get to the US in ways that will almost certainly kill them?
Most of the boats available do not make it anywhere near the US but sink within miles of Cuba. Still, people try.
The question would be why, if it is such a nice place. Or are there just a huge number of people that can't see the paradise for what it is? I know nothing about the conditions in Cuba but I have to wonder about anyplace that people are so desperate to leave that dying doesn't sound so bad.
The problem was identified a long time ago with the phrase that the American democracy would last until the people figured out they could vote themselves benefits. When that happens, it is pretty much over.
I would say that the beginning of the end was probably Social Security, although it was a relatively minor form of the problem. Welfare programs could have been the nail in the coffin, but somehow they were repealed. The current argument about things like a living wage, minimum guaranteed income and, yes, government-paid health care is pretty much going to doom any real democracy forever. I don't think these programs can be repealed once they are enacted.
So really it is that people are acting in their own interest - exclusively. The "mob" can't understand that there are only a few ways to equitably split up resources and putting all of them in the government's hands and trusting them to be given out fairly is the wrong answer. The majority will always vote for more benefits and more taxes because they aren't paying them. Right now we have around 30% of the people not contributing either through unemployment or other reasons. Once they stop looking for a job they aren't counted any longer by official numbers, so this doesn't count disabled, discouraged or impaired people all of which are vying for government support in one form or another.
Part of the problem is that the majority doesn't understand that the wealthy (not necessarily rich, just with more than the majority has) are mobile whereas the majority are not. If Bill Gates wants to move to Brazil, Greece or Australia who's going to stop him? If the Bush family moves to South America, who is going to stop them? Yes, right now the US is a pretty stable low-tax country but that is likely to change very, very soon. When Michael Moore writes about how America is not broke - the rich have money, just take it from them - it is clearly not something that takes a genius to figure out. Well, the rich are unlikely to sit still for it. Close the borders and keep them here? Unlikely, as we can't even keep people we do not want out today.
The problem with "investing in the network" is that over the last 15 years or so they have invested in the network - they ran fiber from the head end to neighborhood nodes. These boxes then take the fiber and break it out to as many as 1000 homes. The fiber link has a finite capacity and while we're not really there 100% of the time, things are getting close in some areas.
So, what happens? Well, they can re-dig trenches all over the city and spend another 15 years running more fiber to more nodes. Well, they probably are in fact doing a lot of that, but it is going to take 10-15 years until it is done. What do we do in the meantime?
I guess one possibility would be to instill in the customers a healthy respect for the limits of that fiber link to their neighborhood node. Failing that, well everyone just gets crappy service during peak times.
In large measure, the money was loaned out to unqualified people because the banks could package the loans up and sell bonds backed by the rather risky mortgages. If the bonds had been rated as junk bonds with high interest rates (commesurate with the risk) we wouldn't have the current problems. No, the bonds were rated AAA - investment grade.
The real problem today and into the future is all the folks like pension funds that invested their money in these investment grade bonds that are in fact junk and are going to default. So where does that leave the Small Town, OK Teacher's Pension Fund? Bankrupt. The second wave of the bond defaults hasn't really hit yet. When it does things are likely to get a lot worse.
The board of directors of most corporations do not have any real responsibility for line-execution of anything. They are there as an advisory capacity only. Let's say you have a badly-run corporation and the stock price plummets. The shareholders aren't able to sue the board of directors as they really only advised. The CEO and COO are the ones with line-execution responsibility for either following the advice of the board of directors or for doing whatever the heck is needed, perhaps in direct contravention to some really bad advice from the board.
So the CEO and/or COO get sued and probably other C-level executives because they weren't doing their job.
If the board of directors had any actual responsibility you would find it a very difficult position to fill. Most smaller corporations have an uncompensated board. Even a lot of large corporations have uncompensated board members that are there because it is a prestigious role. If there was any actual responsibility the board wouldn't be there uncompensated and it would be a whole lot different job than it is.